The second time, he examined the Virgin Mary and the half-dozen pictures. He didn’t pick anything up, just went down on his haunches and looked at the photos in their plastic frames. That must be Mum, he thought, looking at the tight perm and big glasses. And there’s little Andrea, all blond and chubby. And is that a brother or a boyfriend? And here’s somebody’s birthday with so many faces you can’t tell who’s important and who isn’t. He looked again at the six- or seven-year-old Andrea — just a bit older than Melanie — and took the image home in his head.

The third time, he eased open the top drawer; it stuck, and Andrea’s mum toppled over. There was mainly underwear, most of it familiar. Then he went to the bottom drawer, because that’s where secrets are normally kept, and found only sweaters and a couple of scarves. But in the middle drawer, under some shirts, were three items he laid on the bed in the same order, and even the same distance apart, as he found them. On the right was a medal, in the middle a photo framed in metal, on the left a passport. The photo showed four girls in a swimming pool, their arms around one another, a lane divider with cork floats separating one pair from the other.

They were all smiling up at the camera, and had wrinkles in their white rubber caps. He instantly picked out Andrea, second from the left. The medal showed a swimmer diving into a pool, with some lines of German writing on the back and a date, 1986. How old would she have been then — eighteen, twenty? The passport confirmed it: born 1967, which made her forty. It said she’d been born in Halle, so she was German.

And that was that. No diary, no letters, no vibrator. No secrets. He was in love — no, he was thinking about being in love — with a woman who’d once won a swimming medal.