“I have a photograph of my brother’s grave,” Cassie says suddenly. “My mother has a framed copy up on the wall, only I’d rather hide mine in a drawer. I do visit him from time to time, though. Keeping him in the sideboard doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten him. He’s in Tyne Cot. The cemetery, I mean.”

“I should go there too,” Harry says. “I do intend to. I’ve been told that, if Francis has been buried anywhere, it’s likely that’s where he’ll be.”

“You’ve already checked the registers, I take it?” Ralph asks.

“We’ve done all the conventional paperwork trails, but found nothing. It’s all blanks and dead ends and just more questions.”

“We?”

“Francis’s wife, Edie, and I. We’ve both been chasing paper trails. She has never wanted to come over here before, but last month she sent me a postcard from Arras. I don’t know if she’s found something.”

He recalls Edie’s face through the viewfinder, her hand extending toward him with the bag of peppermints. The flight of geese moves across the sky above Edie’s head. What has changed since then? What new motivation has pushed her to make this journey now?

“Why Arras, if he’s likely to be around Ypres? Is there any significance?”

“Possibly. Maybe. She might just have been on her way to Ypres. She might only have been passing through. I honestly don’t know.”

“You’ve no way of getting in contact with her?”

“I’ve called her at home. I keep trying the telephone, but it just rings out. I can only assume that she’s still over here.” He tries to imagine Edie in Ypres, among all the plunging masonry and the too-close groan of the guns, but he can’t quite pull her into that picture.

“What’s your own feeling?” Ralph asks. “Do you believe that he is probably dead?”

“For a long time I assumed that he had to be, but then I see him everywhere. I go through life grabbing strangers’ elbows and calling their backs by his name. I don’t know if Francis is haunting me, or whether my wiring has gone awry.” His eyes connect with Cassie’s. She smiles sympathetically and shakes her head. “And now I’m picking over his old photographs looking for clues. As if his experience were something removed from my own. Like it was someone else’s war. Only I was there. I was by his side all that time. I honestly start to wonder if I’ve misremembered it all.”

“Would you let me see the photographs?” Cassie asks.

HARRY WATCHES HER flicking through the album, lowering her face to the pages, pointing occasionally and sharing familiar images with Ralph.

“Were you still here then when they took the village?” Cassie asks him.