Past Life

by Dominic Nolan

Genres: Crime Fiction; Domestic Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

THEY TOOK EVERYTHING FROM DETECTIVE ABIGAIL BOONE. EVEN HER MEMORY. From a blistering new voice in crime fiction, PAST LIFE is a razor-sharp thriller perfect for fans of Ian Rankin, Tana French, Joseph Knox, Jane Harper, Don Winslow and Belinda Bauer. 'A beautifully written debut' Daily Mail 'One hell of a debut. ' Heat 'A great story told with real poise ' Simon Kernick, Sunday Times bestseller ' This is crime as it should be written... gripping, addictive, a thrill of a ride.' Jo Spain, international bestseller *** Waking up beside the dead girl, she couldn't remember anything. Who she was. Who had taken her. How to escape. Detective Abigail Boone has been missing for four days when she is finally found, confused and broken. Suffering retrograde amnesia, she is a stranger to her despairing husband and bewildered son. Hopelessly lost in her own life, with no leads on her abduction, Boone's only instinct is to revisit the case she was investigating when she vanished: the baffling disappearance of a young woman, Sarah Still. Defying her family and the police, Boone obsessively follows a deadly trail to the darkest edges of human cruelty. But even if she finds Sarah, will Boone ever be the same again? 'An astonishing debut' Woman's Own 'A smart, distinctive debut' Sunday Mirror 'I loved it...It's taut, beautifully written and at some points the tension is almost too much to bear. ' Harriet Tyce 'I really loved this...a twisting, heart-wrenching story with wonderfully vivid characters' Claire McGowan 'Memory is at the centre of Nolan's bold and sharply written book...In a genre oversaturated by samey stories, Past Life is a dark crime fiction debut that feels fresh, smart and thrilling.' Culturefly WHY BLOGGERS AND READERS ARE GRIPPED BY PAST LIFE: 'Gripped me from page one all the way to the end...an assured and adept novel from another fresh writer entering the crime fiction arena. A superb debut you won't forget! ' ***** Crimesquad 'An amazing debut novel ' Anne Bonny Book Reviews 'I highly recommend to anyone but especially to those who like their crime fiction to have genuine depth... loved it.' LizLovesBooks 'Past Life is gripping and completely intens e; once it grabs a hold of you, it refuses to let go.' The Book Magnet ' Beautifully written, thrilling and heartbreaking...I can really see this in my top ten reads of 2019 and it's only February.' Lost In The Land of Books 'An AMAZING debut novel' ***** Goodreads reviewer 'A fast-paced electric thriller of book...a 5-star read for me.' ***** Goodreads reviewer 'That's a damn good read.' ***** Goodreads reviewer

Release date: August 8, 2019

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Whatever was happening was already receding, departing from her mind quicker than she could gather up its wool. It surprised her that she was lying down. There was a bare mattress beneath her and she faced the wall. In the low light her eyes slid round the room seeking something familiar, anything that might tell her where she was. Planks neatly boarded up the window, bolted into the wall either side. Walls of cheap Anaglypta, once white but now maroon and bubbled with damp, peeling away at the corner to reveal older laminae beneath like decorative strata.

Evidence of bygone peoples.

She was exhausted. No, more than that – drained, as if it was something done to her, making her bones weary and her head light and daffy. She was scared, felt it low down in her guts, but didn’t know what of. Didn’t know anything, in fact. That icy realisation set off a mild panic. It would come to her, she told herself, it would all come to her. Just lie here a minute, wait for the obvious stuff to occur.

Such as your name.

Her body began to make itself known. Head pounding, mouth coarse and spitless. One eye was barely more than a slit, her face tender to the touch, and new pains were cropping up faster than she could identify them. She couldn’t have chosen this, whatever this was. Movement was a trial, and battling to sit up she drunkenly toppled sideways before pushing herself up onto her knees.

She wasn’t alone.

In the far corner a half-dressed girl sat slumped against the wall, legs stretched out before her with bare feet turned inward.

Trying to speak to her, her voice snagged awkwardly. Working up some saliva in her mouth, she cleared her throat with a rasp.

