'Profession?' asked the doctor.

'Gilder,' replied William.

Baulieu looked up.

'Applying gold leaf to wood, metal or plaster,' William elaborated. 'Anything from an old picture frame to the dome of Les Invalides.'

'I take it you work together?'

'Correct,' mumbled William.

'That's interesting work. How many gold leaves does it take to do the dome of Les Invalides?' asked the doctor without looking up from his notes.

'Five hundred and fifty-five thousand.'

William let his gaze wander about the room. As in all surgeries, there were a handful of perplexing 'personal touches' that made you wonder why the doctor had chosen them as a back-drop to his consultations. They were usually blandly inoffensive, with vaguely artistic connotations: paperweights, statuettes, antique inkwells, mortars ... William's eye was drawn to a white marble head mounted on a plinth on the doctor's desk.

'That's a Cycladic head on your desk.'

'Yes,' Baulieu replied, keeping his head down.

'Is it linked to your work?'

'Follow that thought,' the doctor said softly.

'It has no eyes, because your patients can't see. No mouth, because they can't talk. Just the nose to breathe through.'

The doctor looked up at William and ran his hand over the marble.

'Four thousand years of silence,' he murmured. 'You'll get your friend back, try not to worry.

'And get some rest you look done in,' Baulieu said, before seeing him out.

Biscuits for Belphegor and a Martini Rosso for him. William stood in the kitchen in silence. He was leaving for Berlin the next morning and still had not managed to find anyone to feed the cat. There was no one he could really trust to take care of the keys and, more importantly, the pet. None of his friends would bother trekking across Paris to feed a cat. He would just have to leave bowls of food scattered about the flat and let Belphegor feed himself while he was gone. He knew Laure considered this something to be avoided at all costs because the cat was liable to eat everything in one go and then sick it all up. But he could see no other option. After draining another gla.s.s of Martini, he lined up the bowls on the worktop and was preparing to fill them under Belphegor's watchful gaze, when the doorbell rang.

Brown hair. Jeans and black loafers. White shirt. The man in the dark coat and blue scarf looked very surprised to find him there.

'h.e.l.lo ...' said William.

'h.e.l.lo ...' replied Laurent. There was a pause and then he cautiously continued. 'I've come to see Laure ... Laure Valadier.'

The cat came out onto the landing to greet him. Laurent knelt down. 'h.e.l.lo, Belphegor,' he said, smiling and stroking the cat. The animal turned gracefully to wrap his tail around Laurent's hand.

'Are you a friend of Laure's?'

Laurent looked up at William. 'Not a friend exactly. I'm not sure how to put it ...' he said, looking embarra.s.sed.

He was about to launch into a lengthy explanation but William stopped him.

'It's OK, I won't ask. I think I know who you are. She mentioned she'd met someone ... Come in. You've met the cat, so you must know your way around. I'm William, a friend of Laure's we work together.'

'Laurent.'

The two men shook hands and the door closed behind them.

He had planned for everything, except this. A man with cropped bleached hair and a mildly eccentric dress sense opening the door and inviting him in. Since he had learnt her name, Laurent had called Laure's home number several times. She was in the phone book and he had located the only Laure Valadier in town with a few clicks online. As he suspected, she lived only a few streets away from where he had found the bag. The first time he dialled the number he antic.i.p.ated various potential outcomes: that she would pick up, that a man would pick up her husband, perhaps that it would be engaged, that a child would pick up, that it would go through to her voice on an answer phone, that it would go through to a pre-recorded computer voice on an answer phone. Which is what happened. Laurent left no message. He repeated the process several days in a row. With false jollity, the computer voice told him over and over he could leave his message after the tone and save it with the hash key. No one ever picked up. So he composed a carefully worded letter instead. He settled down to write it after shutting the bookshop, and as he did so it struck him it had been a very long time since he last wrote a letter. After three pages of description detailing how he had found the bag, including apologies for looking inside it, explanations of the many paths his search had led him down, and ending on the story of how the mystery of the key ring had been solved by a French author doing a signing at his bookshop, Laurent felt totally spent. The work that had gone into producing three pages he was satisfied with writing, rereading, revising, choosing every word and turn of phrase, crossing sections out, going back to change a verb and then an adjective further on only increased his respect for writers.

