“Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve made a dreadful mistake,” she said, just as Ann had. “I thought—”

“You didn’t make a mistake,” he said dully. “I’m Colin.”

“Colin Templer?”

He nodded.

“Oh, good,” Eileen said. “I was afraid for a moment I’d got the wrong man. It’s been so many years since I saw you.” She glanced toward the gift shop. Three chattering women were headed their way from it with bags full of parcels. “Come, let’s go find somewhere quiet where we can talk.” She led him back into the Blitz exhibit and over to the door marked “Air Raid Shelter.”

She opened the door, took a swift look around, and pushed him through it. Inside was a replica of an Underground station platform. Mannequins sat along the curved tile walls and lay on the floor wrapped in blankets.

Eileen shut the door. “This is perfect,” she said over the muffled sound of a bomb. She sat down on a bench and patted the seat beside her.

He sat down.

“Now, then,” she said, and beamed at him.

And how can she? he thought. Knowing how I failed her? “Eileen,” he said helplessly. “Merope, I am so sorry—”

She looked up at him in surprise. “Oh, Colin, I am sorry. I recognized you, so I suppose I thought you’d recognize me, but I was forgetting you haven’t met me yet.”

Haven’t met—

“And even if you had, it’s been over fifty years. I should have told you straightaway.” There was another explosion and a flash of red light. “I’m not Eileen. I mean, I am, but not Eileen O’Reilly.”

Hope leaped in Colin. This wasn’t Eileen, which meant there was still a chance he could get them out. And if this Eileen knew where they were—

“I should have started at the beginning,” she said. “I’m Binnie Hodbin. My brother, Alf, and I were evacuees. We were sent to the manor where M—where Eileen worked as a maid.”

Alf and Binnie Hodbin, the children everyone had remembered because they were such terrors. And apparently Alf still was, since he was “detained” at the Old Bailey. Was that merely a polite way of saying he was under arrest? Or worse?

But this made no sense. Binnie had been a child during the war. “But the women said you drove an ambulance,” he said.

“I did. During the V-1 and V-2 attacks.”

“But you’d only have been—”

“Fifteen,” she said. “I lied about my age.”

And that certainly went with what he’d been told about the Hodbins. And now that he looked more closely at her, she was obviously younger than the other women. “But you said your name was Eileen—”

“It is. Binnie wasn’t a real name—it was short for Hodbin. So, since I hadn’t any name of my own, Eileen said I could choose any name I wanted, and that’s the name I chose. And then after the war, when Mum—I mean, Eileen—and Dad legally adopted us, that was the name that was put down.”