This is a photo of my mother with me on her lap. It was taken by my father. I was 11 months old, and she was beautiful and elegant.

My parents died when I was a young teenager and I lost sight of my sisters shortly afterwards.

I spent the next 34 years looking for them, and I also spent those 34 years dogged by nagging questions and doubts about how my mother died. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but...... So this meant I spent half my life wondering about the fate of both my sisters and my mother. I never forgot what my mother looked like though, because for all those years I carried around in my head the memory of the photo you see above.

I was reunited with my sisters this summer via Facebook.

It was a wonderful moment, and I shall never forget it. One of them came to France and gave me the original of the photo.. I was over the moon to be able to hold it in my hands after all those years, touch it, smell it, and remember how it was always my favourite photo of her when I was a child. There’s what appears to be a tea-stain in the middle of it. She looks so fine and strong.

It’s impossible to describe the profound feelings I felt when I saw that photo again. Up until that moment, I had believed myself to be a strong and rational man, a man impervious to that kind of sentimentality. Well, that moment proved me to be so terribly wrong.

I also learned that my doubts concerning my mother’s death were not unfounded. I learned that she had been murdered by anti-german fascists (this was the 1960’s, and feelings were still running high about World War Two) because she was of German origin.

I have done my own detective work since, and I have just located one of the three people who killed her. He is still alive. He is now 86 years old. He lives alone in a small town in the North-East of England. I have his address.

Since my sister went back to England she has written to let me know that seeing me again was wonderful and that she was glad to know that I was alive and well, but she felt that us finding each other again had brought back too many bad memories for her, memories she had tried to erase during all of her adult life. She said that although she wanted us to keep in touch, she didn’t want to see me too often, at least for now. My other sister thinks more or less the same thing.

So here I am.

One photo. Two sisters. One killer.

I can’t see my sisters, but I can see the photo of my mother. It’s stuck to the bottom left corner of the computer screen I am looking at as I type these words.

I don’t know what you are going to think of this, but I prefer to have this photo near me, and not my sisters, than to have my sisters near me, and not this photo.

And that’s because there’s a detail I need to attend to.

I loved my mother. And someone killed her. And he’s out there.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see my sisters much, but I have a much more important issue to address.

I am going to go to England in a few weeks. I am going to go to the house of the person who killed my mother.

I am going to walk in, look him in the eyes, tell him who I am, tell him that I know who he is, tell him that I know what he did, tell him what I came to do, and do it.

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I shall tell him that I could kill him.
I shall tell him that I should kill him.

Then I shall tell him that I won’t.

Then I shall walk out of there.

But, just before I leave, I shall make him look at this photo. Hard and long.

He shall then be free to live out the rest of his days..........

Revenge.

Revenge?

Tell me about it...................

Michael C