Vivian tuned out. All she could see was Gloria’s face: Stanhope’s vision of Gloria’s face, with that cunning blend of naivety and wantonness, that come-hither smile and its promise of secret delights. It both was and wasn’t Gloria.

Then she thought, with a tremor of fear: if they had already discovered Gloria, how long would it take them to discover her?

“It only said he’s missing,” Gloria insisted over two months later, at the height of the summer of 1943. We were standing by one of Mr. Kilnsey’s drystone walls drinking Tizer and looking out over the gold-green hills to the northwest. She thrust the most recent Ministry letter toward me and pointed at the words. “See. ‘Missing during severe fighting east of the Irrawaddy River in Burma.’ Wherever that is. When Mr. Kilnsey’s son was killed at El Alamein it said he was definitely dead, not just missing.”

What had kept us going the most since we heard the news of Matthew’s disappearance was our attempt to get as much information as we possibly could about what had happened to him. First we had written letters, then we had even telephoned the Ministry. But they wouldn’t commit themselves. Missing was all they would tell us, and nobody seemed to know anything about the exact circumstances of his disappearance or where he might be if he was still alive. If they did, they weren’t saying.

The most we could get out of the man on the telephone was that the area in which Matthew had disappeared was now in the hands of the Japanese, so there was no question of going in to search for bodies. Yes, he admitted, an unspecified number of casualties had been confirmed, but Matthew was not among them. While it was still likely he might have been killed, the man concluded, there was also a chance he had been taken prisoner. It was impossible to get anything further out of him. Since the telephone call, Gloria had been brooding over what to do next.

“I think we should go there,” she said, crumpling the letter into a ball.

“Where? Burma?”

“No, silly. London. We should go down there and buttonhole someone. Get some answers.”

“But they won’t talk to us,” I protested. “Besides, I don’t think they’re in London anymore. All the government people have moved out to the country somewhere.”

“There has to be somebody there,” Gloria argued. “It stands to reason. Even if it’s just a skeleton staff. A government can’t just pack up and leave everything behind. Especially the War Office. Besides, this is London I’m talking about. It’s still the capital of England, you know. If there are answers to be found, you can bet we’ll find them there.”

There was no arguing with Gloria’s passionate rhetoric. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to start.”

“Whitehall,” she said, nodding. “That’s where we start. Whitehall.”

She sounded so certain that I didn’t know what to reply.

For the rest of that month I tried to talk Gloria out of the London trip, but she was adamant. Once she got like that, I knew there could be no stopping her getting her own way. Even Cynthia and Alice and Michael Stanhope said it would be a waste of time. Mr. Stanhope had no time at all for government bureaucrats and assured us they would tell us nothing.

Gloria insisted that if I didn’t want to come with her, that was fine, she would go by herself. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I had never been to London, not even in peacetime, and the whole prospect scared me stiff. London seemed about as remote to me as the moon.

It was finally arranged for September. Gloria decided it would be best if we went and returned by night train. That way she would only have to rearrange her one and a half days off for midweek rather than ask Mr. Kilnsey for more time when things were busy. To her surprise, Mr. Kilnsey said she could take longer if she wished. Since he had lost Joseph at El Alamein, he had become a more compassionate and sympathetic man, and he understood her grief. We still decided to stick to the original plan because I didn’t want to leave Mother alone for any longer.

Cynthia Garmen said she would look after Mother and the shop while we were gone. She said Norma Prentice owed her a day’s work at the NAAFI in exchange for baby-sitting the previous week, so it should be no problem. Mother offered to buy the train tickets and gave Gloria some of her clothes coupons to use down there if we had time to visit the big shops. Though she accepted them gratefully, for once clothes were the last thing on Gloria’s mind.

It was about ten o’clock when the road crested the hill and Banks could see Edinburgh spread out in the distance in all its hazy glory: the stepped rows of tenements; the dark Gothic spire of the Sir Walter Scott Monument, like some alien space rocket; the hump of Arthur’s Seat; the castle on its crag; the glimmer of sea beyond.

Apart from one or two brief police-related visits, it was years since Banks had spent any time there, he realized as he coasted down the hill, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” on the stereo. When he was a student, he used to drive up to see friends quite often for weekends and holidays. At one time he had a girlfriend, a raven-haired young beauty called Alison, who lived down on St. Stephen Street. But as is the nature of such long-distance relationships, “out of sight, out of mind” beats “absence makes the heart grow fonder” any day of the week, and during one visit she simply turned up at the pub with someone else. Easy come, easy go. By then he had his eye on another woman, called Jo, anyway.

Banks tried to recollect if he had ever taken Jem up to Edinburgh with him, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember even seeing Jem outside his room, though he must have gone out to buy food, records and dope, as well as to sign on the dole. Banks had never even seen him out in the hallway. He saw people come and go from time to time, strangers, sometimes at weird hours of the night, but Jem never mentioned any other friends.

Banks’s Edinburgh days were all pre-Trainspotting and the place didn’t look quite so romantic when he came down off the hill into the built-up streets of dark stone, the roundabouts and traffic lights, shopping centers and zebra crossings. He got through Dalkeith easily enough, but shortly afterward he made one simple mistake and found himself heading toward Glasgow on a dual carriageway for about three miles before he found an exit.

Elizabeth Goodall lived just off Dalkeith Road, not far from the city center. She had given him precise directions on the telephone the previous evening, and after only a couple more wrong turns, he found the narrow street of tall tenements.

Mrs. Goodall lived on the ground floor. She answered Banks’s ring promptly and led him into a high-ceilinged living room which smelled of lavender and peppermint. All the windows were shut fast, and not the slightest breeze stirred the warm, perfumed air. Only a little daylight managed to steal through. The wallpaper was patterned with sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Parsley and sage, too, for all Banks could tell. Mrs. Goodall bade him sit in a sturdy damask armchair. Like all the other chairs in the room, its arms and back were covered by white lace antimacassars.

“So you found your way all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Banks lied. “Nothing to it.”

“I don’t drive a motorcar myself,” she said, with a trace of her old Yorkshire accent. “I have to rely on buses and trains if I want to go anywhere, which is rare these days.” She rubbed her small, wrinkled hands together. “Well, then, you’re here. Tea?”

“Please.”

She disappeared into the kitchen. Banks surveyed the room. It was a nondescript sort of place: clean and tidy, but not much character. A few framed photographs stood on the sideboard, but none of them showed Hobb’s End. One glass-fronted cabinet held a few knickknacks, including trophies, silverware and crystal. That would be tempting to burglars, Banks thought: old woman in a ground-floor flat with a nice haul of silverware just there for the taking. He hadn’t noticed any signs of a security system.