Do Not Believe Me

— Do we know each other? said Claire.

— Yes.

— I don't think so.

— I know, said the woman. That is exactly what you told me you would say.

Claire stood on the path, hands on her hips, getting her breath back, and felt the sweat begin to cool on her back.

Her first reaction was neither fear nor curiosity: it was irritation. She had forty-one minutes before waking her son, she was soaked, it was four degrees, and a stranger was blocking her path.

She did what she always did in a situation she did not understand: she took the facts in order.

A woman of about forty-five, an elderly labrador, an ordinary brand of parka, a public path at seven in the morning. Nothing alarming. The dog changed everything: dangerous people do not own old labradors.

— Will you listen to me for two minutes? said the woman.

— Go on.

— My name is Corinne Delvaux. I have walked my dog here every morning for eleven years, between twenty to seven and ten past.

— All right.

— Yesterday morning, in this same spot, you stopped and talked to me for about seven minutes.

Claire pulled back the sleeve of her running top and checked the sensor on the back of her left arm with her fingertips, as she had done forty times a day for twenty-two years. The disc was in place, the adhesive holding. She pulled the sleeve down again.

— Yesterday I spoke to nobody.

— You did.

— Madame, I would know.

Corinne Delvaux did not lose her temper. She took a small black notebook from her pocket, opened it at a page held by an elastic band, and read.

— You said: “My name is Claire Baumann. I live at number 12, rue de la Madeleine, fourth floor. I work at Verrières et Fils, in Thise.”

Claire did not move.

— You told me you were not feeling well, Corinne went on. You told me you were cold and hungry. You sat down on the bench, over there, and stayed there for seven or eight minutes.

— That's untrue.

— Then you said a name.

The mist passed between them at knee height. The labrador had sat down.

— What name? said Claire.

— Wait. I'd rather finish with that.

Corinne turned a page.

— And at the end you said something I wrote down word for word when I got home, because I did not understand it and because I still do not.

She looked up from the notebook.

— You said: “Tomorrow I'm going to come back here at the same time. I'm going to tell you I don't know you. Do not believe me.”

Claire Baumann was standing in the middle of a towpath at ten to seven in the morning, in running kit, her breathing settled without her noticing.

— You are saying I said exactly that? she said.

— Exactly that. It's written there.

— Show me.

Corinne Delvaux handed her the notebook.

It was an ordinary page, written in ballpoint, in the careful hand of a schoolteacher. At the top, the date: Wednesday 8 October. Below it, seven lines.

The lines were numbered. Corinne Delvaux numbered the lines of her own notes, which was the most reassuring and the most disturbing thing Claire had seen all morning.

Claire read them twice.

The last one was underlined.

“Do not believe me.”

She glanced at the previous page too, one second, because she could not help it: it was a shopping list and a vet's telephone number.

It was not the notebook of a crank. It was the notebook of somebody who writes things down.

She gave it back.

— There is a very simple explanation, she said, and I say this without wanting to be unpleasant. You have the wrong person.

— You gave me your address and the name of your employer.

— You could have found those another way.

— How?

Claire opened her mouth and had nothing.

— I have not come to bother you, said Corinne Delvaux. I have come because you asked me to and because it kept me awake last night.

— What did I ask you?

— To come back this morning. To repeat to you what you had told me. And not to believe you when you said it had not happened.

She closed the notebook and put it back in her pocket.

— So there it is. I've done it.

Claire looked at the bench, twenty metres away, under the trees.

— The name, she said. You said I gave you a name.

— Yes.

— What name?

Corinne Delvaux whistled her dog, which got up with difficulty.

— I'll tell you tomorrow, she said. Because if I tell you now, you will go home, look it up on the internet, and you will never again know whether you remembered it or whether you read it.

She clipped on the lead.

— You told me that as well, yesterday. That if you ever doubted, you had to be careful not to mix up what you knew with what you had been told.

She moved off three paces, then turned round.

— Madame Baumann. Are you ill?