‘I think List and my mother were lovers,’ Barbara said. ‘She looks happy here. But she was never a happy woman, as I knew her. She kept his picture, despite the war, but did not keep my father’s. And there is a date, here.’ She turned the photograph over. ‘Christmas, 1943. She must have been pregnant.’

‘Perhaps she was already a widow.’

Barbara shook her head. ‘There is no marriage certificate.’

‘Perhaps there was no wedding. You said yourself you didn’t need to be married to have a child.’

Barbara leaned forward, hunched her shoulders. ‘It’s crazy, I know. I just have this feeling. I never felt at home with my mother. We didn’t get on.’

‘What happened to this Maximilian List?’ Dora said, hoping Barbara did not hear the quiver in her voice.

‘He’s still alive,’ Barbara said.

Dora felt dizzy and clutched the side of the sink for balance.

‘He lives in Hamburg,’ Barbara went on. ‘That’s the irony. I could have met him at any time. Perhaps I did, and never knew it. As a matter of fact, I have to go back to Hamburg next week, on business.’ She smiled. ‘So much for my holiday, but I work freelance, and you can’t turn down work.’

‘Will you visit him?’ Dora said. Willed Barbara to say, No, I’ll leave it at that.

‘Perhaps.’

‘You’re good at turning up unannounced,’ Dora said, and smiled though her heart was beating as fast as a baby’s and she could feel the blood flooding to her hands and feet. ‘Springing surprises. Like your mother.’

‘Like my mother?’

‘Yes.’ Dora thought fast. ‘With her box of memories. What else did she have in there?’

‘Not much,’ Barbara said. ‘A newspaper clipping of a boxing match between a priest called Father Joseph O’Cleary and the Wehrmacht champion.’

‘This Joseph O’Cleary who told you about me? Who lives at the farm?’

‘I think so. I shall ask him if he knows my mother.’

‘Anything else there?’

‘A beer mat. A pressed flower. A bird’s feather. Bits and bobs. Nothing of interest. Why did you ask?’

‘Just in case,’ Dora said. ‘Just in case.’

Jersey: May – June 1943

The trees fizzed with green and dog roses coated the woodlands. Dora cycled down the hill to Geoffrey’s farm, feet off the pedals and her legs splayed out, with the breeze in her hair and the soft kiss of the day’s warmth. She looked over the cliff to the sea beyond, at the white tufts and crests of the waves that churned beige and grey on a cloudy day, to the sapphire and emerald and turquoise that shimmered when the skies were cobalt, the sun high and the breezes becalmed. She pretended not to see the rolls of razor wire on the beach.