the photograph towards the light of the open window, better to see each grain of detail. It struck Laurel that there was something not quite right about her mother’s face; it was strained, as if the extreme good humour she’d found for the photographer wasn’t entirely genuine. It wasn’t antipathy; certainly not; there was no sense that she didn’t like the person behind the camera—rather that the happiness was an exaggeration. That it was driven by some emotion other than pure simple joy—
‘Hey!’
Laurel jumped and made an owl-like whoop. She glanced at the tree-house entrance. Gerry was standing at the top of the ladder, laughing. ‘Oh, Lol,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You should have seen your face.’
‘Yes. Very funny, I’m sure.’
‘It really was.’
Laurel’s heart was still pounding. ‘To a child perhaps.’ She looked out onto the empty driveway. ‘How did you get here? I didn’t hear a car?’
‘We’ve been working on teleporting—you know, dissolving matter into nothing and then transmitting it. Going pretty well so far, though I think I might’ve left half my brain in Cambridge.’
Laurel smiled with exaggerated patience. Delighted though she was to see her brother, she was in no mood for humour.
‘No? Oh, all right. I caught the bus and walked up from the village.’ He climbed in and sat down next to her. He looked like a lanky shaggy giant, craning his long neck to take in every angle of the tree house. ‘God, it’s been a while since I’ve been up here. I really like what you’ve done with the place.’
‘Gerry.’
‘I mean I like your flat in London, but this is less pretentious, isn’t it? More natural.’
‘Are you finished?’ Laurel blinked sternly at him.
He pretended to consider, tapping his chin, and then pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. ‘You know, I think I am.’
‘Good, then would you kindly tell me what you found in Lon-don? Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to solve a rather significant family mystery here.’
‘Right, well. When you put it like that …’ He was wearing a green canvas satchel across his body and he lifted the strap over his head, long fingers feeling about inside to draw out a small notebook. Laurel felt a surge of dismay when she saw it, but she bit her tongue and didn’t remark on how tatty the book was—bits of paper coming out at all angles, some curling Post-it notes at top and bottom, a coffee ring on the front. The man had a doctorate and more besides, presumably he knew how to take good notes, hopefully he’d be a dab hand at finding them again.
‘While you’re riffling,’ she said with determined cheerfulness. ‘I’ve been wondering about what you said the other day, on the phone.’ ‘Mm?’ He continued searching through a clutch of papers.
‘You said Dorothy and Vivien weren’t friends, that they hardly knew each other.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I just—I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand how that can be. Do you think you might’ve got it wrong somehow? I mean—’ she held up the photograph, the two young women, arms linked, smiling at the camera—‘what do you say to that?’
He took it from her. ‘I say they’re both very pretty young la-dies. Film quality’s come a long way since then. Black and white’s a far more moody finish than col—’
‘Gerry,’ Laurel warned.
‘And—’ he handed it back—‘I say all this photo tells me is that for a split second, sixty years ago, our mother linked arms with another woman and smiled at a camera.’
Damned, dry science logic. Laurel grimaced. ‘What about this then?’ She took up the old copy of Peter Pan and opened it to the frontispiece. ‘It’s inscribed,’ she said, pointing her finger at the handwritten lines, ‘Look.’
Gerry set his papers in his lap and took the book from her. He read the message. ‘For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.’ It was small of her, she knew, but Laurel felt just a wee bit triumphant then. ‘That’s a bit harder to dispute, isn’t it?’
He stuck the pad of his thumb in his chin dimple and frowned, still staring at the page. ‘That, I grant you, is a little trickier.’ He brought the book closer, lifted his brows as if he were trying to focus, and then he leaned it more towards the light. As Laurel watched, a smile brightened her brother’s face.
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What is it?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t expect you to notice, of course—you humanities types are never big on