‘Well, if you decide to try it,’ Thierry said, ‘just come and see me. I’ll find you a house. You can get something surprisingly decent for half a million or so . . .’

‘Listen,’ says Roux. ‘I have to go.’

Anouk protests. ‘But you just got here!’ She shoots an angry look at Thierry, who does not notice in the least. His dislike of Roux is visceral, rather than reasonable. No thought of the truth has crossed his mind, and yet he suspects the stranger of something – not because of anything he has said or done, but simply because he looks the type.

What type? Well, you know the look. It has nothing to do with his cheap clothes or his too-long hair, or his lack of social skills. There’s just something about him; a left-handed look, like that of a man from the wrong side of the tracks. A man who might do anything: clone a credit card or set up a bank account using nothing but a stolen driver’s licence or acquire a birth certificate (maybe even a passport) on behalf of some person long deceased, or steal away a woman’s child and vanish like the Pied Piper, leaving nothing but questions in his wake.

Like I said.

My kind of trouble.

2

Saturday, 1st December

OH, BOY. WELL, hello stranger. Standing there in the chocolate shop, just like he’d been away for an afternoon and not for four whole years of time; four years of birthdays and Christmases with hardly a word, never a visit and now—

‘Roux!’

I wanted to be angry with him. I really did; but my voice wouldn’t let me, somehow.

I shouted out his name, louder than I’d intended.

‘Nanou,’ he said. ‘You’re all grown-up.’

There was a kind of sadness in the way he said it, as if he was sorry that I’d changed. But he was just the same old Roux – hair longer, boots cleaner, different clothes, but just the same, slouching with his hands in his pockets, the way he does when he doesn’t want to be somewhere, but smiling at me to show that it wasn’t my fault, and that if Thierry hadn’t been there, he would have picked me up and swung me around, just like the old days in Lansquenet.

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m eleven and a half.’

‘Eleven and a half sounds pretty grown-up to me. And who’s the little stranger?’

‘That’s Rosette.’

‘Rosette,’ said Roux. He waved at her, but she didn’t wave back, or sign anything. She rarely does with strangers; instead she just stared at him with those big cat’s eyes until even Roux had to look away.

Thierry offered him chocolate. Roux always liked it, way back when. Drank it black, with sugar and rum, while Thierry talked to him about business, and London, and the chocolaterie, and the flat—