The Unforgotten: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Powell is a commissioning editor at The Daily Telegraph. She has written features and interviews for The Guardian, The Observer, the London Evening Standard, and various women’s magazines. Laura has won several awards, including a Scott Trust Bursary from the Guardian Media Group and a New Writer’s Bursary from Literature Wales. Originally from Wales, she now lives in London. The Unforgotten is her first novel.

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The Unforgotten

1

Early June 1956

The girl runs along the promenade and around the lighthouse keeper’s derelict cottage, her ponytail whipping the air and new tears flying down her face. She stops at the topmost step that leads down to the crescent of shingle, cups her hands around her mouth, fixes her eyes on the pair of figures below—the size of thumbs from here—and she bellows.

They don’t turn around. The shorter of the two figures raises his arms and flips over on his hands. His body cartwheels a perfect circle. The second figure, a head taller and wearing a black-and-white-striped dress belted at the waist, turns away as if trying not to notice the cartwheel or its impressiveness. The girl on the promenade tries again. She calls louder this time, but her words are carried off by the wind. The girl below raises her own arms. For a moment she is a cloud of whirling stripes and cotton and ivory stick legs, then she is back on her feet, dusting sand from her hands.

The girl on the promenade inches down the steps, changes her mind, and leaps back up again as though the steps are scorching hot. She opens her lips, and she shouts a third time.

“Betty, come up here quick. They’ve found another girl. Dead!”

Seconds pass. Betty is pleased she executed the cartwheel well; her hips had stayed straight as they rolled in a neat circle. She glances sideways at George, who is cramming broken gingerbread from his trouser pocket into his thick lips. Something about him makes her stomach curdle. She turns away from him and notices the girl on the promenade.

“I think Jennifer’s calling me—”

“There was me thinking you were too frightened to go upside down,” George cuts in, still munching. “But now just look at you, cartwheeling about like a clown.”

“I wasn’t scared. You only dared me because you wanted a look at my knickers.”

“Your knickers, indeed,” he says, and his eyes swim over her body. “One day you won’t speak to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Not when I have a Bentley S1 and drive us to the South of France, then back through London for tea with the queen herself. You’ll wear a dinging silk scarf. And my child’ll be growing in your stomach.”

He jabs his eyes into her middle. Betty turns away and kicks up a toeful of sand. A seagull shrieks. Jennifer waves her arms madly.

“I’d better go back up. Jennifer wants something.”

“Fine. You go,” says George. “As long as you come with me to the dance. Pa’ll drive.”

“But—”

“No buts. You’re coming with me.”

Betty sighs; if she protests, he will spend the next three weeks trying to persuade her. She gives a small nod and skips off across the sand.

“Your ma sent me,” cries Jennifer as Betty reaches her. Her voice is raspy, as if the words have been pulled out of her throat and over a grater. “A busload of up-country men have arrived at the hotel.”

“Calm down.”

Always so urgent; Betty would like to stitch pebbles into her hem to slow her down.

“But that man what stabbed Maureen,” pants Jennifer. “He’s struck again on the New Road. They’ve come to write about him for the papers. Didn’t you hear me calling?”

Betty shakes her head. She tries to look calm, but she feels sick.

“Who?”

“They don’t know yet. She’s not local.”

“Why didn’t you come down onto the sand to tell me?”

“No.” Jennifer’s voice drops to a whisper. “Maureen’s blood is probably still wet on it, God bless her soul.”

“Don’t be silly,” snaps Betty, but she walks faster.

“My da said he stabbed her in the neck with a bait hook. And my ma said—”

“Right,” she interrupts, not wanting to know more. “Get yourself home safely. I’ll help Mother.”



PARKED MOTORCARS LINE THE street and a man wearing a spotted bow tie lolls outside the hotel sipping a glass of something amber. His left arm blocks out half of the hotel sign. Eden, it reads now.

“Fully booked, love,” he mutters without looking up.

“I live here,” says Betty curtly, and she squeezes past him.

Inside, the big room is misty with tobacco warmth. Men stand shoulder to shoulder, still wearing their overcoats, and Mother wriggles between them doling out cups of tea and cinnamon slices of loaf cake and toothy smiles.

“Want your grushans topped up with a drop of stout?” she calls to a man in an armchair with an empty teacup balanced on his knee. He ignores her.

“The killer has to be a local,” another of the reporters is saying to no one in particular.

“Apparently her blood was still warm when they found her,” chips in a younger one with a cigarette wedged in the gap between his front teeth. “And the inspector just told me that the first poor lass was stabbed in the stomach forty times . . . or was it fourteen?”

“Mind your lip, Tony,” says the eldest with an Irish accent. “There’s ladies about.”

“I’m just saying it like it is.”

“Well, don’t,” snaps the bow-tie man, stepping into the room. They all quieten. His face is stern, but he slips Mother a wink. Betty pretends not to notice.

“All warm enough in your rooms?” chirps Mother, giving the bow-tie man one of her special smiles. “Enough blankets on your beds?”

“My darling, the only way we could possibly be more comfortable is if you hopped into our beds with us.”

Mother pretends to look coy and sashays into the kitchen as the men fall about laughing, all except the silent man on the armchair, the teacup still balanced on his knee.

“What’s wrong with you?” snaps the bow-tie man, glaring at him. “Silver spoon still stuck up that backside of yours?”

They all laugh harder and stare at the armchair man. As Betty squeezes between them, making for the kitchen, she glances at him, too. His eyes are low and he doesn’t speak. He seems to want to keep himself in a separate bubble. He skims through a stack of papers, each covered with black words inked in tight orderly shapes. She can’t quite make out his eyes, just the steep curve of his forehead and the black curls jostling for space on his crown. He has narrow shoulders, she notices. A long face, too. He looks strangely streamlined.

She stares at him, fascinated at how the teacup still balances while his right hand holds a pen and the other supports the wad of papers. He cocks up his left eye and locks onto her.

“Yes?” he grunts, but not altogether unkindly.

His voice is deeper than she expected, startling her to silence. His eyes are glassy blue puddles of cold water, and pink capillaries thread across his face. Beautiful, somehow.

She fumbles for something to say. She is usually so composed around hotel guests.

“Ever so sorry,” she manages.

She wants to know why he doesn’t talk to the others, why...