The Paris Secret (5 page)

‘People are busy,’ Angus said, without looking up from his iPhone. ‘They mind their own business, particularly in the smarter districts. And there’s a lot of overseas
owners. Most people don’t own – they rent here – and the landlords like long lets with minimal hassle from their tenants. A mate of mine had to get his
parents
to act as
guarantors for a lease and he’s thirty-eight!’

‘Yes, but nothing at all – in seventy-three years? Come on.’

Angus shrugged.

‘If nothing else, you’d imagine there must have been plumbing leaks from neighbours – or what about needing to read electricity meters? Or calculate rates?’

Angus paused and considered this. ‘I doubt it has any electricity. If it was abandoned in the war and no one ever sought to get it reconnected, the electricity board is hardly going to go
looking for it.’

‘And the rates?’ she persisted stubbornly.

Angus looked back at her, bemused. ‘Well, the apartment clearly hasn’t been extended or altered in that time so I guess everything would have just gradually gone up with inflation.
Lilian said it had all been set up by her father-in-law for the payments to be paid quarterly via the notary.’

‘But they said nothing to the family all that time? It’s weird!’

‘No. They were just doing their duty,’ Angus shrugged. ‘They’re not paid to pass comment.’

Flora looked back out of the window. They had crossed the river, and the wide boulevards and bountiful banks of flowers planted in strict formations along the Jardins des Tuileries had been
replaced by labyrinthine streets that looped and twisted back on themselves, modest fountains or stand-alone trees populating tiny, dusty squares, metal grilles pushed back against shop walls. The
roads narrowed to become one-way only and racks of bikes and scooters littered the kerbs.

She looked on with interest and a foreigner’s eyes. The properties here now commanded handsome prices but the area had only become really fashionable from the 1950s onwards; and for all
its bohemian charm, the 14th was a far cry from the opulence of the Napoleonic Haussmann boulevards and town houses in the 16th district where the family now lived.

Their circumstances had clearly changed for the better in the intervening years, she thought as the car drew up outside a building where the render had long since been blackened. A cascade of
decorative Juliet balconies scaled the wall, one at every window, but only a couple boasted tended window boxes on them and the paint on the bottle-green main door was dull and split.

Even as she looked up from the street, she could see that the dust on some of the windows was as thick as a net curtain. Flora glanced around at the neighbouring properties as she climbed out
– at the bike on one balcony, washing on a collapsible airer on another – those apartments across the street only six metres away and the inhabitants surely able to peer in. Had they
really never been curious about the complete absence of life in those rooms? Never questioned the eerie stillness, quietness, darkness that shrouded the apartment at all times?

Angus, eager to reassure himself against Madame Vermeil’s worry that their trip had been wasted, thrust the key into the communal door lock and bounded up the stairs two at a time,
Flora’s footsteps a light staccato on the wooden treads behind him. They stopped on the fourth floor outside Apartment 8, the bronze figure on the door dull with age and neglect. Flora bit
her lip, suddenly apprehensive. It felt odd to be standing on the threshold of a shuttered apartment that wasn’t theirs, to be the first people through and the family themselves denied.

Angus swore quietly under his breath as the key refused to move in the rusted lock; it took two hands to force it to turn and then his shoulder to the door to push back against the hip-height
pile of fliers and post that had accumulated behind it. He squeezed in, telling Flora to wait until he could clear it out of the way and open the door, unimpeded.

A minute, several, dragged past. What was he doing in there?

‘Angus? Is everything OK?’ she called, pushing her face through the gap.

When finally he opened the door a moment later, his cheeks were florid with high excitement. ‘Sorry, I . . . Well, you’ll see. Come in.’ He opened the door wider and darkness
spilled out like a cloud of bats. Flora stared into the gloom, Angus’s sharp-suited silhouette already retreating from her and disappearing into the shadows. ‘I’ll just check
everything’s clear,’ he called over his shoulder like some TV cop.

She stood rooted to the spot. It was as though the packers had already arrived – pictures were stacked in rows on the floor, twelve, eighteen deep; leather-bound books piled high in
leaning towers, and that was just in the hall. She followed Angus, stepping carefully around the collapsed mountain of post, her fingers tripping over the stacked paintings as she wove slowly past
– was that a Matisse? – all the while coughing lightly as the stale air sank in her lungs, eyes automatically scouring for treasure: she saw a Napoleon convex mirror, round and topped
with eagle motifs. Several hundred euros maybe. Nice but no cigar.

She did a quick estimate – there must be fifty, eighty, paintings in the hallway alone.

A door to the right was already open. Angus must have glanced in; from the sound of his footsteps on the stripped floors, he was tearing through the apartment for a quick look-see before
settling in for a more detailed survey.

She peered in, aware of a powdery odour – more books, piles of them, some on the floor, the red and green cloth covers faded to mere tints, the corners fraying and pulling back like shed
skin. Swagged curtains in burgundy silk hung as limp as broken bones, the rail coming away from the wall in one corner so that light escaped around the side; papers scattered across a desk.

She looked around the room, trying to see what
wasn’t
there – her eyes searching for lighter stains on the walls where paintings which might once have hung had now been
removed, their absence delineated and marked out. But there was nothing amiss. Shelves laden with books entirely covered two of the walls, the windows a third, and the fourth wall was decorated
with an Empire-print wallpaper that had begun to peel in the top corners. A couple of small watercolours of agricultural scenes hung on wire from the picture rails.

