Page 46 of The French Wife

Emma stared at him, taken aback by the sudden question. ‘I didn’t think you knew about those, I just happened to see them at the gallery this morning.’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘We all know about it. It’s very difficult to keep secrets in a small town like this. My grandmother doesn’t know that we know, though. It’s a sensitive subject, so none of us have raised it with her.’

‘Have you seen the paintings?’

‘Of course. My brothers and I were always in and out of the studio behind her house when we were kids. They were hidden away under dust sheets, but we would take them off and have a look.’

She asked, slightly bemused, ‘Why didn’t you mention them to me when you told me about your grandmother?’

Brodin shrugged. ‘Like I said, she is secretive about it, so we try not to mention them. And I wanted to see if she would tell you about them herself,’ he added. ‘I thought she might, for some reason.’

‘The lady in the gallery told me about some unfinished paintings,’ Emma said. ‘Have you seen them too?’

‘Of course. I’ve seen them all. There were quite a few of them piled up in there. My grandfather wanted to burn them, but Grandmère wouldn’t hear of it. She always wanted to sell them, but she had to wait until the old man died to do so.’

‘Do you think she would let me see the unfinished ones?’ Emma asked.

‘I’ll ask her for you,’ he said. ‘There is one landscape and there’s another one too. It’s not at all like the others, it is very different.’

‘Oh, really?’ she asked, intrigued. ‘What is it of?’

He looked her in the eye, his face suddenly serious. ‘It is of a woman,’ Inspector Brodin said. ‘And a very beautiful one too.’

SIXTEEN

AMÉLIE

1942

The morning after the ambush on the road outside Narbonne, Amélie got up early and pedalled down the cinder track to work as usual. She felt nauseous and shaky from exhaustion and her cheekbone was smarting from her fall in the ditch during the gunfight. Examining it in the bathroom mirror that morning, she’d been dismayed to see a purple bruise blossoming under the skin. She’d patted foundation powder from her compact onto it, but it didn’t do much to disguise the ugly wound.

‘You’ll have to think of something to explain that bruise,’ Bruno had said over breakfast, giving her an evil smile.

She’d wanted to remind him it wasn’t the first time she’d had to explain away bruises at work, but she remained silent. She was too tired to engage with his taunting; she’d had barely any sleep.

After she’d driven the truck home from Narbonne, she’d spent several hours with Lili in the cellar nursing Raoul as well as Ivy. He’d been shot in the abdomen during the gunfight and although the bullet had passed straight through him, he’d lost a lot of blood. On the journey home, while Amélie drove the truck along the winding road in the pitch-black as fast as she could, Henri had tried to keep Raoul awake in the cab beside her, but he’d fainted in the final few kilometres of the journey. When they’d finally arrived at the farm, Marcel and Tomasz had carried him down to the hidden room in the cellar and laid him out on the bed beside Ivy’s. There, Amélie had set to work bathing his wound and binding it with strips of cotton torn from Bruno’s old shirts.

Tomasz had been shot too, although his injuries weren’t serious; a bullet had grazed his arm, so she dressed that for him as well. He wasn’t fazed by his injury – his eyes were shining and he was full of the raid.

‘I don’t know how many Boche we got, but I counted at least ten,’ he said. ‘And we managed to bring back some extra weapons too. German ones. Inferior to British ones of course, but handy for future missions.’

Amélie had shuddered at the thought of another night as terrifying as the one she’d just lived through.

When she’d finished bandaging Tomasz, she made sure Ivy was comfortable with a dose of aspirin to keep her aches and pains at bay. She’d finally crawled into bed, weak with tiredness, at around four o’clock in the morning, and as usual was woken at six by the shrill bell of her alarm clock.

Now, as she cycled towards St Marie, her mind went over and over the events of the night before. Again and again, she relived the tension of waiting in the car for the convoy, the terror of forcing herself out on the road to hail down the lead vehicle, the surprise of the first shots and the shock of the gunfight with the bullets pinging around her. It all returned to her like a jumbled nightmare, but worst of all was the memory of the German soldier she’d shot at point-blank range that kept coming back to her; the look of astonishment on his face as the bullet hit him, the way his head whipped back with the force of it, and how he lay inert in the ditch, his legs and arms at odd angles like a broken doll’s. Guilt and horror coursed through her at the thought that she’d killed someone. Although he was an enemy soldier, he was still a man; a man who probably had a family at home, people who loved him and who would mourn his loss. She would never forget what she’d done, and she knew she would never feel the same again.

When she entered the mairie, she could hear panicked voices echoing around the building and the place seemed to be unusually busy; policemen and German soldiers rushing about, pounding up and down the stairs, carrying papers, talking urgently in loud voices. She slipped up the stairs unnoticed and glanced through Hauptmann Bauer’s window. He was also engaged in animated discussion with Glock, so she slipped away into her office.

Monsieur Colbert looked up and his eyes widened in surprise. ‘Madame Garnier, are you alright? You have a mark on your cheek. Have you hurt yourself?’

‘I slipped on the ice when I was feeding the chickens yesterday evening,’ she said. Each time she said something like this she was surprised how easily the lie came.

‘It’s been treacherous out, hasn’t it?’ Colbert replied.

There was some shouting in German in the corridor and a door banged.

Colbert shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard, but there was an attack on a German convoy outside Narbonne last night. There were several others in the area too, but that was the closest one to St Marie. As you can hear, it’s got our German friends quite animated. Several soldiers were killed and a couple of vehicles destroyed, apparently.’