Harry can’t annotate these images for Edie, he can’t write in a place or a precise date, because there is a gap in the chronology, there is a piece missing—and, as time passes, he can’t help but feel that there is something important about this missing piece. After all, it was in the days that followed that everything went wrong.

“Your wars went off in separate directions at that point?” Cassie asks.

“Briefly. Unofficially. My brother went missing for a while. He went home on leave in 1917 and didn’t come back.”

“He went absent without leave?”

“For ten days.”

“Golly. I can’t imagine that had a good outcome?” Cassie shifts in her chair. He sees her eyes widen.

“No.”

“So did he just stay at home?”

Harry shakes his head. “I don’t know where he went. I asked him, of course, but he wouldn’t tell me where he’d been or why. He wasn’t really talking much at all by then.”

And so, it was simply a blank, and remains so. Harry suspects that these images might fill that blank, that this is what Francis did with those missing days, but he would like to know exactly where they were taken, why Francis needed to be in this place at that time, and what happened there that made things change afterward.

“Did something go wrong while he was at home? Something that would have caused him to go absent?”

“I wish I knew.”

He has asked Edie about Francis’s period of leave, as delicately as possible, but there didn’t seem to be much to tell. Harry can’t help but wonder if there are parts of that week that she’s chosen to edit out; just as, in turn, he has chosen not to tell her about Francis’s subsequent absence and arrest.

Cassie points at a slice of townscape in the background of an image. “If I were a betting woman, I’d say that it’s somewhere in Ypres. And there, that’s quite a distinctive ceiling with the vaulting. Are those faces carved on the ribs? This looks like they’re carousing in a crypt.”

Beneath the ceiling vaulting there are other faces. Harry looks again at the last page of photographs. Men around a table stare at the camera. The table is cluttered with bottles and glasses, but the men’s faces don’t suggest that this is any kind of celebration. Carousing isn’t quite the word. The light carves hollows in their faces and they all have the same bleak, empty look. Harry has seen that look in another photograph recently.

“Ypres could make sense. We were in a camp at Proven, near Poperinghe, so I suppose it’s not impossible that he could have been in Ypres.”

“Albie would know where this is.”

“Albie?”