Cover

Dedication

For Lilli, April and Pete
with all my love

CHAPTER ONE

Paris, France, 1953

It started right here. In Paris. In the Eighth Arrondissement. The night that ripped my life apart. It was a night when the wind was sharp and the scent of the river strong. I was seated in the dark in my cranky old Renault on a dull street outside a dreary five-storey building you wouldn’t look at twice. But I knew that behind its ordinary black door and beneath its innocuous grey zinc roof it was anything but dull. I wanted to be inside that building so bad it choked me.

It was late evening. I had been waiting for three hours, hands clamped on the steering wheel, sweat crawling between my shoulder blades, and every ten minutes I wiped my palms on my coat. Cars droned past. Headlights chased each other through the night down towards Boulevard de Clichy, where I could hear heavy traffic grinding past, ignoring me. An old lady, black as a cockroach in her widow’s weeds, leaned out of a brightly lit upper window and studied me with suspicion. I swore, sank down in my seat and burrowed into my scarf. I’d swept my long dark hair up out of sight under an unmemorable felt hat and my navy coat collar was pulled up around my ears. I was well trained.

When the black door finally jerked open, the overhead fanlight showed me a man who flew down the three front steps in one stride. I studied his face, seeking signs. He was tall, alert, fast. He moved with authority and focus as he hurried to my car. His name was André Caussade and he was my brother.

‘Drive,’ he ordered.

I prodded the engine into life. He threw himself into the front passenger seat and slammed the door with such force I felt its old bones grind against each other. He smelled of polished boot leather.

‘Drive, Eloïse.’

Not a shout. No panic. But the urgency of his words left me in no doubt. I threw the gear lever into first and the car skidded away from the kerb. I forced a path through the darkness into the incessant flow of Paris traffic, elbowing my way in behind a wheezing truck. This was why I was here – to help my brother. The Caussades together. But Parisian drivers are like Stalin’s army – they take no prisoners. Horns blared. My mother’s moral status was loudly called into question by a driver who nearly took my bumper home with him. It was ten o’clock at night, and no Frenchman in his right mind thinks of anything after that hour except a glass in front of him and a warm thigh under his hand.