Chapter 3
France—One Year Later
Eve walked through the market, trying to ignore the rabbit hopping along behind her.
Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to get the ferry to St. Malo a few days ago.
She’d hoped that being abroad might make her birthday easier.
The market was nothing like the antiques ones she often went to back home.
In fact, it was little more than a flea market, full of bric-a-brac, and knitted cardigans, and secondhand books.
Eve didn’t really expect to find anything of interest there, but it was something to do, something to look at.
She’d found herself thinking of Max Everly several times today, too.
The episode last year had been as strange as it was sad.
Eve had never seen anyone die before. It was the one small mercy when it came to her sister.
She’d thought about trying to track down his next of kin in case they wanted the octopus back, but she hadn’t known where to start.
The hospital had found no identification on him and the only reason the medics even knew his name was because Eve had given it to them.
It made her sad to think of him being buried alone.
There was the hat too—the fedora Eve had collected from the cloakroom.
It was old and shabby, at odds with the smart suit he’d been wearing.
The initials ME had been written on the label inside, along with a single musical note inked in one corner.
Once again, Eve found it impossible not to be struck by the coincidence of this man sharing a name with her favourite composer.
It seemed wrong to throw the hat away, but there was no one to claim it, so she’d taken it home, along with the octopus.
She’d tried googling Max Everly in the hopes of locating his family, but the fact that he shared a name with such a famous composer made that impossible.
Her searches only returned information about the Everly from the 1900s.
She ran her eyes over the handful of photographs she knew so well—a headshot of seventeen-year-old Everly in his lieutenant’s uniform, just before he set off to war; some pictures taken at musical performances, along with a couple snapped at glamorous-looking parties.
Black-haired and handsome, with dark eyes that were almost magnetic.
Eve had had a bit of a crush on him when she’d first discovered his music as a teenager.
“Crush” was the wrong word, though. More of an obsession, really.
But there was something about the photos that always made her feel a bit shivery too.
Perhaps it was the fact that he’d disappeared sometime in 1935, and nobody ever found out what became of him.
It seemed so wrong for there never to have been an answer.
One day, he simply stepped out of the world and was gone, off to join the Missing Persons’ Club with Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, and the crew of the Mary Celeste.
A disappearance made all the more mysterious by the fact that the suitcase full of music had turned up sixty-five years later.
The octopus ornament the modern-day Max Everly had given her wasn’t valuable, although Eve liked it very much.
In fact, she loved it. It was like seeing one of her drawings brought to life.
Right now, it was sitting on her bedside table back home, and she was thinking about it at the very moment she rounded a corner of the street market in France and found herself face-to-face with the teacups.
The stall in front of her held an assortment of china, including a tea service in a striking lavender-grey colour, all stamped with a white octopus crest. It was identical to the creature back home on her bedside table.
It even had the same black tip on one tentacle.
Eve walked over and asked the stallholder in her stumbling French whether she might examine the set.
This was not her field of expertise, but she could tell at a glance that the tea service was decades old and that it was of superb quality.
Names like Limoges and Sèvres went through her mind, but when she carefully picked up a plate, she found no relevant marks on the back.
It was still exquisitely beautiful but all in quite bad condition.
The sugar bowl was chipped and so were some of the plates.
The handle of the milk jug had broken sometime in the past and been glued back on.
Most of the teacups were damaged, and the teapot was missing altogether.
It might have been worth something if it had been better preserved, but Eve doubted it was valuable in its current condition.
Even so, she couldn’t stop staring at the teacup in her hands.
She asked the stallholder where the items had come from, but the response she received was too rapid for her to follow.
There was one word she did recognise, though—h?tel.
Come back to the hotel….
She recalled Max’s words, hearing his voice as clearly as if he was standing beside her in the market.
She tried to ask for more information, but the stallholder’s reply was more impatient this time. “Hotel closed,” she said curtly in English.
It was clear she wanted to turn her attention to the other prospective customers gathering at the stall, so Eve took out her wallet and asked how much she wanted for the tea service.
A short while later, she walked away with the pieces hastily wrapped and bundled into a couple of supermarket carrier bags.
When she got back to her room, she spent some time examining the china from every angle, turning it over and over in her hands, marvelling at the beauty of the octopus and the strangeness of the coincidence.
When she returned to work after her trip, she took one of the teacups with her to show Kate. Ever since that Miss Scarlett comment, the other woman had avoided Eve whenever she could, but chinaware was her specialty, so Eve was determined to pin her down.
“It’s not a brand I recognise, I’m afraid,” Kate told her. “It was probably made by one of the smaller regional factories in France. It’s beautiful but not worth much.”
“And its background?” Eve asked. “The stallholder seemed to think it had come from a hotel.”
Kate shrugged and handed the teacup back. “That doesn’t really narrow it down much, although it’s…Wait, can I take another look?”
