The Streak

It took Tom three minutes and ten seconds. I timed him on the oven.

It was Wednesday evening, 7.12. He was eating pasta at the kitchen table, earphones round his neck, his phone beside his plate, and I had just handed him the card. He is seventeen, in his final year at a school in the centre of Namur, one metre eighty-seven tall, and he reads everything you give him as if it were a coded message from his personal enemy.

He read the death notice. He looked at me. He read it again.

“You've been dead for seventeen days and nobody told me.”

“Eat.”

He put down his fork and picked up his phone.

I started the oven timer without telling him. I wanted to know how long it takes, in 2026, to find a stranger when you know her name and her town. When he turned the screen towards me, the timer read 3:10.

“Right. The tea room first. Chez Claire, Rue du Marché, Spa. No website. A listing on an online map, four and a half stars, a hundred and twelve reviews. People go on about the orange scones. Some of them talk about them like a religion.”

He scrolled through the photos. A shop window with jars of jam lined up on three shelves, handwritten labels. A dark wooden counter. Mismatched cups. A copper bell above the door. Scones on a plate, close up, cut in half, with cream.

“And her?”

“Hang on.”

He searched some more, with one thumb. He opened three social networks, typed the name, tried it with the tea room, with Spa, with “Mathy Spa”.

“Nothing. Nobody. No account, no photo, not one selfie in the window, nothing. Even my Latin teacher has an account, and she's sixty-one. The customers have photographed the whole place except her.”

“And the accident?”

He found the article on the website of the Courrier des Fagnes, the local paper for Spa and the surrounding area. It was dated Saturday 24 October. The headline said: “Malchamps: search suspended”. He handed me the phone and I read it standing up, by the oven.

A forty-four-year-old woman from Spa, Claire M., manager of a tea room in the town centre, had gone for a run late on the afternoon of Sunday 18 October, as she did every Sunday. She had parked her green Fiat Panda in the car park of the Bérinzenne estate. Fog had come down over the Fagne de Malchamps at around 5.30. Her partner had raised the alarm that evening. Her phone had been found the next morning on a boardwalk. The Fagnes police zone, the civil protection service, dogs and a drone had searched the moor for five days, in the rain. The search had been suspended the day before. “The terrain is very difficult; the peat bogs are deep in places,” one official said. The paper published no photo of her. It showed the Panda, alone in the middle of the car park, with police tape around it.

I read the paragraph twice. The second time, I was counting.

Sunday the 18th. Alarm raised the same evening. Phone found on Monday the 19th. Five days of searching, from the 19th to the 23rd. Article on the 24th. The death notice had been printed afterwards, for a service on 7 November, twenty days after the disappearance.

The paper said “missing”. The rescuers said “search suspended”. The death notice said “died accidentally”. Between the first word and the last there was no body. And without a body, as I knew from having closed two complicated estates, there is no death certificate. Someone had written on a black-edged card a word that no official document had yet written.

“Mum.”

“Yes.”

“You're doing your balance-sheet face.”

“I don't have a balance-sheet face.”

“You've got a balance-sheet face. You had it all through the divorce.”

He picked his phone up again, put his earphones back on and, just before the music started, said without looking at me:

“Are you going to go, on Saturday?”

I didn't answer. He didn't press. He is very good at not pressing when he already has the answer.

---

My father rang me on Thursday at 6.05.

He never rings. Since Mum died, I'm the one who calls, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and on Sundays we see each other: one week with Tom, one week without. He makes a roast, or a carbonnade when it's cold, and he asks after my clients the way other people ask after the family.

When I saw “Dad” come up on the screen, I thought of his heart, his knee, the cellar stairs.

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything's fine. It's about Sunday. We'll have to cancel.”

“Why?”

“The dog's ill.”

I waited for the rest. There wasn't any.

“Ill how?”

“He was sick yesterday. He's hardly eating. He's thirteen, Claire. He can't cope with commotion. I'd rather we kept things quiet, him and me.”

