He pulled out a chair from the table and pointed for her to sit. He should take her into the front room, but they never used it these days, never had guests, and over the years it had become a storeroom, full of newspapers to be read one day and broken chairs to be mended. Joe would have to clear it out before he could turn it into a bedroom for Geoffrey, but in the meantime, it did no harm.

‘I hope you don’t mind the kitchen,’ Joe said. His mother, now, she would never let a stranger in her kitchen, would only ever use the front room.

‘This is fine,’ Barbara said. ‘Homely.’

‘You’re persistent,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll give you that. Coming back again.’

‘I’m on a quest.’ She smiled.

He stood with his back to the Aga. It made him feel big, brave, to stand and not to sit with her, at her level. ‘So it seems.’ He added, ‘Are you any further finding Dora?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I may have found her.’

‘And?’

Barbara shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She hasn’t been helpful. She said the woman in the photograph wasn’t her and she said she didn’t know who you were.’

‘Then why are you so sure?’

‘I have a hunch.’

No, Joe thought, that’s not good enough, not for Geoffrey.

‘You see,’ Barbara said, ‘she seemed to know the old man who lives here. It quite agitated her. And though she denied it, I’m pretty sure she recognised the woman in the photo. I don’t know what any of this means.’

‘Has she not talked to you about anything?’ Joe said.

Barbara shook her head. ‘What is there to tell me?’

‘Everything,’ Joe said. ‘Everything.’

‘I am sure I have upset her.’

‘You’ve upset us all,’ Joe said.

‘It’s so difficult, to talk about what happened.’

‘It is that,’ Joe said. ‘That it is.’

‘I sent you a photograph,’ she said.

‘You did.’

‘Did you know her? She was a nurse.’ Barbara leaned forward, her blouse briefly gaping open, showing a white, lacy brassiere. She wriggled free of her jacket and draped it on the back of the chair. ‘She was my mother.’

Joe leant against the Aga and stared at the young woman in front of him. She didn’t have Trude’s physique, although she was a brunette, had her mother’s colouring. He knew there were children who bore no resemblance to their parents. He’d known families where some were short and stout and others tall and lanky, same mother and father, or others where the children had blue eyes and the parents brown. It was just the way the genes and chromosomes toppled, some to the father’s side, some to the mother’s, some with too few bits and pieces in their make-up, some with too many. Oh, he’d seen his fair share of those.