retrieval team coming disguised as patients. “Where is he?” He started to swing his feet over the side of the bed, and then remembered he was supposed to still be bedridden.
“I’ll send him in,” Sister Carmody said, and almost immediately the ward doors swung open and a man with a freckled face, a bandaged shoulder, and a cast on his arm came striding jauntily into the ward. It was Hardy.
“Do you remember me?” he said. “Private David Hardy? From Dunkirk?”
“Yes,” Mike said, looking at his cast. I’d hoped you’d died, that you hadn’t had the chance to do any damage.
“I wouldn’t have been surprised if you didn’t remember,” Hardy was saying. “You were pretty badly off. How’s your foot? Did they have to cut it off?”
“No.”
“They didn’t? I thought it’d definitely have to come off,” he said cheerfully. “It looked like bloody hell.”
“How’d you get that?” Mike asked, pointing at Hardy’s cast.
“Dunkirk,” Hardy said. “Messerschmitt. It was coming straight at us, and I dove for the deck and came up hard against the side. Smashed my shoulder blade to bits. That’s why I’m here, to have surgery on it because it’s not healing properly, and the moment I arrived I asked, ‘Is there a patient here who mangled his foot unfouling a propeller at Dunkirk?’ and they said yes. I can’t tell you how glad I was. The hospital in Dover hadn’t any record of your ever having been admitted, even though I’d seen you into the ambulance myself, so I thought you must have died on the way to hospital. And then when they said they were sending me to Orpington, I thought perhaps that was what had happened to you, and here you are. I’m awfully glad I found you. I wanted to thank you for saving my life. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be in a German prison camp. Or worse.”
He beamed at Mike. “And I wanted you to know what a good day’s work you did when you rescued me. As soon as I’d had a hot meal and a sleep, I went back over on the Mary Rose, and then, when she was sunk, the Bonnie Lass. I made four trips altogether and personally got five hundred and nineteen men safely on board and back to Dover.” He grinned happily at Mike. “And all because I saw that light of yours.”
No ships in sight. Something must have gone wrong.
—CAPTAIN JOHN DODD, ROYAL ARTILLERY, AT DUNKIRK, MAY 1940
En route to London—29 September 1940
POLLY’S JOURNEY BACK TO LONDON WAS EVEN WORSE than the one to Backbury had been. The train had no empty seats, and she had to stand squashed in the corridor—the only advantage of which was that she couldn’t fall down when the train swayed or stopped so the inevitable troop trains could pass.
When she changed trains at Daventry, she managed to snag a seat in a compartment, but at the next stop scores of soldiers poured onto the train, all with enormous kit bags which they crammed onto the overhead racks and then, when they were filled, set on the already crowded seats, squashing Polly into a smaller and smaller space.
Colin warned me about the dangers of blast and shrapnel, but not about the possibility of being smothered. Or stabbed to death, she thought, attempting to shift the kit bag on her right, which appeared to have a bayonet in it from the way it was poking her in the side.
And why had the train had to arrive in Backbury on time, today of all days? No other train had been on time during the entire war. If it had been put onto a siding by even a single troop train, she’d have had time to speak to the vicar and find out for certain if Merope had gone back to Oxford.
Of course she’s gone back, she argued. She left when the Army took over the manor. Her assignment had obviously been designed to end then. With everyone leaving, her disappearance wouldn’t even have been noticed. They’d have assumed she’d taken another job or gone home to her family, like the sergeant said. But what if she hadn’t left for Oxford? What if the evacuees had been sent to another village, and Merope’d gone with them?
No, the sergeant had said the children had gone back to London, and even if they’d been sent to another manor, it would have had its own staff to care for them. And the last thing Merope