The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  ‘I didn’t think you were interested in journalists,’ I said coldly.

  She looked at me. Didn’t respond. I pointed at her left hand.

  ‘Did you tell Patrick that the wedding ring you’re wearing is just for show? That you bought it for yourself?’

  Sarah quickly got up, but then stood there, looking confused. ‘If I’d known that you were … his wife … then …’

  ‘Then what?’ I gave her a piercing look. ‘If you’d known I was married to him, would you have told me you were attracted to him? Would you?’ Anger surged inside me. For the first time in days I felt like myself again.

  Sarah flicked the lock on her briefcase, making a nervous clicking sound.

  ‘Is there somewhere we could talk?’ she said in a low voice.

  They’d met more than once. I got that out of her at last. We were sitting in my hotel room. Sarah had taken the desk chair, hunching over like a little girl with her legs pressed together and her hands in her lap. I didn’t like seeing her sitting in Patrick’s chair, but there was nowhere else except the bed, and that option was no better.

  She said that she’d helped him with something that must never get out.

  I didn’t need to ask why she’d done it. I could hear it in her voice whenever she mentioned his name. A gentleness that wasn’t there when she was rattling off legal terms.

  Patrick had wanted help with two other matters. He had turned to her because she knew the French legal system and where to find the information. She knew people.

  The first thing he wanted to know involved property records. He wanted her to find out who owned a building on avenue Kléber.

  ‘Number 76,’ I said. ‘A company called Lugus owns it.’

  Sarah raised her eyes to look at me and nodded.

  ‘The other property was a warehouse up in Saint-Ouen, in the northern part of Paris,’ she said, leaning down to take a small notebook from the outer pocket of her briefcase. ‘Actually, I wasn’t able to find out very much.’ She leafed through her notes and then read aloud: ‘The property at 76 avenue Kléber is owned by a real estate company named Epona, which is part of a corporation that also owns the consulting firm Lugus, which leases the premises. The entire firm is controlled, in turn, by a foundation registered on the island of Jersey.’ Sarah Rachid looked up. ‘It’s impossible to get any information from Jersey.’

  ‘Just give me the short version,’ I said.

  ‘The warehouse is owned by another real estate company, which is part of a corporation controlled by the foundation on Jersey.’

  ‘The same foundation?’

  Sarah nodded and again looked at her notebook. ‘That’s all I was able to find out.’

  I got up and went over to the windows to open them. Connections. That’s what Patrick was looking for. Something that could link Alain Thery to the imprisoned slave labourers in the warehouse. I wondered whether he’d collected enough information to publish the story. Salif had identified one of the men associated with Thery. But now Salif was dead. I thought of the deserted office space with the glass walls and thick carpets on avenue Kléber. Behind the stage set of a successful consulting firm was something else altogether.

  I turned around.

  ‘What was the other thing Patrick wanted help with?’

  Sarah drew her jacket closer around her. ‘Do you think you could close the window?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She looked down at her notebook again.

  ‘It had to do with a think tank, a lobbying group, or whatever it’s called. La Ligne Française. He wanted to know where their funding comes from. Are you familiar with that organization?’

  I nodded and sat back down on the bed. ‘Did you find out?’

  ‘Well, the information is not available in any public records.’

  ‘But you did make an effort to find out, didn’t you? For Patrick’s sake?’

  She blushed.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? With La Ligne Française?’

  ‘Between Patrick and me,’ she said, the crimson spreading to the lobes of her ears. ‘I want you to know that.’

  I dug my fingers into the coverlet that the cleaning woman had put on the bed. That same invisible person who left the scent of lavender in her wake.

  ‘Did you know that he was assaulted?’ said Sarah.

  I gave a start. The next second I flew into a rage.

  ‘What else are you not telling me?’ I said, standing up and taking a few steps towards her. ‘You sit here hiding behind your fucking laws, thinking you have the right to keep quiet, but this is my husband we’re talking about. Do you understand?’ I leaned against the wall with my arms crossed. ‘What the hell do you mean he was assaulted?’

