“Nonsense. I wouldn’t dream of it. It was my pleasure.”

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I wondered afterward—did you draw when you were here during the war?”

“Yes, all the time.” He lights a cigarette and offers her the packet, but she shakes her head. “It was likenesses, mostly. I drew them so they could send themselves back, put their face in an envelope and post it to their mothers and their sweethearts. They paid me for it sometimes. Other times it was a trade for a piece of chocolate or a cigarette. Mostly it was because I wanted to. I like faces—how people’s personality and experience show through—and you have to practice.”

“You do?”

“Francis said that.” He looks at Rachel West and sees the shadows of her eyelashes, the fine lines at the corners of her mouth. There are freckles under her face powder. “And you always have to be looking.”

“Francis?”

“My brother. Although his thing was cameras. He wanted to be a photographer, you see, to do it professionally.” He knocks back the last of his coffee. “I’ve somehow ended up doing it for him, though. It’s what I do for a living now, it’s my everyday bread and butter, but really it was always much more Francis’s passion than mine.”

“Doing it for him? Am I wrong in assuming that he didn’t get the chance?”

“A small matter of a war rather got in the way.”

“It does that, doesn’t it?”

RACHEL HAS PLACED a guidebook down on the table: an Illustrated Michelin Guide to the Battlefields. She has moved it aside to make way for her coffee, but flicks through the pages and shows him a photograph of Arras in ruins. There are tips for motoring tourists, he sees, and day-trip itineraries. “It looks like Pompeii,” says Rachel and shuts the page on Arras. “I have to be there tomorrow. I have an appointment to look through lost property.”

“Lost property?”

“Lost men’s property. Personal effects. Potentially identifying items found on bodies which haven’t yet been named. Although it’s not officially phrased that directly.”

“No, I expect not.” Harry picks dirt from under his fingernails. He thinks about what items might have been in Francis’s pockets. He considers how that photograph of his brother’s face might have been identified and found its way to Edie. “I have some business to do in Arras too. I could accompany you to your lost property office, if you’d like?”

Rachel plays with her teaspoon. “Would you? You wouldn’t mind? Thank you. I’d be grateful for some moral support.” Her thin fingers are ringed with hearts and flowers formed in tin and brass and aluminum. Harry has seen similar before, worked from spent cartridges and corned beef cans.