“I want you to take a photograph of Francis’s grave.”

She had rolled a sweet on her tongue, he remembers. Her recalled words smelled of peppermints.

“I will try for you,” he had replied.

He’d gone back to London with good intentions. He would talk to all the appropriate agencies and do all that he could to find some evidence. If a grave existed, he would go there and take the photograph for her. But did it? Could it? He had written letters and waited in offices, checked through casualty and prisoner lists, circulated descriptions, and visited hospitals, but all of his inquiries had come to no end. There was nothing. He had tried and failed again, as he had warned her that he probably would. The days went by, the file of correspondence thickening and the possibilities diminishing, and it was only when he received her postcard from Arras last week that he realized another three months had passed.

Isn’t this a bit back-to-front? Edie’s postcard handwriting insists. Shouldn’t it be you sending this to me?

There is a picture of the Hôtel de Ville on the card and a July postmark. Could Edie have found something, then? Could she somehow have succeeded where he has failed? Has something of Francis surfaced in Arras?

Harry tries to block out the voices in the walls. He tries to shut out the photograph faces, and the thoughts of ghosts and graves, and just to focus on the pattern of the wallpaper. His hotel room has yellow walls and overlarge pieces of furniture that look like they have come out of a grander house. There is a dead bird on his window ledge. He watches its feathers shift. The sheets smell of stale sweat. The ceiling is watermarked in the shape of Africa. Shadows creep from the corners until he is staring into darkness.

HE MEETS RACHEL at six, as arranged, in the next-door restaurant. The room is full of people who look lost. At the tables all around they are telling each other their stories. There is slightly too much gesticulation to be normal. Conversations are conducted in a slightly higher emotional register. Confidences spill out over the soup. It is like everyone in the room is slightly drunk, Harry thinks. They eat steaming boiled potatoes and mutton with gray fat. Photographs of the missing are posted on the greasy floral walls. He finds himself looking for faces that he might recognize, that he might himself once have committed to paper. He finds himself looking for Francis’s face.

“He hasn’t gone,” says Rachel suddenly, after two glasses of wine. “David, I mean. He is a robust man, a strong man, a man full of life.”

Harry feels himself being eyed comparably and not coming up to the mark. “There you are, then,” he says.

“I haven’t shown you, have I?”