I had never been this pleased to see my father. As soon as I saw him I wanted to throw myself on him and cry, but this was my dad and so I didn’t.
‘Libby,’ he said again, and at that point I actually did burst into tears, and he hugged me tighter than he had ever hugged me before, and we walked away from the Mona Lisa together and took the escalator down into the entrance hall. My legs weren’t working very well and he had to support me some of the way.
‘You found me,’ I managed to say. Dad had hardly said a thing. Some things didn’t change.
He spoke, after a few minutes.
‘I am so relieved,’ he said. ‘I need to text Anneka.’ He sat me on a bench in the empty ticket office and tapped out a message on his phone as he spoke. ‘Zoe appeared on our doorstep. Very upset. She said you were alone in Paris and you’d been robbed. I went to London but I couldn’t get on a Eurostar today, so I caught the fast train to Dover, and the ferry to Calais, and then the train from there. That’s why it’s taken me all day to get here. I’m so glad you were here.’
‘You came to rescue me,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to need to tell me what’s happened. Zoe was sketchy on the details. She was focused on rescuing you above all else. She said you were at the Louvre in a ballgown, and if one of us didn’t come to get you, she was going to do it herself. And here we are. She was right. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and as I said it I felt more hungry than I ever had in my life before. ‘Starving.’ I hadn’t eaten anything, or even thought of food, since I took the canapés off the tray last night.
‘You probably need some new clothes.’
‘Yes.’ I looked down at myself. ‘This is all I have.’
‘Food first, or clothes?’
‘Food.’ I was dizzy now I had thought of eating. He put a hand on my arm and guided me through the underground shopping mall and up to the street.
‘Anneka’s replied.’ It was dark outside. He looked at his phone and said, ‘Ah, yes. She’s booked us a hotel. It’s not far from here, I think. We were waiting until I found you here to plan what was next. Excuse me a moment.’
He put his phone to his ear and said, ‘Yes, I’ve got her! Yes. Yes, exactly. She’d written messages in chalk outside the Louvre, and I followed her trail and found her. Yes, it’s a big place but I thought I’d start with the Mona Lisa, and there she was. I’m not sure who was looking the more enigmatic. She’s OK. Fine. Well, not exactly fine, but she’s safe. I know. Yes. All OK there?’
I listened to him chatting away and wondered how Anneka had done it. How had she got my dad to be talkative like this? I wished she were here too.
‘Right,’ he said, and he turned to me with the warmest smile I’d ever seen from him. ‘Libby. Let’s get you some food, and everything else you need, and we can exchange a few stories. Does that sound OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it does.’
I ended up getting the everything-else first because we walked past a branch of Monoprix that was about to close forever, so I came away with a bag that had a toothbrush, a pair of shorts and some T-shirts, and new underwear (which was more embarrassing for Dad than it was for me at this point). I had retrieved Natasha’s passport and her two notes from my underwear in the changing room, so they were in the bag too. I had changed into a second pair of shorts and T-shirt, and was debating throwing my poor ballgown away before deciding that it wasn’t its fault, so I kept it.
‘Now. Food?’ said Dad, looking over at me with a smile.
We sat outside a brasserie on a corner. It was a warm night, as ever, but there was a bit of a breeze.
‘Order anything you want,’ said Dad, and I looked down the menu and ended up asking for a mushroom omelette and chips and a salad. That was, for some reason, the thing I wanted most in the world. Dad asked whether I wanted a beer or wine, but it turned out I didn’t. I just wanted a carafe of water and an Orangina, which turned into three Oranginas. The sugar was the thing.
‘So,’ I said when it had arrived. ‘We need to talk about … our summer visitor.’
‘If you feel up to it.’ His voice was gentle, understanding. Different.
‘How sure are you,’ I said, ‘that that was Natasha? I mean, do you even have a niece called Natasha? Because her passport belonged to Deanna Glancey, who was your brother’s girlfriend. I don’t think that was Natasha Lewis at all.’ He didn’t say anything. I let it hang there for a bit, then gave up. ‘So she arrived in Spain, straight from your house,’ I said. ‘I liked her. I thought she was amazing. She made me feel different. I felt that I could do so many more things. I believed in myself, I suppose. I could talk to people. She showed me how to do magic tricks and read palms and things like that. I suppose I was swept up in it.’
‘She contrived a fight with your mother and took you off to Madrid,’ he said.
