On the way to the X-ray she looked for a telephone box. There was one just outside the ward. Good. And luckily, their beds were just inside the ward’s doors. As soon as she got her bag, she’d sneak out and ring up Croydon and ask them to go check the incident again. But when she got back, Fairchild was crying.

Dread gripped her. “Did they find him?” Mary asked.

Fairchild shook her head, unable to speak for the tears spilling down her cheeks.

“What is it?” Mary asked. Oh, God, it’s Stephen. “What happened?”

“Camberley …,” she said, and broke down.

“What about Camberley? Has something happened to her?”

“No,” she sobbed. “To the ambulance.”

“What ambulance? The one from Brixton?” Oh, God, they’d been transporting the man to hospital, and there’d been another rocket—

“No, our ambulance. Camberley said the V-2 hit it.”

Mary’s first thought was, My bag was in it. Now how will I get the coins to phone Croydon?

And then, That was the second explosion I heard, the fire I saw. It hadn’t been a gas main, after all. It had been the ambulance’s petrol tank blowing up.

If I hadn’t called Paige to leave the stretcher and bring the first-aid kit, she’d have still been in the ambulance when it hit. But if that was the case—

“We’d only just got it,” Fairchild said, sobbing, “and we’ll never be able to get another one.”

“Nonsense,” Mary said. “This is the Major we’re talking about. If anyone can talk HQ out of another ambulance, she can. I don’t suppose you’ve any money with you, have you?”

“Yes,” Fairchild said, wiping at her eyes. “At least, I do if my shoes made it with me to hospital. Mother insists I always carry a half crown in my shoe. She says I might get in a sticky situation and need to telephone.”

“And she was right,” Mary said, hoping the shoes were in the cupboard between their beds.

They were, and so was the half crown. Mary hid it under her pillow and got back into bed, and the next time the nurse left the ward, she tiptoed out to the telephone box. She rang up Brixton.

“We weren’t in Croydon last night,” they told her.

“But I saw—”

“It must have been Bethnal Green’s ambulance you saw.”

No, it wasn’t, Polly thought, but she rang them up. They hadn’t been at the incident either.

She rang up Croydon, and they promised to go recheck the area where the newspaper office had been, “though the rescue crew went over every inch of it,” the FANY said. Mary asked them what other ambulances had been at the incident, and she said, “Norbury,” but Norbury hadn’t transported anyone of that description either, or seen an ambulance from any other post.

“Except yours,” the Norbury FANY said. “It was difficult to miss. Could this man you’re looking for have been military? If he was, he might have been taken to Orpington.”