There were photographs of the small family as they once were, all smiling. The two little girls were identical; the man pictured was handsome and laughing. The woman was dark and young and attractive. As he stared down at them it all flooded back, the inexplicable suddenness of the child’s disappearance, the second bleak tragedy of that poor woman’s life.

Something rekindled and stirred in Blythe, as it always did. The theory at the time was abduction for some nefarious means by persons unknown. The child was blonde and pretty and European and had seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Mind you, police methods had improved hugely since the 1970s.

How had the woman borne it, all these years, never knowing what had happened to her child? And what about the twin, now grown up and expecting a child of her own?

Blythe knew that he and the woman and the surviving twin, despite the intensity of emotion engendered at that time, would have passed each other, without recognition, on a London street. Yet here they all were once again in the same place, twenty-eight years older, desperately hoping for the answer to something it might be better never to know.

TWENTY-ONE

I had thought about finding Saffie almost every day of my life, and now, when it had finally happened, it was not at all as I imagined it. All my childhood I willed myself to believe that Saffie was leading a strange foreign life somewhere and one day I would be walking down a street, a long way from home, and I would catch a glimpse of her, grown-up and happy, brought up by parents who paid someone to snatch her because they couldn’t have children of their own. Or perhaps taken by a family who came upon her by chance and wanted her so badly they carried her away with them, but not to do her harm…just to have her live with them.

Oh, I had a whole safe world for Saffie, a place where, when I was angry with my mother or Fergus, I would join her, with her new parents who gave her everything her heart desired. In my imagination she would turn as I ran after her and her face as she saw me would widen and she would immediately know that this was why she cried in the night, this was why and where her unbearable sense of loss came from. Me. I was the missing link in her perfect life. I was the missing piece.

As I grew up the tale I comforted myself with seemed unlikely, faded, and became a thing I could not hold on to. I had to make the hole inside me bearable and I turned my back on Fleur. But not Fergus. I had been appalling to him when he and Fleur married, but I couldn’t keep it up. He refused to dislike or cease to love me, whatever I said or did. In the end, I guess he became as much my father as my real father had been for those short first five years of my life.