The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

‘I needed to clear my head and think about something other than death and destruction. You have no idea what this journey is like, I’m headed straight into the darkness.’

‘Sweetheart, let’s talk more in the morning. OK?’ I was having a ridiculously hard time getting off the phone. A small part of me was afraid he’d disappear if I ended the call.

Then I heard a shrill ringtone somewhere near him.

‘Just a sec,’ said Patrick. ‘Somebody’s calling on the other phone.’

I heard him say his name with a French accent. It sounded funny, as if he were a stranger. Who would be phoning him in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Paris? Patrick raised his voice, shouting so loud that even the Russian standing above us must have heard him. He said something about a fire, and God.

‘Mais qu’est-ce qui est en feu? Quoi? Maintenant? Mais dis-moi ce qui se passe, nom de Dieu!’

Then he was back on the line.

‘I’ve got to run, sweetie. Shit.’ I heard a bang, as if he’d knocked something over, or maybe stumbled. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

We both clicked off, and that was the last I’d heard from him.

I cut across 8th Avenue, heading for the Joyce Theatre. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a whirling blue light at the next block, but the sirens seemed to be coming from far away, from another universe, where none of this was happening. The silent phone in my hand. The tiny speck growing inside me. Patrick, who didn’t know he was going to be a father.

‘Ally!’

That was the girl at the reception desk — Brenda something or other — calling to me as I entered the theatre. ‘Your last name is Cornwall, right? Alena Cornwall? There’s a letter for you.’ She held up a fat envelope. ‘From Paris.’

My heart leaped as I took the envelope.

It was addressed to Alena Cornwall, c/o The Joyce Theatre, 8th Avenue, Chelsea, New York.

There was no doubt it was his handwriting. Neat letters evenly printed, revealing that Patrick had once been a real mama’s boy.

The envelope felt rough to the touch and seemed to contain more than just paper. According to the postmark, it had been sent from Paris a week earlier, on 16 September. Last Tuesday. The image on the stamp showed a woman wearing a liberty cap, her hair fluttering, in a cloud of stars. The symbol for France and liberty.

‘When did this get here?’ I asked, looking up at Brenda. ‘How long has it been lying around?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. Under the desk she always kept a stash of sticky Mars bars, which she ate in secret. ‘Maybe on Friday. I wasn’t working that day. I guess they didn’t know where to put it.’

I went down the corridor, which led to the offices and dressing rooms. Why the hell couldn’t I even get my mail delivered on time? Certain people seemed to think I didn’t exist because I didn’t have a proper job contract or mailbox. But why on earth would Patrick send the envelope to the theatre and not to our apartment? That seemed incredibly impersonal. And he hadn’t even managed to write the whole address. No street number and no zip code. That had to be significant.

He must have been in a hurry. Something had happened. Maybe he’d met somebody new and didn’t dare come home to tell me. Maybe he was leaving me.

I stopped abruptly when a door crashed open, right in my face, and out rushed one of the dancers from the show.

‘But I nearly killed myself!’ Leia cried. ‘Don’t you get it? The wall practically reared up in front of me.’

I groaned loudly. Leia was a 22-year-old bundle of nerves who’d been singled out as the next big star on the New York dance scene, which had made her believe that the rest of the world revolved around her. She opened her eyes wide when she caught sight of me.

‘You need to do something about it,’ she said. ‘Or else I’m not setting foot on that stage ever again.’

‘I can’t rebuild the whole place,’ I told her. ‘Everybody knows how cramped the space is off-stage. You need to ask someone to stand there and catch you. That’s what they usually do.’ I turned my back on her and kept on walking. I had no intention of grovelling before a girl who was named after the princess in Star Wars.

‘You shouldn’t even be doing this job,’ she yelled after me. ‘Because you don’t care about other people.’

I turned around.

‘And you’re a spoiled little diva,’ I said.

Leia ran into her dressing room, slamming the door behind her.

