WATTYS WINNER 2020
Two interconnected murders, 64 years apart. One woman's search for truth and identity.
Readers' comments: 'a masterpiece', 'impeccably written', 'amazing', 'superbly crafted page-turner', 'hauntingly beautiful', 'tremendous plot a...
Plot reminder: Whilst in Lincolnshire to attend her biological mother's funeral, Mary is shocked to discover that the remains of her father - an Italian prisoner of war - have recently been unearthed in a local field.
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This is the pencilled annotation on the back of the oldest surviving photograph of my mother. It's almost as if her life had started there in the backyard of the Harvey farmhouse, hers the rightmost of the three smiling, youthful figures. From the low slant of the sun, the visible shoulder straps of their regulation smocks and a certain moist grubbiness to their faces, it's clear the shot was taken at the end of a long working day. Her future father-in-law, she'd wryly grinned on more than one occasion, would have had them out there in the middle of the night had he only been able to rig up some damn floodlights.
Without intending any disrespect to Ivy or Betty, it's fair to say that my mother was by some margin the prettiest of the three. There's something classical to the set of her features, yet at the same time the cheek dimple dug out by her smile adds a disarming touch of girlishness. Having lied to officials about her age, she was at the time still several months shy of the requisite Land Girl minimum of nineteen.
She'd had more reason than most to do her bit for the war effort. Her native Liverpool had been and still continued to be the most heavily bombed British city after the capital, a blitz which had accounted for her mother and two younger siblings. Her elder brother hadn't made it back across the Channel from Dunkirk; the last she'd heard her father had been captured in Borneo, and reports were already beginning to filter through back home of the brutality of the Japanese camps. For few the war would come at a greater cost than it had for Irene Brennan.
Yet even in the midst of all this personal tragedy, even despite the long hours and back-breaking toil, the spring and summer of 1943 were, by her own admission, the happiest days of her life. Partly it was the fresh, country air, partly the comradeship of her fellow Land Girls. Mostly though, the reason for her newfound contentedness had a name: Vincenzo D'Ambra.
She'd endeavoured to tell me as much as she could of course, but with no photograph to prompt her memory she'd been unable to summon any kind of unified image of his face. Couldn't even remember the precise colour of his eyes, just the curve of his upper lids, the slight downward slant of his brows - both tracts she claimed I'd inherired from him.
Something he most definitely hadn't passed on to me however were his artistic abilities. These were evidenced in the sketch Irene had shown me - a small yellowing sheet of paper, dangerously fragile along its central fold, which had borne a skillful ink sketch of the same coyly smiling beauty who stood alongside Ivy and Betty in the photograph. Featuring as it did both date and brief romantic dedication, the sketch had for the duration of her married life been stowed inside the Brennan family bible, one of the tragically few possessions she'd carried with her from Liverpool to Lincolnshire. Stanley Harvery hadn't been the most devout of Christians, it seemed, and the bible had been the one place he was unlikely to have ever come across it.
