The woman at the reception desk had looked at him coolly as he had asked her the question. She told him that Edie had paid for her room and left early that morning with her suitcase. He had run through the streets to the station. The train had gone two hours earlier. It had then occurred to him that, instead of going straight for the train, she might have first come here. Might he yet find her at Tyne Cot?

He knows that it is the most likely place. That is what they have told him—and what, in turn, he has told Edie. Those casualties that were hurriedly buried behind the railway lines had all been transferred to this cemetery. He looks down at the directions to this place formed in her handwriting, and thinks about how she had suspected that Francis himself could have sent that photograph. Did she really have a doubt? Is that really why she made this journey? Surely she would need to silence that doubt before she went home?

There are vans parked by the side of the road and parties of men digging in the fields beyond. He thinks of Ralph and is aware that their spades have no agricultural purpose. He leaves the bus at Zonnebeke and guides himself with an atlas of the fighting line that he had bought for two shillings back in Tidworth in 1916. The line on the front cover looks like ancient history; it might as well be a map of Carthage. He remembers Francis looking in this map book in 1916, all trepidation and excitement, as they had traveled east in cattle trucks. He thinks of Francis, just eighteen months after that, turning the pages of his diary.

Along the sides of the road there are the usual sentinel trees. They show its line ahead. He recalls reading about the taking of this village when he was waiting for his return train in London in 1917. It is now nothing but ruins—a stack of roof tiles by the side of the road, a pile of anonymous masonry parts, some curiosities of old carving, and yellow grass in between. The name of the cemetery doesn’t exist on his map and so he is glad now of Edie’s directions. It is terribly desolate all around, as if an effort has been made to erase every feature from the map. The only landmarks are clues to things that no longer exist.