Napps, Millet-Bass and Dinners had been reduced to sepia portraits, with their centre-partings and utterly joyless expressions. These photographs were stamped through a hundred biographies until the repetition erased any emotional content and their faces became nothing more than the emblems of a tragedy. The three men were almost mythical creatures, so dead it was hard to believe that they'd ever been real. Which made evidence that they'd truly been here, walking this same beach and seeing this same view, as remarkable to find as a trilobite fossil. But the past was a different world. It remained unknowable and evasive, even when you were holding solid proof of it in your hand.