Pa was restless. He got up and lit a couple of oil lamps, and the yellow light illuminated something at the back of a desk drawer I had thought to be empty. I took it out and dusted it with my sleeve. It was a photograph in a frame – a formal photograph of a bride and groom on their wedding day. A vicar was standing beside them. I looked closely at the faces of the couple. She was a young woman with long, yellow-brown hair just like mine. She was wearing a simple dress with a pattern of leaves on it, and holding a bouquet of wild flowers. He was a gentle-looking man with sticking-out ears, wearing his only good suit.

It is Mutti and Pa. I’d know Pa’s ears anywhere . . .

I recognized one of the other figures – the old lady who stood beside the bride was Mrs Fisher from the village. She was dead now, but she used to do the flowers at the village church and was a cousin or aunt of Mutti’s (Mutti worked in her hotel when she first came over to England from Germany). Mrs Fisher was easy to recognize because she always wore a hat covered in large artificial sunflowers. A thin man stood beside her. He had fair hair, an angular face and a neat, pointed beard. He was holding a plate piled high with wedding cake.

I wanted to show the photograph to Mutti and Pa, but something told me not to. There were three things about the photograph that struck me as being very important and very strange:

1. It was Mutti and Pa’s wedding day, but there only seemed to be two guests.

2. No one in the photograph was smiling.

3. The photograph had been hidden away in the coal cellar.

I put it back and gently closed the desk drawer, leaving it where I had found it – amongst the rubbish and the dust and all the other forgotten things.

Chapter 4

4

It seemed wrong not to tell Mags about the wedding photograph straight away – I had always told my sister everything, but for some reason I wanted to keep this as my secret, at least for the time being. I sensed that there was a mystery attached to the picture – a secret reason for it being hidden away like that – and I wanted to solve the puzzle myself, without Mags taking over.

She knew that there was something on my mind. That night, she whispered to me from her bed, ‘Are you all right, Pet? Are you scared about an air raid or something?’

‘I’m fine,’ I replied.

‘No, you’re not,’ she insisted. ‘I can always tell when you’re lying, Pet. Sisters always know.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said again.

She hmphed quietly, and I heard her bed creak as she rolled over towards the blacked-out window. I was aware of an odd, new distance opening up between us.