I came out into the front garden (two flowering currant bushes, a Christmas rose, and a couple of thistles) and looked up at the house they’d left, I don’t know why. Foresight perhaps? I had no such feelings at the time. I fancied I saw a light in a window on the very top floor, in a dormer on the mansard, but it was only where a slanting ray from the setting sun had touched the glass. As far as I knew, the Silvermans had left behind them an empty house.

So where does the coincidence come into all this? I’ll tell you. I’d been wishing for someone to tell my story to and he was up there all the time. He was up there with a story of his own.

Chapter 4

4

KISSING FACES THROUGH GLASS is no longer my style. But I still have that photograph of Daniel, still in its silver frame. I took it with me when I left old Mrs. Fisherton’s, stole it, I suppose. After all, I had stolen the photograph in the first place. It and a lot of copies of it were on the table when I went to see Mrs. Fleetwood after the hospital discharged me. I should really say when she summoned me to tell me what she thought of someone who’d sent a boy of sixteen, her only son, to his death. She went out of the room because she was crying so much and while she was away I took one of the photographs, rolled it up and put it inside my jacket. Poor thing, she’d have torn up those prints rather than give me one.

That portrait stands in our living room now, along with one of Mum and Dad. There ought to be one of my husband but the only time he ever had his photograph taken was when we got married. Our wedding photograph has pride of place. But Daniel is there too and the one man who might be jealous doesn’t mind. When people ask me who the boy with the keen eyes and the cheerful grin is, I don’t tell them, I say in the words of Emmylou Harris’s song that it’s just someone I used to know.