It was a Haussmann-era six-storey building with the traditional golden stone faade and zinc roof. Laurent had come armed with Laure's keys to get through the heavy gla.s.s and black-iron door. So he would use the security fob and leave his envelope in the letter box marked Laure Valadier, which he knew he would find somewhere near the entrance. He looked for it among the wall of brushed-steel boxes, probably dating from the 1970s, on which the names of all the building's occupants were displayed. Larnier, Jean-Pierre ground floor, right. Franon, Marc and Eugenie 2nd floor, left (no junk mail please). C. Bonniot 3rd floor, right. Dirkina Communications 2nd floor, right. Dental surgery 1st floor, left. Lecharnier-Kaplan 4th floor, right. Laure Valadier 5th floor, left.

As he went to slide the envelope through the opening, he hesitated. Had he come all this way, and gone to quite a lot of trouble, just to put a letter in a slot? There was an aroma of pot-au-feu floating in the air. By this time of the evening just about everyone was home from work. Through the door of the ground-floor flat he could hear a television tuned to a 24-hour news station. He heard laughter coming through the wall upstairs. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to head back out into the dark on his own and wait around for the phone to ring? Five floors up, Laure might be at home tonight. With shoulder-length brown hair, fair skin, light-coloured eyes grey, perhaps and a beauty spot to the right of her upper lip. Laurent was too close to stop now. He put the envelope back in his coat pocket and called the lift. The kind of museum piece found only in old Parisian apartment blocks rattled down. It had little wooden swing doors and the panel recording the floors dating from the 1930s. He pressed the black Bakelite b.u.t.ton marked '5'. The cabin clattered shut and carried Laurent upwards to the sound of screeching pulleys. The entrance to the fifth-floor, left-hand apartment was dimly lit by a tulip-shaped lamp on the landing. There was no name on the door, just a little braided silver doorbell. So here he was. He would ring the bell and she would come to the door. Laurent ran his hand through his hair, cleared his throat and rang the bell.

William answered.

'I rang several times but no one picked up so I came round to leave a note,' said Laurent, taking the envelope out of his coat pocket.

William looked at him.

'So you don't know ... No, of course, you couldn't have known,' he said, fl.u.s.tered.

'Is there something I should know?' Laurent murmured.

'Take off your coat and sit down. Will you have a drink of something whisky, vodka, orange juice, Martini Rosso? I'm on Martini.'

'Martini then,' said Laurent.

'Perfect, I'll be right back.'

William disappeared off down the corridor. Laurent hung his coat on the hook in the entrance hall.

The hall was dimly lit and on one of the walls he noticed a series of landscape oil paintings. These small pictures, dating from the nineteenth century, had been hung above a pedestal table. Bucolic lake or forest scenes with one thing in common: the absence of people. Just the natural setting and an impression of silence. Above the paintings, there was a box frame containing one of those metallic-blue b.u.t.terflies whose name was on the tip of his tongue. On the table, a dish held a dozen golden antique keys. He picked one up. It was just like any other key that might have opened doors in days gone by, only it had been gold-plated, as had all the others in the bowl. Laurent thought of Bluebeard and the golden key that opened the door to the room of dead wives. Hearing William's footsteps coming back down the corridor, he put it back.

'There you go. I filled it halfway and put two ice cubes in I hope that's how you take it.'

Both men sat in the sitting room, Laurent on the sofa and William facing him on a chair.

'Laure's fine,' he began, before immediately back-pedalling. 'Well, what I mean is ... it could have been a lot worse. When did you last see her?'

Laurent pretended to think about it.

'Don't worry, it's not important,' cut in William. 'Something happened on the night of the 15th. Sorry, I'm not being very clear, but what I can tell you is that Laure was mugged. She had her bag stolen, she hurt her head, she's in a coma at the moment, but they think she'll wake up.'

