The Girl You Left Behind

towards Henry, who
     is scanning the pages.
    ‘I’m looking,’ he
     whispers.
    ‘In it Louanne Baker discusses her
     household move from Newark, in Essex County, to Saddle River.’
    ‘That’s right,’ says
     Marianne. ‘Saddle River. That’s where I grew up.’
    ‘Yes … You’ll see here
     that she discusses the move in some detail. She talks of trying to find her saucepans,
     the nightmare of being surrounded by unpacked boxes. I think we can all identify with
     that. But, perhaps most pertinently, she walks around the new house trying …’
     he pauses, as if ensuring he reads the words verbatim ‘… “
trying to
     find the perfect spot to hang Liesl’s painting
”.’
    Liesl.
    Liv watches the journalists rifle through
     their notes. But she realizes with a sickening feeling that she already knows the
     name.
    ‘Bollocks,’ says Henry.
    Jenks knows the name too. Sean
     Flaherty’s people are way ahead of them. They must have had a whole team reading
     the journals through lunchtime.
    ‘I would now like to draw Your
     Honour’s attention to records kept by the German Army during the First World War.
     The
Kommandant
who was stationed at St Péronne from 1916, the man who
     brought his troops in to Le CoqRouge, was a man called Friedrich
     Hencken.’ He pauses to let that sink in. ‘The records state that the
Kommandant
stationed there at the time, the
Kommandant
who so
     admired the painting of Édouard Lefèvre’s wife, was one Friedrich
     Hencken.
    ‘And now I would like to show to the
     court the 1945 census records of the area around Berchtesgaden. Former Kommandant
     Friedrich Hencken and his wife, Liesl, settled there after his retirement. Just streets
     away from the Collection Point storage facility. She was also recorded as walking with a
     pronounced limp, given a childhood bout of polio.’
    Their QC is on her feet. ‘Again, this
     is circumstantial.’
    ‘Mr and Mrs Friedrich Hencken. My
     Lord, it is our contention that Kommandant Friedrich Hencken took the painting from Le
     Coq Rouge in 1917. He removed it to his home, seemingly against the will of his wife,
     who might reasonably have objected to such a – a potent image of another woman. It
     stayed there until his death, upon which Mrs Hencken was so keen to dispose of it that
     she took it a few streets away to the place she knew held a million pieces of artwork, a
     place where it would be swallowed up and never be seen again.’
    Angela Silver sits down.
    Jenks continues – there is a new energy
     about him now: ‘Ms Andrews. Let’s go back to your mother’s memories of
     this time. Could you read the following paragraph, please? This, for the record, comes
     from the same journal entry. In it, Louanne Baker apparently finds what she believes is
     the perfect spot for
The Girl
, as she calls the painting.’
‘As soon as I put her in that front parlour, she looked comfortable.
     She’s not in direct sunlight there, but the south-facing window, with its
     warm light, makes her colours glow. She seems happy enough, anyhow!’
    Marianne reads slowly now, unfamiliar with
     these words of her mother’s. She glances up at Liv, and her eyes hold an apology,
     as if she can already see where this is going.
‘I banged the nails in myself – Howard always does knock out a fist-sized
     chunk of plaster when he does it – but as I was about to hang her, something
     made me turn the painting over and take another look at the back of it. And it
     made me think of that poor woman, and her sad, embittered old face. And I
     remembered something I’d forgotten since the war.
    ‘I always assumed it was something out of nothing. But as Liesl handed
     over the painting, she briefly snatched it back, as if she’d changed her
     mind. Then she rubbed at something on the back, like she was trying to rub
     something off. She rubbed it and rubbed it, like a crazy woman. She rubbed so
     hard I thought she actually hurt her fingers.’
    The courtroom is still, listening.
‘Well, I looked at the back of it just now, just as I looked at it then.
     And it was the one thing that really made me wonder whether that poor woman had
     been in her right mind when she handed it over. Because it doesn’t matter
     how long you stare at the back of that painting – aside from the title – there
     is truly nothing there, just a smudge of chalk.
    ‘Is it wrong to take something from someone not in their right mind? I
     still haven’t