“Yes. She had a brother. Much older than her. He went to camp before she was born, so she doesn’t need to go.”

Mayor Anderson started tapping her fingers against her thigh. Slowly. One at a time. Littlest, ring, middle, index, thumb. One, two, three, four, five. Like she was learning piano.

“I’ve got proof,” I said.

“Proof?”

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.

“Yes, look.” I took out the photograph. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all. “This is Felix, Una’s brother, see? And here, in the corner – it’s the photographer’s signature. It’s an official eldest photograph. Mr Wetheral checked it with his magnifying glass.”

She glanced at it.

“Mr Wetheral,” said Mayor Anderson, “is the crazy idiot my sister was foolish enough to marry, and she landed up dead.” She pulled a hairband off her wrist and tied her hair into a tight ponytail. “He’s a coward and a dreamer. A good portrait artist, I’ll grant you, but don’t listen to everything he says. He’s got even worse since the fire.”

A crazy idiot? Mr Wetheral?

A coward?

“But, Mayor Anderson, he’s—”

“But nothing, Cruise. This photograph is meaningless. And where d’you get it, anyway?”

“I … um … Una gave it to me. A few days ago. It’s not meaningless. It’s proof. You can’t take someone to—”

“Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do?” She pinched the top of the photograph and pulled it out from between my fingers. “You don’t even know if this is really her brother.”

“But they look exactly like each other. How could he be anyone else?”

She held it out of my reach and glared at me. “I don’t see the likeness,” she said.

Then she tore Felix into two pieces. Right down the middle.

“Stop!”

She put the two pieces together, one on top of the other, and tore again. “Go home, Maggie Cruise. Enjoy being the hero for a few days, get on with your schoolwork, then go and do your apprenticeship with crazy old Wetheral. It’s that or be out in the fields with your mother.”

Again, she tore the picture. It was in eight pieces now. Mr Opal’s photograph. The one he’d kept so carefully for all those years.

She slammed the door shut, taking the torn photograph with her.

I held my hand to my mouth.

I stared at the closed front door.

She hadn’t even looked at it properly.

She tore it up.

Why would she do that?

Why would she send someone to camp who wasn’t an eldest?

I turned round.

The square didn’t look square any more. Its edges leaned towards me and the corners closed in.

And Andrew Solsbury stood in the middle and sneered.

CHAPTER 27

I shook my head. Rubbed my eyes.

Una.