The envelope I was holding was making my hand sweat.

I went into the small, windowless cubbyhole that was the production office for visiting ensembles and shut the door, but not all the way. Then I tore open the envelope.

A little black notebook tumbled out, along with a small memory stick and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. I felt a burst of joy as I read the brief message.

Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. There’s just one more thing I have to do. Love you always. P.

P.S. Keep this at the theatre until I get back.

I read the words over and over.

The air was getting stuffier in the cramped office. The walls were closing in on me, and I had to kick open the door to make the space seem bigger. I reminded myself what I’d memorized: Turning left, the corridor led to the loading dock on 19th Street. Turning right, I could reach the foyer, where the art deco stairs led up to street level. There were exits. It wouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds to run outside.

I sank back onto the desk chair and studied the famous steel structure on the front of the postcard.

There’s just one more thing I have to do, he’d written. The envelope had been postmarked a week ago. Shouldn’t he be done with whatever it was by now?

I leafed through the notebook. Scattered words and sentences, names and phone numbers. Why had he sent this to me? And why keep it at the theatre instead of taking it home? I saw darkness gaping beneath the illusory cheerfulness of the postcard.

Don’t worry meant that I had every reason to be nervous. I’d worked in the theatre long enough to know that people don’t say what they mean. The true meaning is hidden behind the words. I’ll be home soon and when I get back sounded like simple, practical information, but the words could just as well mean that he was trying to fool me. Or himself.

I stuck the memory stick in my laptop. While I waited for the pictures to upload, I slipped into an emotional limbo, a neutral position between plus and minus. It was something I did on opening nights or in disastrous situations. When Mama had suffered an embolism and I’d found her dead in her apartment, I’d wandered about in that state for several weeks afterwards. I’d finished up the set design for a music video at the same time as making arrangements for the cremation and funeral. My friends began telling me to see a psychologist. Instead, when it was all over, I slept for two weeks, and then I was ready to go back to work.

A picture appeared on the screen. It was blurry, showing a man partially turned away from the camera. In the next photo I saw two men standing outside a door. It seemed to be night time, and this picture was also blurry. I scrolled through more images, but couldn’t make any sense of them. Patrick was definitely not a great photographer. Words and language were his forte, but he was usually able to take decent pictures. These were awful. Nothing but hazy-looking men with disagreeable expressions. One of them appeared in several photos. A typical bureaucrat or banker, or maybe an advertising executive, with thin, rectangular glasses and light eyes, wearing an overcoat or suit. The pictures seemed to have been taken from some distance, in secret. The men could have been any anonymous strangers, in any city on earth. And they told me absolutely nothing about what sort of story Patrick was so immersed in over there.

I closed my eyes to think for a few minutes.

Then I opened the browser on my laptop and found the home page for The Reporter. I looked for the phone number of the editorial office.

‘I’d like to speak to Richard Evans,’ I said on the phone. He was the editor of the magazine that bought Patrick’s freelance stories, and a legend in the publishing world.

‘One moment, please.’

I was put on hold. An extended silence, while I waited to be put through. Then I heard that Richard Evans was not available. After half an hour of being rerouted to one person after another, I reached an editorial assistant, and I was able to trick her into telling me where he was. When I said that I had a story to deliver from Patrick, she told me that the editor would probably be back from the Press Café in an hour because he was due at a meeting. The assistant advised me to make an appointment. Instead, I slipped out of the theatre and took a cab to the corner of 8th Avenue and 57th Street. That was the location of the Universal Press Café, just across from the magazine offices.

Richard Evans was sitting next to the window, leaning over a table that was too low for his tall body. He was deeply immersed in a newspaper and gave me only a brief glance as I approached.

‘There are more tables over there,’ he said, motioning towards the other side of the café. Even though he was over sixty, his blond hair was thick and wavy.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘My name is Ally Cornwall, and I’m married to Patrick Cornwall.’