‘I’ve always been told that he and my mum died in a house fire.’

‘That was the story that was circulated.’

‘So how …?’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yeah, I suppose you would.’ He peered at Max and his craggy face seemed to soften slightly. ‘Sit down, Max.’

‘I don’t want to …’

‘Just sit down, mate. Please.’

Hector had never called him ‘mate’ before. It caught Max off guard. He took a seat on a nearby sofa. Hector remained standing. ‘I told you I served with your dad. There’s a bit more to it than that.’ He seemed to be having difficulty getting the words out. Max listened silently. ‘Reg was in Afghanistan. His commanding officer instructed him and his team to launch a night-time assault on an enemy compound. Reg was the first man over the wall. Turned out that the enemy were waiting for him. He was taken captive. The rest of his team were killed. Your mum, Maddy, was back in the UK. She was an army intelligence officer, looking after you on maternity leave. When Reg was taken, she left you with a friend and headed straight to Afghanistan. She’d operated there, you see. She thought she’d be able to help find him. And she did. She used her contacts to discover that he was being held in a cave system near the Pakistan border. The commanding officer launched a major operation to rescue your father. It failed. Reg was killed by enemy fire. So was Maddy.’

Max felt numb. In all the years he’d wondered about his parents, all those wakeful nights he’d spent picturing their deaths, he’d never imagined such a story.

‘It was all hushed up,’ Hector continued. ‘The public never get to hear about operations like that, especially when they go so badly wrong. Nothing in the papers, nothing on the news. As far as the man in the street was concerned, Reg and Maddy were written out of history.’

‘No photographs,’ Max said bitterly. The lack of photographs was nothing to do with a non-existent house fire after all.

‘Right.’ Hector nodded.

Max stared up at the painting. The painting stared back.

‘So why are there pictures of him here?’ he said. His voice cracked. ‘That’s him in the hallway, isn’t it? And this …’ He pointed up at the painting.