He waited another fifteen minutes on the platform to give Tensing and Ferguson time to get well away from the station, then hurried back to Mrs. Jolsom’s, taking a roundabout route so he didn’t have to pass Dilly’s girls’ house or the Bell, and looking carefully in all directions before he crossed each street.

It was after ten by the time he got to Mrs. Jolsom’s. Maybe she’ll have already gone to bed, and I can leave her a note, he thought hopefully, but she opened the front door before he could put his latchkey in the lock. She was wearing an apron and drying her hands on a tea towel. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Davis,” she said. “I was doing the washing up and heard someone at the door. How are you this evening?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid,” he said, following her into the kitchen. “I don’t know if I told you, but I came here for medical treatment. For my foot. I’ve been seeing Dr. Granholme in Leighton Buzzard, and I was sure he could help me, but he said he couldn’t, and sent me to Dr. Evers in Newton Pagnell, and he says I’ll have to have surgery, so he’s sending me to Dr. Pritchard in Banbury,” he said, giving the wrong villages for all three doctors in the hope that when Tensing couldn’t find him, he’d conclude Mrs. Jolsom had got the names and places mixed up. “The problem is, he wants to do the surgery right away, so I can’t give you the two weeks’ notice you—”

“Oh, you mustn’t worry yourself over that,” Mrs. Jolsom said, drying a cup and saucer and putting them away in the cupboard. “I only asked for that because of the boarders from the Park going off without bothering to notify me.” She folded the tea towel and hung it over the edge of the counter. “Or not coming at all, and me left holding the room for weeks. And do you know what the billeting officer said when I told him? He said he didn’t know anything about it. He even denied sending the letter!”

The letter. That day in the lab, when Phipps had returned from his drop, he’d said he’d sent the letter. Could it have been the letter reserving a place to stay? But he was supposed to have come through in the summer, not the fall.

You don’t know that, Mike thought. July was when the recon and prep was, not necessarily the assignment. Maybe that was why the first drop had been necessary—because of the lodging shortage and the necessity of making arrangements months in advance. And if there’d been increased slippage on his drop, Mrs. Jolsom would have been left holding the room. Which was why she had the only vacancy in Bletchley.

I should have made that connection, Mike thought.

“Do you leave in the morning, Mr. Davis?” Mrs. Jolsom was asking.

No, tonight, he started to say, and then remembered there wasn’t a train to Banbury till morning. “Yes, but I need to go see Dr. Pritchard first, so I’ll probably be leaving before you’re up. Your boarder who didn’t show up, what was his—”