He doesn’t tell Rachel how Mrs. Gibson had described her husband’s long death. How she had shared the ways in which he had suffered through those weeks, and told Harry of all the anger that still builds up inside her and which she can’t yet focus. He would never tell anyone else about all the secret anger and agonies and sorrow that people send him in letters. This isn’t his to share, he feels. He only hopes that the evidence that he can provide, and the actions that he can take on their behalf, can go some small way to quietening all those raw and open-ended emotions; that the placing of flowers and the knowledge of the details can bring the families some peace. But all the words and images in those letters stay in Harry’s head, compounding his own private agonies and angers, and he knows no peace.

“Do you think that she feels some malice towards these walls?” Rachel asks. “Do you think that she wants it to be all broken down and blasted?”

“Perhaps she wants a photograph of it just so she can tear it up.”

“And would you mind if she did?”

“No. Of course not. Not if it makes her feel better.” He hopes that it is so.

“I suppose it’s a full stop, isn’t it?” says Rachel, who has found no full stop again today. “That it’s some proof. That it makes it real and final.”

“I think that in most cases they just want to be able to picture it and to understand.” Is this what Edie wants? Could that be the limit of it? “And I hope it helps them move forwards.”

“I’m not sure how I’d feel if I were sent a photograph of this place and told that a fragment of brick had finished David off. I think I might feel cheated. I think I’d feel angry. I mean, it doesn’t scream ‘right and might,’ does it? I’m not seeing ‘just and worthy cause.’ It doesn’t look like something worth dying for.”

He shrugs. “No. Perhaps not. But it’s different now than it was in 1916. This town was a battlefield. The trenches were cut all through the suburbs, right through the factories and the cellars and the shops.”

“You were here yourself?”