“Yes. If you’d told us which train you’d be on,” Eileen said, playing along, “we’d have come to meet it.”

“I didn’t know myself,” Mike said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “What’s going on? Was someone spying on us back there?”

Only Eileen, Polly thought. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but loose lips sink ships. Come along.”

She led them past the trenches to an open lawn with a large monument in its center. From here, they’d be able to see anyone coming from any direction. “All right,” she said, sitting down on the monument steps. “Now we can talk.”

“What did you mean, ‘loose lips sink—’?” Mike stopped, staring at the statuary around the monument. “Jesus, what is this thing?”

“The Albert Memorial. Possibly the ugliest monument in all of England.” Polly smiled happily at the elephant, the water buffalo, the semi-naked young women clustered round them, at Prince Albert sitting on top reading a book. She felt giddy in her relief that Mike wasn’t in the Tower. Or dead.

“It’s hideous. It wasn’t destroyed in the Blitz, was it?” he asked hopefully.

“No, only minor damage, I’m afraid, though supposedly at one point someone put up a large arrow to guide the Luftwaffe to it.”

“It’s too bad it didn’t work,” Mike said, still staring, appalled. “Christ, is that a buffalo?”

“Who cares what it is?” Eileen said impatiently. “Tell us what happened and why you went to Oxford.”

“Okay. After I called you about Tensing, I went back to Mrs. Jolsom’s to pack my stuff, and she told me the room I’d rented was supposed to have been Phipps’s.”

“It was Gerald’s room?” Polly said.

“Yes. He was supposed to have come two months ago, but he never arrived, so I went to Oxford to see if I could find out whether something had happened to him on the way.”

“And?”

“He never came through. He’d made a reservation at the Mitre in Oxford for the night he arrived, but he never showed up there either.”

“The increased slippage could have sent him through late,” Eileen said, “and he decided to go straight to Bletchley instead of stopping in Oxford.”

Mike shook his head. “He’d mailed a package addressed to himself to the Mitre. He never picked it up.”

“Do you know what was in it?” Polly asked.

“Yeah, that’s why I was gone so long. It took me forever to steal it.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and laid them out on the steps of the monument. “It’s all the papers documenting that he was who he said he was—letters of recommendation, school records, security clearances, everything he’d need to pass a background check. Plus train tickets and money. And a letter from his sister in Northumbria informing him his mother was ill. Addressed to Mrs. Jolsom’s address.” He looked up at them. “He obviously never came through.”

The net wouldn’t let him, Polly thought, which means its safeguards are still functioning. Only it didn’t necessarily mean that at all. It might just as easily mean that there was no Oxford from which to send him.