The Girl You Left Behind (34 page)

‘Are you coming for lunch?’
Janey appears at the door. ‘The table is booked for one thirty.’

She must have just applied perfume. It
punctures the air, even on his side of his desk. ‘You really need me there?’
He is not in the mood for small talk. He doesn’t want to be charming, to detail
the company’s astonishing track record in recovery. He doesn’t want to find
himself seated beside Janey, to feel her leaning against him as she laughs, her knee
gravitating towards his. More pertinently, he does not like André Lefèvre,
with his suspicious eyes
and his downturned mouth. He has rarely
taken such an instant dislike to a client.

‘Can I ask when you first realized the
painting was missing?’ he had asked.

‘We discover it through an
audit.’

‘So you didn’t miss it
personally?’

‘Personally?’ He had shrugged at
the use of the word. ‘Why should someone else benefit financially from a work that
should be in our possession?’

‘You don’t want to come?
Why?’ says Janey. ‘What else have you got on?’

‘I thought I’d catch up with
some paperwork.’

Janey lets her gaze rest on him. She is
wearing lipstick. And heels. She does have good legs, he thinks absently.

‘We need this case, Paul. And we need
to give André the confidence that we’re going to win.’

‘In that case I think my time would be
better spent doing background than having lunch with him.’ He doesn’t look
at her. His jaw seems to have set at a mulish angle. He’s been sour with everyone
all week. ‘Take Miriam,’ he says. ‘She deserves a nice
lunch.’

‘I don’t think our budget
stretches to treating secretaries as and when we feel like it.’

‘I don’t see why not. And
Lefèvre might like her. Miriam? Miriam?’ He keeps his gaze steadily on
Janey’s, leans back in his chair.

She pokes her head around the door, her
mouth half full of tuna sandwich. ‘Yes?’

‘Would you like to take my place at a
lunch with Monsieur Lefèvre?’

‘Paul, we –’ Janey’s jaw
clenches.

Miriam glances between the two of them. She
swallows her mouthful. ‘That’s very kind. But …’

‘But Miriam has a sandwich. And
contracts to type up. Thank you, Miriam.’ She waits until the door closes, purses
her lips in thought. ‘Is everything all right, Paul?’

‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Well.’ She cannot keep the edge
from her voice. ‘I see I can’t persuade you. I’ll look forward to
hearing what you’ve turned up on the case. I’m sure it’ll be
conclusive.’

She stands there a moment longer and then
she leaves. He can hear her talking in French with Lefèvre as they head out of the
office.

Paul sits and stares ahead of him.
‘Hey, Miriam?’

She reappears, holding a piece of
sandwich.

‘Sorry. That was –’

‘It’s fine.’ She smiles,
pops a bit of escaping bread back into her mouth, and adds something he cannot decipher.
It is not clear whether she heard anything of the previous conversation.

‘Any calls?’

She swallows noisily. ‘Only the head
of the Museums Association, like I said before. Do you want me to call him back for
you?’

His smile is small and doesn’t stretch
as far as his eyes. ‘No, don’t worry.’ He lets her close the door and
his sigh, although soft and low, fills the silence.

Liv takes the painting off the wall. She
runs her fingers lightly over the oil surface, feeling the graduated whorls and strokes,
wondering at the fact that they were placed there by the artist’s own hand, and
gazes at the woman on
the canvas. The gilded frame is chipped in
places, but she has always found it charming; has enjoyed the contrast between what was
old and shabbily ornate, and the crisp, clean lines around her. She has liked the fact
that
The Girl You Left Behind
is the only colourful thing in the room, antique
and precious, glowing like a little jewel at the end of her bed.

Except now she is not just
The
Girl
, a shared piece of history, an intimate joke between husband and wife. She is
now the wife of a famous artist, missing, possibly murdered. She is the last link to a
husband in a concentration camp. She is a missing painting, the subject of a lawsuit,
the future focus of investigations. She does not know how to feel about this new
version: she only knows that she has lost some part of her already.

