MasterStroke Read Free Page B

challenge begins because a regular trail just doesn’t exist anymore. Provenance gets very murky once you have to work through items that were dispersed around the world but largely throughout Europe. Factor in two world wars and it gets even more complicated. By comparison, separating the genuine items from the fakes is the easy part.
    “Your turn,” he said brightly. “Tell me a little about yourself.”
    Inwardly, Sandrine squirmed. Jack’s story had seemed so incredibly fascinating and reminded her how quiet her life was in comparison. However, there was also the matter that she really didn’t like to discuss her life. Part of it was because she closely guarded her privacy. She liked that, in an age where the Internet allowed everybody to share their most intimate thoughts and feelings, no matter how banal or pedestrian, she kept so low a profile it could be deemed invisible. She didn’t have a Facebook account or take to Twitter. She didn’t feel the need to blog or post opinions on other people’s websites.
    She didn’t have a large circle of friends although those she had she’d known for years. If she needed to contact anybody, she phoned them or wrote notes on the exquisitely stylish stationery she collected. There was always something about receiving a letter that she found far more exciting than the robotic plink of an email notification in her in-box.
    That’s not to say the Internet wasn’t a major presence in her life. She loved the ease with which information was so readily available. Just about anything and everything was accessible via search engines and she used such tools several hours a day to research and search for books for her customers. But while Sandrine was comfortable probing the hidden crevices of the world for her own uses, she hated to think her own life could be so easily uncovered.
    She wasn’t sure from where this evolved but felt the answers lay in her childhood. Her mother and father had died in a car accident when she was very young, still a baby really, barely three years old.
    All she knew about her parents came from her aunt, her father’s elder sister, and even then that lacked the essential details she demanded as she grew older and so desperately wanted to know more. Aunt Bridget had been estranged from her family for several years, had not spoken to her brother in that time, but following the accident she had immediately taken steps to care for Sandrine, bringing her back to her English home and lavishing love and attention on her, as though raising her brother’s infant daughter could go some way towards repairing the rift in her own life.
    All Sandrine had to remind her of her mother and father was a faded Polaroid print. In it, they looked pale and haunted, two young people, slight and good-looking, dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts, their love for each other radiantly apparent as they walked hand-in-hand towards the camera. They were in a meadow of some kind, a gentle slope of faded yellow grass, in a pale golden late afternoon light, their shadows cast long behind them. Far behind them, a hill rose and, barely peeking above its crown, was a long hard edge of terracotta roofing and a brick chimney. She had no idea where the photo was taken and neither did Bridget. The location was as much a mystery as her parents’ own lives.
    Sandrine could recognise the genetic similarities with her mother who was slim and delicate with pale skin and auburn hair. Her father was just as slim with slightly darker blonde hair; her parents were quite obviously the products of a time before fast food had taken hold.
    Sandrine had kept that photo in a frame on her bedside table throughout her childhood. It was the last thing she’d see at night and the first she’d see in the morning. She built up elaborate fantasies about her parents, the meadow, the golden glow and the glimpsed house beyond the hill. It permeated her waking hours and very often her dreams.
    Time after time,