She draws a breath that turns into a sob. She wipes her face with her sleeve, but it isn’t enough. She rises, fetches tissues, resumes her place, tries to make sense of what she has read. So many questions.

How hard it must have been for Connie to keep her secret. Yet her mother was dead, her lover absent. Who could she have confided in? Who would have known her well enough to spot the signs, if she were determined to hide them?

In the hall, Marina hears a door opening and a cough. Giovanni is on his way out – to a concert, presumably. She goes to the window. He walks slowly as if in pain. Has he been ill? Is that why she hadn’t seen him before? Had he been in his room all this time?

Marina’s breath catches inside her throat. People may not have seen Connie in the house, but it didn’t mean that she wasn’t there, or at least somewhere close. What is it they say? Hiding in plain sight. Perhaps Connie was doing precisely that. Not in the flat, because Harry had visited, but the attic, maybe. It was a perfect hiding place.

And what does it mean – the fact that Connie wrote but didn’t send the letter to Johnny? According to the letter, she planned to travel on 7 August. Had she hoped to have the baby in Paris? Or to have the baby and then travel to Paris? She wouldn’t, presumably, have booked a ticket near to the baby’s due date, but that was assuming she knew the due date. Marina has always been told she was a small baby, born early.

As the questions multiply in Marina’s mind, fresh tears rise, thinking about Connie alone and pregnant. Frightened, not knowing what to do. Marina scrubs at her face with the tissues. Connie is her mother. She is certain. It’s simply the logistics she needs to work out. And she will work them out and then she will find her. She will search the whole of Paris, if necessary. She imagines the record offices she will scour, the town halls she will enter, the officials she will talk to, the red tape she will work through until she unearths an address, a boulevard, an apartment. Then she will knock on the door.

She stands abruptly and strides to the window. Somebody must know something. A baby can’t be born and survive even for a few days without help. Who had been there for Connie? Her mother was dead. Her aunt lived on the other side of the country. She had no siblings and no cousins according to Harry, and no grandparents as far as Marina knew.