Mrs Backeberg sips her tea and shakes her head with a sigh.

“No one knew what had happened. Not even his closest friends. It was all anyone talked about for the rest of that year. There were crazy rumours, of course. He’d been murdered. He’d been poisoned. He’d suffered a heart attack, or an aneurysm. An evil spirit had captured his soul. The theories got wilder and wilder as term went on. Then final exams started, and we all settled down to study. And then somehow, we forgot about it and moved on to other concerns, as teenagers do. But the mystery was never solved.”

I can see that Lael is as disappointed as I am. We are no closer to finding out what happened to Jim, which was our original goal. But I find I am as curious to know what happened to Amelia – and that, surely, is some-thing her best friend can tell us.

“We’ve been reading excerpts from Amelia’s diary,” I tell her.

“It’s locked up in a display cabinet, so we hav-en’t finished it yet. We’ve got up to the part where she leaves school for the last time. Do you remember that?” Mrs Backeberg smiles.

“That diary! I haven’t thought of it in years. She was always scribbling away in it. I remember when we were fourteen, a few of us tried to pinch it. We wanted to see what she said about us, but she hid it too well. We never did manage to find it. Of course I remember the day she left. I was devastated. We’d been friends for so long and now she was moving on to a phase of her life that I couldn’t even imagine. She was going to be a mother. It seemed an incredibly grown-up thing.”

“Did she keep in touch after she left?” Lael asks. “She wasn’t allowed to. Her parents had decided that Brentwood College was to blame for the situation their daughter was in, and they wouldn’t let her keep in con-tact with anyone from the school. I sent a few letters, but they were all returned to me unopened by her mother.”

“But surely you heard when the baby was born? There must have been a notice in the newspaper at least?” “You’d think so, but there wasn’t. I checked the Joburg Tribune in the library every single day, but it never appeared. I don’t even know if the baby was a boy or a girl. All I know for sure is that it was born.”

Mrs Backeberg’s hand shakes slightly as she reaches for the teapot to top up our cups. She makes a clucking noise when she finds it empty.

“Oh, dear! I’m so sorry. I didn’t make enough. Let me brew up a fresh pot.”

“Not to worry,” Lael says quickly. “We don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all, dear. It will only take a moment.” Lael opens her mouth to protest again, but stops when I catch her eye and give a tiny shake of my head. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that some people like to fuss.

They enjoy going to a lot of trouble for their guests.

Mrs Backeberg comes back into the sitting room with a fresh pot of tea. She looks steadier now.

“It must have been really hard to lose touch with Amelia after she left Brentwood College,” I say, sympa-thetically. “Did you ever try to get in contact with her later?”

Mrs Backeberg pauses in the act of lifting her teacup to her mouth. She looks stricken as she lowers the cup carefully back to the saucer.

“Oh, my dear,” she says. “You mean you don’t know?”

Lael’s face reflects the dismay I’m feeling. “Know what?” she asks.

“Amelia died many years ago. She came down with meningitis about two years after she left Brentwood. It was very quick.”

“Are … are you sure?” I know how silly that sounds.

Of course she’s sure.

“Positive. I was at the funeral. My mother saw the death notice in the newspaper and encouraged me to go to the funeral because Amelia and I were such good friends.”
I am stunned. Somehow, I always believed we would find Amelia and speak to her – that we would be able to ask her about her baby and about Jim. I thought she would be able to answer all our questions and put our doubts to rest. The knowledge that she has been dead all this time is shocking. She outlived Jim by only two years.

“I’m so sorry for the loss of your friend,” Lael says, and she adds the traditional Jewish blessing when someone has died:

“I wish you a long life.”

“Thank you.”

“The funeral must have been hard,” I say. “You were still a teenager yourself.”

Mrs Backeberg has that faraway look on her face again. “It was very hard. I was hoping to hear news of how Amelia had been during those two years. I thought I might even see the baby. Amelia and Jim’s baby. It would have been wonderful. I didn’t even know whether she’d had a girl or a boy. But it wasn’t there.”

“In my father’s culture, small children don’t usually attend funerals,” I say.

“In my mother’s culture, it’s also quite unusual.”

“For us, it’s more flexible,” says Lael. “Some families choose to include children in funerals and some don’t.” “You don’t understand,” says Mrs Backeburg. “It wasn’t just that the baby wasn’t there. It was as though it had never existed.”

Lael and I stare at her.

“None of them would admit that there had ever been a baby. Not her brother, and especially not her parents. I went up to them to express my condolences and to talk about how close Amelia and I had been. They were wary right from the beginning. As soon as I said that I’d known Amelia from boarding school, they were on their guard. Then I said something about how hard it must be for the little one to be motherless now, and they gave me blank stares. It was as though I had started speaking Greek.”

“What did you do?” Lael asks.

“It was clear that they were going to stonewall any oblique references I might make to the baby. They were going to pretend not to understand me. So I decided to ask them directly.”

“What did you say?” I ask, sitting forward.

“Well, her father was like a stone. There was not a hint of weakness anywhere. I knew there was no point in speaking to him. But her mother was more emotional. She seemed more fragile, and I’m afraid I took advan-tage of that. I asked her:
‘What about the baby? Where is Amelia’s baby?’”

“And then?” we prompt.

“Her eyes filled with tears and she started to speak, but her husband cut her off. He turned his body so that he was between her and me and he said, ‘You are mis-taken. There is no baby.’ Then he led her away from me, and I didn’t have the courage to approach them again.”

“What does that mean?” I say. “Is it possible … that the baby was never born? That Amelia had a miscarriage?”

“No,” says Lael.

“Mrs Backeberg told us a moment ago that she knew for a fact the baby had been born. How did you know that, Ma’am?”

“Something arrived in the post for me a few months after Amelia left school. There was no note with it, or any explanation at all. I still have it somewhere. Wait a little while I see if I can find it.”

She heaves herself to her feet and disappears into the back of the house.

“I knew I still had it somewhere.” She comes back holding a small black-and-white photograph. She hands it to me. It shows a tiny baby in the arms of someone whose head is cut off. I know babies, and this one looks very young to me. Like, just-been-born kind of young.

“Wow! Is this the baby?” asks Lael.

“I think so. As I say, there was no note with the pho-tograph, but the letter was posted in Brits, which was where Amelia was from. Jim too, come to think of it. Their family farms were not far from each other. But Jim was at school at the time, so it definitely wasn’t from him.”

“What’s this written on the back?” I ask, trying to de-cipher the faded blue ink. “Is it a date?”

“The 29th of November 1968,” says Mrs Backeberg. “I think it was the day Amelia’s baby was born.”

Lael does sums in her head. “Yes. That date works. That’s almost exactly when her baby would have been due. Who is this holding her? Do you think it was Amelia?”

“Oh no, dear. That would have been a nurse. You can see the pinafore-style uniform she is wearing, with epaulettes on the shoulders.”

“Do you mind if Trinity and I take photos of this on our phones? Obviously, you will keep the original, but it would really help if we could have copies.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Go ahead, my dears.”

Lael and I take quick snaps of both sides of the photograph.

“What sort of badge is this that the nurse has on her breast pocket?” I say, using my fingers to zoom in on it.

“My goodness, if I’ve asked myself that question once, I’ve asked it a dozen times. I always thought if I could find out which hospital that badge belonged to, I could find out what happened to the baby. I even looked it up in the library once, but I never could find a trace of it. It’s one of those mysteries lost to history. We cannot realistically hope to find it…”

“Got it!” Lael and I say at almost the same time.

***