This time I brought the photograph.
I didn't knock. I held it up to the front window of 4 Mill Row, the two girls on Fete Day with their arms around each other, and I stood there in the drizzle until the curtain moved.
The bolt slid back. Margaret Hollis opened the door wearing a cardigan buttoned wrong and the expression of a woman who had lost an argument with herself.
"You'd better come in," she said. "Wipe your feet. And don't touch the cat, he bites."
The green coat was gone from the hook. So was the second cup. The kitchen table had been wiped so thoroughly it still shone wet.
I didn't wait for the kettle. I put my phone on the table between us. I'd photographed the page in Joan Kerridge's request book before she closed it: the looping hand, leaning hard to the right, and the name.
"Somebody asked for the Courier from October 1968," I said. "On the day after my grandmother died. She signed herself S. R. Calloway."
Margaret looked at the screen for a long time without touching it.
"And there was a green coat on that hook last week," I said. "Wet from the rain. It's gone now."
"Half the women in this valley own a green coat." She pushed the phone back to me with one finger. "And anybody can write a name in a library book, Iris. Paper doesn't check."
"That isn't an answer."
"No," Margaret said. "It isn't."
She made tea with shaking hands and did not drink it. For an hour she talked about everything except Sylvie. The price of flour. The new houses on the Marlow road, which she was against. The cat, whose name was Bishop and who did, in fact, bite.
I waited. I had learned from the ledgers that the women in my family only told the truth when they ran out of other things to say. I was beginning to think it went for their friends as well.
At last she put both hands flat on the table.
"I was seventeen," she said. "Same as her. We were going to go to London together. I was going to work on a proper paper and she was going to sing in clubs, God help us, because Sylvie had a voice. Everybody said so. She sang in the choir and the old ladies cried."
"What happened?"
"What always happens." Margaret looked at the photograph, face up between us. "She fell in love with someone she shouldn't have. And by the summer of that year, she was expecting."
The kitchen clock ticked very loud.
"I won't tell you his name," she said, before I could ask. "That's not mine to tell. He was sent away the minute his father found out. And his father..." She stopped and started again. "His father had a place arranged. A church home, up north. Girls went in with babies and came out without them. Everyone knew it and nobody said it. It was 1968, Iris. That's what was done."
"And my grandmother said no."
"Your grandmother said no." For the first time, Margaret sounded almost proud. "She stood in the vicarage hall and said nobody was taking her daughter anywhere. And then she went home and thought about what the whole valley would say, and she found a way to say no that nobody could argue with."
"The storm."
"The storm." Margaret's mouth twisted. "She came to my mother's door that night, soaking wet, and she asked for me. She said Sylvie had gone, and would I put it in the paper. She dictated most of it standing in this kitchen. I typed it up in the morning and my uncle ran it on page six because he didn't care about anything that didn't sell advertising."
"Did you know where Sylvie really was?"
"Not that night." She pushed her cup away. "A week later I went up to Hollow Lane with a cake, like a good neighbour. Evelyn wouldn't let me past the hall. But I heard someone moving upstairs. And when I walked back down the lane I looked up at the top window, and Sylvie was there. Just for a second. She put her hand flat on the glass."
"Your grandmother hid her," Margaret said. "In that room. All winter. She told the village she'd lost her daughter, and she kept her upstairs with the curtains drawn so no one would ever say the word that got said about girls like Sylvie."
"For how long?"
"Months. I was let in now and then, when Evelyn trusted me. Then I wasn't." Margaret pressed her lips together. "By the spring Evelyn stopped answering the door at all. I'd stand in the lane at night and look up at the window and wait for a light. Some nights there was one. Some nights there wasn't."
"What about the baby?"
She didn't answer that. She looked at the clock instead, as if it might help.
She stood. She went to the sink and ran the tap over nothing, then turned it off, and spoke to the window with her back to me.
"There was one night in June," she said. "Warm. The windows open all over the village. I couldn't sleep, so I walked up Hollow Lane, the way I always did. Every light in that house was out. But the top window was open." She stopped. "And Sylvie was singing."
"Singing what?"
"A lullaby. The one the old ladies cried at. She sang it right through, twice, very soft, the way you'd sing to someone you didn't want to wake." Margaret's hand found the edge of the sink. "I stood in the lane until she finished. I almost called up to her. I didn't. I've thought about that every day since."
"And then?"
"Then I went home to bed like a coward." She turned around. Her eyes were dry now, and very hard. "And at six the next morning, Joe Finch went up Hollow Lane with a cart of bricks."
The cat jumped onto the table and walked across the photograph, and neither of us moved to stop him.
"I never saw her come out of that house, Iris," Margaret said. "Not that morning. Not ever."
"Then who signed her name in that book?" I was on my feet. "Is she alive, Margaret? Yes or no."
She looked at me the way you look at someone you're about to hurt, and have decided to anyway.
"I've told you everything I saw with my own eyes," she said. "Every word of it true. If you want the rest, it's behind those bricks, where Evelyn left it. And I'm too old to lift a hammer."
Then she went to the back door, opened it onto the wet garden, and stood beside it until I understood that I was meant to leave.