The painting … was taken and passed into German possession.

André Lefèvre, his face blankly
belligerent, barely even bothering to glance at Sophie’s image. And McCafferty.
Every time she remembers Paul McCafferty in that meeting room her brain hums with anger.
Sometimes she feels as if she is burning with it, as if she is permanently overheating.
How can she just hand over Sophie?

Liv pulls out her running shoes from the box
under the bed, changes into sweatpants and, shoving her key and phone into her pocket,
sets off at a run.

She passes Fran, sitting on her upturned
crate, watching silently as she heads off along the river, and lifts a hand in greeting.
She doesn’t want to talk.

It is early afternoon, and the edges of the
Thames are mottled with stray meandering office workers going back after long lunches,
groups of schoolchildren, bossed and
herded by harassed teachers,
bored young mothers with ignored babies, texting distractedly as they push buggies. She
runs, ducking in and out of them, slowed only by her own tight lungs and the occasional
stitch, running until she is just another body in the crowd, invisible,
indistinguishable. She pushes through it. She runs until her shins burn, until sweat
forms a dark T across her back, until her face glistens. She runs until it hurts, until
she can think of nothing but the simple, physical pain.

She is finally walking back alongside
Somerset House when her phone signals a text message. She stops and pulls it from her
pocket, wiping away the sweat that stings her eyes.

Liv. Call me.

Liv half walks, half runs to the edge of the
water, and then, before she can think about it, she swings her arm in a fluid motion and
hurls her phone into the Thames. It is gone without sound, without anybody even
noticing, into the slate-grey swirling waters that rush towards the centre.

February 1917

Dearest sister

It is three weeks and four days since you left. I don’t know if this
letter will find you or, indeed, if the others did; the mayor has set up a new
line of communication and promises he will send this on once he gets word that
it is secure. So I wait, and I pray.

It has rained for fourteen days, turning what remained of the roads to mud that
sucks at our legs and pulls the horses’ shoes from their hoofs. We have
rarely ventured out beyond the square: it is too cold and too difficult, and in
truth I no longer wish to leave the children, even if just for a few minutes.
Édith sat by the window for three days after you left, refusing to move,
until I feared she would be ill and physically forced her to come to the table
and, later, to bed. She no longer speaks, her face set in hollow-eyed
watchfulness, her hands permanently attached to my skirts as if she is fully
expecting someone to come and snatch me away too. I’m afraid I have barely
had time to comfort her. There are fewer Germans coming in the evenings now, but
enough that I have to work every night until midnight just to feed and clear up
after them.

Aurélien disappeared. He
left shortly after you did. I hear from Madame Louvier that he is still in St
Péronne, staying with Jacques Arriège above the
tabac
, but in
truth I have no appetite
to see him. He is no better than
Kommandant Hencken in his betrayal of you. For all your faith in people’s
goodness, I cannot believe that if Herr Kommandant genuinely wished you well he
would have torn you from our embrace in such a manner, so that the whole town
might become aware of your alleged sins. I cannot see any evidence of humanity
in either of their actions. I simply cannot.

I pray for you, Sophie. I see your face when I wake in the morning, and when I
turn over some part of me startles that you are not there on the other pillow,
your hair tied in a fat plait, making me laugh and conjuring food from your
imagination. I turn to call for you at the bar and there is just a silence where
you should be. Mimi climbs up to your bedroom and peers in as if she, too,
expects to find you, seated before your bureau, writing or gazing into the
middle distance, your head full of dreams. Do you remember when we used to stand
at that window and imagine what lay beyond it? When we dreamed of fairies and
princesses and those noblemen who might come to rescue us? I wonder what our
childish selves would have made of this place now, with its pocked roads, its
men like wraiths in rags, and its starving children.

The town has been so quiet since you left. It is as if its very spirit left with
you. Madame Louvier comes in, perverse to the last, and insists that your name
must still be heard. She harangues anyone who will listen. Herr Kommandant is
not among the handful of Germans who arrive for their meal in the evening. I
truly believe he cannot meet my gaze. Or perhaps he knows I should like to run
him through with my good paring knife and has decided to stay away.

