“You look like a statue!”

Lockhart looked down at himself. His uniform had turned entirely gray.

“So I do! So do you in fact! Christ, that was close! Where did it land?”

Together they turned to look back up the street. Lockhart couldn’t believe it.

“Am I right in thinking…” he began.

“Yes,” Leni interrupted. “Yes you are! I don’t believe it!”

She smiled at him.

“You know,” she said, “I never liked that flat.”

Almost a year and a half had passed before he heard any news of her. Between the collapse of Holland in May 1940 and the day when he received the phone call in November 1941, Lockhart had woken every morning under the assumption that Anna might have been killed in the German advance. But throughout the course of each day, he tried to convince himself that she had survived, and that it was impossible for her to send out any news. Some days he succeeded in this attempt, and almost slept normally, but the majority of the nights were broken by his sudden awakening in the small hours. His subconscious told him that she had to be dead, that she would have found a way to let him and Amy know that she was still with them, that the fact that she hadn’t could only mean one thing.

Lockhart entrusted Amy to Anna’s sister Elspeth a month after Anna’s disappearance. He was spending nearly every day up in London, and was finding it increasingly difficult to find any time—or petrol—to get back to Oxford. There was no room in the flat in Pimlico for a child and a nanny, so the only option was to let Amy grow up with her cousins. Anna’s sister had two children, both a little older than Amy, and as they lived in South Kensington, Lockhart was in fact able to see Amy more often than he would have done had she been back in Oxford.

He buried himself in his work at the Ministry. Although much of it was boring and routine, it proved a good distraction. Had his colleagues known him better, they would have remarked that he had become more withdrawn, more introverted. As it was, his charm and good nature—even at a low ebb—were far in excess of the level of those two qualities displayed by the somewhat dusty types that normally inhabited the corridors of the Ministry.

The call came one morning in the middle of November. It had just been announced that the Ark Royal had sunk near Gibraltar, and everybody’s spirits, including Lockhart’s, were especially low. He had slept particularly badly the night before, and he answered the phone in the office with a yawned hello.

“Charming!” said the voice at the end of the line. “That’s no way to treat a friend with some very good news.”