‘Hey.’

Nothing.

‘Hello?’

Crawling towards the girl, she discovered bruised knees and shins along the way. Late teens perhaps, childlike body appearing younger, skin the colour of sand at low tide. She noticed her arm, little bug bites along the veins, and on the floor a needle and spoon, all the makings. Leaning over, she held her hand under the girl’s nose.

‘Shit.’

Finding no pulse at her neck, she pressed her ear to her chest, just above the little top that covered her small breasts. There was nothing, the skin stone cold.

Deep breaths now. Resist the urge to call out.

The door was locked and had no handle on the inside, a brass plate screwed over the hole. One of the planks across the window had been worked loose and, scuttling over on hands and knees, she pulled away the slack end. Peering through the dark glass she saw it was boarded from the outside too. She sat back against the wall beneath the sill, where an unpainted patch and small holes cut in the carpet suggested a radiator had once stood.

The room was ill-lit by a low-wattage bulb in a lamp on the floor, its fuchsia shade grubby and tasselled. It wasn’t plugged into a socket in the room but rather an extension cord that disappeared out beneath the door. The ancient carpet had probably sometime in the seventies been a tangy shade of orange. Now dark and dirtied, it had worn right through in places so soot from the disintegrated underlay spilled out like scorch marks. An accumulation of stains covered it, the nature of which she didn’t care to speculate on.

She was alone and she knew a few things. What a radiator was, and wallpaper and doors and locks and the absence of heartbeats. And, when she heard them, the sound of footsteps. She froze. They came from outside the room, on exposed floorboards she guessed. Edging towards the door, she cocked an ear. Old white paint peeled from the frame, little curls of it on the floor like nail clippings. Her breath was quick and shallow, her heart the loudest thing. She tried to listen over it. Voices, human voices, indistinct through the walls but definitely two voices in another room.

Please God be speaking in the same words I’m thinking.

The footsteps were right outside the door, the voice clear as he passed – she knew it was a man – but none of it made sense, gibberish to her. Another one followed, calling out from further away, his noises as incomprehensible as the first’s.

What did that mean? She’d forgotten how people spoke to one another? Maybe wherever she was, she wasn’t from there. A foreigner, lost and stupid in some faraway place.

The first voice stopped outside. At the sound of a key in the lock she scooted back over to the mattress and lay exactly as she’d woken, back to the door. She heard it swing open and felt eyes on her, but nobody came in. The other one was shouting from afar, the closer one replying. The door pulled to again, this time unlocked.

She chanced a peek over her shoulder, then moved quickly and quietly to the door. It was open a crack and she could see one of them through another doorway across the hall a few yards down. His feet and legs, his bulk resting on his thighs where he sat on a stool. He held a tray on his knees and wore gloves, thin disposable ones. With a fork in his fist, a balaclava rolled up over his chin, he heaped tangles of tinned spaghetti into his mouth, loose ends whipping about, leaving a trail of sauce across his full lips.

She almost laughed. Spaghetti. She knew what that was too.

A third voice in the other room, a woman’s. Not speech, but other noises.

Noises of fear. Noises of pain.

Putting the tray on the floor, the man heaved himself to his feet and moved deeper into the room, out of view. His size was such that he listed from side to side, more of a lumberer than a walker. The noises of someone being struck, of a woman pleading.

She slipped out of the door into the hall, where power cables trailed up and down the floor. A door down the end, past the room the rumpus was coming from, looked like the entrance to a flat. There were two other rooms the other way. The first, almost directly opposite, was a bathroom, frosted glass in the door. The other was a kitchen. A camping stove was heating a pan of water on the side and another pan, smeared with congealing sauce, sat in the sink. The window was boarded up like in the other room, but the various power cables came together and went out through a hole cut in the bottom plank to wherever the electricity was being siphoned from.

She crept back to the bathroom, leaving the door open enough to see the door of the room she’d been locked in. Key was still in it. The bathroom was small and windowless, served only by the cataracted light from the sandblasted door panels. A newspaper hung over the edge of the bath and she squinted in the dark, stifling a cry of joy as she read and understood the headlines. She scrambled around for anything else she might read, but the room was bare.

