Anouk remembered the Mennonite farm, her father, blue duck eggs. The stroke of leather boots on a dry, wooden floor. Here was time, folding over on itself. Now, on the beach, she imagined hooves grinding over stones and sand, wood and iron wheels creaking and straining. A thick-clothed bathing suit, down to the ankles and up to the chin. The self-conscious laughter of women swimming carefully so as not to wet their hair. She could hear it.

‘The girl who was killed, the chambermaid, she was caught stealing from one of the hotel guests,’ said Lucas. ‘I’ll show you something at the lighthouse.’

They turned around and, with the airport at their backs, cut across the point.

‘Story goes, she was caught with something like two or three coins. Not a lot. She’s put under guard until the York police can pick her up, but at some point in the night she escapes, gets chased by the island constable to the top of the lighthouse, and there’s a scuffle. She ends up getting tossed down the stairs.’

‘Shit.’

‘Neck breaks, she dies, leaving a bloody handprint on the twenty-third step. No matter how often they scrub it, bleach it, whatever, the handprint won’t go away. It’s still there.’

‘Get outta town.’

‘I’ll show you.’

It was a few degrees cooler inside the lighthouse, and it smelled of mud and wet stone, like a cellar. Anouk followed Lucas up the spiral stairs, which disappeared like a lick with the curved wall of the tower. Going slowly, respectful of the legend, Anouk counted each step.

‘It must have been dark that night,’ she said.

‘Yes, it would have been very dark.’

‘There must have been torches.’

‘Imagine that light jittering on the walls,’ he said.

The staircase was narrow, turning into itself at each shallow step. Light from above, from the nest, cascaded down the close walls. Lucas jumped up a few steps then stopped and turned. He pointed to the step just level with Anouk’s face. ‘Do you see it?’

She leaned towards the step, propping her weight against the outside wall, which was smooth and cool against her shoulder. On the step, the suggestion of three splayed fingers and a horseshoe wedge of palm, a crescent tip of thumb. Tea-brown, grabbing the edge of the step. Obviously paint.

‘We take the school kids up here with flashlights at night,’ said Lucas. ‘Scare the living shit out of them. They love it.’

‘Do they believe it?’

‘Sure. More fun if you believe it.’

40

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1899

Laurent tardieu’s nephew, the young mouleur, arrived at the morgue directly after his breakfast, and was indeed impressed with his uncle’s judgement of the contours and plumpness of my cold, dead face. They both agreed that I had been decent-looking in life, and that now, the face of my corpse provided an ideal model for a death mask that might just help the nephew make his name at last.

So. In an examination room in the morgue on the south-eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, my body was prepared. The young mouleur handled my corpse carefully, using a bolt of linen to prop my head in a line of equilibrium with the rest of my body. This step was necessary to avoid displacement of my skin and facial muscles, which had relaxed to putty. With needle and thread he sewed shut my mouth and eyes, then spent a moment in silence resting his hands gently on my shoulders, trying to get a sense of my true expression. Already the fiction, the myth, was taking shape. Solidifying before the plaster had even been applied. He and Laurent Tardieu both saw a victim. Feeble. Scorned and wet.