Early access · Book two

Cold Ground

A Carmen Reyes Investigation

Eighteen months after the Nerja case, Detective Carmen Reyes is called to a hillside above Frigiliana where a grave has been dug carefully and filled in badly. The body has been in the ground nine years.

15 chapters · 70,662 words · Chapter One free for everyone, the rest for full-access readers

1. 01Chapter OneThe town was different in October.
2. 02Chapter TwoThe calls took two hours.
3. 03Chapter ThreeShe did not sleep well.
4. 04Chapter FourThe satchel contained the following things, catalogued by the forensics team in the order they were found when it was opened in the evidence room in Málaga on the Thursday afternoon following the discovery:
5. 05Chapter FiveThe pathology report arrived on Friday morning, two hours before Detective Sergeant Mendes was due at the comisaría.
6. 06Chapter SixThe statement took three hours and forty minutes, which was long — longer than most formal statements Carmen had been present for, and longer than the substance of Ana's account strictly required. The length was a product of Mendes's method: the careful…
7. 07Chapter SevenSunday lunch at her parents' house had the first Sunday lunch Ana had attended — the quality of something observed and participated in simultaneously, the double consciousness of a guest who was genuinely present and who was also, somewhere below the…
8. 08Chapter EightShe went to see Elena Vidal on Tuesday morning, having given Monday afternoon and Monday evening and Monday night for the document to work on Rodrigo.
9. 09Chapter NineRestrepo came to the comisaría on Wednesday morning with two things Carmen had not expected: a colleague, and a box.
10. 10Chapter TenAndrade arrived in Spain on a Thursday morning in the third week of November, extradited from Portugal under the bilateral treaty, transferred by road from the Alentejo detention facility to the Málaga provincial facility where Saura had been held since…
11. 11Chapter ElevenTomás Jiménez arrived at Málaga airport on a Thursday afternoon in the first week of December, on a direct flight from Mexico City via Madrid, carrying one piece of luggage and the wallet that had been in his family since before he was born.
12. 12Chapter TwelveTomás left Nerja on the Monday morning of the second week of December, on the eight o'clock bus to Málaga and then the flight to Madrid and then the long flight west.
13. 13Chapter ThirteenJanuary arrived on the coast with January on the Costa del Sol, which was neither the January of the north — the grey commitment of a northern European winter, the dark arriving at four in the afternoon — nor the January of the summer season. It was…
14. 14Chapter FourteenThe spring arrived on the coast in February.
15. 15Chapter FifteenThe verdict came on a Thursday morning in the third week of April.