The Girl You Left Behind

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 appetiteto 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 nearDouai, 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

21
    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,