She spent her days reading books and magazines and writing poetry. Literature stood in for a life. Increasingly she read about Paris and the Bohemian scene in Montparnasse. The French didn’t care for straitlaced English morality. You could be whoever you wanted to be in Paris.

She began collecting shoes, ordered from catalogues and delivered from Harrods. Shoes were beautiful, sensual objects. They provoked, subtly—drawing attention to the delicate arch, the slender ankle, and prompting a glimpse farther up the leg. Shoes connected a person to their world—you walked in them, you danced in them. Without your shoes, you could barely step out of the house. The marks on their soles were the outward signs of a lived life.

Genevieve’s shoes were unworn.

At the dinner table, she watched her mother nibbling tiny mouthfuls, her father munching methodically. She hated the movements of their respective jawbones. The way her father would clear his throat before speaking loudly about something he thought would make him sound knowledgeable. The way her mother would fiddle ceaselessly with her napkin or her hair or the stitching on her sleeve, murmuring occasionally to show that she was listening even though she wasn’t. Topping up her glass when she thought nobody was looking. She hated her father for his pointless bluster and for the way he let himself believe anyone was paying attention to him. She hated them both for what they’d done to her, and for what they’d been doing to each other for as long as she could remember. She ate her food in silence, looking down at her wrists and hands, pale and brittle.

So many dinners, so much hate. Years of it. Until the day when Lord Ticksted brought home a young American he’d met at his club and Genevieve saw her chance.

( thirty-three )

ROBERT MADE A BOGUS enquiry about vacancies and prices to distract the receptionist while Felperstone snuck a look at the occupancy list to get the room number.

“They’ve used a false name,” said Felperstone as they crossed the polished floor through the oval atrium. The hotel’s twenty bedrooms were arranged around this open oval, on six floors. You could stand here, where Robert now stood, and look all the way up those six levels to the glass roof at the top and through it to the sky above.

Robert stopped. “Then how do you know it’s them?”