Chapter 1

Karlskrona is a typical town of southern Sweden: clean streets, quaint houses, pine trees and not much else. The museum ship is worth a visit, and so is the little archipelago down the coast. In the main square, there’s a leafy garden café where you can sit in the summer and drink coffee in the shade. On a good day, attractive blondes wander aimlessly about, vaguely hoping something might happen.
Today is Sunday. The boys have polished their fat American import cars and it's time for the parade. V8s, Oldsmobiles and glistening chrome cruise the streets in a timeless loop of macho pride, and the girls in the café sit and watch and wait.
God it’s boring.
Inga loves Staffan, Staffan loves Inga, Staffan loves his car, Inga does not. Sometimes Inga goes for the round-town ride and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she just dreams of running away.

Her mother did not like Staffan. The hours she’d spent trying to convince her daughter he was an ignorant, self-centred yob had done little but back her into a corner. Inga loves Staffan... well, she did, once.
He seemed so different then: good-looking, fun to be with and had none of her mother’s stifling prejudices. But he had his own and, one by one, she discovered them.
He didn’t read, didn’t like museums or exhibitions, and “what’s the point of walking when you got a car?” He did condescend to go into the woods now and again but only because they rarely got very far.
The difficult bit was how to drop him without her mother strutting around like a stuffed turkey with her “You see, I told you so!”
To Staffan, Inga was a sort of appendage, a fact. The possibility of her thinking differently to him rarely crossed his mind, and when it did, the crossing was brief. As a person, he was totally without doubt. Everything was simple, or if it wasn’t, then it should be: she loved him, he loved her, and that was an end to it.
Sven, he was different. His infectious smile could wrap the girls around his finger. His tee-shirts got a bit grubby so you usually knew what he’d had for lunch, but he was only thirteen. He also had a mild form of Down’s syndrome. He was Inga’s brother and she loved him more than anyone in the world.
That was probably why she stayed with Staffan in the first place: he never went anywhere, so neither did she. She had to stay.
Inga knew she would be there for Sven for the rest of his life, but sometimes it was all too much, so much pressure. If she could just go away for a year, see the world and get it out of her system…
Just a year. One year to do everything she ever dreamed of and then come back for good.

