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

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Copyright © Tove Alsterdal, 2009 By agreement with Grand Agency

Translation copyright © Tiina Nunnally 2016

Cover design by Alex Allden © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Max Bailen/Cultura RM/ AlamyStock Photo (woman on beach); Shutterstock.comall other images.

Tove Alsterdal asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Originally published in 2009 by Lind & Co, Sweden, as Kvinnorna på stranden

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008158989

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008158996

Version: 2017-05-22

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Tarifa

Monday, 22 September

3.34 a.m.

The boat heeled over and the view through the small porthole changed. For a long while she could see only the masts of other boats and clouds, but now she glimpsed the town for a moment. All the windows were dark. If she waited any longer it would soon be dawn.

When she stood up a sharp pain shot through her left leg. The world swayed, or maybe it was the sea and the boat.

Before the man took off he had told her three or four o’clock. She had crept into the corner and sat as still as she could. ‘ A las tres, cuatro ,’ he said. ‘ Esta noche ,’ and she understood at last when he held up three, then four fingers and pointed at the sun, motioning that it was setting. Darkness. Night. That’s when she would leave. Tonight.

She couldn’t tell him that she had lost both her watch and her sense of time. That’s what happened when you prepared yourself to die and sank down into the big black deep where time no longer existed.

He had left a rolled-up rug on the floor of the cabin. She didn’t know what a rug was doing on a fishing boat. It was red, and woven in a beautiful pattern; it belonged on a tiled floor in an elegant room. If they have rugs like this in their boats, she thought as she unrolled it and curled up to wait, then I wonder what kind they have in their homes.

All sounds had ceased after that. The clatter of iron tossed onto asphalt, men’s voices, cars that started up and drove off. As the sun set the clouds turned a pale pink until all the colours vanished and the sky looked black and heavy. No moon, no stars, not a single fixed point. Like a silent prayer, a certainty that the world remained the same.

Slowly she pressed down the handle on the steel door. The smell of gasoline and the sea washed over her. She stepped quickly over the high threshold, closed the door behind her, and huddled on the boat’s deck.

The darkness she’d been waiting for had not arrived. The harbour was bathed in the yellow of sodium lights that were taller than church towers. She crouched there quietly and listened. A mooring line creaked when the boat moved. The rattle of a chain, the water sloshing gently against the quay. And the wind. Natural night-time sounds. That was all.

She grabbed the mooring line and slowly, very slowly, pulled the boat closer to the quay. With a dull thud the boat made contact.

She felt the rough surface of stone against her palms. Dry land. With her uninjured leg she kicked off and heaved herself up onto the dock. She rolled over and landed on her stomach behind a pile of rolled-up fishing nets. When she looked along the quay she saw a similar net with a rug covering it. So that’s what the fisherman uses those rugs for, she thought, to protect his nets from the rain and wind, or from animals that roam about, looking for fish scraps.

A few seconds passed, or maybe it was minutes. Everything was quiet, except for the wind and the beam pulsating on and off from the lighthouse.

She took a deep breath and then ran, stooping forward, moving as fast as her injured leg would allow, past a harbour warehouse. With his finger the man had drawn on the floor the way she should follow the wall out of the harbour, continue along the shore, and then go up through the town. To the bus station. From there she could catch a bus to Cádiz or Algeciras or Málaga. Cádiz was the name she recognized.

She stumbled over some pipes and heard the sound reverberate between the stone walls. Quickly she pressed herself close to a container.

There are guards, she thought as she listened intently. I can’t let myself be fooled by the calm and the quiet, and besides it isn’t really quiet. I can hear the surf striking the seawall, and the wind making the sheet metal clatter somewhere nearby, but I don’t hear any footsteps, and no one can hear mine.

She looked down at her bare feet. Her shoes had been swept out to sea, along with her skirt and cardigan. Now she was dressed in a green jacket that she’d found draped over her when she awoke on the deck of the fishing boat. In the cabin she’d found a towel and tied it around her hips as a skirt.