'She's in a coma?' Laurent echoed.

'Yes, and she's taking her time waking up, but it should only be a matter of days now. I saw the doctor again yesterday and he's confident.'

'So that's why no one answered the phone ...'

'Yes, and her mobile's missing, of course, along with her wallet and her bank card. They've taken two thousand euros out of her account; I found out when I rang the bank, but it should be covered by her insurance, and anyway that's not what matters.'

'No, it's not what matters,' mumbled Laurent.

'The important thing is that she wakes up,' William went on. 'I'll give you the details of the hospital and the ward she's on.'

'I don't know if I'll be allowed to visit, I'm not really family,' Laurent said awkwardly.

'Neither am I.' William shrugged. 'Anyway, now that she doesn't have her parents or husband any more, she doesn't have any family as far as I can tell, apart from her sister who lives in Moscow, and her friends.'

'You're right,' said Laurent. 'No husband any more,' he repeated.

'She told you about it?'

Laurent took a chance. 'Yes.'

William shook his head and took a gulp of Martini.

'It took her a long time to get over it.'

Laurent said nothing.

'You met her quite recently?' William went on.

'Yes, not long ago ...'

Laurent let his gaze wander around the living room, taking in the frames and books, a fireplace filled with logs waiting to be lit, a Venetian gla.s.s ceiling light, a modern lamp, a large mirror with a very elaborate gold frame.

'Where? If you don't mind me asking ...'

'In my bookshop. I'm a bookseller.'

'That makes sense,' William smiled. 'A few weeks ago, she b.u.mped into a well-known author. She happened to have one of his books in her bag and asked him to sign it for her she must have told you about that.'

'Yes, it was Modiano, near Odeon; it was raining.'

'Exactly. We were finishing off a project at the Senate. You seem like a nice person I'm glad,' William added after a pause.

Laurent got up.

'Sorry, I just need to stretch my legs.'

'Yes, of course,' murmured William.

Laurent went over to look at a large framed photo. William and Laure were standing at the highest point of the roof of the Opera Garnier. Dressed in overalls, they were perched either side of the statue of Apollo holding up his golden lyre to the avenue below. They were both pointing at the lyre as they smiled at the camera.

At last, Laurent could see her face. Laure's hair was swept back by the wind, and it was possible to tell that her eyes were a light colour. There was the beauty spot to the right of her upper lip, and a chain around her neck with the hieroglyphic pendant hanging from it. She had delicate hands and wore a blue bracelet around her wrist. Now the mist had lifted and her features were in sharp focus. Her face was both different and very similar to the one he had imagined.

'I've got a copy of the same picture at my place,' said William. 'It was taken a few years ago. We did half of Apollo's lyre each.'

Next to the photo was another, smaller one of Laure, this time surrounded by five colleagues. They were all standing on the roof at Versailles, holding up their tools. She was wearing black sungla.s.ses. Here again, there was gilding all around. It was beginning to make sense to Laurent: the keys in the entrance hall, the monuments, the job at the Senate William had mentioned. What they all had in common was gold.

'She doesn't wear the pendant with the hieroglyphics any more,' remarked Laurent.

'She attached it to her keys instead,' said William, swallowing another mouthful of Martini. 'It was a gift from a client in Egypt eight or ten years ago. Everyone who worked on the job got their full name spelt out in hieroglyphics. I lost mine. We've been all over the place together; she taught me everything I know. Laure's the best gilder out there.'

'Laure,' whispered Laurent, but whether he meant to say her name or that of the metal, l'or, he wasn't quite sure.

'Listen, I'm really sorry to ask,' William went on, 'but I have to go to Berlin for a couple of days, for work. Is there any chance you could look after Belphegor?'

