Tove Alsterdal - The Forgotten Dead - A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall. I’m not really sure, but I think he’s staying at your hotel.’

‘No, he’s not.’

I clicked back to the search list. Were there more Sorbonne hotels?

‘I’m afraid he has checked out.’

‘What did you say?’

‘He has checked out.’

I grabbed the armrest and held on tightly.

‘When was that?’

‘And who, may I ask, is calling?’

I was just about to say ‘his wife’, but something stopped me. Shame. I felt my cheeks flush. I suddenly saw the situation from the other end of the phone line. France was a country in which even the president had secret lovers and got away with it. And I was the abandoned wife.

‘We’re colleagues at the magazine,’ I said. ‘And I’m sitting here with a travel invoice that I can’t quite decipher. That’s why I need to speak to him. So I can send him his money.’

I sounded like a real bureaucrat.

‘Just a moment.’ An eternity passed as the clerk paged through the information in a ledger or a database or whatever they used in the Old World. I heard a clattering somewhere in the background. Maybe they were setting the tables for breakfast.

‘It was last Tuesday,’ he said finally. ‘September sixteenth.’

A week ago. The same day the envelope was mailed. I took a deep breath.

‘Were you on duty when he left the hotel?’

‘Yes, of course. He was happy to be going home to New York. He said he missed his wife. I told him that he should bring her with him next time he comes to Paris. It’s the romance capital of the world, after all.’

‘Are you sure about that? That he was going home to New York?’

I gripped the phone even harder.

‘Yes. He said that quite clearly. We almost had a quarrel about the fact that he was so eager to leave us.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Just that he would stay with us the next time he’s in Paris.’

I ended the call. The silence pressed against my skull. At any second it would explode. Fragments of information would scatter across the floor. Checked out. Back home to New York. The baby money. The positive pregnancy test. We never pay advances.

Restlessly I paced the apartment. Took some juice out of the fridge and drank from the bottle.

Where had he gone? Why had he lied about where he was going? And if he was telling the truth, why hadn’t he come home?

On the kitchen counter were the remains of the snacks I’d eaten over the past few days. Since the kitchen was just a corner of the bedroom, we always did the dishes before we went to bed so we wouldn’t have to look at leftovers when we got up in the morning. But now there was a small pyramid of empty yogurt containers. And I thought I noticed that they were starting to smell. The smell grew. Dirty glasses and cutlery, salad packaging and pizza boxes. All signs of his absence.

I picked up the garbage can and with my arm swept the whole pile of trash off the counter and into the pail. Several forks and a glass fell in too. I closed the lid. Then I went back to my computer and logged into the Internet bank again. I transferred $6,282 from the savings account — the baby money, all that was left of it — to my own account. Then I typed words in the Google search box:

New York. Paris. Flights.

Tarifa

Wednesday, 24 September

‘He wants to know what you were doing on the beach in the middle of the night.’

Terese slid further down on the hard plastic chair they had provided for her. It felt as if they could read her mind, as if everything were clearly visible even though she had showered for hours and changed clothes and slept seventeen hours and then taken another shower after that.

The policeman sitting at the desk leaned forward, twirling a pen between his fingers. His nails were stubby and ugly, grimy with dirt underneath.

‘Why does he want to know that?’ she whispered to her father, who was sitting next to her. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘You have to answer his questions,’ said Stefan Wallner. ‘I’m sure you realize that.’

Terese rubbed her ear. He was talking to her as he had when she was a child. She regretted agreeing to have him act as her translator during the interrogation. ‘But we don’t need to call it an interrogation,’ he had said. ‘They just want to know what you saw on the beach.’ Maybe it would have been easier to be surrounded by strangers, she thought. People who wouldn’t be ashamed of her, or disappointed.

‘I just went for a walk,’ she said.

‘In the middle of the night? Before dawn?’ The policeman gave her a thin-lipped smile. It looked like a straight line below his moustache. She noticed an upper tooth was missing. His eyes were fixed on her breasts.

‘I was drunk,’ Terese said in Swedish. ‘I didn’t feel good. I may have got lost.’

Stefan translated.

‘Was she alone on the beach?’ asked the officer.

‘Yes, I was.’ She swallowed hard. Her throat felt tight. ‘I already told you that.’

‘Alone on the beach, a young girl, in the middle of the night.’ He shook his head. On the wall behind him hung a picture of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Her father didn’t translate what he’d said, but she understood. She had studied Spanish for three years in high school, and she knew enough to order food in the restaurants. That was why her father had invited her along, so she could practise her Spanish. He wanted to show her the places he’d visited in his youth, when he was hitchhiking through Europe. She gave her father a sidelong look. His hair was blonder, so the grey was hardly visible, and his skin was suntanned. They’d been in Tarifa for a week when their holiday was disrupted.

‘Why isn’t he asking me anything about the body?’ said Terese. ‘Why is he only asking about me?’

The officer leaned back in his chair, his legs wide apart. He was tapping the pen against his lips.

‘I know exactly what the likes of you get up to on the beach,’ he said. ‘You come here and hang about in the bars, ready to take off your clothes for anybody. My cousin has worked on the beaches. He had to pick up after people like you. You have no idea what he used to find on the sand in the morning.’

He leaned towards Terese, and she gave a start when his eyes again fastened on her breasts. She wished she had put on a sweater. A cardigan over the camisole that was so tight it revealed half her tits.

‘That’s enough,’ said her father in Spanish, placing his hand, heavy and warm, on her bare shoulder. ‘My daughter has been through a terrible ordeal. You need to realize that she’s in shock.’ He glanced at Terese and then back at the police officer. ‘She told you that she was alone.’

The officer smiled wryly, again exposing the gap in his teeth. Terese lowered her eyes.

‘Who was the dead man she found?’ Stefan went on. ‘Do you know anything more about what happened to him?’