Katherine Debona - The Girl in the Shadows

But if she wasn’t dead, where was she? Was anything he had ever told her true, or just stories designed to placate a child’s endless questions?

Alice ran her eye along the shelves, reaching high for the first in a long line of albums stood in chronological order. She flipped over the pages, searching the photographs for anything she might have missed.

Her parents stood outside a church, squinting into the sunlight: her father’s face barely containing his unequivocal happiness, her mother holding a small bouquet of peonies.

Her father stood underneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower, arms spread wide and cigarette dangling from his lips.

The silhouette of her mother looking out of an open window at the rooftops of Paris, one hand cradling the stretch of fabric pulled tight over a swollen stomach.

She knew each and every one off by heart – the images melted into her mind through fingertips that would brush over the glossy surfaces, hoping that one iota of her mother would somehow come back to her.

Then the album’s memories changed to pictures of her as a baby. Swaddled in her father’s arms, his weary face and awe-struck eyes turned to the camera. Strapped in a high chair with the remains of a meal smeared over her face, in her hair, on the wall behind. Another of her sat in the middle of brightly coloured building blocks, arms reaching out for the photographer, a jagged line held together by Steri-Strips on the side of her skull, peeping out from amongst tufts of blonde hair.

Like a little bulldozer, her father would say, barrelling straight through things instead of going around. Alice wound her fingers through her hair, seeking out the tiny thread of scar tissue, only one of several that decorated her skin like milky tattoos, a permanent reminder of childhood accidents.

Putting the album to one side she began to pull other files from the shelves, tearing out records of a lifetime spent together but nothing bringing her any closer to the truth. Tax returns, medical records and her father’s employment contract see-sawed through the air to land in a haphazard circle on the floor around where she stood.

She thought back to Barnard Castle, to the gothic architecture and a grumpy tomcat that would run into the kitchen at the first sign of rain. Was there anyone who remembered their arrival from Paris? She could picture the hazy outline of faces: a woman with furious ginger hair and glasses strung on plastic beads around her neck. A man who carried with him the scent of burnt toast and the constant expression of one who had woken only to forget where he was supposed to be.

But nothing about Paris. Nothing about her mother.

What was the point of rifling through his belongings looking for answers that he was unable to give?

She sank to the floor, clutching the photograph to her chest. There was no one to ask. Her father, like her, had been an only child – his parents long since dead and buried. He never spoke of her mother or her family so Alice had no clue, not one bloody clue as to what had really happened.

***

The photograph lay in the pages of the guidebook in front of her, one full of questions. She opened the guide book, easing apart the pages and feeling the creak along the spine. A map of Paris lay before her, the river at its centre like a serpent that curved through the streets, twists and turns reminiscent of the Thames in London.

She remembered a trip she and her father had made to the town of Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, where the source of the Danube rose in turquoise bubbles after a journey through strata of chalk and gravel. The tradition was to throw a coin over your shoulder and make a wish. Alice had complied, the whispered desire passing over lips, a repetition of every time she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.

Bring my mother back to me.

After a lunch of schnitzel and kartoffelsalat her father had wiped the froth of beer from his moustache and drawn a map of Europe on a paper napkin, a ragged line representing the river Danube as it passed through Vienna, Budapest and out to the Black Sea.

‘Where does it come from?’ she asked through mouthfuls of Schwarzwald Kirsch Kuchen , cherry juice sticking to her tongue in the same way as the unfamiliar words had when she ordered her dessert.

‘From everywhere and nowhere at all,’ her father replied, stretching his arms high and wide. ‘The constant change of our planet prevents us from ever knowing all of its secrets.’

He had always encouraged her inquisitiveness, allowed her to pull apart each new intrigue, forever ready with answers to all the questions in her mind.

But never about her mother.

Alice thought of the diaries she would write as a child: naive observations interspersed with wonderings about her mother. About the clothes she wore, the foods she ate and the house in which she lived. There was a drawing on the inside cover of each book, added to and amended each year, but in essence the same. Whitewashed walls, pitched roof, blue shutters and a room under the eaves complete with window seat piled high with cushions. A view over Paris and the knowledge that downstairs, perhaps in the kitchen preparing supper, or maybe pruning roses in the garden, was her mother.

This drawing was an invisible lifeline to a childhood lost – one she had yearned for and perfected over the years. She had even gone to the school library, sought out a map of Paris and chosen the street on which her version of herself, an imaginary twin, lived. South of the river, next to a small park where her mother would watch as she played.

But none of this was real and now the cacophony of streets on the map in front of her promised nothing, gave no clue as to her mother’s whereabouts.

It was a new challenge, a new puzzle to figure out. Anything to stop the whispered imaginings in her mind.

‘Where on earth am I supposed to start?’ she asked, her eyes following the outline of the river Seine as it cut the city in two.

Chapter 4

Veronique

Veronique danced around the room, her feet bare, the only sound a soft thwack as her boxing glove made contact with the leather bag. The sky hung heavy outside, dawn seeping through the leaded windowpanes and casting shadows across the polished wooden floor. She didn’t have long before her solitude would be interrupted.

Perspiration gathered at the base of her neck, a line running in between her shoulder blades as she circled the bag. There was comfort in the rise and fall of her ribcage as her body pumped oxygen to her aching muscles – the familiar repetition of movements allowing her brain to relax, to process.

There was something about Christelle Benazet that didn’t quite fit. Veronique had expected a grieving mother, finding instead a mask so cleverly painted that she was unable to see past the layers of Botox and mascara. Was she really unaware of her daughter’s habitual drug use, or was this conveniently ignored? Veronique understood the pull drugs could have, how easy it was to slip inside their darkness. Was this what had happened to Mathilde?

A light came on in the corridor outside and she turned to see Christophe pushing the glass door ajar, dressed head to toe in skin-tight Lycra.

‘You want some company?’ he asked, easing off biker boots and woolly socks to reveal bright pink toenails.

Veronique nodded towards his feet.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘It’s the only make-up I can get away with in the lab.’

She smiled, wiping the back of her arm across her forehead as Christophe scooped up two pads and slipped them over his wrists.

‘Not too hard, remember.’ His eyes found the mirror on the wall behind as he adjusted his bleached-blonde quiff. ‘And stay clear of my face. I’ve got a date tonight.’