The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

‘You’re thinking about the wrong things,’ he said, kissing her, pressing his tongue deep inside her mouth. And his hands were everywhere, under her camisole and inside her knickers all at once. Then he unbuttoned her tight capris and slid them down and they tumbled onto the sand together. And she thought she might fall in love with him. She thought he was the most gorgeous guy she’d ever been with.

If only her friends could see her now!

You can’t go to Tarifa without having sex on the beach, he’d told her. It would be like not seeing the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Then she’d felt the sand against her skin as he pressed her down. Grains of sand rose up between her buttocks and pushed between her legs as he guided his cock with his hand, not finding his way at once, rooting around. All she felt was a scraping as he seemed to pump her full of sand.

She shouldn’t have fallen asleep afterwards. It had happened so fast.

From up in the mountains came the endless rumbling of the wind turbines, turning counter-clockwise. She had thought they looked like electric eggbeaters, whipping the air into cream. He laughed when she said that. Terese bit down on her fingertips to keep herself from crying.

He must have thought I was no good. Worthless. Otherwise he would have stayed and made love to me again and again.

Nausea rose up into her throat. She might have had two or three Cosmopolitans, and then a few Mojitos after that.

The whole beach swayed as she stood up. She leaned forward with her hands on her knees and stayed like that until things stopped moving, swallowing over and over to keep herself from throwing up and having to smell everything that spewed out of her. She couldn’t bear to be so disgusting. That was why she staggered down to the water. It wasn’t far, maybe twenty metres.

She moved slowly, setting her feet down carefully, so as not to step on anything unpleasant. The sand felt cold under her feet, and she was surprised when the first wave reached her. The water was almost lukewarm and silky smooth. She waded out a few steps to meet the next wave. When it broke, she caught the foamy water in her hands and splashed it over her face. It was refreshing and made her think a little more clearly.

To her left a low, black ridge rose from the sea, a jetty of large rocks that extended at least ten metres out into the water. It looked like a big prehistoric animal resting on the shoreline, the spine of a slumbering brontosaurus. She waded towards it, thinking that she would climb up and sit on the rocks at the very end. Let the sea wash over her wrists for a while. That usually helped against nausea. If she did throw up, the vomit would vanish into the water in seconds and be forgotten.

The water surged over her ankles. The wind from the sea picked up force. She’d thought the jetty would be hard and sharp, but when she set her foot on the first rock to clamber up, it felt soft and slippery and slid away.

She shrieked and fell forwards onto the rocks, striking her shoulder. She hauled herself up onto the jetty, quickly drawing her feet out of the water. Then she leaned forward and peered down. She had to find out what sort of revolting fish she’d stepped on.

The waves receded and the sea prepared to send in the next onslaught. Terese stared, the roaring sound growing inside her head.

It wasn’t a fish. A hand was sticking up out of the water, attached to an arm below the surface. For a long moment she stared at the place where the arm transitioned into a shoulder and then became an entire body. A person was lying there, wedged between the rocks. A black person.

She whimpered when she realized that was where she’d placed her foot. She’d stepped on a corpse. On the chest or stomach. She didn’t want to know where. She sobbed and stammered and slid backwards up onto the ridge, scraping her soles hard against the rough surface, trying to get rid of that soft and slippery feeling on the bottom of her foot.

But she couldn’t resist taking another look. It was a man lying down there. That much she could clearly see. His skin was black and shiny with water. Like a fish, an eel, something slimy that lived in the sea. He was naked. She thought she could make out an animal creeping along his shoulder, and against her better judgement, she leaned forward. The next wave struck the rocks and the shore, spraying up into her face and then receded, the water foaming and roiling around the body. It looked as if it were moving. For an instant she thought the black man would rise up, grab hold of her ankle, and pull her down into the water. What if he was alive?

At that moment the first traces of morning light appeared beyond the mountains, and the colour of the sea changed to green. She was looking directly into the face of the dead man. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was wide open, as if uttering an inaudible drowned scream, his teeth gleaming white and swaying under the water.

Dear God in heaven, thought Terese. Papa, please help me. I’m all alone here.

Then her stomach heaved, and she pressed her hand to her mouth as she made her way across the rocks and tumbled down the other side. She was still throwing up as she ran, staggering, away from the scene.

