Boscombe Down. Could that be the name of Gerald’s airfield? It was two words, one beginning with a B and one beginning with a D. It had to be it.

She’d expected to need to spend the entire day tracking down the information about the casualties, but now that she’d solved both her problems, she could actually do what she’d told Eileen she intended to do and go visit Marjorie. It would mean one less lie she could be caught in.

But it wasn’t ten yet, and at any rate she couldn’t go in the front door when she was supposed to be hurrying off to tell her Padgett’s friend that James Dunworthy was all right.

She knew which ward Marjorie was in from when she’d attempted to visit before, so she wouldn’t need to ask, but if the admitting nurse saw her going up …

She found the emergency entrance and waited out of sight till an ambulance pulled in, bells clanging, and began to unload patients, and then walked purposefully past them and the attendants coming out to help.

From there, she darted up the first flight of stairs she saw to the fourth floor, and into Marjorie’s ward. And found she needn’t have gone to all the trouble of inquiring after a fictitious patient to find out what she needed to know. She could have simply asked Marjorie.

“I was wrong about five people being killed. There were only three,” Marjorie said, sitting propped against her pillows, her arm in a sling. “None of them worked at Padgett’s. They’ve no idea who they were or what they were doing there. Like me. If I’d been killed, no one would have known what I was doing in Jermyn Street either.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I went to meet Tom,” she said, and at Polly’s blank look she explained, “the airman I told you about. He’d been after me to go away with him, and I wouldn’t, but then when you were nearly killed at St. George’s, I thought, why not? I might be killed tomorrow. I’ve got to snatch at life while I can.”

Polly’s heart began to pound. “You changed your mind because of me?”

“Yes. When I saw you that morning, your skirt torn and your face all covered in plaster, it brought it home to me that you might have died—that I could die at any moment. And that working at Townsend’s would have been all there was to my life. And I decided I wasn’t going to die without ever doing anything, so the next time Tom came in—it was the Friday you went to see your mother—I told him I’d go away with him.”

And when she went to meet him, she’d been hit, buried, nearly killed. And I did it, Polly thought. I’m the one who put her there.

She’d been assuring Mike that he hadn’t saved Hardy, that Hardy would have seen the boat even without Mike’s pocket torch or been rescued by some other boat, but there was no other reason why Marjorie would have been in Jermyn Street that Friday night. No other reason for her broken arm and cracked ribs, for her having spent all those hours in the rubble, for her nearly having been killed.