The Girl You Left Behind

him.
    ‘Paul.’
    ‘Liv.’
    She smiles. She smiles every time she looks
     at him. And she takes a little breath. ‘You know how good you are at finding
     stuff …’

Acknowledgements
    This book owes a great deal to Helen
     McPhail’s excellent book
The Long Silence: civilian life under the German
     occupation of northern France, 1914–1918
, about a largely unrecorded (at least
     in this country) corner of First World War history.
    I would also like to thank Jeremy Scott,
     partner at Lipman Karas, for his generous expert help on the issue of restitution, and
     for answering my many questions with patience. I have had to tweak certain legal points
     and procedures for the sake of the plot, and any errors or deviations from actual
     practice are, of course, my own.
    Thanks to my publishers, Penguin, especially
     Louise Moore, Mari Evans, Clare Bowron, Katya Shipster, Elizabeth Smith, Celine Kelly,
     Viviane Basset, Raewyn Davies, Rob Leyland and Hazel Orme. Thank you to Guy Sanders for
     research help beyond the call of duty.
    Thank you to all at Curtis Brown, most
     especially my agent Sheila Crowley, but also including Jonny Geller, Katie McGowan,
     Tally Garner, Sam Greenwood, Sven Van Damme, Alice Lutyens, Sophie Harris and Rebecca
     Ritchie.
    In no particular order, I also wish to thank
     Steve Doherty, Drew Hazell, Damian Barr, Chris Luckley, my writing ‘family’
     at Writersblock and the astonishingly supportive writers of Twitter. Too many to mention
     here.
    Most thanks, as ever, to Jim Moyes, and
     Lizzie and BrianSanders, and to my family, Saskia, Harry and Lockie
     – and to Charles Arthur, proofreader, plot-tweaker and long-suffering writers’
     ear. Now you know what it’s like … 



Chapter One
    Paris, 2002
    Liv Halston holds tight to the guard rail of the Eiffel Tower, looks down through the diamond-strung wire at the whole of Paris laid out below, and wonders if anyone, ever, has had a honeymoon as disastrous as this one.
    Around her, families of tourists squeal and duck back from the view, or lean against the mesh theatrically for their friends to take pictures, while an impassive security guard looks on. From the west a glowering clump of storm clouds is moving towards them across the sky. A brisk wind has turned her ears pink.
    Someone throws a paper aeroplane, and she watches it travel its corkscrew course down, buoyed by passing winds, until it grows too small and is lost from view. Somewhere down there, among the elegant Haussmann boulevards, and the tiny courtyards, the classically laid-out parks and the gently undulating banks of the Seine, is her new husband. The husband who had informed her, two days into their honeymoon, that he was really sorry but he was going to have to meet someone that morning for a work thing. The building he had been telling her about on the edge of the city. Just for an hour. He shouldn’t be long. She’d be okay, wouldn’t she?
    The same husband she had told that if he walked out of the hotel room he could bugger right off and not come back.
    David had thought she was joking. She had thought he was. He’d half laughed. ‘Liv – this is important.’
    ‘As is our honeymoon,’ she had replied. The way they had stared at each other then, as if they were each facing someone they had never seen before.
    ‘Oh, my. I think I’m gonna have to go back down.’ An American woman, with a huge money-belt around her waist and hair the colour of gingerbread, pulls a face as she inches past. ‘I can’t do heights. You feel it creaking?’
    ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ Liv says.
    ‘My husband’s like you. Cool as a cucumber. He could stand there all day. My nerves were shot coming up in that darned lift.’ She looks at a bearded man, who is taking pictures intently with an expensive camera, shivers and makes her way towards the lift, holding on to the rail.
    It is painted brown, the Eiffel Tower, the same shade as chocolate, an odd colour for such a delicate-looking structure. She half turns to say as much to David before realizing that, of course, he isn’t there. She had pictured herself and David up here from the moment he suggested a week in Paris. The two of them, their arms wrapped around each other, perhaps at night, looking down at the City of Lights. She would be giddy with happiness. He would look at her the way he had when he proposed. She would feel like the luckiest woman in the world.
    Then a week had become five days, because of an