Chapter 92

Emre goes to Ghent in June and sits with Absalom Lieth for four days.

He does not expect anything. He says so on the phone to Veira on the first evening, in the flat voice of a man managing an expectation downward before it can damage him.

"He doesn't know me. He hasn't known anybody since 2013."

"Then why four days."

"Because he taught me everything and I read something out at his memorial while he was alive and eleven years is a long time." A pause. "And because if there is one lucid hour in a year I would like to be in the chair when it happens."

There is no lucid hour.

What there is, on the third afternoon, is a photograph album that a nurse brings out because a visitor is the first Absalom Lieth has had in nine years and the staff have decided to be kind.

Emre goes through it slowly.

Ghent. Lyon. A dog. A conference in the 1980s. And then, on the fourth page from the end, a photograph taken in a garden that Emre recognises immediately because he has walked in it, with a man in his fifties and a woman with dark hair, both squinting, both laughing at something outside the frame.

He telephones Veira at eleven at night.

"There's a photograph," he says. "1993 or 1994, Lyon, in Lieth's garden. He's in it and so is a woman." He is breathing carefully. "Veira. It's your mother."

The line is silent for a long moment.

"Are you certain," she says.

"I have been looking at it for four hours. I'm certain."

"How does a public health postgraduate from Aberdeen end up in a Kin investigator's garden in Lyon in 1994."

"I don't know. But she went to Braehead Lodge for the first time in March 1994, and this photograph is from the same year." He stops. "There's something written on the back. It's in Lieth's hand and it's four words."

"Read it."

"She asked to be told."

Veira does not say anything at all.

"I don't know what it means," Emre says. "It could be about the photograph. It could be about anything."

"It isn't about the photograph."

"No," he agrees. "I don't think it is either."

She is quiet for a while and he lets her be.

"He recruited her," she says at last. "Or he tried to. Aldara said there were nine of them and she was the ninth and she recruited nobody." A pause. "Aldara was recruited in 1974. Lieth was still active in 1994. What if he went looking for a tenth?"

"And chose a human."

"Chose a human with no bloodline, no affiliation, no register entry, and no stake in any of it." Veira's voice has gone very quiet. "Who then went to Aberdeen fourteen times over three years to sit with a woman nobody else would sit with, and never told anyone, and had a daughter in 1997."

"And said one sentence about it, eight years ago, on her deathbed."

"Don't let them be the first voice." Veira breathes out. "She wasn't warning me about the Folklore, Emre. She was warning me about the register. About the nine people who spent a hundred and thirty-six years deciding what hybrid children were allowed to know about themselves."