She reached in again and pulled out more sheaves of paper: landscape shots he had taken from this cabin across the marsh to the sea; pictures of unidentified, old English streets she didn’t know. Then in among the larger shots, one small snapshot of him in front of a plane, with the rest of the crew. Her hand shook. The plane was RAF, she thought: the target roundel was just visible. The men were lined up in front of the nose of the plane. On the nose someone had painted a huge, bloodshot eye, the veins like tentacles clearly visible across the cornea. Jack was at the end of the row, his shoulders slouched and slightly leaning to the side in a relaxed pose. It didn’t seem to make any sense that he would have flown with the RAF. At the bottom she saw Jack’s handwriting, curled and expressive, the words – Holkham, January 1952. January? He’d arrived in May, with the jet bombers. She thought back to when she’d met him, in the lower field. He had said he’d just arrived. But it wasn’t true.

This was the only shot that had anything to do with the military. The rest were innocuous: more landscapes, more streets. There was a self-portrait he must have taken with a timer, squinting into the sun, a white shirt open at the neck, tents behind him. She couldn’t look at it. Then one of a boy. A bright-haired boy in a polo shirt grinning at the camera on a lawn somewhere. Behind him a blurred figure, female. She brought the picture up close. The camera seemed to gaze at the boy lovingly, focusing on him rather than the woman behind, the light of the sun shining on him like a halo. She wondered who the boy was. But she couldn’t linger. It wasn’t what she was looking for. Trance-like, trembling, she sifted through the rest of them, faster and faster under the torchlight until, finally, she came to what she had been dreading. Photographs of her.

*

Snow fell onto the sea and the ground and blew sideways into Arthur’s face. He imagined it melting into the damp marsh and the black sea. The snowclouds obscured the moon and there was no other light. He could barely breathe through the wet flurries and his chest was tight with panic. What if someone came after him? But no one knew where he was. He saw Peter’s boyish, worried face at the door. He might go out looking for him, he might find the bike, dumped on the lane, but it seemed unlikely. Peter would do nothing.