PROLOGUE
THE LUTETIA, PARIS
1945
‘There’s another body,’ says one of the porters. ‘Upstairs, Room 11.’
He sighs. ‘Murder or natural causes?’
‘That’s your business, not mine. I told them you’d take a look.’
He is tired of murder and bodies. The war is over, but death goes on. He gets up and leaves the office and enters the lobby. The Hôtel Lutetia, the jewel on Paris’s Left Bank, is full of people. There are crowds by the entrance, people mingling in the grand dining hall, standing all the way up the vast staircase and along the corridors. The Occupation is just a memory now, or a nightmare.
Today Paris is full of American GIs, British liaison officers and French resistance fighters.
But no one notices them. They only see the survivors. Each survivor from the camps arrives at Gare d’Orsay with their striped rags, shaved heads, bone-thin and some barely breathing. This grand hotel is their new temporary home. They are like ghosts returning to the land of the living.
He reaches the first floor and finds Room 11. Other residents stand in the corridor hoping for more information. The victim is young. She should have her whole life ahead of her. It is tragic, really, but so are most things in this city after the war. He bends down and puts his fingers towards the neck, feeling for a pulse.
She is dead, right enough. He checks the name on the records.
The Red Cross don’t want bodies registered here at the hotel, so he will say she died in transit, one of the many who never made it back to Paris.
He leaves Room 11 and walks down the grand staircase of this magnificent old hotel, past the latest group of survivors heading to their rooms. In the old days, this hotel was one of the most famous in the world. Guests crowded into the bar, dined loudly in the restaurant, conducted passionate affairs in the suites and bickered over cigars in the lounge. He remembers the magic of the place before the fighting started. Paris was always the city of lights. The last five years have changed everything. For too long, it has been a city of darkness.
He returns to his office, writes up the form and stamps it. At lunchtime, he takes a walk along the Left Bank to clear his head. He feels his hand shake as he puffs on a cigarette, the prick of tears in his eyes as he smokes, his whole body wracked with urgent feelings he can’t explain.
He wasn’t always like this. And, just like the Lutetia itself, the glories of the past seem dead now. They are all survivors here, in one way or another.
Paris will never quite be the same again.
And nor will he.
DAY ONE
PRESENT DAY
1
OLIVIA
The call comes at the worst possible time.
I’m getting TJ ready for school. As always, he’s refusing to put his socks on because they’re itchy, then also refusing to put his shoes on, and the less said about making sure his geography homework is in his rucksack the better. It’s only me and him and he has enough strength as a six-year-old to make the morning routine more like a WWE wrestling match. I sometimes wish I had The Rock as my live-in partner. I’m sure he could ace the no-shoes dilemma in thirty seconds flat. But, alas, it’s just me. It always feels like I’m doing a two-person job on my own.
Eventually I corner TJ on the stairs and manage to wedge the shoes on, Velcroing them up tightly before he has a chance to protest, and I find the dog-eared homework perilously close to the marmalade jar on the kitchen table. He’s incorrectly identified Asia as Africa and put North America across the shape of Europe. It’s too late now. Only the top corner is sticky, so I wipe it clean with my fingers and then put it in his rucksack and end up, as usual, carrying the damn thing myself.
‘Right, go, go, go, go.’
TJ is now singing to himself. It’s a mangled version of Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift which he must have picked up from the radio in the car on the way to school. I don’t remember my mum doing any of this. She was still in a dressing gown at this point in the morning smoking one of her sixty a day. She thought traditional parenting was so passé, an old-fashioned notion that liberated souls like her rejected, and I always had to get myself ready for school. Now I’m standing in my very proper semi-detached house in a grey, bang average London suburb – Redbridge, if you’re interested, neither glamorous like Islington or fashionable like Camden; no one has ever used the words ‘Redbridge’ and ‘scene’ in the same sentence – holding the door open as my six-year-old sings. I am mum, doorwoman, chauffeur and, last but not least, psychotherapist and memory expert.
