and five days late, so I missed the bus and couldn’t get to Dover.” He told her the story of how he’d ended up in Dunkirk. “The slippage was trying to stop me. If I hadn’t gotten on the Lady Jane—”
“But if your being at Dunkirk was going to alter events, it would have stopped you. It would have sent you through after the evacuation. Or to Wales or somewhere. Historians can’t change the course of history. You know that.”
“Then why did you look so horrified when I told you I’d been to Dunkirk?”
Careful, Polly thought. “Because you’d just told me none of our drops were working. And that your retrieval team hadn’t come to pull you out when you were injured. Even if it took them a long time to find you in hospital—”
“No, you don’t understand. They’d never even think to look in hospitals. Nobody knew I’d gone to Dunkirk except the captain of the boat and his grandson, and they were both killed.”
Killed? Polly thought, but he was already hurrying on. “I’d told the people in the village that I was going back to London to file my story, and nobody in the hospital knew who I was. Anyway, the point is, there was no way for the retrieval team to find me.”
“Mike, it’s time travel. No matter how long it took for them to find you, they could still have been there.”
“Not if they’re still looking for me. I’ve spent the last three and a half weeks looking for you in stores on Oxford Street and couldn’t find you. Which store do you work in?”
“Townsend Brothers.”
“I was on every floor of Townsend Brothers twice and never found you, and neither did Merope—I mean, Eileen—and she works four blocks away. And you couldn’t find Eileen even though you went to Backbury.”
“But this is—”
“I know, time travel. And part of time travel is slippage.”
“Five months’ worth?”
“No, just enough for our retrieval teams to lose the trail. If they came through after I was moved from the hospital in Dover or Eileen left for London—”
He was right. They’d have no way of knowing Eileen was working at Padgett’s, and if the hospital hadn’t known who Mike was, they could easily have lost the trail. “But what about all those weeks when Eileen was quarantined?” she asked. “They knew exactly where she was then.”
“I don’t know. Maybe the quarantine was some kind of divergence point. Measles can kill people, right? Maybe the retrieval team wasn’t allowed to come through because they’d have caught the measles and infected some general who played a critical role at D-Day.”
It sounded just like the arguments she’d used these last few weeks as she’d tried to convince herself they’d be here any day. She wondered if that was what Mike was doing, trying to convince himself. And it still didn’t explain the drops.
“I never said mine wasn’t working,” Mike said. “I just said I couldn’t get to it. And the same goes for Eileen’s. If there were evacuees in the woods, they could have kept it from opening, or someone from the village could have—”
There was a pounding on the door below them. “Stay here,” Mike said and ran down to see who was knocking.
It was Eileen. “I only had enough money for sandwiches and two teas,” Polly heard her say. “But I thought we could share.” She heard them start up the stairs. “The queue was endless.”
Polly waited where she was, thinking over what Mike had said. If there’d been two or three days’ slippage on her team’s drop, they’d have come through before she found a job, and when they went to Townsend Brothers, they’d have been told she didn’t work there. And they wouldn’t have been able to find her at night because she was at St. George’s rather than a tube shelter. Mike was right. They might still be looking for her.
Eileen came up the stairs, carrying oiled-paper-wrapped sandwiches, followed by Mike with cartons of tea. “Cheese sandwiches were the cheapest thing they had,” she said, passing them out. “What happened to you, Mike? Why didn’t you come?”
“Polly and I were discussing what we’re going to do.”
“Which is what?” Eileen said, unwrapping her sandwich and taking a huge bite out of it.
“Well, first we’re going to eat our supper.” He took the lid off the carton of tea.
“And you’re going to tell me how you got shanghaied,” Eileen said, “and, Polly, you’re going to tell me why you told me Padgett’s