  Sarah wrung her hands.

  Patrick had phoned her late at night on September 11.

  ‘That’s a date that always sticks in my mind. We talked about that too. About what it was like to be in New York on that day.’

  Sarah shifted position on her chair.

  ‘I was in bed reading a novel by Maryse Condé. I always go to bed at eleven. He said he needed help, and he didn’t know who else to call. I said he could come over to my place. I live in Belleville. He took a cab.’

  Sarah stood up and went over to the window. ‘They dragged him into a doorway not far from here, a little further along rue Saint-Jacques.’ She pointed to the left, towards the river.

  ‘He wasn’t bleeding, but he’d suffered a serious blow to the head and had vomited. He thought he might have a concussion.’ She closed the windows and turned to look at me. ‘It was a warning. They wanted him to go back home.’

  ‘Who did?’ That was all I could manage to say.

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  I was sitting down on the bed again, feeling a mixture of fear and bewilderment. And searing jealousy. The next day, on the twelfth of September, he’d phoned me. Why hadn’t he told me about what had happened?

  I’m not going to let them think they can silence me. That was what he’d said as I stood in that hopeless stairwell in Boston. And then something about not being able to talk about it on the phone.

  Sarah Rachid had tried to persuade him to go to the hospital, but Patrick had refused. He just asked her for some aspirin and an ice pack for the back of his head.

  ‘What an idiot,’ I said aloud.

  She gave a start.

  ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Patrick. That warning probably just egged him on. He was convinced he was on the right track. Believe me, I know him. He never gives up until he gets to the bottom of things and digs up all the shit he can find.’

  She stared at me in silence before going on.

  ‘In the morning he was up and dressed, ready to go out and land his story, as he said.’

  ‘He slept at your place?’

  ‘On the sofa.’

  Sarah turned away. I looked out of the window at the dome of the Panthéon, picturing the pendulum inside, demonstrating the rotation of the earth and the passage of time. One day after another.

  Thursday, September 11. Patrick eats lunch at Taillevent, and Alain Thery has him thrown out. That same evening, he’s assaulted.

  Friday morning, 12 September. Patrick leaves Sarah’s apartment in Belleville.

  I didn’t know where that part of town was located, nor did I want to know. At any rate, later on Friday he goes to Hôtel Royal to talk to Salif and the others. And that night the hotel burns down.

  He hadn’t paid any attention to the warning.

  ‘Don’t be mad at Arnaud,’ said Sarah, unable to look me in the eye. ‘Sometimes he crosses the line in terms of what’s legal, but it’s only because he wants to help. Plus he has a weakness for Nedjma. She can get him to do anything.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. I’d been thinking about Patrick and was hardly listening.

  ‘She’s the woman Arnaud has been seeing. I don’t trust her.’

  Sarah
fidgeted, looking unhappy. I fixed my eyes on her. Arnaud’s love affairs didn’t interest me at all.

  ‘Did you see my husband again?’ I asked. With special emphasis on ‘my husband’.

  She shook her head. Tugged at the sleeves of her blouse. First one, then the other. Finally she told me that late on Sunday night she had called Patrick. She’d heard about the hotel fire on the news, and Arnaud had told her that Patrick was there that night.

  ‘I just wanted to hear how he was doing,’ said Sarah quietly.

  ‘So how was he?’

  ‘He said he was going to get them arrested. He yelled about the police burying the investigation. He was ranting, worse than Arnaud ever does. The politicians are in on it too, he said. I got worried. He was so angry. He was in a bar. I don’t know whether he was drunk. I thought it was strange for him to go to a bar when so many horrible things had just happened.’

  ‘Did he say which bar?’

  ‘Plaza Athénée, somewhere near the Champs-Élysées. I don’t go to those sorts of places.’

  I recognized the name at once. Caroline Kearny had mentioned it. Every Sunday he holds court at his regular table, she’d said. And Patrick had been there on a Sunday, upset and angry. That was exactly two weeks ago, today.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now I’d like you to leave.’

