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Before they bid each other farewell, Sabine hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘I found this at the restaurant.’ She gave him the small slip of order paper with the note that she’d found wedged behind the drawer, written in what she assumed was Marianne’s handwriting.
‘I mean, it’s just a scrap. I didn’t know if it would mean anything to you?’
He took out his glasses from his jacket pocket and tried to read it in the weak light. He couldn’t even make out the first line, even as he squinted. All he saw was a splodge.
‘I don’t recommend getting old,’ he joked and she laughed, as he tried to read the piece of paper with his arm outstretched, but it blurred in the light and the chicken scrawl handwriting didn’t help.
‘It says, the days are short, but the hours seem long and something about her needing to spend time with her boys,’ said Sabine. ‘I thought perhaps it was when your mother was ill.’
Monsieur Géroux’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Perhaps. Marianne often left us messages of advice, or reminders on slips of paper. I’d forgotten about that.’ He looked sad, and she wished she’d never brought it up.
After that they said their goodbyes and went their separate ways, and it was only when she was home, snuggling into Antoine as he snored, and she went over everything that had happened in her brain, that she realised he’d kept the note from Marianne. Even now, perhaps, a part of him still could not reconcile the Marianne from his memories with the one who had later done what she did.
The next morning, far too early for Sabine, Antoine brought her a coffee in bed, and then proceeded to stare at her meaningfully. ‘And?’
Antoine had clearly been dying to hear how her evening with Monsieur Géroux had gone, and crucially, hear about that night when Marianne had poisoned her customers.
Sabine frowned. ‘We haven’t got there yet.’
He raised his brow. ‘What?’
‘You don’t understand, there’s just so much history – they were real people, Antoine, and I think he feels that if he shares this story with me, I need to know that.’
‘But?’
‘I didn’t realise how hard it would be to hear.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘No, you really can’t,’ she said, her face solemn, haunted, and then she told him everything.
His eyes widened in horror. Especially when she got to the part about the school. They discussed that for a long time. Antoine, however, had a theory of his own and seemed to think that Marianne had had something to do with the school – that she had somehow used what they’d overheard and that’s how they knew to escape through the tunnels. ‘I think maybe she tipped someone off.’
Sabine sighed. ‘I think you’re an optimist.’
‘But it makes sense,’ he argued. ‘How many others really knew about that school – those officers chose that restaurant for a reason. The Batignolles – while charming – isn’t in the centre of Paris, it’s out of the way, and could be thought of as a discreet place to meet in order to have conversations you might not be able to have anywhere else… it stands to reason she used that information somehow. Or how else would it have happened?’
‘We’re speculating – who knows who else knew the plan in reality?’ argued Sabine. ‘Besides, how do you go from saving a school of children to killing your customers on purpose? The idea that she just sat back and prevented Monsieur Géroux from telling his friends in the Resistance fits more with what we know of her, I think, sadly.’
Antoine took a sip of his own coffee. ‘Maybe.’ Then he looked up at her, a thought seeming to light in his dark eyes. ‘You said he thinks you look like her. Want to find out for sure?’
She blinked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, that German propaganda paper you mentioned earlier – the one that did the article on Marianne, about her cooking and her grandmother, maybe we can find it?’
‘How?’
He grinned. ‘You’re the librarian, you tell me? I just work at the post office, remember?’
She laughed, then thought about it for a while. ‘It’ll probably be at the BHVP – the historical library. If there’s a record of it anywhere, it’ll be there.’
‘See? That’s what I was thinking – that you’d think of something like that,’ he said, and she laughed. ‘Want to go on Saturday?’
She nodded.
That evening, Antoine was making dinner when he accidentally bumped the cat poster that had been up on the counter. There was an almighty crash and the sound of glass breaking.
Sabine raced to the kitchen. ‘Are you all right?’ she cried.
