He sits at the table after Gabriel leaves, and stares at the photograph of Daniel East’s absence. Was it the camera, or is his mind playing tricks? He almost suspects that if he looks away from the print for a moment, the figure will return. But will it be Daniel East there against the wall this time, or the face of the man with the camera in Saint-Christophe? Harry tries to bring to mind the face of the photographer, to pull it back into focus. He had surely seen it, and known it, but he can’t now recall a face at all. Harry watches the lying photograph; he doesn’t mean to let it catch him out; he means to reason all of this through, he tells himself; he will go back to Saint-Christophe.

But when he picks up the phantom photograph, he can’t make it stay still. Why can he not hold it still? He tries to pin it to the tabletop, but his fingers won’t do as he wills them. The photograph falls to the floor and he crosses his arms over his chest. He tries to brace it, to keep it in, to push the shaking back inside his body.

Chapter Sixty-Five: Edie

Chapter Sixty-Five

Edie

Denham Hall, Cheshire, October 1921

THERE ARE ONLY GHOSTS HERE NOW,” SAYS THE MAN BY THE GATE. “Did you know it before?”

“Not really. Not well. I came here once. Back in 1917. My brother-in-law was a patient here.”

Edie hadn’t expected to come back to this place, but it is one bus stop before the street where Captain Rose lives, and somehow, as the familiar walls of the house came into view, she had wanted to rewind and be here, not there. It wasn’t that she had expected to step inside the walls, just that she would have liked to lean on the gate and remember it all better, just to see the house from across the water again and to try to put it all back into place, but now the agent is turning the key and it can’t hurt to look again. Can it?

“I saw the sign. It’s to be sold?”

“It’s going to auction at the end of the month. Every stick and stone of it. Every item of it has been catalogued. Every napkin, candlestick, and soupspoon. I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. Alastair Bowen, property agent.”

She shakes the man’s hand. “How sad for the family.”

“They’ve taken a house in town. These old places are too much of an expense to maintain—all those windows to clean, all those steps to climb—and the roof needs work. The damp is finding its way in. It’ll probably become an institution of some kind, or be split up into flats, or just bulldozed to make way for new houses. That’s the way it’s all going now.”