The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller
An unputdownable thriller set in the dark underbelly of Europe, perfect for fans of I AM PILGRIM.Into the darkness they fall…Tarifa, Spain. A man’s body washes up on the beach. No-one seems to care.Patrick Cornwall is a highly acclaimed investigative journalist. His latest project: to uncover the plight of migrants trying to start new lives in Europe, and expose the corruption that runs to the highest levels of society.Patrick’s wife, Ally, is used to Patrick being out of contact. But she’s just discovered she’s pregnant, and she must track him down. Unable to reach him and starting to worry, she flies across the ocean to get answers.Still unable to find him, Ally delves into the secrets Patrick was determined to expose, and is drawn into an ever-deadlier web. Because in the dark underbelly of Europe, where lives are cheap, the perpetrators will stop at nothing to keep their sins hidden, and their victims forgotten…
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Translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Tove Alsterdal, 2009 By agreement with Grand Agency
Translation copyright © Tiina Nunnally 2016
Cover design by Alex Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Max Bailen/Cultura RM/ Alamy Stock Photo (woman on beach); Shutterstock.com all 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
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.
