‘I guess they will be finding bodies, even now.’
‘They think she died towards the end of the war, maybe even a couple of years ago, a stray bomb. Something about the way she was held under the rubble meant she’s only partially decomposed.’
‘And you’re worrying—’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to the hospital mortuary tomorrow.’
‘It might be … well, dreadfully grizzly.’
‘Jack, they told Cam she was wearing a charm bracelet and a policeman told me she had red hair. I have to go, if only to put my mind at rest.’
‘There must be other similar bracelets.’
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘You really think she might be Rosalie?’
‘I don’t know what to think. If she is Rosalie, it still doesn’t explain why nobody has heard of her.’
He nodded.
She stared at him as the light finally dawned. ‘Oh Lord, I’ve been such an idiot. She must have changed her name. I should have thought of it. Obvious, though, isn’t it? I should just be asking about a French woman, never mind her name.’
‘Don’t give yourself such a hard time. There used to be a hell of a lot of French here, so it may not have helped anyway.’
Jack accompanied Florence to the mortuary the next day. Cam had phoned ahead to tell them she’d be coming and that she believed the dead woman might be a relative.
Florence took in the entrance hall, painted a rather sickly acidic green. Then she marched across to ask at the reception desk and was pointed towards a staircase and told to go down then turn right at the bottom. After that there would be signs. With a feeling of deep unease, Florence held Jack’s hand as they followed the woman’s instructions and eventually reached a door where a notice told them to walk straight in and take a seat. She turned the handle and went into a room painted the same awful green as the entrance hall and all the corridors. A notice on the wall gave the address and phone number of afuneral director, along with a small photograph of a church. She rang a bell on the wall, and then waited on a hard metal chair, her heart hammering in her throat as she tried to second guess what she would see when the final door swung open. Would the body be Rosalie’s?
After a few minutes, an almost bald middle-aged man came out. ‘Miss Baudin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please follow me.’
He took them into a small anteroom and asked them to wait again. Florence was overcome by a feeling of doom. All this interminable waiting was making it worse, and it was chilly down here in the bowels of the hospital, with nothing to look at on the walls but for a cross.
When the man returned, he was holding something wrapped in white cloth. He unwrapped it carefully and held out his hand.
Florence stared and her throat constricted. Oh God! She recognised it immediately, knew all the individual charms. The little horse, the rabbit, the Eiffel tower, the goat, and more. She nodded at the man and showed him her own bracelet, then said, ‘I want to see her body. I think I must.’
‘She’s not in too bad a condition, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ the man said. ‘We think she was trapped in a space that must have remained sealed and dry, probably in the basement and covered by dry dust and rubble in the air pocket.’
‘Did she die immediately?’ Florence asked.
‘Hard to tell. She might have died from her injuries, orfrom suffocation. When the building collapsed, she was contained in a kind of rocky vault, if you like. I would have expected insects to have got in, but it doesn’t appear so.’
Florence and Jack were then shown to a small room where a body lay on a trolley covered by a white sheet. There was a sweet, sickly smell, and Florence held a hand over her nose. The bracelet was Rosalie’s. Was this Rosalie’s body too? When the attendant pulled back the sheet, her heart thumped even more wildly as she glanced at the partially decomposed face of the dead woman, her eyes open, and her skin purplish. Then she stifled a groan. Although the woman’s face was damaged, her dusty hair was clearly red. Poor Rosalie had bright red hair.
Florence stepped back. In that instant she lost hope, her shoulders slumping. This had to be her aunt, killed when a bomb had fallen on the building. Somewhere along the line Rosalie had changed her name or possibly married, although none of the churches had given up a clue to a marriage. She wondered if anyone had even known of her death or disappearance. This poor dead woman had to be Rosalie, it was the only thing that made any sense, but the dead don’t give up their secrets easily and they certainly don’t give up a name.
She left the room and numbly sat with the attendant, trying to explain she had no idea what name her aunt had been using. The staff didn’t seem to care, only keen to certify an unknown woman’s death as caused by a stray bomb in the vicinity of the ruined Opera House towards the end of the war.
Later, in the awful blackness of night, Florence couldn’tsleep. Images of her dead aunt plagued her, but it wasn’t that alone. Something about it seemed wrong, although she couldn’t figure out what. Jack grunted in his sleep and reached out an arm to enfold her, but she slid from his embrace and left the bed, tiptoeing away from him and into the other bedroom.
She sat and thought about her aunt, wondering about her life, and feeling desperately sad that she had died the way she had, and that Claudette would never set eyes on her sister again. Rosalie was dead. And Claudette would be soon. There had to be a ship heading back home sooner than Jack had said. There had to be. She needed to look after her mother, convey the sad news, and face the music with Hélène. There was no point thinking of Rosalie any more.
CHAPTER 47
