Talbot looked over at Fairchild. She still hadn’t come out of the ether, though now she looked like she was only sleeping, and her color was better. She looked even younger and more childlike than usual.

“What about Flight Officer Lang?” Talbot asked. “Shall I ring him up and tell him what happened?”

“Not till after I’ve been discharged,” Mary said.

Talbot nodded approvingly. “When will they let you go home, do you think?”

“This afternoon, I should imagine.”

And then I’ll go look for the missing man myself, Mary thought. But the doctor refused to let her go due to her possibly having a concussion, and when she attempted to explain about the man to her nurse, the nurse told her to “try to rest.” Which was impossible when there was a chance that no one had transported him, that they’d missed him in the darkness and he was still lying there in the rubble.

She wished she’d asked Talbot to bring her her bag. If she had some money she could ring up Brixton herself. If the nurses would let her anywhere near a telephone. Thus far they wouldn’t even let her out of bed. They’d even reprimanded her for walking the two feet over to Fairchild’s bed when she woke and called for her.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she’d said groggily, clutching Mary’s hand. “I was so afraid—”

“So was I,” Mary had said, “but the doctors say we’re both going to be perfectly fine, though a bit banged up.”

And it’s a good thing I’m going to be here through VE-Day, she thought. If I went back to Oxford looking like this, Mr. Dunworthy would never let me go to the Blitz.

Camberley came late that afternoon as Mary was about to be taken up for X-rays, on her way home from a run. “Did you ring up Brixton?” Mary asked.

“Yes,” Camberley said, “but they said they weren’t at the incident. Might the ambulance have been from Bromley?”

“I suppose so.” She could have misread the name in the flickering firelight.

“Or might he have been examined and discharged?” Camberley asked, but the hospital wouldn’t even discharge her, and she only had a few cuts and bruises.

“No,” she said, “he was much too badly injured. Did you check the morgue here and at St. Francis’s? He might have died on the way to hospital, and that’s why they don’t show him as being admitted.”

“I’ll check,” Camberley said, and hesitated. “Are you certain you saw him last night? You were rather badly concussed. You might have been muddled—”

“I wasn’t muddled. He—”

“You were muddled about Brixton’s being there. You might have got someone you administered first aid to at some other incident confused with—”

“No, I saw him, too,” Fairchild said from the other bed, and Mary could have kissed her. “That’s who I was fetching the medical kit for.”

The orderly arrived with a wheelchair to take Mary to X-ray. “When you come again, bring my bag,” she told Camberley. “It’s in the ambulance.”