“Do you remember what they looked like?”

“No, aside from their being extremely grubby.” He squinted, attempting to call up a picture. “The boy might have been seven and the girl—”

He stopped and looked at Polly. “You believe it was Alf and Binnie, don’t you?”

“No, I know it was. They told me,” she said, and at Mr. Dunworthy’s doubtful look, “You forget, it only happened seven months ago as far as they’re concerned, not fifty years. They don’t know it was you they ran into, though. How long did you stand there, speaking to them and the guard?”

“Five minutes, perhaps. Not long.”

“But long enough that if they’d told you straight out where you were instead of trying to get money out of you, you wouldn’t have collided with the Wren.” She leaned forward. “On the night we were looking for John Bartholomew, Eileen saw him and ran after him, but she wasn’t able to catch him because Alf and Binnie jumped in front of her. And they were what kept her from going back to Oxford on the last day of her assignment.”

“I don’t understand. You think Alf and Binnie are somehow responsible for that, and for what I did? That it’s their fault and not mine? But if I hadn’t come through, if I hadn’t decided to go see St. Paul’s, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Exactly,” Polly said. “Listen. Because they kept Eileen from going back through to Oxford, she was there to save their lives at least once and possibly more than that.” She told him about the measles and the City of Benares.

“And they repaid her by keeping her from catching John Bartholomew?”

“Yes,” Polly said eagerly. “And because they delayed her, when she did go after him she was waylaid by a fire captain and forced into driving a bombing victim to St. Bart’s. She saved that bombing victim’s life, and Mike saved Hardy’s life, and last night I saved Sir Godfrey’s.”

“And you think those people went on to do something important in the war?” Mr. Dunworthy asked. “What?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps someone went to see the pantomime Sir Godfrey’s going to put on, and their house was bombed while they were at the theater. Or your Wren’s RAF plotting saved some pilot’s life, and he went on to do bombing runs over Berlin. Or the naval officer who stopped to help your Wren torpedoed a U-boat or captured the Enigma codebooks or sank the Bismarck. Or one of them affected someone else who did something. We know Hardy brought back five hundred and nineteen soldiers from Dunkirk. And those soldiers could each have—”

“And you think this is all part of some grand plan?”

“Yes. No. Not a plan, but … the thing is, it wasn’t an accident that I was performing at the Alhambra, and it wasn’t an accident that Sir Godfrey was at the Phoenix.” She told him about her shoe and ENSA and Mrs. Sentry at the Works Board seeing her in A Christmas Carol and what Sir Godfrey had told her about his decision not to join the touring company and go to Bristol.