Her gaze flicked to the scar on my face. Clarisse had been good to me after the crash, allowing me time off to recover and breezing into my cramped apartment every few days with a box of glossy patisseries or a racy book or the latest Vogue. I valued her friendship, she’d make me feel almost human again, but now her eyes had narrowed to green slits, as bright and as hard as the king-size emerald nestled on her finger.

‘You have to let it go, Eloïse.’

‘Let what go?’

‘The guilt.’

‘What guilt?’

I stared right back at her, refusing to let her feel sorry for me, but she stretched out an arm and peeled back my fingers from their grip on the curved edge of her desk. Her hand was gentle. Silence crept into the room and all I could hear was our breathing in the quiet office with its Eames chair and modern colourful coat stand. My head hummed with darkness.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What is it that you’re not saying?’

Clarisse sat back in her chair, tapped her nails on her desk, then opened a drawer and withdrew a piece of paper from inside it. She placed it in front of me.

‘For you,’ she announced.

A telegram. I saw it had been opened though it was addressed to me. From my father. I felt a pain at the back of my eyeballs so sharp I couldn’t read. There was only one reason my father would send me a telegram.

André was dead.

My eyes blurred. The world turned a smoky grey.

‘I opened it,’ Clarisse said quietly. ‘You’d given the agency address to him and so I opened it. Read it.’

I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus. There were only two words. Come Now.

CHAPTER SIX

I drove. South. Straight south.

I drove my flimsy 2CV so hard and so fast that it moaned and rattled and expelled fumes in my face that smelled of overheated wiring, but I did not take my foot off the pedal for a second except to refuel. I cursed the grey tin-can’s lack of pace a thousand times. It may have been fine for around the city, but a top speed of 65kpm was not exactly greased lightning with a journey of 750 kilometres to drive.