The Paris Secret (7 page)

‘Straight from
Pulp Fiction
?’ Stefan asked, scepticism lacing his words.

‘
Exactement
,’ Ines said firmly. ‘And you’re not allowed to use that, by the way. It is off the record.’ She pointed a stern foot at him.

Bruno snorted again, setting down his guitar and getting a pack of rolling papers out of his pocket. ‘These rich kids . . . Always it is the same. Too much money – it fucks you
up,’ he muttered, shaking his head.

‘Well, some of us did OK,’ Ines said shortly. As the sole heiress to a boutique-hotel empire she was the embodiment of everything that Bruno – wrong side of the tracks, fifth
of eight kids, left home at sixteen – railed against. But with the heart of a hippy, she was also his soulmate and it was only occasionally that they found themselves caught in the crossfire
of their conflicting childhood politics.

He blew her a kiss – apologetic, whimsical – but their eyes lingered and Flora looked away from the private promises that were communicated between them. They had been together now
for four years – moving in together within a weekend of meeting at a party in Ibiza – and were not just settled in any old pedestrian relationship but a sex-on-the-stairs and
breathless-abandonment
coup de foudre
that Ines couldn’t understand wasn’t contagious.

Flora smiled. Was it any wonder she enjoyed hanging out with these guys so much? Their divergent backgrounds, sharp moralities and burning ambitions were refreshing to her and such a break from
the circles she moved in professionally.

‘Keep away from them. They’re trouble,’ Stefan said shortly, throwing his hands behind his head and fixing her with a sharp stare.

‘I doubt I’ll be privy to any such histrionics in the course of curating their fine-art collection,’ Flora said ironically.

‘Stefan’s just bitter because he’s lost more than one girl to Xavier Vermeil. Isn’t that right, Stefan?’ Ines laughed.

‘It has nothing to do with that,’ Stefan replied testily.

‘So what, then?’

‘They’re unprofessional and spoilt. They think the world revolves around them.’

‘Oh God,’ Ines groaned. ‘You’re not still going on about that photo shoot, are you? Let it drop!’

‘They pissed off a lot of people that day, not just me. Busy people. Important people.’

Flora dangled her leg idly. ‘Rewind a bit, please. What happened?’

‘They pulled out of an article we were running,’ Stefan said, flexing his foot.

‘On them?’

‘And others. The title was “Young Guns, the hip new scions of old dynasties”.’

‘Oh, hey, I remember that.
You
were in it,’ Flora smiled, lazily digging Ines in the ribs with her elbow.

‘Only because I was doing my friend here a favour,’ Ines shrugged. ‘My father was furious with me.’

‘Excuse me –
I
was doing
you
the favour,’ Stefan replied lightly, earning himself a tatty linen Chanel espadrille that went flying through the air towards his
head as Ines swore under her breath in French. ‘You know yourself how much attention that article got. It made your business.’

It was true that Ines’s eponymous erotic-lingerie label had mushroomed from a modest hand-sewn sideline, using leftover lace and ribbons from the Chanel atelier (the head of couture was a
friend of her parents) into a cult brand with a flagship store in the Marais. Gaggles of Asian tourists and fashion students already made pilgrimages just to Instagram the boutique which was justly
notorious for the handmade Belgian white lace stretched taut across the windows, hiding and revealing what was inside at the same time: alpaca fur rugs on the floors in the changing rooms and
velvet on the walls. There was usually at least one paparazzo lurking on a Vespa nearby, ready to snap the latest celebrity or society darling on her way out with a smile on her lips and a bag in
her hand.

‘Please,’ Ines said with a roll of her eyes but gently nudging Flora with her arm. Stefan was successful and very good-looking with cropped, almost shaven, hair and a tide of
stubble. He was forever appearing on his own magazine’s pages, photographed stepping out with models and actresses in borrowed couture, but he was humourlessly ambitious and that made him an
easy target to his old friends. ‘The company is following my business plan perfectly. It was just coincidence that the article came out at the same time.’

Flora knew there was no business plan. Ines was not the type of woman to bother with anything as grey as that; she lived by instinct and passionate conviction.

But Stefan took the bait. ‘Ines, it was our biggest-selling issue of the last three years and the feature syndicated to thirty-six countries.’