A small cabinet above the basin was empty, but closing it she caught sight of herself in the mirror and didn’t recognise the face. Not because it was marked and bruised, but because she was certain she had never seen it before. The mouth was doing strange things in the glass and she didn’t know the colour of the eyes. Trembling, she got down on the floor, sitting beneath the basin with her knees drawn up. The plaster walls had been stripped, the plumbing exposed, and the bath was without its panel. A broken shard of tile lay on the floor. She picked it up, clutched it close to her.

Through the wall the other woman cried out again. She listened to her and, pressing herself further back into the gap between the cold ceramic pedestal and the crumbling wall, listened to the sounds of the things they did to her.

Heavy footsteps approached down the hall. Forcing herself up, she hid behind the door in a sprinter’s crouch. When the dark shape moved across the pearly glass, she hurled herself out and crashed into the mass, jamming the fractured tile deep into it.

He roared and arched his back, reaching for the tile. Her hand had slipped, slicing her palm on the sharp edge, but the tile stuck fast in him under the shoulder blade. The impact staggered him into the room and she pulled the door closed behind him, locking it and removing the key, sending it skating across the hard bathroom floor into a dark corner beneath the tub.

No way the other man didn’t hear the commotion and the big one was already shouting. He kicked at the door but it opened inwards, so the frame held against his boot.

In the kitchen, the pan was boiling over furiously, water spitting in the flames. She took hold of the end of the handle, hot but not too hot, keeping it on the heat. Hopping from foot to foot, she could hear the other one in the hall.

Closer, closer, let him come to you.

She lifted the pan and jumped out.

Baseball cap and a bandana around his mouth and nose so she could see only his eyes, dark and implacable with black brows. A brush of dark hair sprouting out around each copper ear. His jeans were undone, the open flaps and unbuckled belt ends clutched together in one fist.

They stared at one another, and she flicked the pan.

Boiling water scalded his face and he gave a peculiar shriek, dropping his jeans and clawing at the steaming bandana. He collapsed into a sitting position, jeans pooled around his ankles, and she tossed the remaining water into his lap, drawing another scream.

The big one had booted the panelling out of the bottom half of the door and on his hands and knees was trying to force his way through a hole that needed to be twice as big.

Telling her he was going to fucking kill her.

Dirty little bitch.

She understood his words perfectly now.

A woman tottered into the hallway from the other room, moving gingerly on the balls of her feet. Wearing only a grimy white vest, her blonde hair darkly streaked with blood, she wiped more from her eye as it trickled down from her scalp.

Grabbing the pan, she strode over to the burns victim and clouted him about the head again and again. Making strange noises, he grabbed at her ankles but she smashed his elbow with the heavy bottom of the pan and his breathing could barely keep pace with his cries.

When she spoke, it made no sense, like the men before but different. She went into the pockets of the burnt man’s jeans and rooted around, coming up with keys. As she got the front door open, the big one was almost through the hole, splintered bits of door tugging at him. A wooden panel hung across the doorway outside, but was affixed by only one corner and swung aside easily.

Clambering through after the other woman, she covered her eyes. Though grey and overcast, the light was still blinding and she blinked into the sun as if it was something new. Having expected the baked ochre bricks of some desert place, as the kaleidoscope faded from her eyes she found herself on the external deck of the first floor of a low-rise housing block in a distinctly British town. Flats up and down the way were similarly boarded up, the car park beneath them almost empty. Maybe half a mile away the tubular crown of a stadium squatted on the skyline, and nearer than that, standing at staggered intervals, three tower blocks. Giant tombstones facing the dying sun.

Something struck her hard on the back of the leg and she tumbled sideways.

The big one was coming out through the door and had hold of her.

‘Run,’ she screamed at the other woman. ‘Don’t fucking stop.’

The woman was frozen for an instant until yelled at again, then she was off in a sprint towards the stairwell at the end of the deck.

