‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for contacting him.’
‘I thought it right that the man who saved you should share in all this. He sent this for you.’
She took the gift; she could tell it was a book.
‘We’re going to play pass the parcel, so hurry back in. And I like to win, so it’s going to get ugly,’ he warned, wagging his crooked finger with a wicked grin.
She blew him a kiss as he left. Katerina undid the wrapping and knew what the title of the book would be before she fully revealed it. It was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. When she opened it she could tell it was an original edition and that it was Otto’s personal copy of the book … creased and well-thumbed from many readings. It linked them again in a private way, and while she sensed that she had become his Rebecca, haunting his life, she refused to believe it was sinister.
She could hear music starting and then stopping, followed by raucous laughter. She didn’t think Edward would ever grow out of his childish joy of making people happy, and she would see to it that he never did. As she wrapped her book back up with a promise to keep it as a treasured item in her private study upstairs, Edward reappeared.
‘I’m coming,’ she said, turning to see him cradling Amálie in his arms.
‘Our precious girl woke up and Mrs Biskup said she uttered the word “Daddy”,’ he said with a wry smile.
‘Edward, you terrible fibber; she’s not talking yet and you know it.’
‘Well, she’s thinking it,’ he assured her, kissing his child’s forehead.
Peter peeped around the door. ‘Come on, we started the game and now we’re all waiting.’ He bent down and kissed his infant sister’s head. ‘And Mum, Daniel’s cheating.’
Katerina felt in this moment as though her world had fully righted itself. This was where she was meant to be: surrounded by family and friends, in love with all of them and finally looking forward to life rather than simply existing. ‘Let me take her before she realises she’s hungry.’ And as Edward placed their child into her arms, he kissed their daughter first and lingered for a longer kiss with her mother.
‘I’ve never been happier,’ he whispered.
‘Neither have I,’ she replied.
BOOK CLUB NOTES
1. In the prologue, Samuel Kassowicz puts his son Petr on the Kindertransport against his wife’s strong wishes. Do you think he made the right decision at the time?
2. In what ways has Katerina’s work as a jewellery curator prepared her for the challenges she later faces in her personal life?
3. What do you think Otto means when he tells Katerina, ‘There are rules to war’?
4. Daniel describes Ruda Mayek as ‘the devil … a monster that walks this earth in plain sight’. Do you agree with this assessment? How else might we perceive him?
5. Katerina tells Daniel that ‘perhaps life was preparing me for this hunt’. In what ways do you think this is true? And in what ways does she feel she needs to become a new version of herself to track down Mayek?
6. Katerina was determined that she had no susceptibility to being romanced, or to falling in love. Why did she feel this way? In what ways did Edward manage to prove her wrong?
7. Otto is described as displaying ‘love of the most generous kind’. What does this mean, in your eyes?
8. Katerina was prepared to risk her own life in order to end Ruda Mayek’s. Do you see this as a weakness or a strength in her character?
9. Can you appreciate the attitudes of Petr Kassowicz’s adopted parents?
10. Did Katerina do the right thing in keeping her baby, despite how he was conceived?
11. Which character changes the most throughout the course of the story?
12. Do you think this book has a happy ending?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is usually a host of generous people behind each of my stories and The Pearl Thief is no exception.
Notably, Alex Hutchinson has become my firm research buddy, and she is in the pages of this novel walking alongside me through most of the research done in England. She sat alongside me in the Jewish Library and studied book after book. Without Alex I doubt I would ever know where that secret door in the British Museum is, and when I was pondering a location not too far out of London for some scenes, Hampstead Ponds was her inspiration. It was Alex who suggested Robin Hood’s Bay when I needed a particular sort of wild and lonely setting, and it was she who made me put on my beanie and get out of the car on the freezing Yorkshire moors to see the Hole of Horkum. She even bought me my own hammer so she could show me how to hunt fossils for ammonite on a rocky beach, and she taught me about Whitby Jet. She is also responsible for most of the hilarity we share on our research trips and I am delighted that, over the course of this book, Alex has been picked up by a major UK publisher and contracted to write a series of period novels. Her first, A Quality Street Christmas, will be out for Christmas 2018 under the pen name of Penny Thorpe. I hope she enjoys all the success she deserves.
My thanks to Kay Hyde and the Tourism York team for their help while I was up in the north, and I’d like to give a nod to our lovely guide, Mrs Zuzana, in Prague for helping me to hunt down the location in the forest where, arguably, this book’s most powerful scene takes place. It was so important to get the setting right and she took her brief seriously and got it bang on. I am grateful.
William Altman, one of the top tourist guides in Paris who we have used in the past, will wave away the idea that he did much, but without his wisdom my Paris of 1963 would lack the richness he brought to it. His help came just at the right moment.
Thank you to the Wiener Library in London for all of its helpful research tools that I go back to time and again when I am writing about the Holocaust.
The team around me at Penguin Random House seems to expand with each book and I am so grateful to each of you but especially to my publisher, Ali Watts – who always helps me to be better – and to Lou Ryan, Chloe Davies, Rebekah Chereshsky, Amanda Martin, Louisa Maggio, Saskia Adams and Penelope Goodes. The sales team … you’re brilliant, thank you.
Booksellers of Australia and New Zealand – you are power-houses of resilience, and long may your shops be the secret worlds we will always want to escape into. Thank you for your support and excitement for this novel. The world really is a better place with your magical spaces.
And the counterbalance to our booksellers are the readers. Without you, there are no books worth writing, and I am the lucky recipient of one of the best audiences any novelist could be blessed by, full of mischief, fun and a hungry need for more stories. Love and thanks to all those wonderful people out there who buy books and borrow books from our marvellous libraries – thank you to the enthusiastic library teams nationwide. Don’t ever stop reading! And thank you to my audiences for all the fun when I’m touring – you bring out the best and the wicked in me.
Writers need to be alone … it’s just how it is. But when I emerge there’s always a fun, affectionate family waiting for me. My thanks to my beloved gang, who make life a happy one – especially sons, Will and Jack, and my husband, Ian, who I think we should call Mr Spinach because over the course of this book he grew fields of the stuff! For the next adventure I have a feeling we may have to call him Mr Broad Bean.
Fx
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Copyright © Fiona McIntosh 2018
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Fiona McIntosh has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
This edition published by Ebury Press in 2019
First published by Ebury Press in 2018
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781529103786
The Pearl Thief Page 47