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

His gaze settled on her body, as if licking her up and down, and then back up again to force its way between her breasts.

Terese squirmed and tugged at her father’s arm. She hated her arse and thighs, which were too fat, and her nose, which bent slightly in the middle. But her breasts were perfect. Round and naturally big. The only part of her body she was completely satisfied with.

‘I probably just dropped it somewhere,’ she said. ‘Come on, Papa, let’s go.’

‘No matter what, we need to file a report,’ said her father without budging.

‘For that, you’ll need to talk to the local police.’

‘We have to talk to the local police,’ Stefan Wallner translated for Terese, but she was already on her way out of the door.

‘I want to go home,’ she said when they were out in the corridor.

‘But we have a whole week left of our holiday.’

‘Didn’t you see how he was staring at me? He’s bloody disgusting.’

Her father looked over his shoulder at the door that had closed behind them. The officer’s assistant stood next to them, shifting from one foot to the other, holding the official form in his hand.

‘Somebody like that should be reported,’ said Stefan, putting a protective arm around his daughter. ‘Come on, sweetie, let’s get this over with. Then we’ll go out and have a really good lunch. Just you and me.’ He gave her a poke in the side. ‘And we’ll sit in the sun and have a glass of white wine. I think we need it. Both of us do.’

Paris

Wednesday, 24 September

With a shiver of anticipation, I turned the key in the lock of room 43. As if he would just be sitting there. And he’d get up and come towards me with open arms and a look of surprise, wondering what I was doing here, laughing at me. What an impulsive thing to do, flying to Paris.

But all I found was emptiness. And the faint scent of lavender soap.

The door closed behind me with a muted click . Eight days and eight nights had passed. All traces had been carefully cleaned away.

I threw open the window. A damp gust of wind against my face. Beyond the rooftops rose the dome of the Panthéon. In front of me the university buildings were spread over several blocks.

It was here that Patrick had stood when he had called, in this very spot. I remembered his voice on the phone. I miss you so much … I’m headed straight into the darkness …

The wind was fluttering the curtains, which billowed up and then sank back to the floor. I turned around and took in all the details. The big bed, the open-work white coverlet with a floral pattern. On the wall, a framed poster of a sidewalk café. The telephone on the nightstand. That was the phone I’d heard ringing in the background. Someone had called to tell Patrick that something was on fire. But tell me what’s going on, in God’s name!

The room was exactly four metres wide and five metres long. After all my years as a set designer, I automatically took measurements. Four times five metres, twenty square metres. Those were the physical dimensions of loss.

In the corner of the far wall stood a small desk. That’s where he had sat to write, bending low over his computer. Patrick always sat that way, as if he wanted to smell the keyboard, breathe in the words. In reality he needed glasses, but he was too vain to get them.

In the bathroom I met my own face in the mirror. Pale, with blue shadows under my eyes. My skin creased with fatigue. I rinsed my face with ice-cold water. Splashed water under my arms, and rubbed my skin hard with a towel.

Then I got clean clothes out of my suitcase. I was going to turn over every single stone in this city if that’s what it took.

The price of a slave. That’s what it said at the top of one page. Followed by numbers, amounts that appeared to be sample calculations:

$90 - $1,000 (= $38,000 = 4,000 for the price of one.)

Mark up = 800% profit = 5%

30 million – 12 million / 400 = 30,000 per year. Total?

The last calculation had been crossed out. Next to it were also a few words scrawled across the page, underlined and circled:

Small investment – lifelong investment

The boats!

I kept paging through Patrick’s notebook, which was filled with these truncated and basically incomprehensible scribblings. I was sitting upstairs in a Starbucks café, determined not to leave the table until I’d figured out at least some of these notes.

The café was three blocks from the hotel, on a wide boulevard lined with leafy trees, and newsstands that belonged in an old movie. Everything reinforced by a feeling of unreality. Jetlag was making me hover somewhere above myself.

The simplest thing, of course, would have been to go straight to the police and report him missing. But Patrick didn’t trust the police. He would hate me if they came barging into his story. First I needed at least to find out what he was working on.

I ate the last bite of my chicken wrap and crumpled up the plastic. Then turned to look at his last note. That was how I usually approached a new play, by starting at the end — Where is it all heading? How does it end?

Patrick had jotted down a phone number. That was the very last thing he had written.

Above the number was a name: Josef K.

This is the endpoint, the turning point, I thought. After this he’d chosen to check out of the hotel, and he’d put this notebook in an envelope and sent it to me.

Keep this at the theatre.

I turned the page to the previous note. It was scrawled across the page, as if he’d been in a hurry: M aux puces, Clignancourt, Jean-Henri Fabre, the last stall — bags! Ask for Luc.

I spread the map open on the table. Looked up the words in the index of my guidebook. Bingo! My heart skipped a beat. It was like solving a puzzle, and suddenly the answer appears.

I felt like I was on his trail.

Porte de Clignancourt was way up in the north, where the Paris city limits ended and the suburbs began. It was the end station for the number 4 M é tro line. It was also the location of the world’s biggest flea market, Marché aux Puces. Rue Jean-Henri Fabre was one of the streets in the market. Then I read the next line in the guidebook and my mood sank. The market was open only Saturday to Monday. Today was Wednesday.

Out of the window I could look straight into the crowns of the trees. The leaves had started to fade, turning a pale yellow. At least it was easier working here than at the hotel. Patrick’s absence wasn’t screaming at me in the same way.

I continued paging through the notebook, studying what he’d written. There were a lot of names, addresses, and phone numbers, but no explanation as to who the people might be. I marked the addresses, one after the other, on the map, and slowly a pattern emerged, an aerial view of Patrick’s movements around the city.

When I looked up again, rain had begun to streak the windowpane, and people down on the street were opening their umbrellas. It was close to three in the afternoon, morning in New York. I massaged the back of my neck, which felt stiff and tight after spending the night in an aeroplane seat.