She heard the sound of something being scraped across the floors further along; Angus was clearly investigating. She quickly took a few snaps on her phone camera and walked out of the room, back
into the hall.

A door in the wall revealed a small cloakroom – there were coats hanging on a rack, some shoes on the floor, and a black fedora on a shelf, the dimple of the finger-pinch almost white with
dust. She reached out to touch the sleeve of an opera coat – crushed rose-pink velvet and bordered with a gold brocade; beside it, a woman’s brown tweed belted coat with leather
buttons; beside that, a man’s dark grey Crombie coat, one single black hair on the collar.

She walked on, stopping in the doorway of the kitchen. Copper pans, long since oxidized to green, sat nesting one inside the other on a shelf; tea towels, stained and limp, hung from the rail of
a grey gas stove with an enamel splashback; a rubber hot-water bottle dangled from a hook, its pleated gills cracked with age. A dainty gold-rimmed tea service with hand-painted burgundy-and-black
roses was arranged neatly on a wooden dresser, one teacup missing and a large chip on the side of the milk jug. The handle of a mesh sieve was pushed behind, and held in place by, a copper pipe
that ran down the wall; a wooden clothes airer was strung up to the ceiling on blackened rope; there was a well-worn butcher’s block still faintly stained; and a coal scuttle stood half full
by a boiler, a misting of coal dust on the wall beside it.

Flora opened the narrow door in the darkest corner of the room, opposite the tall window that faced onto a patch of concrete and the back of the building behind, her eyes watering at the release
of the sharp odour trapped within. The larder: she scanned rows of Kilner jars of pickled fruit and vegetables, a thick scummy skin of mould furring the tops of the liquid; a dish of lard; white
enamel jars with
Sucre
and
Farine
written on them in red; tins of condensed milk; sachets of what she thought were powdered eggs . . . She closed the door again, the odour beginning
to catch in the back of her throat.

She walked back out to the hall and towards the large room opposite, stopping in the doorway as she surveyed it in wonder. It was a tableau from another time – grey velvet curtains and
pelmets dressed the windows, the walls were lined with duck-egg flocked wallpaper, an elaborate marble fireplace was topped with an ornate gilded mirror which was as stippled with age spots as an
old man’s hand. But it was the stuffed ostrich Flora couldn’t help staring at – it was seven feet tall on spindled legs, and its glassy eyes and open beak gave the impression it
was laughing, as though amused by the ivory satin bed-jacket draped insouciantly over its feathered back. Her eyes wandered obediently, professionally, to the finer details of the room: the crystal
chandelier, blackamoor lamps, gold candlesticks, Aubusson rug, but it was the ostrich to which they kept returning – it invested the room with whimsy and glamour, bringing to her ear the
sounds of long-faded laughter and conversation, the tinkle of crystal and jewels, the crackle of a fire and the sinuous sliding of silk. She could feel the lives that had once pulsed here, the
social gaiety that must have been enjoyed in this very room before the horrors of war and then the enduring silence afterwards. She walked over and reached out a hand to touch the bird’s
plumage—

‘Flora!’ Angus’s voice was muffled but she caught the tone of it, the slice of excitement. ‘In here.’

‘Coming.’ Her hand dropped down and she crossed the hall into the dining room, a carmine-red salon with twelve chairs pushed around a large rectangular table and dressed with a
jacquard cloth. The tabletop was strewn with scattered
objets
and ornaments – a pair of china swans, Lalique crystal figurines, burnished silverware, balloon decanters . . . Angus was
waiting for her, his feet hidden from view by the sheer number of boxes on the floor, and holding in his arms a large framed portrait of a young girl.

‘Stream of consciousness, tell me what you think. What do you see?’

Flora frowned in concentration, taking in the rose tint on the girl’s cheeks, the paleness of her grey eyes, the high sash of her silk dress and the precise undulations of her bonnet. She
saw the formal pose – the girl’s body turned slightly away, a closed parasol in her hand – and the stately manse in the background, horses nosing the grass, with softly whipped,
sun-tinted clouds in the summer sky, hints of cadmium yellow. ‘It looks like Faucheux to me,’ she said with a breath of amazement.

‘Exactly.’

Faucheux had not been a prolific artist, dying of syphilis when he was only twenty-five, but he had already painted for some of France’s noblest families by the time of his death in 1811
and almost all his works were held in private collections.

‘God, when was the last time a Faucheux came onto the open market?’ she mused as Angus turned the painting around and propped it on a chair by the wall so that they could both look
at it. ‘It was the fifties, wasn’t it?’

‘Something like that. I do know for a fact only two others have been sold since the artist’s death.’

Flora felt a spike of excitement. The painting was a good size, handsome, and the rarity factor meant there would be significant buzz around it. ‘What do you think for the
reserve?’

Angus tapped his chin, eyes screwed tight. ‘Two hundred and fifty?’

She nodded. ‘I agree. I can think of four buyers off the bat who’d be interested.’

‘And I’ve got some contacts in the States who I know would sit up and beg for this.’

Flora felt her breath quicken. She looked around the room. Even apart from the pieces littering the table, there must be another five dozen paintings stacked in piles against the walls. The
sheer volume of art and artefacts was staggering. There was far more, surely, than could ever have been hung on the walls here; the apartment was not grand or built on the lofty scale of the
Haussmann town houses. What were they all doing here?

‘What else have you found?’ she asked, wandering over to the nearest lot and beginning to flick through them.

‘A lot of modernism, actually,’ Angus 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.