‘Cynthia was there – in Rowanbrook, all that time?’

‘She used to do afternoons when Cora came out of school. Victor was around at night, of course. Now, you might well ask what Cynthia was doing at a Rowanbrook picnic on a Saturday afternoon. Victor should have been perfectly capable of looking after Cora himself.’ Susie shakes her head. ‘I’d say Cynthia liked the cash, and she liked mingling with people here in Rowanbrook. But she didn’t like to be seen as the babysitter – as a lowly employee. She wanted to be one of the guests.’

On some level, I can hear the snobbery in her words, but I don’t process it. I can’t take my eyes off Cynthia. I suck in a slow, quiet breath to steady myself before I speak again.

‘This is 1982, yes? Was she still around in the years following this photo?’ I ask it this way because I can’t yet ask the more direct question.

‘Oh God, yes. Part of the furniture. She used to mind mine – I had six, as you know, I needed all the help I could get. And she minded Cora a lot, and Lily too, until Mary stopped asking her.’

‘Why did Mary do that?’

Susie picks at the hem of her skirt. ‘She got it into her head that Cynthia wasn’t quite reliable. That she was on drugs. At least that’s what Della told me.’ Susie laughs. ‘As if anyone was on drugs in Ireland in the eighties. And as if I’d let some drug addict mind my children.’ She laughs again, but it sounds forced.

‘So you kept using her, even after Mary stopped?’

‘Well, no. Not long after, she became unavailable. She stopped coming.’

‘And when was that?’

‘Goodness, why so many questions about Cynthia?’

Deep breaths. Slow breaths. ‘She just looks familiar,’ I say, choosing my words. ‘I’m trying to work out where I might have seen her.’

‘Well, she stopped babysitting when Luke was three, so pretty much three years after this photo was taken. Yes, I remember it as a particularly difficult summer. I had to keep turning down lunches and dropping out of tennis matches because I had nobody to mind the children and Luke was such a handful. Mark was off in Irish College and the girls were on a French exchange and it was just so stressful on my own with the smaller ones.’

‘If Cynthia stopped coming when Luke was three, I guess that was also when Lily was three?’

‘Yes, that must be right.’

‘So the summer Lily disappeared?’

‘Gosh, yes. Oh. When I say it was a difficult summer, obviously there were much bigger things going on than my tennis matches. Goodness, how must I sound.’ Her cheeks pinken.

But I’m not worried about Susie’s memories of her dismantled social life. I’m worried about the woman in the photo, and why her time in Rowanbrook ended when Lily disappeared.

24

June 2018

MY HEADACHE IS BACK on Friday afternoon and the kids are tiptoeing around me in a way that makes me feel guilty and grateful all at once. I should do something with them – something that counts as quality time; the kind of things I thought I’d do when I finished up at work. But my mind is full of Cynthia. And the text from Cora. We need to talk.