When Louisa came down for Jane’s breakfast tray on Friday morning, there was me standing at the bar picking at a bowl of porridge I would never eat if it were the last bowl of porridge on this earth. There was Nancy, banging cups about as usual, but not so usual was that she hadn’t combed her hair—the hairgrips she fixed in it yesterday were sliding out and she’d not noticed. Elisabeth Lind sat at the table by the fire with her neb in a newspaper, studying the personal notices as if she were swotting for an examination. She turned the page and it covered her own untouched porridge, the paper making a wee camp tent over the spoon stuck out of the bowl. When Louisa came in, Sergeant Lind looked to see who it was and then looked straight back at her newspaper as if she were clockwork instead of flesh and blood.

I knew she must be dying inside. But we couldn’t weep in each other’s arms as we’d have done in peacetime. We had to play her stupid game of pretend.

“What’s going on?” Louisa asked.

“Policemen, firemen, Germans, whatnot, I don’t know,” said Nan, sounding angrier than usual.

That was yesterday’s news and we all knew it. Dietrich Althammer had been carried away last night, but the room he’d died in was still a dog’s breakfast. They’d found how he escaped: when the rescue crew broke into his prison from the front, the old chimney was open to the sky above a heap of earth and broken stone and bricks and snow. The bomb debris had not hurt him, nor trapped him, and he’d scarpered up the chimney and lain hidden among the ruined pine trees on the ridge before creeping into the Limehouse.

Nancy didn’t answer Louisa, and I couldn’t speak, so that left Elisabeth Lind to tell her.

“The young men from 648 Squadron ran into trouble last night,” Sergeant Lind said carefully, not looking up, turning another page. “Two planes confirmed down in B-Flight, and the rest are missing. ‘Failed to return’ is how they report it.”

Louisa met my eyes. I shook my head.

She put her face in her hands. I saw her swallow, but she couldn’t speak. I knew what she wanted to ask.

“Jamie made a radio call to Rob Lucknow in A-Flight while the party was going on,” I told her, though I felt like my own voice would choke me. “He told Rob that Madeira was two down and that A-Flight should clear off before the Messers got wind there were more Blenheims about. A-Flight got back all right, but that was the last we heard from any of the others.”

“What do you mean, ‘any of the others’?” Louisa croaked. “Pimms and Madeira both? But it’s broad daylight!”