Eve passed it over and Kate examined it again. “There’s an auction house myth,” she finally said. “A bit of auctioneer’s lore, really. About a place called the White Octopus Hotel. You’ve never heard of it?”
Eve shook her head.
“My mentor told me the story when I first started here. You remember Victor Harris? Lovely man. He retired a few years ago now. He said there was meant to be this beautiful hotel called the White Octopus that was famous in its day for containing various magical objects.”
Eve raised an eyebrow. “Magical objects?”
Kate nodded. “Clocks that could rewind time, a telephone that let you speak with someone who’d died, things like that.
Real fantasy stuff. I thought Victor was just making it up to be amusing, but I’ve since heard the story from other people too.
The hotel supposedly closed under mysterious circumstances and the contents were sold off, scattered through various auction houses across Europe. It’s just a fairy tale, of course.”
Eve didn’t have a particularly hard time believing that fairy tales might be real.
Monsters were, after all. And ghosts. Life could be strange and unexpected sometimes; she was well enough aware of that.
The octopus tattoo tingled on her skin. It was on her collarbone today, perilously close to being visible.
Fortunately, it hardly ever strayed onto her face, so the turtleneck and long sleeves were usually enough to keep it hidden.
Even so, she was just thinking she ought to leave when she felt a tentacle flick casually over the top of her turtleneck.
Unfortunately, Kate’s eyes were drawn by the movement too, making her jump.
“What was…?” she began.
Eve quickly clamped her hand over her neck and stood up. “Thank you for your time.”
“Of…of course.”
Eve picked up the teacup and quickly returned to her own office.
She hoped Kate wouldn’t say anything about the tentacle, but it had only been a momentary flash; she probably hadn’t even seen it properly.
And it wasn’t as if anyone would believe her anyway.
Tattoos didn’t move around a person’s body. Everyone knew that.
Eve set the octopus teacup on the desk and switched on her computer. When she typed “the White Octopus Hotel” into Google and hit the search button, she expected there to be nothing at all, but then the results appeared on the screen, and the headlines all shared the same theme.
The White Octopus and other abandoned hotels…
Uncertainty over future of landmark White Octopus…
Home of renowned painter Nikolas Roth crumbling into ruin…
Eve stared at that last headline. She’d learned about Nikolas Roth at university and knew that he had been a renowned Victorian painter, beloved by critics of the day, who had praised his art as dark and powerful, fascinating, ahead of its time.
His paintings were much sought after by private art collectors, but it seemed that no one could get their hands on an original Roth painting, no matter how high a price they offered.
Nikolas Roth was an eccentric recluse who shied away from interviews and rarely left his home in the Swiss Alps.
Not only did he refuse to sell his paintings, or loan them to museums, but he strictly banned all photographers from his private exhibitions too.
The only place he was known to have displayed his art was on the walls of his hotel.
So, throughout the years, forbidden photographs would sometimes appear, claiming to have captured a Roth painting in situ.
Most of these were dismissed as hoaxes and fakes, but there was one photo, taken in 1927, that modern-day scholars thought could be genuine.
It was too blurred and grainy to make out any details of the painting properly and it didn’t show the whole canvas either—just a small part of it, along with a man stood nearby, whom many believed to be Roth himself.
He was tall, grey-haired, and dressed in a well-cut suit, but you couldn’t see his face because it was angled away from the camera.
Upon his death in the 1930s, his collection of paintings all mysteriously vanished. Eve had always nurtured the vague hope that perhaps, one day, a Roth painting might find its way to the auction house, just as Max Everly’s music had. What a find that would be.
She clicked on the link that referenced the painter and found herself on an art history website.
There was no mention of any magical objects, but the piece detailed the fact that Nikolas Roth had lived and worked in his family home in the mountains, which had also been open to the public at the turn of the century as a lakeside hotel called the White Octopus.
During the era of “grand hotels,” the White Octopus was known as the most beautiful example of belle époque architecture in Switzerland. The pearl-coloured stonework, iron balconies, and asymmetrical turrets had a fairy-tale quality befitting the beauty of its lakeside location.
In its heyday, the thirty-six rooms at the hotel were much sought after, with guests eager to partake of the celebrated afternoon teas on the veranda, restore their health in the exquisitely tiled steam baths, and take a turn about the famous Fountain Room at sunset.
Today, there is little remaining of the splendour that once flourished here, and it seems Roth’s former home is destined to crumble into ruin… .
Eve scrolled down to continue reading the article, but it was broken up with a photo of the hotel.
It depicted a truly beautiful building—more castle than mansion—with elegant white spires piercing a deep-blue sky.
A crystal-clear lake sparkled in the foreground and mountain peaks rose majestically on the horizon, but Eve couldn’t take her eyes from the hotel itself.
She recognised it at once. It was like suddenly seeing the face of a very old and very dear friend, unexpectedly, after many years apart.
She felt a sudden powerful wave of gladness and nostalgia, mixed with an inexplicable sense of homesickness and loss. She’d been to this hotel before.