He died six months after our conversation. I have no idea how many of those on the list he managed to speak to by then, but I kept it when I cleared his apartment. It had been in my desk drawer ever since, until my house burned down. Now it was gone for good.
We drove across the bridge to the Île de la Cité and found the address we had been given. Olof Rutgersson brandished his diplomatic pass like a crucifix, and within no time we had tracked down someone who would be able to tell us where Louise was. A female preliminary investigator called us into her spacious office, which I was surprised to see contained a grand piano, a Bechstein. She asked us to sit down and opened the file in front of her on the desk. She turned to me because I was Louise’s father, but Rutgersson immediately took over; he was the one who wanted answers to our questions. The woman, who was wearing a wine-red skirt suit and had a small burn mark on one cheek, spoke just as quickly as Rutgersson. I had no chance of following the conversation. I had begun to change my opinion of Rutgersson; he seemed to be taking his task extremely seriously. He was not indifferent to what had befallen Louise after all. From time to time he interrupted the Frenchwoman, and gave me a brief summary of what was being said.
Eventually the picture became clear. Louise had been arrested after stealing a wallet from someone’s inside pocket on a crowded Metro train near Saint-Sulpice. It appeared that she had been taken to Belleville, which was some considerable distance away, because the local custody facilities were already full. There was no doubt that she had stolen the wallet. The elderly victim hadn’t noticed anything, but a fellow passenger had seen exactly what Louise had done and had grabbed her. It turned out he was a civilian employee of the French police.
There was no evidence that anyone else was involved, but she probably hadn’t been working alone.
Louise had been arrested and would be formally charged. According to Rutgersson, over the past twelve months the French police had made a point of tackling the increase in muggings and the large number of pickpockets operating in Paris, which had almost become like Barcelona, the pickpockets’ European paradise. When I asked him to find out if it would be possible to let Louise off with a caution because she didn’t have a criminal record in France and was pregnant, the French officer merely spread her hands wide. It seemed unlikely that Louise would be released any time soon.
‘Can’t they just fine her?’ I asked.
‘It’s too early to discuss any kind of penalty,’ Rutgersson replied. ‘The most important thing right now is to see her and hear her version of events.’
‘The most important thing is that she knows we’re here,’ I said. ‘Everything else is secondary.’
A uniformed officer led us through corridors, down stairs and passageways, moving deeper and deeper underground. I began to wonder if this really was the place where I had been held when I was picked up by the police in 1968. I thought I recognised the whitewashed vaulted cellar, the steel doors, the wooden benches, the distant sounds of people shouting to one another. The place was a maze; you could get lost at any moment and never find your way out.
Eventually Rutgersson and I were shown into a windowless room with a dark-stained wooden table and a few rickety chairs. We waited, Rutgersson with a kind of exaggerated calm, while I became more and more agitated. Then the door opened and Louise was brought in by a female officer. She was wearing her own clothes, a pair of trousers and a shirt I recognised. She was very pale. For the first time I could remember she looked pleased to see me. She usually regarded me with some degree of caution, but not this time.
She wasn’t handcuffed, and the officer made no attempt to stop me from hugging her.
‘You came,’ Louise said.
‘Of course I came.’
‘In my life people don’t usually come when I need them.’
I introduced her to Olof Rutgersson. The police officer had stationed herself by the door and seemed to have no interest in our conversation. We sat down at the table, and Louise immediately began to tell us what had happened.
She admitted stealing the wallet on the crowded train. I no longer had any doubt that this was how she made her living, but she was prepared to admit only this one incident. I had some sympathy with her; why should she reveal to Rutgersson that her principal source of income was whatever she managed to steal? We had established a tacit mutual understanding. She had been arrested for the theft of this one wallet, nothing else.
‘Are you so short of money?’ Rutgersson asked when she fell silent.
Once again I changed my mind about him. I had thought he was an energetic and efficient embassy official; now I saw a remarkably insensitive individual sitting beside me.
‘Why else would she have stolen a wallet?’ I said. ‘Don’t forget she’s pregnant, and that her inheritance, my house in Sweden, burned to the ground just a few weeks ago.’
Rutgersson looked at me in surprise, and I realised I hadn’t mentioned my house. I told him the story, and he nodded to himself.
‘We’ll sort out legal representation for you,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately the embassy can’t cover the cost, but we can advance you the money for the time being.’
‘Will it be expensive?’ I asked.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Then I’ll pay.’
He nodded and took out his phone, but there was no signal deep in the bowels of the building. He exchanged a few words with the officer, who let him out. I heard his footsteps hurrying up the stairs as he sought daylight and a phone signal.
I took my daughter’s hand. I wasn’t used to doing such a thing. For the first time since that day almost ten years ago, when Harriet had told me that the woman standing in the doorway of her caravan in the forests of Hälsingland was my daughter, I actually felt as if she was.
I wished that Harriet was still alive, able to see that at long last Louise and I had found one another.
I asked her how she was feeling. I asked about the baby. She answered quietly that everything was fine. Eventually I couldn’t avoid asking why she hadn’t turned up for lunch that day, why she had simply left a note under my windscreen wiper.
‘I just needed to get away.’
I left it there. Her response made it clear that she didn’t want to tell me why she had suddenly taken off.
We got quite close while Rutgersson was upstairs chasing a phone signal. I felt I understood my daughter better than I had in the past; she was running away, but nothing more.
I had one more question.
‘You called me. Did you call anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘Why me? Of course it was absolutely the right thing to do, but just a few days earlier you’d gone off and left me without a word.’
‘There’s no one else I can ask for help.’
‘You’ve always said you have a lot of friends.’
‘That might not be true.’
‘Why would a person lie about something like that?’
‘I have no idea what other people do, but I don’t always tell the truth. Just like you.’
I could tell from her voice that she didn’t want to continue the conversation. We’d gone this far but no further. She had called me. No one else.
Rutgersson returned; there was something weasel-like about the way he moved. He brandished the phone as if it were a gun. He always seemed to be in a hurry.
‘Madame Riveri will take on your case,’ he said before the police officer had time to close the door behind him. ‘She’s helped us out in the past; on three separate occasions she’s managed to get Swedish citizens out of tricky situations. We can safely leave matters with her.’