But there wasn’t a body, as the warden gingerly explained. “It was a thousand-pounder, and then incendiaries, you see.”

Polly saw. There would only have been fragments too small for the rescue squad to have collected. She thought of Paige Fairchild telling her at one of her first V-1 incidents, “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand.”

“It can’t have been Mike,” Eileen insisted. “What would he have been doing out in the middle of a raid? We all promised we’d go to a shelter the moment the sirens went.”

“Perhaps it was too far away and he hadn’t enough time—”

“No,” Eileen said. “I asked the warden. She said Houndsditch wasn’t hit till eleven. And what would he have been doing in Houndsditch? He never mentioned it to you, did he?”

“No. But remember Marjorie? She didn’t tell anyone she was going to meet an airman either. There was no reason anyone knew of for her to have been in Jermyn Street.”

“And Marjorie wasn’t dead. Mike isn’t either.”

“Eileen—”

“He might have been injured and wandered away, or got hit on the head and can’t remember who he is,” Eileen argued and insisted on checking the hospitals—even though the authorities had already done that—and waiting at the foot of the escalator in Oxford Circus Station where they’d agreed to meet if something went wrong.

“You can’t go on doing this,” Polly said after the third night. “You must get some sleep.”

Eileen shook her head. “I might miss him,” she said, and when he still hadn’t come by the fourth night, she said, “Perhaps he found the retrieval team, and they pulled him out. And he wanted to come fetch us, but there wasn’t time—”

Polly shook her head, remembering how adamant he’d been about them splitting up when he realized Mr. Bartholomew was at St. Paul’s. “He’d never have gone through without us.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t any choice. Like Shackleton. He had to leave us behind to go fetch help. Perhaps the drop was in Houndsditch, and if they didn’t go through immediately, it would have been destroyed, so he went and now he’s working with Badri and Linna to find another drop site for us.

“And don’t say, ‘This is time travel,’ like that,” Eileen said, even though Polly hadn’t said anything. “There are scores of reasons why they might not have been able to come through yet. Slippage and divergence points and …”

But the most likely is that that isn’t what happened at all, Polly thought. Mike didn’t go through, and there was no drop in Houndsditch. Only an HE, followed by incendiaries.

“He can’t be dead,” Eileen said. “He promised he’d get us out.”

Yes, and Colin promised he’d come rescue me if I got into trouble, Polly thought. Sometimes promises can’t be kept.

“Perhaps he got a new lead on the retrieval team and went off to find them,” Eileen said. “He went to Manchester without telling us.”

Which didn’t account for his half-burnt papers being in Houndsditch, or his things being at Mrs. Leary’s. If he had gone off, he would have taken his razor and shaving soap with him.