Little snippets of information still find their way through: a scrap of paper
under my door told of another outbreak of influenza near Lille, a convoy of
Allied soldiers captured near
Douai, horses killed for meat
on the Belgian border. No word from Jean-Michel. No word from you.

Some days I feel as if I am buried in a mine and can hear only the echoes of
voices at some distance. All those I love, aside from the children, have been
taken away from me and I no longer know whether any of you are alive or dead.
Sometimes my fear for you grows so great that I find myself paralysed, and I
will be in the middle of stirring some soup or laying a table and I have to
force myself to breathe, to tell myself I must be strong for the children. Most
of all, I must have faith. What would Sophie do? I ask myself firmly, and the
answer is always clear.

Please, beloved sister, take care. Do not inflame the Germans further, even if
they are your captors. Do not take risks, no matter how great the impulse. All
that matters is that you return to us safely; you and Jean-Michel and your
beloved Édouard. I tell myself that this letter will reach you. I tell
myself that perhaps, just perhaps, the two of you are together, and not in the
way that I fear most. I tell myself God must be just, however He chooses to toy
with our futures this dark day.

Stay safe, Sophie.

Your loving sister
Hélène

Paul puts down the letter, obtained from a
cache of correspondence stockpiled by resistance operatives during the First World War.
It is the only piece of evidence he has found of Sophie Lefèvre’s family and
it, like the others, appears not to have reached her.

The Girl You Left Behind
is now
Paul’s priority case. He ploughs through his usual sources: museums, archivists,
auction houses, experts in international art cases. Off the record, he speaks to less
benign sources: old acquaintances at Scotland Yard, contacts from the world of art
crime, a Romanian known for recording almost mathematically the underground movement of
a whole swathe of stolen European art.

He discovers these facts: that Édouard
Lefèvre had, until recently, been the least famous artist of the Académie
Matisse. There are only two academics who specialize in his work, and neither of them
knows any more than he does about
The Girl You Left Behind
.

A photograph and some written journals
obtained by the Lefèvre family have turned up the fact that the painting hung in
full view in the hotel known as Le Coq Rouge in St Péronne, a town occupied by
Germans during the First World War. It disappeared without trace some time after Sophie
Lefèvre was arrested.

And then there is a gap of some thirty years
before the
painting reappears, in the possession of one Louanne
Baker, who kept it in her home in the US for thirty years until she moved to Spain,
where she died, and David Halston bought it.

What happened to it between those dates? If
it really was looted, where was it taken? What happened to Sophie Lefèvre, who
seems to have simply vanished from history? The facts exist, like the dots in a
join-the-dots puzzle but one in which the picture never becomes clear. There is more
written about Sophie Lefèvre’s painting than there is about her.

During the Second World War, looted
treasures were kept in secure vaults in Germany, underground, protected. These artworks,
millions of them, had been targeted with military efficiency, aided by unscrupulous
dealers and experts. This was not the random plunder of soldiers in battle: this looting
was systematic, controlled, regulated and documented.

But there is little surviving documentation
from the First World War, regarding looted property, especially in northern France. It
means, Janey says, that this is something of a test case. She says it with some pride.
For the truth is, this case is vital to their company. There are increasing numbers of
organizations like theirs springing up, all sourcing provenance, listing works that
relatives of the dead have spent decades trying to trace. Now there are no-win no-fee
firms undercutting them, promising the earth to people who are willing to believe
anything to get their beloved object back.

Sean reports that Liv’s lawyer has
tried various legal means to get the case struck out. He claims that it falls
beyond the statute of limitations, that the sale to David from
Marianne Baker had been ‘innocent’. For a variety of complicated reasons,
these have all failed. They are, says Sean, cheerfully, headed to court. ‘Looks
like next week. We have Justice Berger. He’s only ever found for the claimant in
these cases. Looking good!’