“I can come on my own. I don't make a commotion. I'll bring lunch, you won't have to do anything.”

“No. Another time.”

Pilote is thirteen, that's true. He has a grey muzzle and hips that no longer keep up. He was ill twice last winter, and both times my father said to me: “Come over, it'll take his mind off it.” He was right: Pilote adores Tom, he adores visitors, he adores cars pulling into the yard.

“Dad. The death notice on Tuesday…”

“Yes?”

“You really never heard of a Claire Mathy in Spa? You worked forty years in the Population department. A perfect namesake, twenty kilometres from your house?”

“Spa isn't Verviers. It wasn't my department.”

That was correct. Spa is a different municipality. He said nothing else.

“Will you ring me back to tell me how the dog is?”

“I'll ring you back.”

He hung up first, for the second time that week.

---

Tom went to his father's on Friday at 5 p.m., for the weekend only: because of Olivier's staff meetings, I'd had him two weeks running, for once. Olivier lives in Bouge, ten minutes away, with his new wife, two cats and a ping-pong table in the garage. We have been divorced since 2019 and we get on better than before. He teaches maths. When I told him about the death notice on the phone, he said: “It's a mistake. But keep the envelope.” That's exactly what I would have said in his place.

The flat was empty. I ate standing up. I tidied the dishes, the spice cupboard, the year's bills into the blue file. At 11 p.m. I went to bed. At 1.40 a.m. I was back in the kitchen, with the notebook and a pencil.

I did what I always do in such cases: I went back over the accounts from the beginning. Mine.

1982: I am born in Verviers, on 14 March. My parents already live in Heusy. There will be no brother or sister at home.

2000: I go to Liège to study. Accountancy, then the master's.

2004: I am twenty-two. From February to June I do my work placement at a firm in the centre of Liège, near Place Saint-Lambert. I go home to Heusy on Friday evenings with my washing. In June I graduate. My parents are in the hall. My mother cries. My father takes photos with a disposable camera and botches half of them.

That summer, I remembered now, my father didn't take a holiday. It was the first time. My mother and I went to the seaside for a week, to De Panne, on our own. He had said: “There's too much work in the department.” Nobody had found that odd. There was always too much work in the department.

2005: I meet Olivier.

2006: I marry him in Namur. You need an extract of your birth certificate to get married; my father brings it to me himself, stamped, in a plastic sleeve. He is proud to do it. He says: “That way it's done properly.”

2009: Tom.

2012: the streak.

2015: Mum.

2019: the divorce.

I read the column again. It was correct. I had never lived in Spa, never run a tea room, never had a partner called Vincent or a daughter called Emma. I had lent nothing to anyone. My life fitted on half a page, and there wasn't a single gap.

So the other woman's must have one.

---

At 2.10 I opened the laptop.

Tom had looked for photos on social media. He hadn't looked where an accountant looks: in what an institution has published and then taken down. When someone goes missing, the police put out an appeal with a photo. When the search stops, the appeal is withdrawn. That is the rule, and it's a fair one: you don't leave people's faces lying around. But the internet keeps copies of everything that was public for a few days.

The police page no longer existed. I copied its address into an archive site. There was one copy, a single one, dated 20 October at 9.14.

“Missing person, concern for welfare. Claire Mathy, 44, Spa.”

One metre sixty-five. Slim build. Last seen on Sunday 18 October at around 4.40 p.m., in the car park of the Bérinzenne estate. Wearing black running tights and a light-coloured sports jacket. Distinguishing feature: wears a fingerless glove on her left hand.

And, at last, a photo.

It had been taken outdoors, in autumn, in front of a hedge. A woman was laughing as she turned her head, as if someone had just said her name behind the camera. A rounder face than mine. Lighter eyes. A wider mouth, readier to laugh than mine has ever been. Chestnut hair, longer, tied low at the nape. I looked at her, searching for what we had in common, and found first what we didn't. She barely looked like me.

I enlarged the image.

At her left temple, above the ear, a white streak two fingers wide.

My father's streak. Mine.