Of the three addresses she wrote to for the au pair job in Paris, only one came up. One didn’t reply, the other had gone. If nothing else, it solved the problem of choosing between unknowns. Eighty euros a week all found... it would do for a start. Maybe when summer came and she spoke French better, she could go to Cannes and try to find a job there.
Her room was in what used to be the servants’ quarters on the seventh floor (no lift, of course), a long, narrow corridor with doors tightly spaced together, toilet and shower at the end. A grimy light-bulb hung in the middle. Only three of the rooms were occupied: the end two were used for storage, two were empty and a student lived next to her. Her family told her “there’s a strange man in number five, but the concierge says he’s hardly ever there, so he won’t be bothering you”.
The work was hard, she wasn’t used to spoiled brats, but the evenings and weekends were the worst. The student was polite but busy, that she made quite clear, and as to the “strange man” she never saw him at all. For the first time in her life she was lonely.
So she went to the cinema. It seemed a good way of learning French too. She saw dozens of old black and whites and ploughed through a run of films all starring Gérard Depardieu, but it was very hard work. Now and again, she saw the occasional Bergman to relieve the isolation, but that certainly didn’t help.
Nor did coming home late on the métro. Men just appeared out of nowhere. Even ones standing in the middle of the platform managed to appear in the front carriage when the train came to a halt. Others sat there nervously, looking pointedly elsewhere as if inviting her to say: “Oh, you seem nice, not like them”. But the worst were the ones who just leered obviously with hungry wolf’s eyes.
It became a nightmare, so many pairs of eyes staring at her, focusing on her legs, her breasts, the dark triangle of shadow between the thighs beneath the skirt. She started wearing jeans and thick woolly jumpers, but even that didn’t help - still the stares, the same cold look of greed. She tried walking home, the distance didn’t matter, she was used to that, but the further she got from the crowded areas, the more sinister the streets became. Often she was followed, she could hear the footsteps. The faster she walked, the faster they followed. She ran on more than one occasion.
She stopped going to the cinema.
From her window at the back of the Rue Raynouard, she could see the Eiffel Tower across the grey iron railway bridge spanning the Seine. At night, millions of tiny lights transformed it into a sparkling filigree of golden yellow lace. It seemed so warm, so inviting, like a fairground.
She went there next Saturday. The sky was a clear pale blue and the air had a crisp freshness that reminded her of home. She mixed in with the couples, families and groups of tourists as they wandered about and clambered gruntily up the stairs. Kids clattered up and down, exhausting themselves and making their cheeks red. Smokers had a rough time and blamed it on lack of exercise. A granny wheezed and laughed and carried on bravely.
Reaching the top, she walked around narrow platform and scanned the buildings to find her window. After a while, she found it. It looked so small and alone among the thousands and thousands of others.
Japanese, Germans, Americans, English, Spanish and Italians milled around, picking out the sights: Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and Sacré Coeur, places known throughout the world. Inga felt as if she was the only one looking for something personal, something identifiably hers, and the loneliness hit her again.
Among the babble of voices, she suddenly heard a familiar sound: Swedish! She turned and smiled and started talking like they were long-lost friends. Where were they from? How old was their little boy? What were they doing? It was such a relief to speak her own language. Except for her weekly phone call home, she hadn’t spoken it for almost two months. She felt like a cloak of lead had been lifted from her shoulders.
They chatted for a while, and as she talked about her work, her dingy little room with its horrible wallpaper, the brats and the antisocial girl next door, she gradually exorcised the sadness she’d accumulated. The couple listened and sympathised. She needed little more to make her feel normal.
When they said goodbye at the foot of the Tower, Inga was smiling again. She walked off, light-hearted, and crossed the bridge to the Trocadéro where she watched the kids roller-blading down the slope, zigzagging between the coke tins, enjoying the immensity of life.
At the top of the stairs, a group of Africans were playing drums. A hippy-looking girl was dancing, eyes closed and out of step. People of all sorts stood around and feet were tapping to the compelling pulse. Inga joined in for a while, part of the crowd.
When she returned home to her room, it was late and she was tired, but happy. She wrote a long and lively letter home, with a big wet kiss on the nose for Sven and a smack on the bum because he certainly deserved it. Choosing the most colourful stamp from her collection, she ran down to post it.
Back upstairs, she put the saucepan on the ring to make herself a cup of tea. “Damn”, she had no sugar left.
She had to go out again. Locking the door, something odd caught her attention: a sliver of light under the door up the corridor.
“What the hell,” she thought, “he can only say ‘no’.”
She knocked on the door. Nothing happened. She knocked again. This time, a voice asked: “Who is it?”
“It’s me, from down the corridor,” she replied in broken French.
The door opened, and there stood her “strange” neighbour. He was tallish, sort of handsome, but looked tired and rather tense. And the room was a mess. Clothes all over the bed and chair, cups, books and computers on the table, and camping equipment piled in the corner. On the floor, held down at the corners by a rock, a stapler and two mugs was a map. Inga took a step back.
For a moment, they stared at each other.
On the floor, the stiff map was curling back up, the stapler sliding downhill.
“Erm, I’m sorry, do you please have some sugar for me?”
“Oh, yes, of course” he said and went over to the cupboard to get some. Before Inga could see what it was, he removed a shiny object from the table. “Here...”
From the door, Inga was staring at the map on the carpet. Unlike the mainly green affairs she used at home on her walks in the fells, this one was a mass of red and yellow and pink and blue. It looked completely incomprehensible, as if two maps were superposed one on top of the other.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The Catacombs.”
Inga’s expression made it clear she’d never heard of it.
“Yes, the Catacombs in Paris where they...” His voice trailed off as he realised that a detailed description of Paris’s ossuary of six million skeletons may not be a very good ice-breaker. “Well, it’s the sort of underground quarries beneath Paris.”
“Really? Can I see?”
The map was a plan of Paris the unknown. Quarries dating back to Roman times, oubliettes from the Dark Ages, troglodyte dwellings, wine cellars, priest holes, crypts and vaults in a 300-kilometre honeycomb of interconnecting galleries and tunnels. For centuries, a world of smugglers, thieves, revolutionaries, escaped criminals, resistance fighters, murderers and weird heretical sects had used this immense underground network unseen and undisturbed. Real Boy’s Own adventure.
Once Inga got the basics, the rest was fairly easy, but that didn’t make it any less astonishing. Some of the passages went three of four layers down and it looked like a genuine maze.
“The place is riddled with passages and chambers but there are dead-ends everywhere. So what I’m trying to do is to work out a route.” And he turned the computer round to show a very confusing spreadsheet. “You see, take this part here, you walk along for thirty metres then turn forty-eight degrees to the left, then, after another eighteen and a half, it curves round and comes to a sort of star-shaped junction with five passages leading off. The one I want is at seventy-one degrees to the right.”
“That’s not how you do it!”
“What do you mean?”
“Well how do you know when you’ve reached seventy-one degrees?”
He screwed up his face and plunged into thought. Sad to say, it did not lead anywhere useful.
“You take your bearings from north. What’s the declination?”
“Eh?”
Orienteering: Inga was on home ground here, and the next ten minutes got rather technical.
But not much clearer. Obviously, the best thing was practice.

“Um… are you doing anything tomorrow?” ¶ 2:30 AM