And he knew too well from being at Notting Hill Gate, on Lampden Road, and in Oxford Street, that being in the same general temporal-spatial location wasn’t enough. He had to know exactly where she was before he went to get her.

And one of these women can tell me that. They’ll have been on the same ambulance crew as Polly or shared the same air-raid shelter or the same flat.

But what if Merope walked through those museum doors? What if he hadn’t rescued Polly and her, and she was still here fifty years later?

If she is, there’s no way she’d come to something like this, he told himself. The war’s the last thing she’d want to be reminded of. But he posted himself next to the doors so he could get a good look at each woman as she came in, bracing himself as they reached the top of the steps and paused to lower their umbrellas and shake the water out of them and he could see their faces for the first time.

The first ones through were all discussing the weather. “What a pity it had to rain today!” one of them said, and the other replied, “But it will be good for my roses. Poor things, they’ve been absolutely parched.”

He wondered if they were here for the exhibition after all. They were the correct age—in their seventies and eighties—and they were all dressed as for a special occasion in frocks and hats—including one enormous one with an entire herbaceous border on it. And one very elderly, very frail-looking lady was wearing white gloves.

But they looked as though they were going to a garden party, not a World War II reunion. And it was impossible to imagine them ever having done anything less genteel than pour tea, let alone put out incendiaries, dig bodies out of rubble, or man anti-aircraft guns.

This isn’t them, he thought. They’re all at St. Paul’s, and this is the Women’s Institute of Upper Matchings on their monthly outing. He was about to turn away when the frail-looking one pointed a white-gloved finger up at the V-1 and said, “Oh, my God, look at that! It’s a doodlebug. One of those chased me all the way down Piccadilly.”

“I do hope it isn’t armed,” the woman who’d come in with her said, and then squealed, “Whitlaw!” and flung her arms around a grim-looking woman. “It’s me! Bridget Flannigan. We were in the same WAAF brigade!”

“Flanners! Oh, my God! I don’t believe it!” And the grim-looking woman broke into a broad smile.

They were clearly the women he was looking for, after all. But another van had arrived, and they were pouring into the lobby too quickly for him now, shaking out their umbrellas, shedding raincoats, talking excitedly. He stood by the door till they were all inside and then made a circuit of the noisy lobby, scanning the faces of the ones he’d missed as they called to one another across the room and greeted each other with cries of delight, oblivious to him as he worked his way through the crowd, searching their faces, looking for Eileen.