He swirls his drink in his glass, will look at everything but her face now, and she feels so desperately sorry for him at this moment. “I wish there’d been more pretty nurses for you, or barmaids, or farmers’ daughters, or conveniently proximate winsome nuns.”

“Nuns?”

It’s a mercy when at last he looks up and smiles, but as she puts the book down on the table, the breeze catches the pages and then Francis’s face is there. “I didn’t tell him that I’d been to see you in hospital,” she says. “I don’t know why. It was an omission, though, not a lie—and we didn’t do anything that we need to feel guilty about, did we?” She tilts his brother’s likeness toward Harry.

“No.”

“When did you draw this?”

“Just after I’d got back from England. Our journeys crossed. I saw him on the station as he was coming home on leave. It’s the last time I drew him.”

“What would that be, then—September?”

“Yes. Towards the end of the month.”

She looks closely at Harry’s drawing and can’t help but think that this isn’t the man in that photograph. Francis would be declared missing within a month of Harry drawing this picture, but the man in that photograph isn’t just one month older. She leans across and unwinds Harry’s fingers from around his cigarette. “You do miss him, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“It’s just that you didn’t seem shocked by that photograph.”

“The one that was sent to you?”

“Yes. You didn’t seem surprised by Francis’s appearance in that photograph.”

There was just something about the way that Harry had looked at it. When she handed the photograph to him back in May, she had watched as he turned it to the light. Why hadn’t he seemed more disturbed by it, as she had been? Why didn’t he see that the face of the man in the photograph was much older? Why did Harry look like he’d seen that face before?

He shakes his head, as if he’s not sure what to reply. “We saw each other at our worst.”

She doesn’t feel like she can press him and nods. But it doesn’t silence her questions.

HE COMES BACK from the bar with a piece of paper in his hand. He passes it to her across the table as he puts down the drinks.

“What is it?”

“The Blue Angel. My mystery. Apparently it’s some sort of drinking dive.”

“This is the place that you don’t recognize in Francis’s photographs? You think he might have been there—that he was there sometime in that October?”

“It was a cellar full of gloomy drinkers then, and seemingly it still is now.”

“Sounds like just my sort of place,” she says.