  I got out of the cab and stepped into a world of boundless luxury, with Prada and Chanel competing for attention in the shop windows. The Plaza Athénée was a white palace that looked as if it was straight out of a fairy tale. A warm light enveloped me as I entered the gilded lobby, with crystal chandeliers sparkling high overhead. In the cloakroom I encountered a voluptuous blonde wearing a fur coat. She cast a patronizing glance at my clothing before she took the arm of her seventy-year-old escort and strode off in her stiletto heels.

  I had changed into the black dress that I’d worn for my lunch at Taillevent. I’d spent twenty minutes looking for the cheap necklace that had glittered so nicely in my décolletage, and finally found it in my suitcase, stuffed inside a dirty stocking.

  In the bar I headed for a rococo style stool. The counter itself was sand-blasted glass, as if sculpted from a block of ice. Candelabra seemed to float in mid-air, burning blue flames. The whole scene could have been a set from Harry Potter.

  Twenty or so guests sat scattered about, mostly couples, plus a group of girls drinking colourful cocktails. None of the men matched the photo of Alain Thery. It was almost ten thirty. I ordered a non-alcoholic drink. The bartender placed a small bowl of nuts and olives in front of me.

  At that moment a group of five men came in, accompanied by three young women wearing dresses that ended just below the panty line. Alain Thery was the man in the middle. I’d studied the pictures of him so many times that there could be no doubt. Those eyes that seemed almost white, but otherwise his appearance was so ordinary that it was hardly memorable. He wore an expensive Italian suit and a blood-red tie. He doesn’t want to be the boy from the coal heaps in Pas-de-Calais.

  The group sat down at a low table in the comfortable lounge area of the room. Their arrival had heightened the activity behind the bar, and two waiters were already on their way over with champagne. Thery was sitting so that I could see his face, on the sofa against the wall. The sofa back was a classical painting printed on fabric surrounded by a large frame, making the guests seem as if they were part of a work of art. Behind Thery a full rigger was pulling into a bustling and dimly lit dock on the Seine in the early 1800s. Reclining on a silver cushion next to him was one of the blondes who had stretched out her legs on the sofa.

  The champagne frothed in the glasses, and Thery put his hand on the girl’s thigh. They all raised their glasses in a toast. I thought about the god with the three faces that had been chosen for the name of Thery’s company. What would it take for another face to appear? For the masks to fall? What had Patrick done when he was here? Aimed his camera at the man, or punched him in the jaw? Accused him of exploiting people as slaves? Of killing the seventeen who had died in the hotel fire? I wondered how the guests in this place would have reacted to such a scene. Maybe they’d think a movie was being filmed, or it was some sort of bizarre art happening. After all, they were in a place where the candelabra seemed to be floating in the air.

  One of the men who sat with his back to me stood up, said something to Thery, and then turned around. My heart leaped into my throat when I saw his face. I coughed and quickly turned away.

  I’d met that man before. A wide face with a nose that seemed too small, and little pig-eyes. He was the one who had thrown me out of the office on avenue Kléber. I’d assumed he was a security guard, but if he was sitting here drinking champagne, he had to be a much closer associate to Thery.

  I tried to look outside, but I couldn’t see the street, only the black night sky. The fabric window drapes made the outdoors seem hazy and unreal, as if it existed in a different era, in a black-and-white film.

  When I dared to turn my gaze back to the bar, the man with the pig-eyes was gone. Maybe he’d gone to the men’s room, or maybe he’d left for home.

  I realized this was my best chance, so I slid off the bar stool and, on trembling legs, headed for Alain Thery’s party. Two more women had joined the group. They wore black-and-white dresses with bold graphic patterns and big, chunky jewellery. Maybe they were actresses, since Caroline Kearny had said Thery had a weakness for actresses. I thought of the picture of Juliette Binoche, and decided that these two bore no resemblance to her whatever.

