She would have to persuade Mike that she should be the one to go to Padgett’s. “Mr. Fetters is less likely to recognize me than Eileen or you,” she could tell him, “especially if I change my clothes and put my hair up. I can tell him I was waiting outside for Eileen and saw people go in just as the store closed.”

But when she tried to persuade him, waking him up before the all clear so the sleeping Eileen wouldn’t hear, he insisted on going himself.

“But shouldn’t I show you where the drop is first?” Polly asked. “If it’s working, you can go through and tell Oxford to send a team disguised as rescue workers.”

He shook his head. “We’ll go to Padgett’s first and then the drop.”

“But what will we tell Eileen?”

He finally agreed to take Eileen back to Mrs. Rickett’s, tell her the two of them were going to the drop, and then go to Padgett’s.

Which created a whole new problem. If they left now, they’d run straight into the troupe, and Miss Laburnum would almost certainly say something about the five fatalities.

“We need to wait here till everyone’s gone so they don’t see us leaving the emergency staircase,” she said. “Once they realize it’s not locked, all sorts of people will want to use it. And we should let Eileen sleep, poor thing. I doubt if she’s had a good night’s rest since she came to London.”

“All right,” he said, and agreed to let Eileen sleep another half hour, during which Polly hoped he’d fall asleep and she could go find out alone. But he didn’t, and after they’d walked Eileen home and Polly had got her safely upstairs without seeing anyone, he insisted on going straight to Padgett’s, even though it had begun to rain again. And there was nothing for it but to go with him and hope a rescue crew was digging, or Mike might insist on going down into the pit himself.

But a crew was there, at least a dozen men hard at work with picks and shovels in spite of the rain, and the incident officer had just come on duty and didn’t know if they’d recovered any victims or not. “But they must think there are some of them under there,” he said when Mike told him he’d seen three people going in. “Or they wouldn’t be working like that.”

Which seemed to satisfy Mike, at least for the moment, and when Polly said they needed to go now or they’d run into people on their way to church—which was true, even though St. George’s was no longer there; the rector was conducting services at St. Bidulphus’s—Mike agreed to leave the dig and let her take him to the drop.

She felt guilty over it—it was raining harder than ever, and even with the Burberry Miss Laburnum had got him, he’d freeze sitting on the cold steps. But she had to have time to find out the truth about the fatalities.