Him, she kicked out at with her heel, catching him in the side of the head and flat against his shoulder. He lost his grip on her leg and she fell back into the shadow of the balcony wall, scrambling to her feet and making off in the other direction to the woman. It was a dead end, a granite wall beyond the door to the final flat. She could hear him coming after her. The other woman was in the clear. She didn’t have the legs for a chase anyway. She pulled up as he was upon her, a big hand round each bicep, thumbs digging painfully into her armpits. He slammed her against the balcony wall, back bent over the edge. She turned her face away, expecting him to hit her, but he did nothing.

Looked at her through his mask.

Studied her.

Then lifted her up and threw her over the side.

Backwards she went, feet coming up over her head, spinning out into gravity. Something hard and immovable caught her across the hip and thigh. She was looking at the sky, and then suddenly the ground, like getting punched in the face with a mountain.

The sky was back again. She remained perfectly still, assessing her options. There was a car beside her. She tried to crawl under it – it was important she not be found until she had fully gathered herself. No part of her was of a mind to obey, however. Something in her mouth, bits of hard stuff she tried to spit out, but it was like syrup in there.

Voices came and faces along with them, hovering above her. Someone touched her shoulder, offered comfort. Their words were familiar.

They told her to stay still, don’t move. Help’s on its way.

She wanted to laugh. Where’d you think I’m going to go? Can’t even get under this car.

Far above the faces, curls of black smoke quilled to the top of the sky, kiting on the breeze that ushered in the end of day. Tongues of fire darted into view where the boards over the windows ignited, the flat alight now along with the horrors it concealed.

Her leg hurt in a way she couldn’t quite figure. It was beneath her, or beside her. Something billowed out above her, a jacket, and floated down to cover her. She realised she was shivering. People were saying it was going to be okay, saying it like a question. She thought maybe she knew them, or she wanted to.

Other voices came, more authoritative. She wanted to speak, to tell them.

Reassure them she was still alive in there, and she still knew a few things.

Tell me your name, love.

That one wasn’t supposed to be difficult.

Tell me what happened.

I don’t remember, she said, or probably just thought.

It’s okay, love. It’s okay.

They didn’t get it. It wasn’t okay. She didn’t remember what had happened. She didn’t remember anything that had happened before waking up in that room, not even her own name.

She didn’t remember anything about anything.

The shower was a generous cubicle, plenty of room for the moulded plastic stool with adjustable legs and rubber feet. Soft water, something fitted to the supply. It had all been done specially for her coming home, an en suite in the biggest bedroom. They’d moved house, actually, but that bathroom was the first thing done. A new start. Not that she remembered the old house at all.

Boone sat and took a pumice to the white skin on her heel. She shifted her weight. Sometimes she could feel the pin at the top of the bone digging into her buttock. It had been almost a year, and she still didn’t quite trust the leg.

Stepping out, she fetched a towel from the rail and turbaned her wet hair. She left the shower running. Wrapping another towel around beneath her arms, she listened at the bedroom door. From downstairs, Jack called, ‘Bye.’ He waited before trying again.

‘Bye.’

Then the boy. ‘She can’t hear you, the shower’s on.’

She waited until she heard the front door close behind them before turning the shower off. Rage had assembled itself silently within her, as it so often did. She crept into the hall, even alone in the house trying to hide that she favoured the hurt leg. Doctors told her it had healed just fine, outside of the discomfort caused by the screw, and there was no reason she should be limping.

Boone considered herself outside the wheelhouse of most of these quacks. Moving into the front guest room (precisely decorated in floral monochrome like a boutique hotel), she stood to the side of the window with her head between wall and curtain, peering down at the Lexus in the drive. It gleamed immaculately beside her twenty-five-year-old Saab 900SE.

The Goose.

Iridium blue, only rusting in a dozen or so places.

They’d tried to convince her to get rid, but there was no way. There was something oddly comforting about it. Maybe because it stuck out beside this beautiful home, with its polished wooden floors and sea views and luxury Japanese automobiles. Maybe because it looked as battered as she felt. It was the only thing in the world that made any sense.