‘So? The women coming to my store bring word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends,’ Ines teased him.

‘You pretend—’

‘OK, OK, kids,’ Flora interrupted. It was too late for one-upmanship. ‘Why did it matter so much if they pulled out of that article?’

‘Everything was set up for the shoot, dozens of people waiting – Annie Leibovitz, for Chrissakes! – and then after three hours of waiting, they cancel?
Vraiment?
Who do
they think they are? The Casiraghis?’

A glint of devilment glittered in Ines’s eyes. ‘Well, Xavier does have the same luck with women. And they’re almost as rich.’

Stefan shrugged but with stiff shoulders, reaching out to take the roll-up offered to him by Bruno.

Flora remained quiet, leaning her head back and staring up at the velvet sky as Bruno began to strum again, Stefan’s intermittent smoke trail drifting into her line of sight. They were
about to become a whole lot richer, those heirs. More damaged, too? It seemed hard to reconcile Madame Vermeil’s cultivated refinement with the stories being shared here.

Idly, she mused on their reactions if they were to hear about the long-locked apartment opened today after a sleep of over seventy years. She could imagine Bruno’s – he would sneer
at the profligacy of owning so many properties that it was even possible to forget about one. Stefan would jump on the family’s surprisingly, and hitherto-unknown, modest background; how had
they risen so high, so fast? he would wonder.

But as she closed her eyes, sleep beginning to snap at her heels like a nervy dog, that wasn’t where her thoughts snagged. An apartment with over two hundred valuable paintings and
artworks stored within it, deliberately locked up and left to the dust? It wasn’t
how
the situation could have come to pass that bothered her, it was
why
.

The cool breath of night made her shiver. She assumed it was that.

She was back in the dust by dawn. As predicted, she had barely slept, creeping from her artfully tumbled linen sheets before five to occupy the abandoned apartment and keep
watch over the priceless treasures. The floorboards had creaked beneath her feet as she’d let herself in, the large key solid and weighty in her palm as she’d checked all the rooms,
anxious as a mother with her newborn, hoping that the people in the apartment below wouldn’t be disturbed by the unusual movements above. Of course, she knew she would be little use against
anyone intent on gaining access but it made her feel better to be there anyway, offering some sort of resistance.

The street was still in shadow, the sun not yet high enough in the sky to illuminate the apartment, and the room slumbered on in hooded gloom. Without any electricity supply, there were no
lights, nothing to see by – funnily enough, she didn’t travel with a supply of candles – so she had spent almost an hour stretched out on the faded velvet chaise longue in the
bedroom, waiting for the light and just staring at the Renoir. It had felt like keeping vigil. Later today, the picture would be moved to an atmospherically controlled environment where it would be
tested for damage and decay and the delicate process of cleaning would begin. It would, in all likelihood, eventually be sold to a leading museum where guards would flank the long marble halls and
tourists would stand behind red ropes to gaze at it, but Flora alone would have had the privilege of enjoying it in the intimacy of a domestic setting, this totem of timeless majesty propped up on
a rumpled and sagging bed.

She wished her father could have been in here with her. It was because of him that she had fallen in love with art in the first place, holding on to his hand as he walked her through long
galleries to show her just one painting or one sculpture, to sit on a bench with her and stare at it for an hour, sometimes playing I Spy with the canvas, other times challenging her to think of
twenty different shades of green or blue or yellow.

Yes, he would love this. Art had always been their shared game. When she had been barely five, she had tucked herself into the hollow of his podium, wanting to play hide-and-seek, staring at his
highly polished shoes as she heard his voice rebound throughout the room, his trousers flapping faster and faster at his calves as he pointed to one bidder, then another, as excitable as a
conductor lost in the music.

And now she was on a treasure hunt, a world-class quest to return a fine-art masterpiece to the public eye. But she wasn’t a child any more and this wasn’t a game. And when the first
spot of sun appeared on the wall, a finger of light pointing her to her duties, she rose to her feet, walked out into the hall and with her camera and her clipboard, she set to work.

