‘Yes, we have. A lot.’ Nic got in first. ‘I can show you if you like.’

Feedback was preserved faithfully in the archives. Many had written in. ‘Visiting the museum has cleansed me’, wrote one. ‘I am now able to face myself’, wrote another.

*

Before she left that evening, Laure made her customary evening round, walking from room to room to check that all was well and in situ.

Her brother Charlie teased that she had the Florence Nightingale chromosome.

Maybe.

Knowing oneself was such a huge task, mostly uphill. Never finished.

‘Good answer,’ Charlie had said. ‘But you – and I – are more piecemeal than many we know.’

Apart from the bursts of laughter coming from the office upstairs where Nic and May had holed up, there was only the clock’s tick and the click of her heels on the floorboards to break the post-visitor hush.

Irresolute for once, she hovered in the doorway of Room 3. Where to place Joseph Broad’s railway ticket? Beside the doll with the smashed-in face? Alongside the milk tooth in the matchbox? They were all connected, as May had been quick to pick up. The convergence between Jamie’s anger and Joseph’s childhood despair fed directly into a shared experience of adult treachery to children.

Room 3’s floor was particularly uneven and it had been necessary to prop up one leg of the cabinet containing the framed Czechoslovakian railway ticket. The notice underneath gave the date, where it was issued and its destination. The label read in English, French and Czech: ‘A railway ticket for the route used by people leaving Czechoslovakia for Austria in the 1980s. This was an escape route favoured by those fleeing from the regime. Many did not make it.’

In the early days of the museum, some visitors were curious to know its history and Laure told stories of eastern European dissidents who had been caught by the dogs or the guards at the crossing point into Austria – narratives of flight, fear and uncertainty. When asked how that particular ticket represented a broken promise, she replied, ‘I’m not allowed to give details’, which only increased speculation.

As the museum developed and filled up with objects, interest in the ticket waned but she clung on to it long after she should have done.

Having unlocked the cabinet, she reached for the frame of unpolished wood which she had chosen because Tomas had loved the forest.

She held it against her chest.

CHAPTER 5

Prague, 1986

MY GOD, IT’S A GREY PLACE, THOUGHT LAURE ON FIRST sighting the city through the windows of the limousine sent to pick up the Kobes family from the airport. Unlike the rainbow Paris which she knew well. Or the green and brown Yorkshire of her childhood.