The Paris Secret by Karen Swan Read Free Book Online Page A

said, watching as she held up an accomplished pastel of a river view. ‘I’ve found a few Picasso sketches, a couple of
Cézannes, Matisse, Dalí . . . Nothing standout or important but signed, nonetheless.’
    ‘Gosh,’ she murmured, remembering the Canaletto in Madame Vermeil’s drawing room. ‘Think we’ll get much for the ostrich?’ she smiled, crouching on her slim
haunches and flicking carefully through the next batch of paintings.
    He chuckled. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ he murmured, picking through the contents of a different box. ‘Another world.’
    She scanned the batch carefully before sighing and folding her arms over her knees. ‘Anywhere else to check?’
    ‘Just the bedroom back there. I haven’t looked in yet. Didn’t make it past this bounty. Be my guest.’
    Flora slipped from the room and into the bedroom. Like the drawing room, it stood as a memorial to a bygone age; there were no paintings stacked along the walls in here or sculptures on the bed.
It was the colour of coral and champagne, with a rosewood dressing table and stool, a mahogany wardrobe and a small (by today’s standards) double bed.
    Again, Flora cast a critical eye over the room like a detective at a crime scene. What could she tell from it? That Monsieur Vermeil’s mother had had long dark hair according to the
hairbrush set on the dressing table, walked in a cloud of perfume thanks to the cut-crystal spray bottle beside it, and set her face with a swansdown puff. She had been a woman of some means
– if not quite the extravagant wealth they enjoyed now – and if the silver brocade gown still draped on a mannequin was anything to go by, a woman of fashion too.
    On the floor were her shoes – some feathered, others robed in velvet and satin – and a large crocodile-skin trunk was pushed against the wall. Flora lifted the half-closed lid,
jumping back, startled, as a moth fluttered out, its crêpe wings stretching in the new space.
    The windows rattled lightly in the breeze, the iron hook-lock only just doing its job. Flora walked over and, after a brief struggle, released the catch. The air inside the entire apartment was
stuffy and stale, and she was beginning to feel cloistered, overwhelmed somehow. She closed her eyes with relief as the fresh day blew in.
    Leaning on the pretty balcony, she looked out. In the apartment opposite, one floor down, a girl in her twenties was lying on a bed in just her underwear, headphones on and her foot tapping as
she watched something on her iPad. She was oblivious to Flora’s stare, just as she’d been oblivious to this treasure trove staring her in the face. On the street below, a small van was
trying to get past a guy on a moped who was talking on his mobile; a couple of women with ripped jeans and white sneakers swung their bags as they headed for the river.
    Flora turned back into the room, astonished by the difference in light quality now that everything wasn’t filtered through a gauze of dust, and in the fraction of the moment it took to
raise her head, she caught something of the original lustre of the coral curtains, the satin thread on the champagne counterpane glistening like a fish slipping through the water.
    There was something else too, barely visible – it could almost have been confused for a trick of the light – a thin slip of white peeping out from the mattress, like a pocket
handkerchief in a gentleman’s jacket. She walked over and, lifting the mattress just enough to release the weight, pulled free a letter.
    Flora felt her curiosity swell, and then her disappointment as she saw it was written in German. Her knowledge of that began and ended with the basic manners of
Danke
and
Guten
Tag
. She could only make out that the name signed at the end matched the one typeset in grey ink at the top –
Birgita Bergurren
– and that it had been written on 14 October
1940. The paper had darkened with age to a nicotine tint and there were a few faint