They made a striking pair, as they walked off the boat: the nun in a green habit; Eva, in blue trousers, her rain cloud of hair. Eva had persuaded Lucija to come back to Harcourt House for supper – and, since that meant missing the last ferry home, to stay the night.

‘I’ll call the convent and let them know you’re with me. You will want to see all my Bosnian things. I have a copper coffee pot, and coffee grinder, plus a Dalmatian silver filigree bangle—’

Lucija held her breath. She wasn’t sure she could cope with this.

Eva said, ‘I also have an early Mevludin. You know, the photographer?’

Lucija’s eyes widened. ‘Of course! I was at school in Sarajevo with Mevludin’s grandson. The family owned a lot of his prints but during the siege they had to sell them out of the country.’

‘Oh,’ Eva said, ‘how very sad that is.’ She glanced quickly at Lucija and then back at the road. She drove quite fast. Lucija felt a bit sick.

Omer had replied to Lucija’s voicemail with another song of Silvana’s, but he had made no plans to come and see her.

When they arrived at the house, Eva led Lucija straight upstairs to her bedroom, pulled the curtains right back, twisted them out of the light, and beckoned her round to the wall between the windows. Both women were silent as they looked at the print. It was one of Eva’s most precious things. Lucija stepped up close to the photograph, and put a finger on the glass. She traced her finger over the faces of the women. The women were standing near where the bread queue massacre had happened.

Lucija said, ‘Many of the Austro-Hungarian buildings on that street were saved from destruction by all the socialist concrete they were clad in—’

She stopped talking only because Eva was crying. Lucija put an arm around her. Then she cried, too. She hadn’t cried for years, either.

JUDGE: What did you think of Eva?

LUCIJA: She was very emotional. For me, with the life I had been living recently – the quiet and subdued nature of the convent – it was extraordinary. She never pretended not to feel what she was feeling. So when she met me, everything got stirred up. She actually hadn’t been back to Bosnia since writing Beyond Illyria, you see. She went outside after showing me Mevludin’s picture, and didn’t reappear until hours later. She came in just as Mariam and I were finishing supper. All wet through, her hair bedraggled, as if she was the one who had been through a flood. She didn’t want to eat. I’m going to take a bath, she said; and I didn’t see her again until the morning. That was how I got to know Mariam.