Читать книгу Little Bird - Camilla Way, Camilla Way - Страница 10

Normandy, France, 10 April 1985

Nobody really knew the man who lived in the forest, and the few who were acquainted with him knew him only as ‘the mute’. He would arrive in his rusty blue pick-up truck at a store in one of the villages some distance from the Forêt de Breteuil, and the shop owners who served him would be struck by a distant memory of the peculiar weight of his silence. And as they helped him take his provisions to the truck or collected money for his petrol, they would feel sure, suddenly, that they had served him once before, one day long ago.

Their conversation would be met with a pleasant, apologetic smile and the silent man would raise a single, bony finger to his mouth and sadly shake his head. Then he would pull from his pocket a note pad and write down his order, and the shop keeper would be struck by the frank sweetness of his gaze, would watch him drive away, wonder briefly who he was and where he lived, before shrugging and turning back to their day.

The young woman who worked in the charity shop in Argentan, however, had never seen the man before. Wham blared loudly from the radio and she was busy on the phone when the tall, grave stranger with the shy smile and slight stoop handed her the amount she had absent-mindedly rung up on the till. And so, ten years later, when the same man’s body had been found in a forest twenty miles away, and when a picture of his face flashed across TV screens around the world, the young woman, whose name was Laure, would not remember that this was the same, silent person who had once bought bags and bags of clothes one afternoon a decade ago, for a toddler, for a child, for a young girl.