‘That’s right. She told Mum she had messages for her from beyond the grave, from someone called Violet.’
I wasn’t expecting him to react to that, but he did. He drew his breath in tightly.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That would, indeed, infuriate your mother. Did she tell you why?’
‘No! Mum wouldn’t say, and then she went to pieces and Sean had to look after her and she didn’t really care what I did. But Natasha said Violet was my sister, who died. Was she?’
‘No. It’s not my thing to tell, darling. Your mother can tell you all about it. I would, but I can’t. Don’t worry, though. Natasha had it all wrong.’
I sighed. Maybe one day someone would tell me. Was Violet going to turn out to be Mum’s first pet or something? A sledge?
‘Fine. So she got us to look alike, mainly through hair. And she copied my mannerisms, I think. I saw her doing it once, when she thought I was asleep. We pretended to be twins, and we went around making money doing street magic. We stayed in a hostel. I saw Mum and Sean from time to time. Have you spoken to Mum? Is she OK?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to her. She’s OK, or she will be by now because Anneka will have told her you’re safe. So then?’
‘Natasha, or Deanna, said she had a spirit guide, but it was all lies. She did some weird psychic stuff. I never believed in it. I actually really wanted to, but I never could. Maybe there is life after death, but I never felt Natasha was accessing it. She did some shows where she said she gave people messages from beyond the grave. She tried to tell me I was psychic too, but I never went for it.’
‘That,’ said Dad, sipping his red wine, ‘is because you are a sane and grounded young woman.’
I smiled. ‘Thanks. So. Your brother. You know the accident, when he died?’
‘Yes.’
‘Natasha said he was with a younger woman. He was cheating on his wife, and he was drunk and they crashed and the woman was fine, but Andy died. Natasha said the woman was called Deanna Glancey, and that’s who this passport belongs to.’ I put it on the table, and he picked it up and flicked through it.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Peggy said there was another woman involved.’
‘Natasha said she hated Deanna. Completely hated her. She told me, eventually, that we were in Paris because she’d been stalking Deanna’s social media, and she knew she was going to this grand party last night, plus another one on Friday at the Louvre. Natasha wanted to go to both of them, and, like, do something terrible. I didn’t know what exactly, but she promised me she wasn’t going to hurt her. She was going to throw a drink all over her. Something like that.
‘Also, I heard her talking to someone on the train saying I was stupid, so I wasn’t trusting her anyway by the time we got here. But we got these dresses, and she got us tickets for last night’s party, and we went. I had a train ticket home for today, so I wasn’t going to the Friday one. She knew. I didn’t tell her, but of course she knew.’
I told him how it had gone from there. It was hard, reliving the dizzying realization that nothing had been what I’d thought, and that she had taken everything I had, and then left a passport with the wrong name in it. I had thought I’d been a step ahead of her, but I hadn’t.
I sipped my Orangina. It was very hard to say this part.
‘And she’s … I think she’s got my bank cards. Well, I know she’s got them because she’s got everything, but I had the card from Grandma’s money in my purse. And the money you sent me in my current account. I had access to tens of thousands of pounds. And she’s got it now. She took it.’ I passed him Natasha’s note, the one that said I didn’t need the money.
He read it. ‘Did she know the PIN to your savings card?’
I remembered us in the dress shop. I remembered Natasha making a point of turning her back and not seeing the number. It was only the second time I’d ever used the card, and I’d never written the number down.
Looking away had been her distraction. I knew it had. She had done it to make me think that she wasn’t watching. Somehow she had been watching. That kind of stuff was what she did for a living. It was no different from making your target look at one hand while you hid a coin in the other. The dress shop was full of mirrors. She had been watching.
‘I used it once in front of her.’ I pointed to the bag. ‘To buy that dress, and her dress, and our shoes. She paid me back for some of it. I just paid because …’ I tailed off. ‘Because we had a cash-flow problem. I didn’t think she saw me put the PIN in, but of course she did.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘I haven’t cancelled the card.’
‘I nearly did when we heard from Zoe. But I didn’t know if you had it, and thought you might need it, because we were very unclear on what had happened, and we couldn’t contact you, so I left it just in case it was your lifeline. I’m sure that even if we’d managed to cancel it straight away, it would have been too late. Anneka’s stopped it now, but, again, I expect she will have taken the money, darling.’
‘I suppose she thought it should have been her money too. If she was Natasha. Which … I don’t think she was.’
