“What wall?” Eileen asked.

He told them how he’d been knocked unconscious and woken up in St. Bart’s.

“You were there?” Eileen said incredulously. “At St. Bart’s?”

We were all at St. Bart’s last night, Polly thought.

The injured firewatcher might have been in the bed next to the unconscious Mike. Mike might have been only inches away from Mr. Bartholomew, as she had been up in the rafters of St. Paul’s, separated from him by only a wall. They had been so close.

But everything had conspired against them, from Theodore’s refusal to leave the pantomime to the blocked streets which had kept them from getting here before he left this morning. It was as if the entire space-time continuum had been engaged in an elaborate plot to keep them from reaching John Bartholomew. Just as it had kept her and Eileen from finding each other last autumn. “How all occasions do inform against us,” she thought.

“It isn’t your fault, it’s mine,” Eileen was saying. “If I’d listened to Mr. Bartholomew’s lecture, I’d have known he was still here, and we could have found him weeks ago. And now it’s too late—”

“ ’Ow come you can’t go to Wales an’ get ’im?” Alf asked.

“ ’Cause they don’t know where ’e is in Wales,” Binnie said. “And you ’eard ’im.” She pointed at Mike. “ ’E ain’t really goin’ there. ’E only said ’e was,” and Polly was glad she’d stopped Mike from saying any more than he already had. They’d obviously been listening to every word the three of them had said. And she was almost certain they were the two delinquents she’d seen stealing the picnic basket that night in Holborn, though she hadn’t said anything to Eileen.

“Well, if ’e ain’t in Wales, then where’s ’e gone?” Alf was asking Eileen.

“We don’t know,” Polly said. “He didn’t tell us.”

“I bet I could find ’im.”

“How?” Binnie said. “You don’t even know what ’e looks like, you dunderpate.”

“I ain’t a dunderpate. Take it back,” Alf said, and dove at Binnie. She darted away down the steps and across the forecourt, Alf in hot pursuit.

Eileen was still blaming herself. “I should simply have told the incident officer I couldn’t take the ambulance to St. Bart’s.”

And I shouldn’t have rushed off to St. Bart’s without finding out the injured firewatcher’s name and who’d gone with him to hospital, Polly thought. If she hadn’t, she’d have found out what Mr. Humphreys had told her a few minutes ago, that he’d helped Bartholomew put the injured man in the ambulance and then gone back up to the roofs. She could’ve told Mr. Humphreys to tell Mr. Bartholomew not to leave till they got there.

“It’s no one’s fault,” she said.

They couldn’t have found him no matter what they did because it had all happened already, and when he got back to Oxford, he hadn’t been bearing a message from them. It had been a hopeless enterprise from the beginning. It had all been hopeless—the attempts to contact Mike’s retrieval team and the search for Gerald.