‘Just see you do. It’s your fault we called her that in the first place!’

‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that you look like Finlay. And like your father. You have curly hair, and I can see in their photographs that they did too, despite their best efforts to control it.’

‘My mother had straight hair. Fine and straight. She hated my curls and always insisted that my hair was brushed flat and put into plaits. Sometimes she pulled it so tight it gave me a headache. It was as though I had grown curls on purpose to spite her.’

He changed the subject. ‘Tell me about Finlay.’

She sighed. ‘Finlay was kind. He was everything she was not. He could be annoying sometimes, but after he rescued me from the fire things seemed to change between us. It was as though we were sort of stuck together, in a good way. He was untidy, and he was impulsive, and loved adventures, and he wanted to learn to fly, but never had the chance. You’re right about his hair, it was always escaping somehow, and he tried using all sorts of oils and potions on it because curly hair wasn’t the fashion, but he hated the smell of them so in the end he just gave up trying. In the photo he had taken before he went away, the last one, where he was dressed up in his uniform, you can see a little twist of hair under his officer’s cap. That was what he was like; trying to do the right thing and be responsible but somehow a little bit of fun always escaped.’ She looked at the photograph of her brother on the dressing table. ‘And even now, I don’t know where he is. He vanished and never came home. There are days when I wonder if it’s a game he is playing with me. I know you understand, because your brothers are still missing too.’

‘They are, yes. In my head Harris is still sharing his marbles with me and Gregor is pulling me out of all sorts of scrapes.’ Keith folded his arms and hugged himself tightly in an effort to keep his feelings under control. ‘This is the real reason you never sold the house, isn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘Just in case, because Finlay told me, he absolutely promised that he would be back, and I believed him.’

‘I think I would have liked your brother.’ He touched Ann’s comprehensively messy hair and hauled them both back to the present. ‘So what would he have done with all this?’

She thought about the question for a moment before replying. ‘Scissors, definitely. And he would have been the one holding them.’

‘And is that what you want to do? You always wear it braided, which is a little surprising, given what you’ve just told me.’