Looking for a woman to return a handbag was one thing, settling down in her flat when she wasn't there, with her cat on his lap was another. The evening after William had asked him, he had opened the apartment door with the spare key William had given him unnecessary since he already had the original. After giving the cat his food in the kitchen, Laurent poured himself a Jack Daniel's. He swallowed a mouthful of the smoky-tasting liquid. The bourbon warmed him up, filtering through his veins and relaxing his muscles. He went through to the sitting room and looked around, feeling as if he were there clandestinely or rather as if he were not really there at all. There are places where it is so peculiar to find yourself that you can't help thinking that your mind is playing tricks on you that you are daydreaming and will soon wake up. What if there were another Laurent? A Laurent who was at home right now, in the apartment above the bookshop attending to his daily ch.o.r.es: replying to emails, preparing dinner, reading a new book.

Laure's apartment, with its sitting room and its deep sofa, its parquet floor covered with rugs and its carefully positioned lighting, was a delicious coc.o.o.n. In front of one of the windows there was a weeping fig whose branches stretched to the fireplace. Belphegor had happily adopted his evening visitor. He ate up his duck-flavoured cat food, then settled unhesitatingly on Laurent's lap, immobilising him on the sofa. It's an honour that cats bestow on you, as he was all too aware, his daughter's cat Putin never having deigned to sit on anyone the most you could hope for was an intense stare that was vaguely reminiscent of his namesake in the Kremlin.

Before the cat had bestowed this honour, Laurent had wandered about the sitting room. The impression of 'reading a letter that's not addressed to you', as Guitry put it, was even stronger than when he had opened the bag. The apartment was itself like a sort of giant bag with thousands of nooks and crannies, each one containing a tiny portion of its occupant's life. Carrying his gla.s.s of bourbon, Laurent had gone from one object to another and from the table to the photograph. One section of wall was entirely taken up with a large bookcase with several shelves which held nothing but art books some of them recent, others very old ones that she must have collected over the years. Architecture, painting gilding of course but also sale-room catalogues. At the end of one shelf there were several books by Sophie Calle, including one of her poetic masterpieces, Suite Venitienne.

In 1980, for purely artistic reasons, Sophie had decided to follow men in the street randomly and without their knowledge. On these long perambulations, like a private detective, she took black-and-white pictures of the men from the back in various locations. Strangers that she followed for entire afternoons. One day she had spotted a new prey, but he escaped her and disappeared into the crowd. That evening by chance the man was introduced to her at a dinner. He told her that he would soon be going to Venice. Secretly Sophie Calle decided to resume her tailing of him to follow him incognito even down the little alleyways and rii of Venice. From that escapade Sophie had created a logbook of 79 pages and 105 black-and-white pictures, with an afterword by Jean Baudrillard. Sophie's shadowing had come to an end when the man had turned round, recognised her and spoken to her. Although it didn't quite end there, because Sophie arranged to get to the station in Paris a few minutes before him to take a last picture. But all the tension and magic of the quest had vanished the moment they had spoken. The return to reality had signalled the end of the affair.

Laure owned a first edition very difficult to find and also very expensive. Novels occupied another shelf. Laurent noticed several Modianos, some of them small paperbacks, some of them large format. Just to make sure, he pulled some of them out to check whether any of them were signed. There were also thrillers English, Swedish, Icelandic and Amelie Nothomb's books, several Stendhals, two Houellebecqs, three Echenozes, two Chardonnes, four Stefan Zweigs, five Marcel Aymes, everything by Apollinaire, an old hardback of Nadja by Breton, a paperback of Machiavelli's The Prince, then some Le Clezio, a dozen Simenons, three Murakamis, and a few of Jiro Taniguchi's graphic novels. The books were in no particular order, Jean Cocteau's Poesies sat next to Tonino Benacquista's Saga, which in turn was beside Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Salle de Bain, then there was a very thick leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine. Laurent took it down from the shelf.