Jack was behind the wheel of the Lexus already, the boy – Quin – half in, half out, his dad telling him to sort himself out. Jack had told her that they’d named him for the home village of her grandmother’s people, farmers from near Ennis in County Clare before they came shilling-chasing after the war. Boone thought that was probably a yarn she’d fed him, as studying the bookshelves in what Jack called the study she had found a copy of Ann Quin’s Berg.

Quin’s door closed with a satisfying clunk as he fiddled with his backpack.

How did his packed lunch get done? She hadn’t noticed if he prepared it himself or Jack did it. Did she used to do it? It felt like mum territory. She watched the car slowly back out of the drive and disappear away down the road out of sight. Left alone and in peace, the anger would disperse as quickly as it gathered.

In her own bedroom, she fetched her bridge from the glass of solution on the nightstand, rinsed it off under the tap and slid it into her mouth. She rolled her jaw, tongued around her gums until it felt right. She pushed out her top lip with the tip of her tongue, under the scar that ran along one ridge of her philtrum. Barely visible now, it was the only outward sign that her teeth had been smashed out. She rubbed in a little moisturising cream. Didn’t seem to be making much difference at this point, but it had become ritual. She did the same with the scars on her leg.

Plodding downstairs in her towels, she left a trail of damp footprints in the duck-egg carpet. The large kitchen was housed in a rear extension. South-facing, its skylight captured the sun and radiated it off the white furniture. She filled the kettle and flicked it on, fetching a cafetière and a vacuum canister of ground coffee beans from a cupboard above the counter. She ground her own, keeping fresh beans sealed in the freezer until she was ready for them.

The press was enough for two cups, the first of which she took with a splash of milk. She liked it either muddy or black. Jack said the coffee was a new thing.

He also said she used to take two sugars in her tea, but she couldn’t imagine it.

Sitting at the breakfast table, she flicked on the tablet Jack had bought her. There was an app that gathered news from all sorts of sources and she browsed through with glazed eyes, skimming the headlines and guessing the rest. News and politics were things she hadn’t yet found the will to engage with. Best to pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening and leave the making of decisions to those who turned up.

She took her time with the coffee, having the second cup black. The day, like all others, stretched out before her as a wide avenue of opportunity. She had time, means and transport. She could do anything, and so invariably did nothing. Taking her coffee upstairs, she dressed in jeans and a thin sweater. She’d inherited wardrobes of stuff from her previous life, but rarely wore anything that couldn’t be folded.

Lounging in the hulking club chair Jack had spent a fortune on for the study, she read for a spell. The chair nearly filled the bay, which was north-facing and therefore bright but not too bright. She was still deciding on her tastes. Not wanting to merely inherit, she’d made Jack promise not to tell her which books were hers and which his, but let her find her own way through the library. Turned out he rarely read fiction and she wasn’t for keeping up with the latest ideas in psychology, so the exercise was moot.

Finding her place, she continued with Richard Stern’s Other Men’s Daughters. It had been the only volume she’d found on the shelves with a bookmark, probably what she’d been reading at the time of her accident (as she’d come to think of it). For months she’d left it untouched, a totem to some previous existence, but the temptation to find a connection to the past had proved too great. Starting over from the beginning, none of it had been familiar.

The card bookmark bore the wild crayon designs of a child and had been laminated. A tin eyehole had been punched through it, looped with a stringy pink tassel. Despite its plastic sheath, it was creased and dog-eared with age and use. After a few chapters, she marked her place and shut it. Having two or three books on the go at once was what she had found worked, different kinds of stuff, and she switched to a detective story, The Laughing Policeman by Sjöwall and Wahlöö.

She was most comfortable in that room. It wasn’t littered with photographs like other rooms – gleaming, grinning faces huddled together for the camera in places she couldn’t remember visiting, their emulsive eyes roving, searching her out as she slid around the house like their ghost.

She’d looked up all the places they’d gone on holiday, read so much about them that she wondered after a while whether it mattered that she didn’t recall going to any of them. What was the half-life of memory? The gradual decay of remembrance must at some point intersect with received knowledge such that the two were indistinguishable.

