“I’ll make enquiries for you,” says Ralph. “Leave it with me. There are unofficial channels. I know men on the ground. Just give me a week or two. Say, give me a telephone call in a month’s time? If there’s anything to find, I’ll find it for you. If a grave exists anywhere, I’ll pull all the strings that I can to track it down.”

Harry thinks, if Francis has a grave, does it lean like the iron crosses in Montauban? Stand straight, tidily aligned with a thousand others, like a battalion on parade? Or does he have a white marker and Bible words and flowers?

Or could Francis yet not be in a grave?

Chapter Twenty-Three: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Three

Harry

Albert, Somme, August 1921

HARRY TELEPHONES MR. LEE, AS ARRANGED, FROM THE RAILWAY station.

“Have you got a pen and paper?” a faraway voice issues from the Bakelite.

“Do I need it? Have you had many enquiries?”

“Yes, and if you can summon ghosts and solve whodunits, we’ll prosper in this business. A Mrs. Cathcart, a clairvoyant, placed her ad in the paper just below ours. If we could team up, we might do quite well.”

“Ah. Like that, is it?”

“Thus far it’s ten enquiries from families seeking missing, three requests for photographs of graves, and two killed-in-action locales.”

“Could you make that sound any more clinical?”

The station is full of excursionists and pilgrims. There are lots of pale young wives with black trimmings on their hats and French officers with older women on their arms. Harry finds himself pressing the earpiece to his head in case anything unduly indelicate should leak from it.

“A Mrs. Bainbridge asked if you would go to Gallipoli,” says Mr. Lee. “I’ve only agreed to Picardy and Flanders. I take it I did right?”

Harry thinks of how many graves there must be between Amiens and Ypres. He wonders what on earth he has agreed to.

“I’ve only said yes to commissions for grave photographs where they can furnish the details of the cemetery. I’ve asked for plot, row, and grave number where possible.”

“Good.” How terribly efficient this all sounds, he thinks. How horribly sensible it all is.

“Can I order you south, then?”

There is a woman with red hair walking down the platform toward the southbound train. “If you must,” says Harry, as he puts down the receiver and his pen.

She is wearing a floral print dress and green shoes. Her hair, grown longer again, is pinned up in a tortoiseshell comb. She puts a hand up to shield her eyes to the sun and then is standing on the tiptoes of her green shoes and waving at someone down the platform.

“Edie?”