It was a photo alb.u.m, probably at least a hundred years old, with thick, gold-edged pages. The first photographs were from the 1920s, showing men with pencil moustaches and women in the outfits and hairstyles of the era. Uncle Edward, Aunt Florence, family reunion Christmas 1937 had been written in pencil under the pictures. The twentieth century advanced with the pages. In one photo from the 1970s a little girl with light-coloured eyes stared into the camera. She was holding a soft toy, a fox, and a Siamese cat was watching her. The little girl had a beauty spot above her upper lip. Laure with young Sarbacane and Foxy. Laure with her parents, Laure as a young girl, Laure on holiday with her sister Benedicte. Laurent felt he had no right to be turning these pages, yet the desire to see the now familiar face in each of the photos was too strong for him. He was about to close the alb.u.m, when he came to the last page. After that there was nothing; everything ended in 2007 with an article clipped from a newspaper. The article showed a picture of a man with short hair smiling as he posed beside the Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Ma.s.soud. 'Xavier Valadier (19622007), our colleague and friend, was killed in Iraq on 7 December. Xavier Valadier's photographs were viewed the world over ...' The text ended with 'We will never forget you, Xavier, and our thoughts are with your family.' This was the man that William had referred to, and who was in one of the photographs in the envelope he'd found in the bag. Laurent put the alb.u.m back in its place and went into the adjoining room.

The study was in darkness and he felt for the light switch. Fluorescent lighting flickered above a shelf high on the wall then stabilised. He saw other shelves with many DVDs and even some old videos, a large flat screen sitting on the floor and on the mantelpiece a CD player and a turntable. Thirty-three-inch records and CDs were piled up on the parquet. There was a mixture of cla.s.sical music, rock and pop. No separation of genres here either; David Bowie was with Rubinstein, Radiohead and Devendra Banhart with Glenn Gould and Perlman. In the large mirror over the mantelpiece, postcards from all over the world were stuck between the gilt frame and the gla.s.s. Laurent did not touch any of them. On the desk, a computer and its keyboard, a jumble of pens and a notepad. A collection of twenty dice, all showing six. A roll of the dice will never eliminate chance, murmured Laurent just as a soft shadow pa.s.sed between his legs. The cat. Who immediately jumped onto the black leather desk chair, then onto the table, nudged Laurent's face with his nose, then looked down at the lined-up dice. With the tip of his paw, he pushed two of them onto the floor, then looked at Laurent and immediately did the same with the next two dice.

'Don't do that, stop now,' Laurent told him, kneeling down to pick up the dice. The cat continued to push them with the end of his paw as soon as Laurent retrieved them. 'No, no, we're not going to play that game,' chided Laurent. He took the cat in his arms, closed the study door and then put him down again. The cat invited him to follow him to his mistress's bedroom. The room was all white, in contrast to the rest of the apartment, and its diffuse feeble light gave it the look of an igloo. An old wardrobe, a framed photograph of a red sky. On the radiator there was a toy fox, a little shabby, obviously the 'Foxy' of the photograph. The cat jumped up on the bedspread to show that it was also his bed and that he had the right to curl up on it whenever he wanted, which he proceeded to demonstrate. Together they visited the bathroom, with its black and gold enamel tiles. And on the shelves dozens of bottles, beauty products, creams and shampoos. Laurent picked up Pschitt Magique: 'New-generation micro peeling with biological action and no abrasive particles transform your skin texture in exactly twenty seconds'. He put it down to breathe in the scent of a black bottle of Habanita. His eyes were wandering over this private intimate universe when his mobile rang, causing the cat to streak off towards the sitting room.

'Your daughter is telling me you put five cloves in the onion when you make pot-au-feu. I say you only need three and Bertrand agrees with me. So,' Clare added, sounding exasperated, 'as this seems to be extremely important right now, please can you confirm how many cloves you use?'

'Put her on,' replied Laurent calmly. 'Chloe? ... You need four cloves.'

'You need five, I was right!' shrieked Chloe.

'Chloe, I said four,' corrected Laurent.

'But I always have to be right,' she murmured.

Laurent closed his eyes and sighed. 'Chloe ... I'm at Laure's.'

'Wait, I'm walking away, they're arguing. Are you with her?'

'No, I'll explain I'm feeding her cat.'

'So you found her?'

'Not exactly.'

'What's her name?'

'Valadier, Laure Valadier.'

'Is she pretty?'