  Thery had removed his hand from the thigh of the blonde, and was pouring champagne into the glass of one of the black-and-white-clad girls. The champagne bubbled and sparkled. He didn’t notice as I stepped close.

  ‘Oh, Alain! How nice to see you,’ I said loudly.

  He looked up with an enquiring expression.

  ‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,’ he said with a wan smile. Nice white teeth, a slightly shrill voice.

  ‘It was in Saint-Tropez. Don’t you remember?’ I said, slipping onto the chair next to him.

  ‘No, but I meet a lot of people.’ He smiled at the girl on his right. ‘I have a yacht down there, you know. A sixty-nine-foot sloop.’

  I reached out to nudge his knee with my hand.

  ‘But you really must tell me about our mutual friend. How is he? I heard that you met here in Paris.’

  Thery laughed and glanced impatiently at the other women. One of them gave a big sigh.

  ‘Who do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Patrick Cornwall, of course. The journalist.’

  Thery’s whole body tensed. I could feel the vibrations as his muscles tightened. He pushed the blonde away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m talking about Patrick Cornwall,’ I said loudly, so everyone in his party would hear me. ‘He was supposed to interview you about your companies, and now he’s missing. Where is he?’

  ‘How would I know? I have no idea who you’re talking about.’

  He motioned to the man sitting across from him. I refused to look away from Thery’s pale eyes. I had my gaze fixed on him.

  ‘He knew too much about you and your companies. Was that it? What have you done with him?’

  Thery stood up.

  ‘This bitch is crazy. Can someone get her out of here?’ He looked in all directions, signalling to the men sitting nearby.

  ‘Throw out this crazy whore. She’s drunk.’

  The next second strong hands lifted me up, locking around my arms and gripping the back of my neck.

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ I screamed, kicking my feet and sending two champagne glasses flying off the table. The girls on the sofa threw themselves aside to avoid getting drenched with the bubbly.

  ‘She’s fucking out of her mind,’ one of them said in French. ‘Do they let in just anybody these days?’

  ‘Which of your men killed Salif?’ I shouted as they dragged me away. Out of the cor
ner of my eye I noticed that one of the men strong-arming me was the same guy who’d thrown me out before. He narrowed his pig-eyes and snarled in French in my ear: ‘I remember you, you little bitch.’

  The last thing I saw was Alain Thery putting his arm around the girl sitting next to him on the sofa as they merged with the picture of the full rigger. His icy-grey eyes were fixed on me as I was hauled out of the room.

  Chapter 10

  Paris

  Monday, 29 September

  Fourteen metres away a beat-up old Peugeot was parked on the street. I recognized it at once the minute I came out of the hotel. A woman sat in the driver’s seat, staring at me.

  I went closer, my heart pounding.

  Soon Olivier, the hotel clerk, would come out. He’d promised to accompany me to the police station to file a proper report. Sarah Rachid was right, I thought. Society is based on the judicial system, and if we don’t put our trust in the law, then everything will fall apart.

  I took the last few steps over to the car and leaned down to the window. Again I noticed the rust on the wheel rims and the door handle, which was slightly crooked.

  Slowly, she rolled down the window. The woman was truly beautiful. Finely etched features and short dark hair. There was no doubt that she was the one who had come to get Patrick at the hotel. She was the kind of woman that a man would notice. She was elegantly attired in a blue coat, and she looked out of place inside that old car.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  The time for polite phrases was definitely over.

  ‘Get in.’ She motioned towards the passenger seat.

  ‘Not on your life,’ I said. If she was somehow mixed up in what they’d done to Salif, I had no intention of going anywhere with her in a car.

  She seemed to hesitate for a few seconds. Then she opened the door and got out. We stood on either side of the vehicle. Both of us the same height.

  ‘Alena Cornwall,’ she said with an indifferent tone of voice, giving the impression her words meant nothing at all. ‘Married to Patrick Cornwall. Why didn’t you say that right from the start?’