She looked at the photo, which was lying next to her on the table. There must, she reasoned, be thousands like it – quick snaps of couples on beaches, their arms around each other. Very few, she suspected, would have such a dark history surrounding them.

She retrieved the photographs of the babies she’d found in the caravan from her bag, keeping them face down and on her lap, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. It didn’t take long to figure out that, yes, these photos were very likely from the same film run that had produced the photo of Reave and her mother – the film was produced on the same day in the same year, according to the codes on the back. It even told her on which shift the film was made.

Thinking of photographs, she remembered the one she had given to Ben Parker, of the fête and the red-headed girl who would grow up to be a PE teacher. Parker had said Fiona was there to pick up a certificate for some sort of nature scheme – on a whim, she put Young Nature Walkers Prize into the search engine. The scheme had ended some twenty years ago, but there were still a few remnants of it left online; someone had put the bare bones of a Wikipedia page together for it, logging the sorts of activities the children had had to complete to get their certificate, things like rambling, pressing flowers, making a corn dolly. The scheme had been sponsored by Oak Leaf, the same environmental charity that had a hand in the very spa she was sitting in.

‘More fucking coincidences.’

Except they couldn’t be. Heather sat back in her seat, ignoring her lunch. What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? Inevitably her eyes were drawn back to the photo of her mother on the beach. Was it possible she had been with Michael Reave while also seeing her dad at the same time? That could mean that the man who raised her was her dad, but she had no memory of her dad ever mentioning a commune in the north, and the idea of her mother playing two men off against each other felt wrong … But then, a lot of what she had thought she’d known about Colleen Evans had turned out to be a lie.

The other option was almost too horrible to contemplate.

‘Doing more local research, Heather?’

She jumped. Bert had appeared at her shoulder. Outside of his house and in the bright lights of the spa café he looked even more wizened, and he was peering at her with his head cocked, just as he had when they’d first met him.

‘Uh, hello, Bert. Just, you know, getting a bit of work done while I’m here.’

He raised an eyebrow at that, and just as Heather was trying to sneak it back in her pocket, he saw the Polaroid.