I sat down beside her.

‘Nightmare at the local rag,’ she said. ‘As far as I can tell, they did nothing on Anya Bauer beyond that one piece when she went missing. They never followed it up.’

‘Neither did the law,’ I said.

‘But look at this,’ Wren said, and held out the magnifying glass.

‘I photographed this town all my working life,’ Monty said, and I could hear an even stronger echo of the old lost countryside that I had heard in Sergeant Lane’s voice. ‘And once a year, on Potter’s Fifth, I photographed the school.’

I was looking at images of boys in military uniform. It was the uniform worn by the seven boys in the Combined Cadet Force of Potter’s Field. But here there was an entire army of them, and they marched across the decades.

‘Potter’s Fifth is the school’s big day,’ Wren explained.

Monty barked with laughter. Fanta the Golden Retriever sat up sharply and then slowly curled itself back into sleep.

‘On the fifth of May every year the school opens its doors to the great unwashed,’ Monty said. ‘And the town opens its heart to the school. Or pretends it does. It’s the Potter’s Field equivalent of the fourth of June at Eton. Of course they’ve got the river at Eton and we don’t have a river.’

‘Do you see them?’ Wren said.

‘No.’

She punched my arm. ‘Jesus, Wolfe! Look harder!’

I saw hundreds of boys in uniform. Marching past the statue of the young King Henry. Saluting the raising of the flag. Eyes snapped right as they marched past the camera. And then I concentrated on one central image on the contact sheet that was circled with red and the mist cleared.

They were not as I remembered them – cocky and grinning and unbreakable, as they had been in that first photograph. Now they were serious, upright, stern, in a line of boy soldiers being inspected by Her Majesty the Queen when she and they were twenty years younger.

Seven of them together in a line that stretched beyond the frame of the camera: Guy Philips, Salman Khan, Ben King, Ned King, James Sutcliffe, Hugo Buck, Adam Jones. And towering by the side of the Queen as Her Majesty frowned at James Sutcliffe, there was Peregrine Waugh, the line of his mouth suggesting that he was about to detonate with pride.

‘And this one,’ Wren said.

There was another contact sheet she had placed by her side. It too had a red circle around one image.