The Charity Shop Bought A Box Of Photos And One Of Them Should Not Exist

I volunteer in a charity shop two mornings a week, mostly for the company, and I sort donations because nobody else wants to.

The album came in a box of house clearance. 1974, going by the car in the first photo. Seaside. Haircuts. A dog. Somebody's awful trousers.

And then, three-quarters of the way through, out of nowhere, a photograph of a treeline at what looks like dusk. No people. Nothing charming about it. It does not belong in the album at all, and it has been stuck in with the same corners as the rest, so it was put there on purpose, by whoever made the album.

On the back, in biro, in the same handwriting as "Margate 74" and "Susan and the dog": DO NOT ENLARGE.

Reader, I enlarged it.

I scanned it at the library at 1200 dpi, because I am sixty-one years old and I have been bored for a decade.

There is a shape in the trees. It is upright. It is roughly where a person would be if a person were standing in the second row of trees, except that its head is at the height of the third branch, and I have measured against the fence in the foreground, and if that fence is a standard fence, the head is at nine feet.

The face — and I use the word loosely, because it is grain and shadow and I would not swear to it in court — is turned toward the camera.

I have not shown it to the manager. I have not put it in the window with the rest of the album, which sold, for four pounds, to a young man who wanted the seaside pictures for a collage.

I kept the treeline photo. I have it in an envelope in my bag, which I know is not how a rational woman behaves.

Somebody in 1974 saw whatever that is, took a photograph, put it in a family album between a beach and a dog, and left a warning on the back for whoever came next.

They knew someone would look. They just hoped it would be later.