During her lunch hour the following day, Val went to the university library and found the Russian history section, thinking that she might read about the Revolution and civil war that had forced her father to leave his homeland. She collected a stack of books and sat down to flick through them and decide which was most enticing. There were black-and-white photographs of the Romanov family in one, and she glanced at them, then stopped and flicked through the following pages: four girls and a boy, just as there appeared to be in her father’s photographs. What was more, the girls all wore white dresses. It had to be coincidence. All the same, she checked the book out of the library and took it home.

Holding her photographs against the book, Val realized with creeping amazement that they showed the Romanov family. The first girl she could identify for sure was Tatiana; she had a pixie face with a pronounced bone structure, matching that in one of the images exactly. Maria’s face was rounder and prettier, just like the girl in a soft, grainy shot. Alexei had a gaunt face and looked very frail. It appeared they had been photographed in the last house where they were held prisoner, the Ipatiev House: there was the high fence surrounding the yard. But how did her father come to have these pictures? And why was there one of him among them?

Ha Suran said he had been a factory worker. Val assumed cameras were expensive in 1918, and wondered how he could afford one. But after the Revolution, he had made his fortune selling the goods of aristocratic Russians who had fled from the Bolsheviks. She guessed he must have stolen this camera from the Romanovs and then taken photographs of himself and two of his friends on the same film. Why did he never process them? Did he forget they were there?

She looked once more at the images of these people who posed for the camera little suspecting that they were soon to be killed in that very house. Then again, given their haunted expressions, she wondered if perhaps they had an inkling.

She checked in her book but it didn’t show any images of the family in the Ipatiev House, where they had spent their final three months. It came to her with a shock that these might even be the last photographs of them alive.

Chapter 36

Sydney, October 1974