The phone rang and she ignored it. No message was left. Ten minutes later it rang again and she knew it was Jack. She grabbed keys and went out into the garden so she couldn’t hear it. The yard was small, with decking sporting a small table and chairs, but beyond its fence only a road and a thin strip of beach separated it from the sea. A gate led out to the grassy verge of the coast road, where the salt surprised her every time.

They were on the outskirts of Lark, a medieval port and Victorian tourist resort now surviving off the dregs of both industries, and the shore there was usually deserted save for the odd jogger or dog-walker. There was a bench, which Boone considered her bench, and she sat there in the stiff breeze communing with the Channel, studying its grey undulations, France a dark finger on the horizon.

If there is no memory, what is time?

Boone’s recollection of that day at the boarded-up flat and the things that happened there had distorted bit by bit, the way a mirror unsilvers. She remembered coming to in the hospital and feeling like she’d been there for a million years. It was her strong belief that there had been many hundreds of people talking to her over that time, all saying the same things, more or less. Repeating their words like the chanting of spells in dead languages. She couldn’t clearly remember any of their faces but they’d surely been there, above her somewhere, looking down. She recalled snatches of what they said.

Distal radius.

Comminuted femoral shaft.

Zygomaticomaxillary complex fracture.

Intramedullary rod.

It had the foggy familiarity of a poem recited in childhood, the sense that she’d always known the words but couldn’t fully comprehend them now. Lacked the context in which to put them to work.

At one point she swore her mother was there, and though she felt the side of the bed sink beneath her weight when she sat, she was less of a person, as Boone understood people to be, and more of a presence.

When she came around enough to make out faces and actual bodies, recognise their workings even if she didn’t know their identities, she was deeply suspicious of everything they told her. Two days, the doctor told her she’d been there. Sedated at first, then under anaesthetic for the operation on her shattered femur, and a few more hours to fully come round. Sounded like bollocks. Nothing these people said could be believed until checked against verifiable quarters.

Only Boone had none. No way of getting her bearings. Nothing before that day at the flat existed. She knew the past only by its absence, and even then had no sense of its shape or volume.

She was presented with two people who apparently were glad to see her. A man leaned in for some kind of hug that he turned into an awkward clutch halfway through and, perhaps realising exactly how much of a mess she was, kissed her on the forehead. A boy hid behind him somewhere, awaiting instructions on how they were all supposed to behave.

Married with a teenage son.

It took a while to convince all parties involved that she hadn’t a clue who they were. The doctors said short-term memory loss wasn’t that uncommon after major trauma, so confusion was to be expected. The heavy dose of benzodiazepines found in her system wouldn’t help either.

They asked her questions, establishing a baseline of what she did remember. The autobiographical stuff, she drew a big blank. Zero recall. No clue who she was, where she came from or who anyone in her life was.

Her semantic memory was better, but still patchy. She understood the world in theory, knew what a hospital was, knew what the various uniforms people wore meant. They showed her an array of objects and pictures of objects and she identified as many as she could be expected to. Specifics were sketchier.

Some things she knew, and some things she didn’t.

She knew what an astronaut was and knew mankind had been to space, but she couldn’t tell them who the first man to walk on the moon was.

Some things she half knew.

They asked her about books from her home and she knew that Simenon had written the Maigret novels but couldn’t remember the plots to any of them. Jack confirmed she had them all and had obsessively read them in order.

Other things she wished she didn’t know.

‘Who is the current prime minister?’ a doctor asked.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Boone said.

When things showed no signs of improvement after a few days, there was a lot of frowning and sharp inhalations of breath, like plumbers just before delivering the bad news. Jack and Quin, father and son, wore their concerned faces and adopted a position of wait-and-see. Only a matter of time before she remembered them, remembered herself. They were positive she was in there somewhere.

Until that time, she held court. Doctors, consultants, surgeons, psychiatrists and experts of every stripe paraded through her room thinking aloud but committing to nothing, waiting for a consensus to coagulate. Numerous scans showed concussion but no serious injury that would impair brain function, and certainly nothing that could result in total retrograde amnesia. They were settling on some kind of dissociative state, a stress. . .