Part one

The Ferrands’ girl hadn’t set foot outside for a hundred and sixty-two days. I know because I counted them. A pencil cross every evening on the post office calendar hanging in my kitchen in Nice. The way you count the days of someone who is ill.

Her name was Maricel. Twenty-four, from the Philippines, from a town whose name I could never remember. She had arrived at the villa in March, brought back from Dubai, where Monsieur had worked for two years. A wheeled suitcase, a cardigan too thin for the mistral. Madame had introduced her as “the nanny, an absolute gem”.

The gem got up before me and went to bed after everyone else. I arrive at seven, I leave at three, and I never once found her sitting down.

One Tuesday in August, while I was mopping the scullery, she came up to me. She glanced towards the stairs, then whispered, with the few words of French she had picked up from the children:

“Pardon, Madame Josiane… Today, what day is it?”

She didn’t even know what day it was.

I need to tell you about the villa.

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is a peninsula of billionaires set between Nice and Monaco. Three-metre pittosporum hedges, gates that open by themselves, gardeners who arrive in white vans and leave before the owners get up. I come on the number 15 bus from the port in Nice, at 6:20. People like me aren’t seen. It’s almost a professional skill.

Les Oliviers Bleus is the Ferrands’ house. Monsieur does something in investment funds, in Monaco. Madame, Constance, does Pilates, dinner parties and charity galas for sick children. They have two children, Gaspard, eight, and Ombeline, five. I saw the little ones born. I ironed the christening gown.

I’ve worked there for eleven years, Tuesdays and Fridays. Madame isn’t unkind to me. Distant, rushed, sharp if there are marks on the shower screen. But she trusts me. One evening three years ago, she rang me from a gala in Monaco in a panic: she had forgotten her earrings. Over the phone, she read out the code for the safe in her dressing room. 1-9-0-6. The 19th of June, Gaspard’s birthday. I took them to her in a taxi. She gave me fifty euros, and forgot all about it.

I didn’t. A cleaner forgets nothing. We can’t afford to: the day something goes missing, we’re the ones everybody looks at.

In the first few weeks, I didn’t want to see anything.

I saw that Maricel slept in the laundry room, on a camp bed, between the tumble dryer and the boiler. I told myself they would be doing up a room for her.

I saw that she always wore the same two T-shirts, one grey and one pink, which she washed by hand in the scullery sink at night. I told myself she was modest.

I saw that she ate standing up, in the kitchen, whatever was left on the children’s plates. Cold pasta shells. Scraps of ham. Once, the crust of a lemon tart, which she gulped down in one go when she heard me coming.

I saw that the front gate, left open all day for eleven years, was now kept locked. And that the little service door, the one that opens onto the coastal path, had a new padlock.

I told myself a lot of things. It’s amazing what you can tell yourself to keep a job.

After “what day is it”, I couldn’t tell myself stories any more.

The following Friday, I bought two pan bagnats from the baker on Rue Bonaparte. One for me, one for her. I put hers on the shelf in the laundry room, behind the washing powder.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she ate it sitting on the floor, very fast, watching the door. She had tears in her eyes and a chin shiny with olive oil. I had tears in my eyes too. I pretended to look for the fabric softener.

“Merci, Madame Josiane. Merci. Merci.”

She folded the sandwich paper up very small, into eight, into sixteen, and slipped it into her pocket. I didn’t understand why. Later, I did: there could be no trace left behind.

The following Tuesday, Madame was waiting for me in the kitchen, in her gym clothes, cup in hand.

“Josiane, Gaspard tells me you brought Maricel a sandwich. I’m going to be clear, because I like you. We don’t feed the staff here. Maricel gets board and lodging, and she owes us a debt. It’s none of your business.”

She said “a debt” the way you’d say “a cold”.

“Besides,” she added, rinsing her cup, “you mustn’t give girls like that bad habits. Next thing you know, they run off.”

From that day on, I watched.

Maricel didn’t have a phone. A twenty-four-year-old girl, with no phone. According to Gaspard, who told me with a laugh, she was allowed to call her mother in Iloilo for five minutes on Sundays, on Monsieur’s computer, “when she’d been good”. He was repeating his parents’ words without understanding them. He was eight.

She had marks on her forearms. Not from being hit, I think. Oven burns, red patches from bleach. The hands of someone who scrubs sixteen hours a day without gloves.

She never looked out of the windows. There was sea everywhere, that picture-postcard sea people pay millions for, and she didn’t look at it. As if it hurt too much.

And every time Madame walked past her, she lowered her head by a centimetre. One tiny centimetre. I used to do it too, at twenty, for a lady in Cimiez. I know that centimetre.

One evening, as I left, I turned round at the end of the drive. She was standing behind the big scullery window, a sponge in her hand. She wasn’t looking at the sea. She was looking at the gate.

On Friday 4 September, I took my apron out of the cupboard in the laundry room, as always. A blue flowered apron that I leave there from one week to the next.

As I tied it behind my back, I felt something in the front pocket. A small square of fabric.

I thought it was a bus ticket. I unfolded it.

It was a laundry label, cut out of the collar of a T-shirt. On the back, in pencil, in capital letters that wobbled a little, was a single word.

PASSPORT.

I looked up. Maricel was in the doorway, a basket of sheets against her hip. She was looking me straight in the eye, for the first time. She didn’t say anything.

Above us, on the first floor, we could hear Madame’s heels in the dressing room. Where the safe was.

And I knew the code.