promised to cover for Polly. And without telling anyone. But perhaps she’d been afraid if she told people, they’d attempt to talk her out of it—or say she’d lost her nerve and was running away—so she’d waited till Polly was gone and the store was especially busy to slip away.
If Merope had been in Backbury, you’d have disappeared just as precipitiously, Polly told herself. As you will now if your drop opens.
But it didn’t. It didn’t open the next morning either, or that night. Which meant either the divergence point was still occurring, or her drop had been damaged after all. But even if it had and the retrieval team had to come through somewhere else, they might still come here looking for clues to her whereabouts.
She scribbled her name and “Townsend Brothers” on a scrap of paper, folded it, and wedged it half under the peeling black door and, after work the next day, ran up to Alterations and stole a piece of French chalk.
It rained that night, preventing her from going back to the drop, so she went to Holborn and, on the pretext of borrowing an Agatha Christie mystery from the lending library, told the frizzy-haired librarian all about the acting troupe and The Admirable Crichton, mentioning her own name twice and Notting Hill Gate three times. “I work at Townsend Brothers in the stockings department during the day,” she said, “so acting makes a nice change. You must come see our play. We’re on the northbound District Line platform.”
She did the same thing at work the next day on her lunch and tea breaks. After work she wrote her address and Mrs. Rickett’s phone number on the back of her sales receipt book and, although it was still misting slightly, went to the drop.
She’d forgotten about the men clearing the site. She had to crouch in the same alley in which she’d hidden from the warden till the last workman left before scrambling over what was left of the mound of rubble to the passage.
The only footprints were the ones she’d made last time, and her note was still there. Polly retrieved it and took out the piece of chalk she’d stolen, then stood there a moment, looking at the door, deciding what message to leave. She couldn’t write what she wanted—“Help! I’m stranded in 1940. Come get me.” Just because the workmen hadn’t found the passage yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
Instead, she chalked, “For a good time, ring Polly,” and Mrs. Rickett’s telephone number on the door, and down in the corner—where it would only be noticed by someone expressly looking for it—the barred-circle symbol of the Underground and “Notting Hill Gate.” She went out into the passage, drew an arrow on the barrel nearest the steps, then squatted down and wrote on the side facing the wall, “Polly Sebastian, Townsend Brothers,” and the address of the boardinghouse, and then sat down on the steps and waited a full hour, just in case the drop was operational now.
It apparently wasn’t. She gave it ten more minutes and then went out to the alley, rubbed out her footprints, sprinkled plaster dust over the floor, and scrawled “Sebastian Was Here” on the warehouse wall above “London kan take it,” and went to Notting Hill Gate.
Miss Laburnum met her at the top of the escalator. “Did the young woman find you?” she asked.
Polly’s heart began to thud. “What young woman?”
“She didn’t tell me her name. She said she’d come from Townsend Brothers. What do you think, white lace for Lady Mary in act one, and then blue for the shipwrecked scenes? I always think blue shows up nicely onstage—”
“Where did she go?” Polly said, looking around at the crowd. “The young woman?”
“Oh, dear, I don’t know. She… oh, there she is.”
It was Doreen. She was red-faced and out of breath. “Oh, Polly,” she gasped, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s Marjorie. Her landlady telephoned Miss Snelgrove just after you left—Marjorie wasn’t in Bath after all.”
“What do you mean?” Polly demanded. “Where was she?”
“In Jermyn Street,” Doreen said, and burst into tears. “When it was bombed.”
Danger: Land Mines
—NOTICE ON ENGLISH BEACH, 1940
War Emergency Hospital—September 1940
HARDY STOOD THERE BY MIKE’S BED, BEAMING AT HIM. “You’ve got five hundred and nineteen lives saved to your credit,” he said, a grin on his freckled face. “That’s a war record to be proud of.”
If I didn’t lose the war, Mike thought sickly. If one of those men it’s my fault were saved