He caught snatches of their conversations as he moved among them:

“No, she couldn’t come, poor dear. Her rheumatism, you know …”

“Are you still married to your American—what was his name? Jack?”

“Jack? Lord, no, I’ve had two husbands since then …”

“… were not, you were a dreadful driver. Remember that poor American admiral you ran over?”

“He wasn’t an admiral! He was only a commander, and he had no business looking the wrong way like that. If Americans drove on the proper side of the road, they’d know which way to look when they were crossing …”

“Ladies!” a large, florid-faced woman with iron-gray hair in front of the door to the museum shouted. “Ladies!” She was holding name badges and a sheet of gold stars. “Ladies! Attention please!” she cried, to no avail. The women were intent on locating old friends, finding familiar faces.

Like I am, he thought, working his way past the name-badge woman and over to the corner where the four women he hadn’t got a close look at yet were passing around snapshots, he assumed of children and grandchildren. He pulled out his notebook and pretended to take notes on the V-1 and the Spitfire while he scanned their faces.

Don’t let any of them be Merope, he prayed.

They were all huddled over the snapshots, their faces hidden, and it took several moments before they raised them again and he was able to see their faces.

Merope wasn’t here. That meant he hadn’t failed, at least not yet, that there was still time to find someone who could tell him where Polly was after March 1941, and he could find her and Merope and pull them both out. And this was the place to find that someone. These women had all done war work, and most of them would have been in London during the Blitz. One of them was bound to have known Polly.

Beginning with the group he’d just been watching. They’d finished looking at the snapshots and were discussing the war.

He edged nearer to hear what they were saying and to find a way to insinuate himself into the conversation. “Do you remember when we went to that dance at Biggin Hill?” the one who’d been passing around the snapshots was asking the woman next to her. “And that RAF pilot—what was his name?”

“Flight Officer Boyd. I certainly do. He kept begging me to go out to see his plane,” she said, even though it was difficult to believe any man had ever begged her to go anywhere. She was a stout, washed-out-looking woman, and her face was a railway map of wrinkles. “And I said good girls didn’t go out alone in the dark with men they’d only just met, and he said there was a war on and we might both be dead by tomorrow—”

“Original,” the woman next to her said.

“My particular favorite was ‘It’s your patriotic duty,’ ” a third woman said, and the others nodded. “Think of it as doing your bit.”