Chapter 46
Florence and Jack talked long into the night. Shredded by exhaustion, disappointment at her progress in finding Rosalie, and fear for her mother, Florence felt wretched.
‘Could you check out how long we’ll have to wait for a ship home?’ she asked Jack.
‘They’re not frequent. I know that.’
‘We might be lucky.’
‘You might even hear back from the archivist at the Times before we can go.’
More than anything she wanted to see Claudette, but her mother had been so desperate for news of Rosalie that Florence hated the thought of returning empty-handed. Claudette was counting on her, and she so wanted to give her mother some peace of mind before she died.
‘I’m going to have my hair cut,’ she said as Jack came out of the bathroom naked. ‘It’s the last thing I really want to do but I need to do something, or I’ll go crazy.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to come back to bed?’ he said and, reaching for her hand, pulled her to him.
‘You’re wet,’ she said and pushed him away. ‘But I’ve made up my mind. My hair’s a fright and I need time to think. The hairdresser’s is a good place for that.’
‘Your hair looks fine to me.’
‘Then I’m going to look at the church records,’ she said, ignoring him and knowing that being resolute was the one thing that would stop her from dissolving into tears whenever she thought of Claudette.
‘I thought you’d been to the churches.’
‘Only the big ones, and I can’t speak Maltese, can I? Cam said he’d come with me this time. It might help.’
‘See you a bit later then. Shall I get the shopping?’
‘What about the little church in Mdina?’
‘Still waiting for the go-ahead. The wheels seem to turn awfully slowly here.’
‘If we’re able to leave for England quickly what will happen about finishing the apartment?’
‘I’ll work something out.’
She left with a heavy heart, and made her way to Paris Style, the oldest salon she could find where people had been going for decades and the magazines might be from the past. You never knew – Rosalie might be mentioned somewhere.
The woman who was to wash and then cut her hair was called Ganna, a large Maltese lady with huge hands, dressed head-to-toe in black. But her chestnut hair was stunning, long, wavy and lustrous.
‘You want a short cut?’ the woman asked with a gleam in her eye.
Florence shook her head. ‘Just a trim. Tidy it up, please.’
Ganna threw her hands up in the air. ‘A trim, always a trim. I am an artiste. I like to cut, to shape, to change.’
‘Sorry,’ Florence muttered.
Ganna gave in with a shrug, washed Florence’s hair and was remarkably deft with the scissors despite the size of her hands.
The two women sitting next to her were talking about their offspring, when Florence thought she’d overheard something rather intriguing.
She leant forward to listen.
‘Lulu says she heard it from her neighbour.’
‘But is it true?’ the other one said in a mock whisper.
‘Well, your guess is as good as mine. Lulu’s neighbour is one for a bit of gossip, I know that.’
‘Hmm. Maybe it was dead horse they found?’
‘Nah. A body, Lulu said.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere behind the old Opera House.’
‘Today?’
‘This morning.’
‘Blimey. Still finding bodies even now and the war’s been over for more than a year. Bloke, was it?’
‘She didn’t say.’
As soon as Florence could politely leave, despite her hair not being fully dry, she paid and hurried to Strada Reale where, flanked by South Street and Ordnance Street, the Royal Opera House still lay in ruins since 1942.
How sad that war had destroyed so much that had been beautiful.
Not far away, the remains of a house piled high with rubble was cordoned off with two bored policemen guarding it.
‘What happened?’ she asked the younger one, who looked like he might be a rookie.
‘Body under rubble. Must have caught a stray bomb at the end of the war. We do still find them. Sad really.’
Florence nodded. ‘Man or woman?’ she asked.
‘Woman. Pretty bashed up I believe. Except for her hair.’
‘Her hair?’
‘Yeah, bright red. Must have been foreign. None of us have red hair like that.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘Where have they taken her, the poor thing?’ she said with a pounding heart but trying for nonchalance.
He shrugged.
‘Do you know? I’m curious, that’s all.’
‘Hospital mortuary,’ he said, relenting.
‘I see. Well, have a good day. Hope you don’t have to stand here for too long.’
Florence glanced at her watch. Oh God, she thought, panicking now about the body, a woman with red hair. Could it be? Could it? And now she was going to be late for Cam too. She forced herself to calm down because there was a shortcut to his office and with luck she might just make it in time.
When she knocked on his door, he already had his jacket on.
‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,’ he said.
‘Sorry, I just heard they found a body. I need a favour. Can you help me?’
When Jack arrived home that evening, he immediately picked up on her distress.
‘Feeling bad about your mother?’ he asked, with a sympathetic look, then came to her and drew her close. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t a ship for ten days. We only just missed one. It left yesterday.’
She screwed up her eyes. ‘It’s not just Maman. You haven’t heard?’
‘What?’
‘A woman’s body was discovered today. Under the rubble in the bombed remains of a building. Cam called someone he knows at the hospital.’
