The Tower is falling. Stones tumble from its crown as it topples into darkness. From the parapet, tiny figures hurl themselves, gesticulating, into the void. One is wearing a red dress – or is it a cloak, with a little hood?

I do not look at the final card. I’ve seen it too many times before. My mother, ever the optimist, interpreted it in many ways – but to me that card means only one thing.

Death grins out from the woodcut design; jealous, joyless, hollow-eyed, hungry – Death the insatiable; Death the implacable; Death the debt we owe to the gods. Outside, the snow has settled thickly, and although the light has begun to fade, the ground is weirdly luminous, as if street and sky had exchanged places. It’s a far cry from the pretty picture-book snow of the Advent house, although Anouk loves it, and keeps finding excuses to check the street. She’s out there now; from my window I can see her bright figure against that baleful white. She looks very small from where I’m standing; a little girl lost in the woods. Of course, that’s absurd; there are no woods here. That’s one of the reasons I chose this place. But everything changes under snow, and magic comes into its own again. And the winter wolves come slinking down the alleys and streets of the Butte de Montmartre . . .

3

Monday, 24th December
Christmas Eve. 4.30 p.m.

JEAN-LOUP CAME ROUND this afternoon. He phoned this morning to say he was bringing some of the photographs he took the other day. He develops them himself, you know – at least, in black-and-white he does – and he’s got hundreds of prints at home, sorted and labelled in all kinds of files, and he sounded excited and out-of-breath, like there was something special that he wanted to show me.

I thought maybe he’d been in the cemetery, that he’d finally managed to take a picture of those ghost-lights he’s always talking about.

But it wasn’t his cemetery pictures he’d brought. Nor was it his prints from the Butte, the Nativity house and the Christmas lights and the cigar-chewing Santa. These were all photos of Zozie – the digital snaps he’d taken in the chocolaterie, plus some new ones in black-and-white, some of them taken from outside the shop, and some with Zozie in a crowd as she walked across the square to the funicular, or stood in a queue outside the bakery on the Rue des Trois Frères.

‘What’s this?’ I said. ‘You know she doesn’t like—’

‘Look at them, Annie,’ he said.

I didn’t want to look at them. The only time we ever fell out was over those stupid pictures of his. I didn’t want that to happen again. But why had he taken them at all? There must have been some reason, I thought—