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He shook his head, feeling ridiculous. ‘Captain in the London 20th.’

‘What’s his regiment, by the way?’ she added, suspicious again.

He gave it to her, including Tom’s rank as sergeant and where he was based. He waited while she looked him up and down again.

‘Well, I’ve just put the kettle on. You might as well come in and have a cup of tea and bring that stuff with you.’ She opened the door fully and the smell of boiling cabbage buffeted Harry as he crossed her threshold into a dark hallway.

He offered a hand. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mrs Fletcher.’

‘You can call me Rose, if you wish,’ she said, taking his hand briefly before she gestured to another door.

The sitting room was tiny and a coal fire guttered as she shooed a cat off one of the three armchairs and offered him that seat as the kettle began a shrill whistle from the kitchen.

‘I’ll be right back,’ Rose said. ‘Timmy will want to sit on your lap but you just tell him no,’ she warned, eyeing the tabby from where it now sat on the rug, the tip of its tail thumping the ground rhythmically as though it were taking stock of the situation.

The cat then curled up in front of the fire, seemingly asleep, but its tail continued to drum silently, not at all relaxed.

Rose reappeared with a small tray. ‘I can’t offer you a slice of cake, I’m afraid, Captain Blake.’

‘A tea will be lovely, thank you. Please call me Harry. We’re all civilians now.’

‘Don’t you have the finest manners?’ she remarked. ‘I’m not used to such posh gentlemen in my house.’

Harry blinked, unsure how to respond.

‘I’ve had to take in lodgers, you see, since the boys . . .’ Rose explained, her voice trailing off on that thought. ‘I’ve got two gents in lodgings upstairs. They’re attending the Church of England teacher training college, both in their second year,’ she said proudly. ‘And I’ve got a lecturer as a permanent boarder. He’s one of the teachers. He helped my Tom to learn his reading and writing. It’s why he was so advanced and was able to pass the office exam into the Corporation Council, who accepted him in at fourteen as a junior office boy. He was taken into the city library for a while and had hopes to train as a teacher, maybe go abroad as a missionary, but he felt the call of soldiering once his brother died.’

While waiting he’d calculated there could only be three bedrooms in this tiny dwelling. ‘Where’s your room?’ he frowned, his curiosity out before he could censor himself.

‘I make do, Mr Blake. I sleep out the back in the parlour on a put-up bed. It’s been enough since Mr Fletcher passed away. We all have to make ends meet these days.’ She sounded defensive and Harry wondered if she’d been criticised for taking in paying guests.

He watched in amusement as she turned the teapot in an anticlockwise direction. Perhaps it was a northern ritual, for he’d never seen this performed at home. ‘Three times widdershins, as my mother used to say,’ she muttered, noting his interest. ‘It’s brewed now. Do you take milk and sugar?’

Again the defensive note; she was surely on rations. ‘Er, just a dash of milk is fine, thank you.’ Sugar had been a luxury in the trenches and much as he relished the taste, he’d become accustomed to tea without it.

She talked proudly as she poured. ‘I give my lodgers breakfast and dinner and I pack up sandwiches for their midday meal. I wash, iron, mend clothes, turn shirt collars and cuffs as needed too. I don’t charge much so the work is regular. If you need anything doing, sir, I’ll be happy to do any repair work.’

He smiled. ‘I didn’t bring enough with me.’

‘No, and it doesn’t look like those need repairing, either,’ she said, nodding at his clothes. ‘I was a seamstress in my day and that suit looks new – straight out of Savile Row, I suspect.’

He felt the colour rising to his cheeks and preferred not to respond. ‘Rose, I brought you these from a battlefield not far from Fromelles.’ He handed her the bag of Tom’s items in exchange for his cup and saucer.

‘I know that’s in Northern France. My Tom had written to me from there. So they’ve dug my son up, is that right? I’m presuming he was buried under all that mud we read and heard about?’

Harry blinked at her directness. He explained about the sweep through the region, clearing the towns and villages of any remaining German troops. ‘There was a hole in the ground, for want of a better word. I think Tom was killed by a shelling; he was in that area at a time of fierce fighting. I’m presuming they couldn’t retrieve the fallen at the time and then those who’d been killed were indeed buried under collapsing trenches and the like. From what I can tell – and I suspect the army will need to confirm all of this – Tom may have been in some sort of reconnaissance party. We used to send them out into no-man’s-land at night, to check on barricades or even to bring back wounded.’ Harry watched her untie the loose knots of the kerchief. ‘There’s a couple of rounds in there that I found clutched in Tom’s left hand. They’re German. I can’t tell you why but maybe he was bringing those back for headquarters to examine.’ He shrugged. ‘All guesswork, I’m afraid, at this stage. But your son was found some way from the main bulk of the party that had presumably gone over the top. I think Tom might have been on a particular mission.’

‘How did he look?’

‘Peaceful,’ Harry lied, swiftly and easily.

‘That’s good. No suffering, then?’ She eyed him. ‘Tell me again why you’re here, in a suit, not calling yourself anything official?’

She was sharp; he’d give Rose that much. He explained about his brother.

‘I remain hopeful they’ll find Ed and someone comes knocking at our door with something of his . . . I feel it would help us to finally let him go.’

Rose nodded. ‘So my Tom reminds you of your brother?’