‘We need to call the police. Did you not think to do that?’
‘Not seriously.’ I considered it. Natasha had trained me, I thought, not to see the police as allies. ‘Also, I ran away from the hotel without paying.’
‘Right.’ He sighed. ‘OK. We’ll go back in the morning and pay for the hotel, of course. That problem will go away in an instant. We need the police. I’ll get the British embassy or consulate or whatever to sort you out with a passport, but I’m afraid we might be here for a few days.’ He laughed. ‘A couple of days with my eldest daughter, in Paris in the sunshine. It might not be so bad, once we get the admin done. And if she’s cleaned out your account … well, it’s only money. And who even knows …’ He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. My voice came out very quietly.
‘Hey.’ He reached out a hand and almost, but not quite, touched mine. ‘If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘Because I sent her to you, without verifying that she was who she said she was. We have a lot to untangle, and to be honest she was very much like Andy, in that she was a spiky character, always shifting, never quite herself. And she’s like Peggy too. I could see traits of both of them, but maybe I was just projecting and seeing what I wanted to see, and maybe she was no relation at all. She was probably playing me like she was apparently playing everyone else. In fact, I was the first to be taken in. I was the gatekeeper and if I’d done my job properly you’d never even have spoken to her.’
‘I didn’t know you even knew Peggy? Mum said she never met her.’
He sighed. ‘I need to tell you a bit of family backstory, Libby. I clearly should have done this years ago.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I really wish I hadn’t inherited that part of you. The bit that wants to say things but can’t.’
‘Tell me about it. Right. Here we go. You know that I was married before I met your mother?’
‘And after!’
‘Indeed. My first wife. Margaret as she was known back then. She was all those things you just said. She lied, she faked things, she pretended to be things she wasn’t. She would absolutely have pretended she could talk to ghosts. She tricked people. She tricked me. She was charming and she swept you up in her charisma.’
‘Margaret? In my head she was a kind of staid, old-fashioned person. She looked like Margaret Thatcher.’
‘She wasn’t. So Margaret did a midnight flit. And took everything she could, just like Natasha did to you. She left me as thoroughly as could be. For … Well.’
I realized I knew what he was going to say, and when he didn’t say it I filled it in for him.
‘For your brother,’ I said. ‘She left you for Andy, and that’s why you never spoke to him again. Margaret is Peggy.’
‘She claimed half the house, and off they went to the States.’ He was smiling and looking sad at the same time. ‘Obviously it was no loss in the long run, though I did keep hoping Andy would turn up saying she’d done the same to him, and he never did. I’m afraid too that it made me mistrustful of your mother when I shouldn’t have been. Amy’s completely different, and I messed up there, I really did. I owe her a huge apology. And you too, of course.’
‘Your first wife was Peggy.’ I was still trying to get my head round this.
‘Yes. Margaret. Peggy. It was very her to have picked Peggy as a new American variant of her name.’
‘So … she’s not American?’
‘Oh, God no. She’s from Surbiton.’
‘I had that all wrong. So Natasha’s completely British?’
‘By parentage. Though she’ll have US citizenship, having been born there, and of course she grew up there. All I can say is that her mother trained her expertly. If it’s her. Oh God, what a mess.’
‘But she’s Deanna. Or she’s using Deanna’s passport.’
He poured himself more wine. ‘If she’s actually the person her passport says she is …’
‘Then she’s your brother’s secret girlfriend, and the real Natasha is someone completely different. If there even is a real Natasha.’
We sat there for a while. I yawned. Once I started I couldn’t stop.
‘He might not even be dead,’ said Dad. ‘Though I think he must be, because he left us that money. According to lawyers. I haven’t seen any of it yet. It might yet be smoke and mirrors.’
I really wanted to go to bed, but my dad was talking to me, and the relief at being safe and knowing I had a bed to go to gave me energy.
‘What was he like?’
Dad shrugged. ‘Well, he wasn’t a great brother, what with him running off with my wife and all that. I don’t know. We weren’t close. Margaret always said she hated him, until it turned out she didn’t. He was older than me, but shorter. I was quite pleased with that. Not that it counted for much.’
And just like that, at that moment, I realized that I could talk to my dad. We had an understanding. We were OK. He had dropped everything and run to Paris to rescue me.
His phone, which was next to him on the table, started to ring. I saw the display: Amy.
He answered and passed it over to me without saying a word.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’