‘I guess they will be finding bodies, even now.’
‘They think she died towards the end of the war, maybe even a couple of years ago, a stray bomb. Something about the way she was held under the rubble meant she’s only partially decomposed.’
‘And you’re worrying—’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to the hospital mortuary tomorrow.’
‘It might be … well, dreadfully grizzly.’
‘Jack, they told Cam she was wearing a charm bracelet and a policeman told me she had red hair. I have to go, if only to put my mind at rest.’
‘There must be other similar bracelets.’
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘You really think she might be Rosalie?’
‘I don’t know what to think. If she is Rosalie, it still doesn’t explain why nobody has heard of her.’
He nodded.
She stared at him as the light finally dawned. ‘Oh Lord, I’ve been such an idiot. She must have changed her name. I should have thought of it. Obvious, though, isn’t it? I should just be asking about a French woman, never mind her name.’
‘Don’t give yourself such a hard time. There used to be a hell of a lot of French here, so it may not have helped anyway.’
Jack accompanied Florence to the mortuary the next day. Cam had phoned ahead to tell them she’d be coming and that she believed the dead woman might be a relative.
Florence took in the entrance hall, painted a rather sickly acidic green.
Then she marched across to ask at the reception desk and was pointed towards a staircase and told to go down then turn right at the bottom.
After that there would be signs. With a feeling of deep unease, Florence held Jack’s hand as they followed the woman’s instructions and eventually reached a door where a notice told them to walk straight in and take a seat.
She turned the handle and went into a room painted the same awful green as the entrance hall and all the corridors.
A notice on the wall gave the address and phone number of a funeral director, along with a small photograph of a church.
She rang a bell on the wall, and then waited on a hard metal chair, her heart hammering in her throat as she tried to second guess what she would see when the final door swung open. Would the body be Rosalie’s?
After a few minutes, an almost bald middle-aged man came out. ‘Miss Baudin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please follow me.’
He took them into a small anteroom and asked them to wait again. Florence was overcome by a feeling of doom. All this interminable waiting was making it worse, and it was chilly down here in the bowels of the hospital, with nothing to look at on the walls but for a cross.
When the man returned, he was holding something wrapped in white cloth. He unwrapped it carefully and held out his hand.
Florence stared and her throat constricted. Oh God! She recognised it immediately, knew all the individual charms. The little horse, the rabbit, the Eiffel tower, the goat, and more. She nodded at the man and showed him her own bracelet, then said, ‘I want to see her body. I think I must.’
‘She’s not in too bad a condition, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ the man said. ‘We think she was trapped in a space that must have remained sealed and dry, probably in the basement and covered by dry dust and rubble in the air pocket.’
‘Did she die immediately?’ Florence asked.
‘Hard to tell. She might have died from her injuries, or from suffocation. When the building collapsed, she was contained in a kind of rocky vault, if you like. I would have expected insects to have got in, but it doesn’t appear so.’
Florence and Jack were then shown to a small room where a body lay on a trolley covered by a white sheet.
There was a sweet, sickly smell, and Florence held a hand over her nose.
The bracelet was Rosalie’s. Was this Rosalie’s body too?
When the attendant pulled back the sheet, her heart thumped even more wildly as she glanced at the partially decomposed face of the dead woman, her eyes open, and her skin purplish.
Then she stifled a groan. Although the woman’s face was damaged, her dusty hair was clearly red. Poor Rosalie had bright red hair.
Florence stepped back. In that instant she lost hope, her shoulders slumping.
This had to be her aunt, killed when a bomb had fallen on the building.
Somewhere along the line Rosalie had changed her name or possibly married, although none of the churches had given up a clue to a marriage.
She wondered if anyone had even known of her death or disappearance.
This poor dead woman had to be Rosalie, it was the only thing that made any sense, but the dead don’t give up their secrets easily and they certainly don’t give up a name.
She left the room and numbly sat with the attendant, trying to explain she had no idea what name her aunt had been using. The staff didn’t seem to care, only keen to certify an unknown woman’s death as caused by a stray bomb in the vicinity of the ruined Opera House towards the end of the war.
Later, in the awful blackness of night, Florence couldn’t sleep.
Images of her dead aunt plagued her, but it wasn’t that alone.
Something about it seemed wrong, although she couldn’t figure out what.
Jack grunted in his sleep and reached out an arm to enfold her, but she slid from his embrace and left the bed, tiptoeing away from him and into the other bedroom.
She sat and thought about her aunt, wondering about her life, and feeling desperately sad that she had died the way she had, and that Claudette would never set eyes on her sister again.
Rosalie was dead. And Claudette would be soon.
There had to be a ship heading back home sooner than Jack had said.
There had to be. She needed to look after her mother, convey the sad news, and face the music with Hélène.
There was no point thinking of Rosalie any more.