But he’d ignored the clues, and now he’d have to climb all the way back up that hill in the rain. Because Polly wasn’t here. Her assignment had ended the twenty-second of October. She’d been safely back in Oxford for at least a month and a half, and this had been an exercise in futility.

Except that now he had the proof he’d been looking for that the slippage was beginning to spike. He had to return to St. Paul’s immediately, go back through to Oxford, and tell Badri to pull all the historians out. He started back up the hill, looking for a taxi, but the streets were completely deserted.

No, wait, there was one, in the darkness at the end of a side lane. He stepped into the lane and hailed it.

It had seen him. It pulled out and began to move toward him, and thank God Colin had insisted on his bringing money. Dunworthy pulled out his papers and shuffled through them, looking for the five-pound notes, and then looked up again.

The taxi was moving away. It hadn’t seen him after all. “Hullo!” Dunworthy shouted, his voice echoing in the narrow street, and rushed toward it, waving.

There, it had seen him now. The taxi began to move toward him again. It must be farther away than he’d thought because he couldn’t hear the engine at all. He hurried toward it, but before he’d gone half the distance, he saw it wasn’t a taxi. What he’d thought was the vehicle’s bonnet was the rounded edge of a huge black metal canister, swinging gently back and forth from a lamppost. A dark shroud was draped over the lamppost. A parachute.

It’s a parachute mine, he thought, watching as the canister swung gently back and forth, missing the lamppost by inches. And if the wind shifted slightly, or the parachute ripped …

He took two stumbling steps backward, and then turned and ran for the mouth of the lane, listening for the tearing of parachute silk, for the scrape of the mine against the lamppost, for the deafening boom of the explosion.

It didn’t come. There was a faint sigh, and he was suddenly on the ground, his hands out in front of him on the pavement. He thought at first he must have tripped and fallen, but when he got to his feet, he was covered with dust and glass.

It must have broken the stationer’s window, he thought, and then, confusedly, The mine must have gone off.

He brushed the glass and dirt off his trousers, his coat. And he must have cut himself in the process because the palms of his hands were scraped and bloody, and blood was trickling down behind his ear. He could hear ambulance bells.

I can’t let them find me here, he thought. I must get back to Oxford. I must pull everyone out. He started down the lane, wishing there was a wall to lean against for support, but all the buildings seemed to have fallen down except the one at the very end. He walked toward it as quickly as he could. The bells were growing louder. The ambulance would be here any second, and so would an incident officer. He needed to be out of the lane, across the road, around the corner …