My Name is Eva An absolutely gripping and emotional historical novel - Suzanne Goldring Page 0,12

much information was buried deep inside her head, beneath her silvery-grey hair. But she must be careful not to tell her so much another time. She must remember to forget.

‘Well, I ought to be going in now, dear. Will you be able to manage on your own?’ Sarah slides the greenhouse door aside and Evelyn shuffles outside to where her trusty walking frame is waiting for her. As she walks away in her halting fashion, she frets. Did I offer too much detail about the snowdrops? So hard to bury all this knowledge, so much harder than burying all the secrets.

Minutes later, she sits in her armchair in her room, sorting through the collection of old photographs in the biscuit tin. There are several of Mama in furs, silk dresses and large ornate hats at weddings, county shows and village fetes. Dear Mama, so elegant. And look, here are quite a few of Papa and dear Charles, standing proudly with other members of a shooting party. Don’t they look grand, all in tweeds and caps, guns cradled in their arms, alert and eager dogs looking up at them and several brace of pheasant at their feet?

There are also more of Evelyn in uniform, laughing with other girls in similar attire and sometimes with young airmen squinting at the camera in sunshine. Such young men, no more than twenty years old or so, soon to be gone, grasping kisses and beauty while they still had life. But there are no more of that awkwardly posed group of four and none at all of Robinson on his own.

It isn’t hard to remember how and when that picture of the four of them was taken and she pulls it out of her pocket to look at it more closely. They are standing outside the entrance to Bad Nenndorf, the former health spa adapted to provide facilities for the interrogation centre. It was in the early days, soon after she’d first arrived, when the place had only just begun operating, before she realised exactly what would happen there and before she saw Robinson’s true nature for herself. In the photograph this short man of slight build looks stern. He holds his chin high, his lips thin beneath a straight pencil moustache, while the other three people alongside him all bear uncomfortable slight smiles, as if they are unsure why they have been made to stand together in false comradeship, squinting in the bright sun.

Evelyn stares hard at the scene from long ago. His face had looked cruel from the time she first met him, but she hadn’t fully understood that was what it was then. He had just seemed cold and efficient, like so many of the commanding officers she had encountered in the service. And although his reputation had preceded him, she had not realised just how calculating he could be until she had seen it for herself.

She begins to tear the photo in half, then stops and peels off just the right-hand quarter, the section that contains the figure of Robinson, standing on the edge of the group, slightly separated from the other three figures. She places this strip on top of her folded newspaper, then picks up her pencil. She tests the tip with her finger, then sharpens it to a needle-like point and then, with the pencil clenched in her fist, she stabs Robinson’s face. Into both the eyes she goes, into that nose and into that hard, unsmiling mouth, until the fragment is tattered and unrecognisable. Satisfied with the destruction of his features, she tears the image into tiny pieces and, clutching them in her hand, shuffles into her bathroom and flushes the scraps away in the toilet.

Then she hobbles back to her chair and picks out the single picture of the blonde child from the tin. She compares it with the one she kisses every night, the one hidden in her bedside table drawer beneath the Bible. She holds both the tiny snaps side by side, trying to decide which is the better picture.

She had often walked past the garden, trying to get a glimpse of the child, and before she finally left Germany, she had decided to take some snapshots around the village. If anyone asked, she could say she was returning home shortly and wanted to remember the years she had spent at Wildflecken. She didn’t really care about recording the houses, the oxen ploughing the fields or the church; she only wanted to keep the