The arcades are scaffolded and crumbling. On the broken walls above he can see the spaces that fireplaces and kitchen ranges formerly occupied. The remains of an electric chandelier are suspended from a ceiling and there are tatters of curtains at windows. These partially intact houses, with their hints to the lives that once went on inside them, are more moving than those that are completely leveled.

“All wrecked,” Rachel says. “All ruin.”

“Yes.” He turns in the center of the square. “I saw an advert in the Times on the way out: six pounds to see the Somme. It’s almost laughable, don’t you think? People are choosing to holiday here now. I can’t fathom why you’d want to come here unless you had to.”

“I have to.”

“I understand that.” Harry shakes his head. A stall is selling trinkets and nougat and shell cases. A woman holds a waffle pan over a burner. The smell of hot fat and sugar is making him feel slightly sick. “I must take a photograph. May I deposit you in a friendly café?”

“I’d rather come with you, if I wouldn’t get in the way.”

THE BUILDING IS all boarded up. He peers through a shutter and sees a room that is full of mangled metalwork. There are giant boilers at crazy angles and a lot of tumbled-together pipework. He wouldn’t know it as a factory, but for the fact that he remembers the junction of the roads. Rachel watches him set up the camera. He focuses in on the nibbled brickwork and wonders which fragment of it finished off Private Michael Gibson.

“Did he die here?” she asks.

“No. Back in England. But he never recovered from the wound that he got here.”

“It was a sugar factory, wasn’t it? It would certainly put me off taking a lump in my tea. You didn’t know him?”

“I never know them. My employer places advertisements in the newspapers and people reply to them. I exchange letters with the families in some cases, in certain instances I meet up with them to discuss what they know and what they want, and sometimes I just deliver the photograph. It rather depends on how good their information is and the particulars of what they want.”

“What a thing to do for a living,” she observes. “What a burden to be tasked with! You do make it all sound rather businesslike.”

“It’s not businesslike at all, if I’m honest. But I’m very conscious of the responsibility—of the importance of trying to get it right and make the process as smooth and easy for the families as it can possibly be. Not that it’s ever really easy.”

“In this case it’s the man’s wife who wants the photograph, isn’t it?”

He nods.

“Have you met her?”

“We’ve exchanged correspondence.”