poke its head out of a hole in the skirting board, or the clock to whirr and spin its hands backwards and strike thirteen. It reminded me a bit of Richard’s office, at the gallery. In fact—it had never occurred to me until that moment—Richard reminded me a bit of Hugo, all round. I wondered all of a sudden if that was why I had been so charmed by that first interview, why I had taken the job, why—a dizzying sense of things spiraling around me, shaping themselves into patterns I had no chance of keeping up with—why everything had unrolled the way it had.
“Ah,” Hugo said, looking up from his desk with a smile. “Lovely. Here—” He moved his laptop aside so I could put his plate on the desk. On the screen: scanned image of a yellowed form, 1883, marriage solemnized at the Parish Church in . . .
“You’re working,” I said, nodding at it.
Hugo looked at the laptop as if faintly surprised by its existence. “Well, yes,” he said. “I am. I did think about taking off on some mad fling through the South American jungle, or at least the Greek islands, but in the end I decided there’s a reason why I haven’t done that already. This suits me much better—whether I like to admit it or not. And besides”—his wide smile lightening his whole face—“I’ve got quite an interesting mystery going on, and I don’t want to go anywhere without seeing how it turns out.”
I sat in the armchair and pulled over the little side table to hold my plate. “What’s the story?”
“Ah,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “A few months ago a lady called Amelia Wozniak contacted me from Philadelphia, looking for help tracing her Irish roots. Which did sound a bit unlikely”—he laughed, polishing his glasses on a frayed edge of jumper—“until I found out her maiden name was O’Hagan. She’d done a certain amount of work herself, come up with a pretty comprehensive family tree as far back as the 1840s, in Tipperary, mostly. But then it all went a bit wonky.” He laid the glasses aside and took a large bite of the casserole. “Mm. This overnighted pretty well, don’t you think?— She submitted DNA to one of the big databases, and up popped a whole assortment of cousins in Clare who, according to her research, really shouldn’t have been related to her at all. McNamaras, and she hadn’t come across that name anywhere. So she called me in.”
“And?” As a kid I had never been particularly interested in Hugo’s “mysteries.” Leon and Susanna liked them, but I didn’t get the fascination: the answers weren’t going to change anything, there was never a throne or a fortune or anything at stake, what difference did it make? I had been involved purely out of companionability, and obviously for the extra cash.
“Well, I don’t know yet. One possibility is a non-paternity event: somewhere along the line a woman stepped out on her husband, or was raped, and with or without her husband’s knowledge raised the child as his.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Lovely.”
“Another possibility”—he was ticking them off on his fingers, fork waving—“is a second family. It happened quite a bit in those days, you know, with all the emigration. A man goes over to America to look for work, planning to send for his wife and children as soon as he’s saved up the passage money; but that’s easier said than done, next thing he knows it’s been years, he’s lonely, he doesn’t know what his children look like any more . . . So easy to fall for someone in your new world, so much easier not to mention that other life back in the old country—and before you know it you’ve got a skeleton in the family closet, safely hidden away for centuries, perhaps, until new technology comes along.”
I was trying to pay attention, but my mind had started sliding. Hugo was right, the casserole was good, rich with herbs and full of big hearty chunks of beef and potato and carrot. His feet stretched out in their worn brown wool slippers, could they be the same old ones? A line of dark wooden elephants marching along the mantelpiece, from largest to smallest, I didn’t remember those—
“And then there’s the possibility of a child who was given up, or kidnapped. Oh, not the nasty man in the white van”—at my startled look—“but Ireland even a couple of generations back wasn’t