“As I told Trot,” Sir Godfrey said dryly, “take it up with the author. Again. From the beginning. We are going to get this right if it kills me. Which it may very well do. Unless the Luftwaffe gets me first.” He looked up at the ceiling. “The raids seem rather excessive tonight.”

They did, but they began and ended when they were supposed to and hit the correct targets, and there was nothing in Sir Godfrey’s Times the next night about security breaches or captured spies, though Mike hadn’t phoned again.

Tuesday there was a letter for Eileen. “Is it from Mike?” Polly asked. Perhaps he had decided to write instead of phoning.

“No, it’s from the vicar, Mr. Goode,” Eileen said, smiling. She opened it and began to read. “Oh, no, he says he’s writing with bad news … But that can’t be right …”

“What can’t?”

“He says Lady Caroline’s son’s been killed, but it was Lord Denewell—”

“Read the letter,” Polly ordered.

“ ‘Dear Miss O’Reilly, I am writing with sad news. Lady Caroline’s son was killed on the thirteenth of November.’ ”

So it couldn’t have been an error in the death notice the vicar had read. Lord Denewell had been killed on the second.

“ ‘His plane was shot down over Berlin,’ ” Eileen went on, “ ‘during a bombing run.’ ”

It’s a discrepancy, Polly thought, a chill going through her. The son was killed instead of the father.

“ ‘This is such sad news,’ ” Eileen read on, “ ‘coming as it does so soon after Lord Denewell’s death.’ ”

So it wasn’t a discrepancy, after all, only a horrible coincidence of the war, and she should have felt reassured, but that night after rehearsal, as she and Eileen composed more messages for the retrieval team, she found herself looking through the newspapers for possible discrepancies, and the next morning she told Eileen she had to be at work early to tidy the workroom and went to Westminster Abbey to see if it had been hit.

It had, and the damage to Henry VII’s chapel and the Tudor windows and the Little Cloisters matched that which she’d read of during her prep. You didn’t alter events, she told herself. The drops won’t open because there’s been an increase in slippage. That’s why your retrieval team’s not here. Unless Mike was right, and they’re in the wreckage of Padgett’s.

Just because the three fatalities had turned out to be charwomen didn’t mean there couldn’t be other bodies buried in that pit. Or in the wreckage opposite her drop. The retrieval team could have come looking for her that night that she was trapped in Holborn. They could have been leaving her drop to look for her just as the parachute mine exploded. No one would have had any idea they were there. Like Marjorie. If the warden hadn’t heard her, no one would have ever thought to look for her there in the rubble in Jermyn Street.