“So you came here to find someone who might have known her, so they could tell you where she was,” Binnie said.

“Yes.” He didn’t mention all the months he’d spent searching National Service and Civil Defence records looking for their names after Michael had told him Polly and Eileen had been planning to sign up, or all the years before that that he’d spent sitting in libraries and newspaper morgues trying to find out if they were still alive, and calculating coordinates for drop after failed drop, and attempting to convince Badri and Linna that rescue was possible, and meeting with Dr. Ishiwaka and every other time-travel theorist he could corner, trying to find out what the bloody hell had gone wrong.

“Alf said he was certain it had happened at one of the anniversary celebrations,” Binnie was saying.

“Wait,” Colin said. “Didn’t Eileen tell you I’d be here today?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand,” Colin said. “Why not?”

“Because she didn’t know where you’d be. All she knew was that at some point she’d told you where they were, and that that was how you’d known where to come.”

“But—”

“She said she didn’t need to know, that she’d be able to find you because she had found you,” Binnie said, and smiled. “Mum was always rather an optimist. Even when she found out about the cancer, she told us, ‘You mustn’t worry. It will all come right in the end.’ When she died I was afraid something had gone wrong, but Alf said it couldn’t have because then you couldn’t have come, so it was up to us to make it happen.” She beamed at him. “And we did.”

“But I still don’t understand. How did you and your brother know I’d be here on this particular date?”

“We didn’t. We’ve been looking for you ever since Mum died.”

“Ever since—”

She nodded. “At first we concentrated on Notting Hill Gate Underground Station and Oxford Street, and, of course, Denewell Manor—it’s a school now—but it was too much territory to cover, even with Michael and Mary—”

“Who?”

“Michael’s my son, and Mary’s my sister—half-sister really, though I never think of her that way.”

“She’s Eileen’s daughter?”

“I’m sorry, I keep thinking you know all this. Mum—Eileen—married the—”

There was a loud screaming swish and the sound of an explosion. The shelter walls shook, and a bright white light flashed on, simulating the flash from the bomb. It went to yellow and then red, bathing the shelter and Binnie’s face in an eerie light.

“Eileen married—?” Colin prompted her, shouting over the noise.

Binnie didn’t answer. She was staring at him with an odd look on her face, as if she’d just realized something.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he said, wondering if the sounds had triggered some traumatic memory. “Are you all right?”

“How strange,” she murmured. “I wonder if she …? That would explain …”

“You wonder if she what? Who? Eileen? What is it?”

She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Nothing. I keep forgetting you don’t know anything that’s happened. Eileen married shortly after the war, and they had two children. Besides Alf and me, I mean. Godfrey, that’s her son, assisted us as well, but even with all of us looking, we hadn’t any luck, and then Alf said, ‘We’ve got to think about this from Colin’s point of view. Where would he look?’ And that was when it occurred to us that you’d go where people who were in the Blitz were likely to be, and luckily that was just before the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s beginning, and—”