David was talking to a man who might have been the landlord. He had appeared defensive initially, but now, ten minutes later, they were shaking hands warmly. He reappeared at their table. She should sort out which things she wanted to keep, David said, and he had a number for a shipping company that could pack those items and fly them home for her. The landlord had agreed to let them remain in the apartment until tomorrow. The rest could be taken and disposed of by the removal men for a small fee. ‘Are you okay for money?’ he had said quietly. The kind of man he was.

Marianne Johnson had nearly wept with gratitude. They had helped her move things, stacking objects right or left depending on what should be kept. As they had stood there, the woman pointing at things, moving them carefully to one side, Liv had looked more closely at the items on the pavement. There was a Corona typewriter, huge leather-bound albums of fading newsprint. ‘Mom was a journalist,’ said the woman, placing them carefully on a stone step. ‘Her name was Louanne Baker. I remember her using this when I was a little girl.’

‘What is that?’ Liv pointed at a small brown object. Even though she was unable to make it out without stepping closer, some visceral part of her shuddered. She could see what looked like teeth.

‘Oh. Those. Those are Mom’s shrunken heads. She used to collect all sorts. There’s a Nazi helmet somewhere too. D’you think a museum might want them?’

‘You’ll have fun getting them through Customs.’

‘Oh, God. I might just leave it on the street and run.’ She paused to wipe her forehead. ‘This heat! I’m dying.’

And then Liv had seen the painting. Propped up against an easy chair, the face was somehow compelling even among the noise and the chaos. She had stooped and turned it carefully towards her. A girl looked out from within the battered gilt frame, a faint note of challenge in her eyes. A great swathe of red-gold hair fell to her shoulders; a faint smile spoke of a kind of pride, and something more intimate. Something sexual.

‘She looks like you,’ David had murmured, under his breath, from beside her. ‘That’s just how you look.’ Liv’s hair was blonde, not red, and short. But she had known immediately. The look they exchanged made the street fade.

David had turned to Marianne Johnson. ‘Don’t you want to keep this?’

She had straightened up, squinted at him. ‘Oh – no. I don’t think so.’

David had lowered his voice. ‘Would you let me buy it from you?’

‘Buy it? You can have it. It’s the least I can do, given you’ve saved my darned life.’

But he had refused. They had stood there on the pavement, engaged in a bizarre reverse haggling, David insisting on giving her more money than she was comfortable with. Finally, as Liv continued to sort through a rail of clothes, she turned to see them shaking on a price.

‘I would gladly have let you have it,’ she said, as David counted out the notes. ‘To tell you the truth, I never much liked that painting. When I was a kid I used to think she was mocking me. She always seemed a little snooty.’

They had left her at dusk with his mobile number, the pavement clear in front of the empty apartment, Marianne Johnson gathering her belongings to go back to her hotel. They had walked away in the thick heat, him beaming as if he had acquired some great treasure, holding the painting as reverently as he would hold Liv later that evening. ‘This should be your wedding present,’ he had said. ‘Seeing as I never gave you anything.’

‘I thought you didn’t want anything interrupting the clean lines of your walls,’ she had teased.

They had stopped in the busy street, and held it up to view it again. She remembers the taut, sunburned skin at the back of her neck, the fine dusty sheen on her arms. The hot Barcelona streets, the afternoon sun reflected in his eyes. ‘I think we can break the rules for something we love.’

‘So you and David bought that painting in good faith, yes?’ says Kristen. She pauses to swat the hand of a teenager scrabbling among the contents of the fridge. ‘No. No chocolate mousse. You won’t eat supper.’

‘Yes. I even managed to dig out the receipt.’ She had it in her handbag: a piece of tattered paper, torn from the back of a journal. Received with thanks for portrait, poss called The Girl You Left Behind. 300 francs – Marianne Baker (Ms).

‘So it’s yours. You bought it, you have the receipt. Surely that’s the end of it. Tasmin? Will you tell George it’s supper in ten minutes?’

‘You’d think. And the woman we got it from said her mother’d had it for half a century. She wasn’t even going to sell it to us – she was going to give it to us. David insisted on paying her.’

‘Well, the whole thing is frankly ridiculous.’ Kristen stops mixing the salad and throws up her hands. ‘I mean, where does it end? If you bought a house and someone stole the land in the land grabs of the Middle Ages, does that mean some day someone’s going to claim your house back too? Do we have to give back my diamond ring because it might have been taken from the wrong bit of Africa? It was the First World War, for goodness’ sake. Nearly a hundred years ago. The legal system is going too far.’

Liv sits back in her chair. She had called Sven that afternoon, trembling with shock, and he had told her to come over that evening. He had been reassuringly calm when she had told him about the letter, had actually shrugged as he read it. ‘It’s probably a new variation on the ambulance-chasing thing. It all sounds very unlikely. I’ll check it out – but I wouldn’t worry. You’ve got a receipt, you bought it legally, so I’m guessing there’s no way this could stand up in a court of law.’