First, she had to count. It took over an hour just to walk through the apartment and tally up the numbers of fine-art treasures in the space. In total, there were 203 paintings; 57 sculptures;
316 artefacts (including candlesticks, perfume bottles, lamps, ornaments, jewellery dishes) and 1 ostrich, whom she had taken to calling Gertie as she worked. (Where the name had come from, she had
no idea. It just seemed to fit.)

Next, she had begun to classify the pieces in order of value, and therefore importance, identifying them via a system of coloured sticky dots with red as the most esteemed, moving through
orange, yellow, green and finally to blue for the minor pieces. According to her notes, there were two reds (the large Renoir which she double-dotted, and the Faucheux), 14 orange (some very
charming but of minor importance, small sketch oils, lithographs and drawings by Matisse, Dalí and Pissarro amongst others), 266 yellow and the rest a mix of green and blue. She used a
different room to ‘store’ each category – she left the Renoir on the bed and put the Faucheux beside it; everything with an orange dot stayed in the dining room, those with yellow
were moved over to the drawing room, greens to the study and blues in the kitchen. After she had moved each piece, she numbered and photographed it extensively – front, back, sides.

Finally, as lunchtime approached after already seven hours’ work, she began subdividing the dotted lists into schools – modernist, Impressionist, cubist, surrealist and so on –
and then artists. Her pulse was quickening with every name she wrote and as she moved a Renoir sketch into the dining room (only experience told her who the artist was, for he never signed his
sketches), another storm of dust swirled around her and she launched into a new sneezing fit. Her eyes were beginning to stream and as she saw the dust patches blackening on her knees she realized
that her white boyfriend jeans, pulled on in the dark, had been a mistake.

She sighed, weary and famished, setting down her work files and reaching for her bag. She needed something to eat. Art could only sustain her for so long.

With her anxiety levels peaking again – it felt so wrong to leave it all – she turned the old lock on the door and left the treasures alone and unguarded, stepping out into the
street. The sun was gentle on her face as she crossed the road, out of the shadows, an easterly breeze keeping the temperature down. Marching quickly, she watched her own shadow, lost in thought as
questions clattered against each other in her head. What news would Angus have from the ALR? He must be in transit for she hadn’t been able to get hold of him all morning. What were the
Vermeils going to do when she reported back to them – keep or sell? Had anyone in the neighbouring apartments heard the sounds or noticed the new activity in this one? She hoped to God not.
Until they had moved the most valuable pieces or got the security guards installed, she couldn’t relax. This was on her watch. Her stomach growled – had she eaten dinner last night?

She couldn’t remember. She crossed the street, heading towards a small pedestrianized square, a church with a leaded dome facing her; passing a dry cleaner’s and a
tabac
, an
Italian restaurant and a shoe shop seemingly catering to the over-fifties. She wasn’t going to be fussy – usually she tried to be gluten-free but today she’d take the first
café or
boulangerie
she came to, buying whatever she could take away.

In the event, she found a sushi bar first and dived in, emerging four minutes later with a box of
maki
. She ordered a coffee to go from the café next door, just so she could use
the loo, before hurriedly retracing her steps. She knew Angus was right – that after over seventy years’ obscurity, another night and day wouldn’t make a difference – but
she couldn’t relax knowing that a significant, long-lost Renoir and Faucheux were just sitting there, propped on the bed, awaiting her return.

Her phone rang and she pulled it hurriedly from her bag. Angus?

‘Freddie?’ she asked, her voice instantly tinged with anxiety. ‘What’s wrong? Is everything OK?’

There was a brief pause. ‘Mum? Mum? Is that you?’

‘Oh, ha ha!’

He chuckled lightly. ‘You deserved that.’

‘Yes, all right,’ she said, rolling her eyes. She pressed one hand to her ear to try to drown out the background drone of traffic. She could just imagine him now, noise-reducing
headphones clamped round his neck, a coffee in one hand. As an assistant director, he was climbing steadily towards the top of the tree in the British film industry and she knew he was currently
filming some adventure movie with a hefty dose of irony at Elstree Studios. No one at work knew yet and he was insisting on continuing to live his life as normal, at least for as long as he could.
‘Innocent until proven guilty, right?’ he’d said bravely, as they’d all huddled around him that Saturday afternoon in the shaded house.