The first thing she saw, when she entered her bedroom, was its absence on her wall. For many decades now, her eyes had sought that street scene, her photograph from Sarajevo, taking comfort in those Jewish women and their child, who had lived with her in the islands, helping her look with strength and equanimity at the fields and trees and sea outside her window.

She found the picture frame on the floor and, when she bent down to pick it up, glass fell onto the carpet. The print had gone. She looked between the smashed glass at her feet and the blank space on the wall, and still failed to understand what had happened.

Among the glass was a small snapshot. She knew immediately what it was. She had put it in with Mevludin’s print when she had it framed in London, years ago. By then she had known she wasn’t going back to Sarajevo.

She picked it up, and looked at it. It was a black and white photograph, taken in Sarajevo by one of her friends. Eva as a young woman, sitting at a café table, hunched forward, happy. Sitting with her, their shoulders touching, was Daris. He was happy, too. She turned the photograph over. Faded handwriting in brown ink. Daris with Eva, 1965.

Mariam! Mariam!

It was a man’s voice, coming from downstairs. Eva propped the picture up on her bedside table and hurried out of her bedroom, and down the front stairs, turning on lights as she went. The voice was coming from the cellar, the door to which appeared to be bolted from the outside.

Mariam, Mariam, Mariam.

Eva walked down the first few steps towards the cellar door. ‘Who’s that?’ she called, and the voice shouted back, ‘I have come to help Mariam, I am her husband, my name is Amjad Maher.’

‘You!’ Eva said. Then she hesitated. ‘Yes, Mariam told us about you.’

‘What? What did she tell you?’ said the voice. He sounded distant and intimate at the same time; talking to him through that thick oak door was like discussing rail travel across Britain with an Indian girl who said her name was Lucy and yet was probably called Parvati; Where are you, Bangalore, Gurgaon?, Eva usually ended up asking; and her susceptibility to these long-distance, cross-cultural exchanges had almost had her scammed before, by young women with faint Indian accents who called up asking to fix her computer, to increase her broadband, please could she turn her computer on, and tell her the password?, and yes, being Eva, she almost fell for it. Everybody in the islands had that exploitable weakness: wanting faster broadband.

‘She ran away from you,’ Eva said.

The man began muttering to himself. He might have been swearing.

‘Because of your girlfriend?’ Eva said.