“No, you won’t,” Polly said. “I can’t face it either. The play’s over, so there’s no rehearsal tonight. As soon as Mike phones, we’ll go to Holborn’s canteen and have sandwiches.”
“What if he doesn’t phone?”
“We’ll wait till seven—he’ll expect us to have left for Notting Hill Gate by then—and then go. And while you’re waiting, you can think about whether you’ll order a cheese sandwich or fish paste.”
“Both,” Eileen said happily, and went off to sit on the stairs with Murder in the Calais Coach so she could hear the phone. Polly ironed her blouse and skirt for work and worried about Mike’s failure to call. And about the retrieval team and Colin and her deadline and discrepancies.
It can’t be all of them, she told herself sternly. They’re mutually exclusive. If it’s increased slippage that’s keeping your drops from opening, then you can’t have altered events and the retrieval teams can’t come through, so they can’t be buried in the rubble at Padgett’s or your drop. And if they are, then the drops must be working again, so you didn’t lose the war, and you needn’t worry about your deadline. You can worry about one or the other, but not all of them at once.
Unless they were connected. Unless the slippage had increased because they’d altered events, and the net was ensuring that other historians didn’t make the discrepancies worse.
No, that wouldn’t work. The increase had happened before Mike rescued Hardy and before she’d come through to the Blitz. And before Gerald had gone to Bletchley Park. And it couldn’t have been anything she did before because she’d been able to go back through to Oxford after VE-Day. And Eileen had—
“It’s seven,” Eileen said, coming back upstairs.
Polly insisted they wait another half hour, and then they went off to Holborn, after first extracting a promise from Miss Laburnum to take down any messages for them and promising in turn to try to find a suitable candle for the Ghost of Christmas Past’s crown.
“And a green fur-lined cloak for the Ghost of Christmas Present,” Miss Laburnum said.
“If I had a green fur-lined cloak, I’d wear it myself,” Eileen said as they walked over to Notting Hill Gate. “My coat isn’t half warm enough for this horrid weather.
And black is so grim.”
“Everyone’s wearing black,” Polly snapped. “There’s a war on. And no one has a new coat. Everyone’s making do.”
“I didn’t…,” Eileen said, turning puzzled eyes on her. “I was joking.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Polly said. “It’s only—”
“You’re worried about Mike,” she said. “I know. He knew you were busy with the play. He probably didn’t want to distract you by phoning.”
Distract me? Polly thought bitterly.
“I’m sure he’ll ring us tomorrow.” Eileen linked her arm through Polly’s and chattered the rest of the way to Holborn about how wonderful the play had been and how hungry she was and about Agatha Christie.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I actually saw her? She lived in London during the war and worked as a dispenser in the hospitals. Unfortunately, she won’t be in the tube shelters. She had an irrational fear of being buried alive.”
Not all that irrational, Polly thought, remembering Marble Arch. And Marjorie.
But it was a pity they had no chance of encountering her. They could have used her help, though Polly doubted whether even Agatha Christie could solve The Mystery of the Drops Which Wouldn’t Open.
“I wonder if she took the tube to work,” Eileen said. “If she—here’s our stop—if she did, we might see her on her way home.”
They got off the train.
“I do hope the queue for the canteen isn’t very long,” Eileen said, starting through the clot of passengers getting off and on and down the platform past a band of urchins up to no good, toward a group of young women in FANY uniforms.
Polly stopped.
“Come along, I’m starving,” Eileen said, beckoning to her.
A sailor passed, going the other way. Polly turned and walked swiftly after him along the platform as the train pulled out and then, as she reached the safety of the archway, looked back.
Eileen was coming after her, pushing through the FANYs, calling “Polly!”
She hurried through the arch and along the tunnel to the hall and onto the escalator.
“Where are you going?” Eileen asked breathlessly, catching up to her halfway up.
“I thought I saw someone,” Polly said.
“Who? Agatha Christie?”
“No, an historian. Jack Sorkin.”
“I thought he was in the Pacific.”
“I know, but I could have sworn …,” Polly said.
They reached the top of the escalator. Polly looked around at the crowd, frowning. “Oh, it isn’t him, after all,” she said, pointing at a sailor on the far side of the hall.
“Too bad.”
“It’s all right,” Eileen said. “We can still go to the canteen.” She started over to the escalator to go back down.
“Wait, I’ve just had a brilliant idea,” Polly said. “Let’s go to Lyons Corner House instead.”
“Lyons?” Eileen repeated doubtfully. “Why?”
“There aren’t any raids tonight. They’re bombing Bristol. We can have a proper meal, and you can tell me all about Murder in the Whatever It Is.”
“The Calais Coach,” Eileen said. “Do you think they may have bacon at Lyons? Or eggs?”
They had both, and tea that didn’t taste like dishwater. And pudding that didn’t taste like wallpaper paste.
“That was the most wonderful meal I’ve ever had,” Eileen said blissfully on the train home. “I’m glad you thought you saw Jack.”
“You were going to tell me about Murder in the Calais Coach,” Polly said.
“Oh. Yes. It’s wonderful. Everyone has a motive for the crime, and you think, ‘It can’t be all of them. It’s got to be one or the other,’ but then it turns out … but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Would you care to borrow it? I’m sure the librarian at Holborn wouldn’t mind if I kept it a bit longer.”
Polly wasn’t listening. She was thinking about the slippage and their altering events. “Eileen,” she asked, “did Linna or Badri say anything about what was causing the increase in slippage?”
“No, not that I remember,” Eileen said, and when they got back to their room, she handed Polly a sheet of paper. “Here, I wrote down everything I could remember, the way you and Mike told me to.”
On the sheet was scrawled, “G had umbrella, ddn’t offer it—Badri wking console—Linna on tphne—mad abt. Bastille—L sd she kn R of T first.”
“What’s R of T?”
“The Reign of Terror. Linna was talking to this person on the telephone about the lab changing whoever it was’s drop to the storming of the Bastille, and the person on the other end was obviously angry, and she said, ‘I know you were scheduled to go to the Reign of Terror first.’ But she didn’t say anything about slippage to them.”
Whoever it was had been scheduled to do the Reign of Terror, and they’d changed it so he or she went to the storming of the Bastille. Which had happened before the Reign of Terror.
“Where was Mike going before his assignment got changed to Dunkirk?” she asked Eileen. “Was it Pearl Harbor?”
“I don’t know. I believe so. They’d changed his entire schedule.”