The front door is locked. TJ skips to the car. The radio comes on as I force our rickety old Ford Mondeo into life and check the time. We currently have six minutes for a ten-minute journey. I’ve planned our morning routines like a military exercise, so why does time always go missing on a school day? I am up way before seven, squeezing in ten minutes of stretches and exercise and a smidgen of me time. But getting to the school gates by eight-thirty is like running the hundred metres in under ten seconds. It will always be beyond me, as fiendish as algebra or the perfectly cooked risotto.
‘Muuuuuuuuum . . .’
That is another thing TJ’s started doing to get my attention. He knows it annoys me which is why he keeps doing it. He learned it from Kyle, his dad and my ex, the master of saying someone’s name with serious attitude.
I’m about to tell TJ off when the call rings through the car speaker. The number isn’t in my contacts. I’m not expecting anyone to ring. But it could be a patient or someone from the hospital. I answer it and shush TJ. I turn down Sabrina Carpenter belting out ‘Please Please Please’ on the radio.
‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Dr Finn speaking.’
This is usually the only thing that keeps TJ quiet. He has always been mystified by this other person called ‘Dr Finn’. Dr Finn looks and sounds like Mum but has a work voice which is very much its own thing and isn’t constantly telling him not to touch sticky surfaces or wash his hands. In TJ’s head, I am the Pepper Potts to Dr Finn’s Iron Man, a helpful personal assistant who passes on messages and makes things run on time.
‘Is this Dr Olivia Finn of the Memory Unit at Charing Cross Hospital?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘I am calling from the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris.’
That explains the accent and the odd number. I think it must be a joke at first, despite the tone of voice. One of my guilty pleasures is entering competitions for mini-breaks in the Cotswolds or a five-night cruise round the Med. But I can’t remember anything mentioning Paris and the Hôtel Lutetia. I’m half-French by birth, but I’ve never stayed at the Lutetia. A broom cupboard of a room on the fifth floor is about six figures a night and it’s way beyond my budget. I do have one connection to the Lutetia, but that is something else entirely. And it’s not my connection, or not really, but my family’s.
My thoughts turn to work now. Could it be one of my old patients, perhaps, who still carries my card with them? Or a colleague? But being a psychotherapist isn’t like being a software engineer in Silicon Valley and no one I work with has enough spare change to stay in the Left Bank’s most famous five-star hotel.
I check the car clock. Paris is an hour ahead of London. If I was a Parisian mother, then my son would definitely be late for school. Then again, I would be Parisian so have a waist like a celery stick and a charmingly carefree attitude to school drop-off times. I’d probably be two espressos in by now and off to meet my sizzling younger lover with a name like Gabriel or Jean-Luc. Instead, I have a nine-thirty with a patient called Alan to discuss distressing memories of school swimming lessons. Glamour is my middle name.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but I’m in London on the school run with my son at the moment. It might be better if I call you back.’
The caller pauses. ‘Do you know a woman called Sophie Leclerc?’
I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I remember patient names as long as I’m treating them. Then they become old files. I once read that the human brain can only cope with a hundred and fifty close relationships. Beyond that, we’re useless. Some days I feel like even fifty relationships is more than enough for me.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not that I can remember. Look, I’ll give you a ring—’
‘Madam Leclerc is waiting in the lobby of the Lutetia here in Paris. She is deeply distressed and insists that only you can help her.’
‘I’m sorry, but you must have the wrong number. I’m in London, not Paris. And I’ve never met a Sophie Leclerc.’
I glance at TJ. He has lost all interest in the caller and Dr Finn and is instead playing with the Chelsea keyring on his rucksack, jamming part of his thumb towards the sharp bit. I am waiting for the cut, the blood, the tears. This morning is proving to be a bit of a nightmare. And it’s about to get even worse.
‘I’m not sure how to tell you this,’ says the caller. ‘But the woman sitting in the lobby, well, she . . .’
I am about to end the call and focus on getting my son to school.
Then he says it.
‘. . . she claims that she’s your grandmother.’
