‘Please,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Just look at them. Then if you think there’s nothing weird about them, I promise you I’ll throw them away.’

Well, looking at them – there were thirty or so – made me feel quite uncomfortable. The thought that Jean-Loup had been spying on Zozie – stalking her – was bad enough, but there was something about those photographs; something that made it even worse.

You could see they were all of Zozie, all right. You could see her skirt with the bells on the hem, and her funky boots with the three-inch soles. Her hair was the same, and her jewellery, and the raffia bag she carries her shopping in.

But her face—

‘You’ve done something to these prints,’ I said, pushing them back towards Jean-Loup.

‘Cross my heart, I haven’t, Annie. And everything else on the film was OK. It’s her. She’s doing it, somehow. How else can you explain this?’

I wasn’t sure how to explain it myself. Some people take a good photograph. The word for this is photogenic, and Zozie definitely wasn’t that. Some people take an OK photograph, and I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but Zozie wasn’t that, either. All of those pictures were terrible, with her mouth an odd kind of shape somehow, and a look in her eyes, and a sort of smudge around her head, like a halo gone wrong—

‘So she isn’t photogenic. So what? Not everyone is.’

‘There’s more,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Just look at this.’ And he pulled out a folded piece of newspaper, a clipping from one of the Paris newspapers with a blurry picture of a woman’s face. Her name, it said, was Françoise Lavery. But the picture was just like those prints of Zozie, tiny eyes and twisted mouth, even down to that weird smudge . . .

‘What’s it supposed to prove?’ I said. It was just a picture, kind of blown-up and grainy like most pictures you see in the paper. A woman who might have been any age, with hair in a kind of plain bob and little glasses under her long fringe. Nothing like Zozie at all. Apart from that smudge and the shape of her mouth—

I shrugged. ‘It could be anyone.’

‘It’s her,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I know it can’t be, but it is.’

Well, that was just ridiculous. And the clipping didn’t make much sense either. It was all about a teacher in Paris, who disappeared some time last year. I mean, Zozie was never a teacher, was she? Or is he suggesting she’s a ghost?

Even Jean-Loup wasn’t sure. ‘You read about these things,’ he said, carefully replacing the clipping inside the envelope. ‘Walk-ins, I think they call them.’

‘Whatever.’