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shrugged. 'We'd never got to meet her. Her family had been going to come over in 1913 but then everything caught up with us and they never came. My father died late that year. John came home for the funeral and he never went back to Germany. Then, when war seemed inevitable, Minna's father forced her to call off the engagement. A good thing probably. She was very young. It was made worse because she died not long afterwards. Appendicitis, John said.'
    'There's no picture of her?'
    'No. He did have one once although I never saw it after they separated. He took her death quite hard. But there may have been other people in his life that we knew nothing of. He left a will before he went to France; they all did. When he came back from the war he made another will. We didn't know anything about it and it wasn't with the family solicitors. He used a small London firm. They sent us a copy. It wasn't very different—he provided for my mother and me—but there were three individual bequests as well. One was to a Captain William Bolitho whose address was a convalescent home. One was to a Frenchman, a Monsieur Meurice of ... somewhere that sounded like Rouen. Doulon—no, Doullens, I think—and the other was to a married woman. I've got her name downstairs. Sadly the Frenchman and all his family were untraceable. Even the village was gone. The solicitors are holding money in case he is found. There were no reasons given for any of the bequests.
    'Captain Bolitho was in John's regiment. He survived although apparently he lost his legs. But nobody knew anything about the Frenchman or the woman. I wondered whether they had been...' She paused. 'Well, whether they had been close, I suppose, and whether he would have written to her if they were. In the end I never tried to speak to her and she never contacted us, though the solicitors could have passed on any letter to us.'
    She looked at him with an expression he found hard to read. Her eyes were steady and almost on a level with his.
    'Look,' he said, quickly, aware of the clumsiness of his timing, 'I'm really sorry but I do have to go very soon.' He glanced at his watch again. He was going to be lucky to catch the half past six train. 'But if you want me to try to contact Bolitho or this woman, I'll gladly make enquiries. Nothing that would embarrass you, enough to put your mind at rest.'
    Although Mary was silent, she looked much happier.
    'Might I take the note he had with him?' he asked. 'It might be useful.' Though he couldn't think how. She nodded and reached for it.
    'Why don't you come up and see me in London?' he said. 'Next week, say? We could go to a concert, if you'd like that. Have you been to the Wigmore Hall? I could try to get tickets. We could talk more then. In the meantime I'll think whether there's anything else I can do.'
    Mary visibly brightened. 'I'd love that. I went there with John just before he joined up and before it was closed down. It must have been before 1914, because it was still a German business. The Bechstein Hall, it was then. They were still playing Schubert and Brahms: dangerous German music.' She smiled again. 'John's favourites. It was the only time we'd ever gone anywhere like that together. It was only because somebody else had let him down at the last minute.'
    He went downstairs ahead of her, said a rather perfunctory goodbye to Mrs Emmett and her sister and shook hands on the doorstep with Mary who was clearly trying not to cry. He wanted to say something to help her, but then she thrust a sheet of paper at him. He was puzzled for a second until he realised it was a copy of John's will.
    Speaking fast, she said, 'You probably think I'm just not accepting it, John's death. But I do accept it. We'd lived with that possibility for four years. It's really his life I'm trying to understand. There's this hole where I should know things. And then there are things I
do
know—such as the people in his will whom we'd never even heard of, and my