“Polly. Polly Sebastian.”

“Sebastian …,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I don’t remember anyone by that name in the FANYs. But I know whom you should ask. Goody. Mrs. Lambert,” she explained. “She’s our group’s historian, and she knows everyone who worked in the Blitz.”

“Which one is she?”

“I don’t see her,” Talbot said, looking round the room. “She’s medium height, gray hair, rather stout.” Which described three-quarters of the women he’d seen this morning. “I know she’s here somewhere. Browne will know.”

She dragged him over to a gray-haired woman peering through her spectacles at a parachute mine. “Browne, where’s Goody Two-Shoes, do you know?”

“She’s not here. She had to do something in the City this morning, I don’t know what, but she said she’d come as soon as she’d finished with whatever it was.”

“Oh, dear,” Talbot said. “This young man is looking for someone who might have known his grandmother.”

“Oh. What did your grandmother do in the war?” Browne asked, and he went through the entire rigamarole again.

“Were you an ambulance driver?” he asked her.

“No, an RAF plotter. So I was only in London for the first two months of the Blitz. You said your grandmother worked at Townsend Brothers. So did Pudge. That’s her over there in the green dress,” she said, pointing at a thin, birdlike woman looking at a display of clothing ration books.

But Pudge, whose name tag read Pauline Rainsford, had worked at Padgett’s, not Townsend Brothers. “Till it was hit,” she said matter-of-factly, “at which point I decided I might as well be in the armed services, and I volunteered to be a Wren.”

“Do you know of anyone who did work at Townsend Brothers?” he asked.

“No, but I know who you should ask. Mrs. Lambert. She’s our group’s historian.”

“I was told she wasn’t here.”

“She’s not,” Pudge said, “but she’s coming. In fact, I expected her here already. I’ll let you know as soon as she arrives, and in the meantime, you can ask the others. Hatcher!” she called to an elegant elderly woman in tweeds and pearls. “You were in London during the Blitz, weren’t you?”

“No. Bletchley Park,” she said, coming over, “which was not nearly as romantic as the historians make it sound. It was mostly drudgery, sorting through thousands upon thousands of combinations, looking for one that might work.”

Like the last eight years of my life, he thought, calculating coordinate after coordinate, searching for clues, trying to find a drop that would open.

“Do you know of anyone who was in London during the Blitz?” Pudge was asking Hatcher.

“Yes,” she said, pointing at two women looking at a display of war posters. “York and Chedders were.”

But neither York nor Chedders—Barbara Chedwick, according to her name tag—remembered a Polly Sebastian, and neither did any of the other women they passed him on to.

“There was a Polly in our troupe,” a large woman whose name tag read “Cora Holland” said.