I opened the box again to find a few more unremarkable letters, and one envelope different from the rest. There was neither a stamp nor an address on it, only a single name: ‘Crispin’. It held something solid and I ripped it open to find a slim paperback book: a copy of Sheridan’s bawdy School for Scandal. Just her sort of thing, I imagined.

I opened the book. Tucked inside was a slip of thin paper with a smudged stamp that read: ‘Citylight Prints, 2a Hannson Street, London W1’. It was dated five months earlier. There was also one of those ‘this belongs to’ gummed labels on the inside of the cover, sporting her spiderish handwriting, and when I traced over her name with my fingertips I noticed something: ridges under the label that told me there was something concealed underneath. I couldn’t help being intrigued.

I tried to scratch back the label with my nails, but it was stuck on too firmly and tearing it away could have damaged whatever lay below. A sharp knife was also unable to lift it safely, so I had to resort to the kettle to dampen and melt the glue. The label slowly curled up, lifted by the blade, to reveal an item around which the glue had been carefully laid down so as not to stick it to the page.

It was a little square negative from a camera film. I gently brushed dust from it with my sleeve, put it to the light and squinted. The head and shoulders of a figure emerged – ‘Crispin’, I presumed. I could just about see that he had a slim face, glasses, neat mid-length hair parted on one side, but beyond that it was impossible to make out anything else. It was strange that Lorelei would have a negative of this man’s image. It certainly didn’t seem to fit with anything that I knew of their scheme.

The woman had so many secrets. Every time I thought I had discovered her, there was another layer below.

I took the box to our room, lifted out the backless red silk dress and held it in front of myself, looking at it in the full-length mirror. The silk was a type that wrinkled and crinkled to give it texture, not the smooth style that had been the norm before the War, and was the same deep red as her hair.