Page 31 of Don't Believe A Word

CRISTY: ‘OK. Let’s talk for a moment about the photos you remember being displayed around the house. The ones you were told were of you and your parents. Who do you now think they might have been of?’

SADIE: ‘It’s a good question. I wondered at first if it was one of my aunts as a child with their parents, but there arealbums of photos from that time in our library and they’re obviously from a different era. Anyway, they’re clearly not the same people.’

JASPER: ‘It’s possible to buy historical family shots like that. Film and TV companies use them all the time.’

CRISTY: ‘Couldn’t the same be said of the photos we’re looking at now?’

SADIE: ‘Of course, but you’ve admitted yourself how much I’m like the woman, and I definitely remember a man in a hat.’

CRISTY: ‘Where did you actually find these photos? I know they were in this box …’

SADIE: ‘… which was under the daybed in Lottie’s sitting room, inside a suitcase full of old postcards and letters from the children Lottie used to sponsor in various parts of the world.’

Seeming to lose interest in that, Sadie picked up the handwritten note again and stared at it for some time before continuing.

SADIE: ‘Why didn’t anyone come back for me?’

JASPER: ‘Maybe they did, but your aunts had already taken you to Guernsey by then.’

SADIE: ‘It surely wouldn’t have been that hard to track them down, if someone really wanted to.’

Though they were still recording, Cristy’s next comment wasn’t really meant for the pod. ‘Until you speak to your aunt we’re not likely to have any answers to these questions …’

Sadie’s eyes widened suddenly as she fixed them on Cristy. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve now shown Mia the pages of Lottie’s story, the ones we’ve already recorded.’

Cristy blinked in surprise. ‘And what did she say?’ she asked carefully.

Sadie’s smile was small and even slightly resentful. ‘The first thing she asked was if you had seen them, can you believe that? And when I told her you had, she said … Wait for this … She wants to talk to you.’

Thrown again, Cristy said, ‘I’ll be glad to talk to her, obviously, but didn’t she comment on the pages themselves, or try to explain anything?’

‘Not at all. It was … Like as if I’d made them up or something.’ She looked to Jasper for his opinion.

‘You probably already know this,’ he said to Cristy, ‘but you can never be sure what Mia’s thinking. It’s possible she didn’t even really take in what she read.’

‘I think she did,’ Sadie insisted, ‘or she wouldn’t have asked to speak to Cristy.’

‘So, does she want me to call her?’ Cristy asked.

‘She didn’t say how she wanted to communicate, and for all we know she’ll have changed her mind, or forgotten about it the next time we bring it up.’ She frowned slightly as she thought. ‘Do you think it would be a good idea for us to record the last bit of this conversation, from me telling you that she wants to talk to you? I’m just thinking it might be harder for her to back out of it if she hears it go out on a podcast.’

‘We’re still recording,’ Cristy told her, ‘but let’s see if she’ll do it without the … persuasion. When are you going back to Guernsey?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then we’ll speak over the next couple of days, and you can let me know how things develop once you’ve spoken to her again. Meantime, would you mind if I take some shots of the box and its contents for the website?’

Sadie opened her hands in a gesture to ‘go ahead’. ‘I suppose there’s an outside chance someone might recognize them,’ she ventured.

Already capturing the images, Cristy said, ‘I’m sure someone will. Our problem will be sorting out who is, and isn’t, genuine before we start following up on anything.’

*

‘Crikey, it must have been a shattering moment for Sadie when she found the actual note,’ Connor commented when Cristy rang from the car to report back on the interview.

‘I think it was,’ she agreed, trying to decide which route back to take, M4 or cross-country? ‘She didn’t say too much about it, but to be honest, I don’t think she’s even close to processing it all yet. She might think she is, but there’s a lot to get her head around. And those photographs! Even I still feel thrown by them, and how closely she resembles her mother – they’re so alike they could almost be the same person. The ones of her father, presuming it was him, weren’t so easy to make out, but what struck me most about all of them was how young the couple looked, and how together andnormalthey seemed as a family.’

‘Any idea where the shots were taken?’

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