Chapter 2 (#u56913766-3a31-58d7-b5ce-9ed3e7a06b7e)

New York

Monday, 22 September

According to the charts, I was probably in my seventh week. I’d put off taking a pregnancy test for as long as possible, hoping in my heart that Patrick would come home. Then we could have done it together. Not the actual peeing on the test stick, of course. There had to be a limit. But the waiting for the stripe to appear.

My pulse quickened as I took my cell phone out of my jacket pocket. I might have missed a call because of all the traffic noise.

I hadn’t. The display was blank.

There had to be some perfectly natural explanation, I told myself. For Patrick, his work was everything, and it wouldn’t be the first time that he’d become so immersed in some ugly and complicated story that he forgot about everything else. He wouldn’t give up until he’d turned over every last stone. Once, three years ago, before we were married, I didn’t hear from him for a whole week, and I was sure that he’d got cold feet and left me. It turned out that he’d latched onto some small-time gangsters in DC and had ended up sitting in jail down there, wanting to do in-depth research from the inside. He’d come home with a broken rib and a report that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

I tapped in his speed-dial number for the eleventh time this morning.

If you answer, I promise we’ll do whatever you want, I thought as the call went through. We’ll leave Manhattan and buy that house in Norwood, New Jersey. If it has already been sold, we’ll find one just like it. And then we’ll have babies and invite the neighbours over for barbecues, and I’ll quit the theatre and start sewing appliquéd baby hats. Whatever. If only you pick up.

I heard a click on the line signalling his voicemail. Hi, you’ve reached Patrick Cornwall …

The same message I’d heard when I woke up in the morning, all last week. It sounded emptier with each day that passed.

If I’m not answering my phone, I’m probably out on a job, so please leave a message after the beep.

It had been ten days since he’d called.

That was on a Friday.

I was in Boston with Benji, my assistant, to pick up a chair dating from the Czarist period in Russia. That piece of furniture was the last puzzle piece needed for the staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It had belonged to an ageing hairdresser’s paternal grandmother, who had fled St Petersburg in 1917.

Patrick had phoned just after I finished the transaction. Benji and I had each taken hold of one side of the chair and were on our way down a narrow flight of stairs in a building that looked like it might collapse at any minute from sheer exhaustion.

‘I just wanted to say goodnight,’ said Patrick from across the Atlantic. ‘I miss you so much.’

‘This isn’t the best time,’ I said, propping the chair onto a step while Benji held on tightly so the precious object wouldn’t tumble down the stairs.

The hairdresser stood in the doorway above us, watching nervously. I really wanted to get out of there before he changed his mind. He’d told us that this chair, which he’d inherited from his grandmother, was the dearest thing he owned, but he wanted to see Mother Russia before he died. Otherwise he would never have even considered selling it. If he had enough money, he wanted to buy a burial plot near the Alexander Nevsky church in St Petersburg, where the great men of his native country had been laid to rest.

‘You won’t believe what a story this is going to be,’ Patrick went on. ‘If it doesn’t turn out to be the investigative story of the year, I don’t know what—’

‘Are you in a bar or something?’ I glanced at my watch. It was 5.45 in Boston. Midnight in Paris. It warmed my heart to hear his voice.

He was audibly slurring his words. ‘No, I’m back at the hotel,’ he said. There were sounds in the background, a car honking, voices nearby. ‘And you know what I’m looking at right now? The dome of the Panthéon, where Victor Hugo is buried. I can see straight into the garret windows of the Sorbonne too. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? But their lights are out now, and they’ve gone to bed. I wish you were here.’

‘Well, I’m standing in a stairwell in Boston,’ I said, as I heard the hairdresser start arguing with Benji. Apparently he was asking for more money.

‘I’ll be damned if human life is worth anything here,’ Patrick went on. ‘Nothing but objects that can be bought and sold.’

‘I really have to go, Patrick. Let’s talk tomorrow.’

I could hear him taking a swig of something.

‘I can’t talk about it over the phone,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to plaster this story all over the world. I’m not going to let them think they can silence me.’

‘Who could possibly do that?’ I replied with a sigh, grimacing at poor Benji, whose face was starting to turn an alarming shade of red. I had no idea how much it might cost to be buried next to Dostoevsky, but it had to be more than my budget could handle.

‘And afterwards I went out for a while, over to Harry’s New York Bar, just to find somebody to speak English with. Did you know that Hemingway went there whenever he was in Paris?’

‘You’re drunk.’