the street. “If it was hit, wouldn’t it be burning?”
Yes, Polly thought, but there was no sign of flames, no reddened sky, not even any smoke. The air was damp and clean.
“Are you certain you got the name of the store right?” Eileen asked, her teeth chattering. “It wasn’t Parmenter’s that was hit? Or Peter Robinson?”
“I’m certain,” Polly said.
“Perhaps you got the date wrong,” Eileen suggested, “and it won’t be hit till tomorrow night. Which means I can fetch my coat. And my handbag.” She set off down the dark street.
“Did you?” Mike asked. “Get the date wrong?”
“No. All the Oxford Street raids were implanted. We just can’t see it from here.” Which was true, but they’d be able to see the fire engines and hear the ambulance bells. And see the blue light of the incident officer. “When we get a bit farther down, we’ll see it,” she said firmly and set off after Eileen.
“Or I changed the course of events somehow so it didn’t get hit,” Mike said, limping alongside her. “I didn’t tell you what I did at Dunkirk—”
“It doesn’t matter what you did; historians can’t alter events. Padgett’s was hit by an HE, not an incendiary. They don’t necessarily cause fires, and if it happened early last night, the fire could have been out for hours—”
Ahead of them, Eileen called, “Padgett’s is still there. I can see it,” and Mike took off toward her at an awkward, hobbling run.
It can’t be, Polly thought, racing after and then past him, but it was. Before she’d run halfway she could make out Lyons Corner House in the darkness, still intact, and beyond it the first of Padgett’s pillars.
Eileen was nearly there. Polly ran after her, straining to see through the darkness. There were the rest of Padgett’s pillars, and the building beyond it. No, she thought. It can’t still be there.
It wasn’t. Before she was even to Lyons Corner House, she could see the side wall of the building beyond Padgett’s, half destroyed, and the empty space between it and Lyons.
Eileen had reached the front of the store. “Oh, no,” Polly heard her gasp.
She turned to call back to Mike, “It’s all right. It was hit,” and ran on to the store. Or the space where it had been. The pillars—and beyond them a deep pit—were all that was left. The HE had totally vaporized the department store, which meant it had been a thousand-pounder. And when we read the newspapers tomorrow, it will say that, and that there were three fatalities.
They had strung up rope at the edge of the pavement, blocking off the incident, and Eileen stood motionless just outside it, staring. In relief or shock? Polly couldn’t tell—it was too dark to see the expression on her face.
Polly reached her side. “Look,” Eileen said, pointing, and Polly saw she wasn’t staring at what was left of Padgett’s. She was staring at the glass-strewn pavement between the pillars. And at what Polly hadn’t seen before because it was too dark.
The pavement was strewn with bodies, and there were at least a dozen of them.
Be careful. Should you omit or add one single word, you may destroy the world.
—THE TALMUD
Oxford Street—26 October 1940
POLLY SQUINTED AT THE BODIES SPRAWLED ACROSS THE pavement. Even though she could only just make them out in the darkness, she could see that their arms and legs had been flung into tortured angles.
Mike limped up. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed. “How many are there?”
“I don’t know,” Eileen said. “Are they dead?”
They had to be. It wasn’t light enough to see their faces—or the blood—but it was impossible for necks to turn that far. They had to be dead. But they can’t be, Polly thought. There were only three fatalities. Which meant some of them had to be alive, in spite of the angles of the necks, the severed arm. “Mike, go fetch help!” she said.
He didn’t seem to hear her. He stood there frozen, staring past Polly at the bodies. “I knew it,” he said dully. “This is my fault.”
“Eileen!” Polly said. “Eileen!”
She finally turned, a look of disbelief on her face. “Go back to the station and fetch help,” Polly ordered. “Tell them we need an ambulance.”
Eileen nodded dumbly and stumbled off.
“Mike, I need a pocket torch,” Polly said, and ducked under the rope. She crunched across the broken glass to the bodies, but as she ran she was already processing the scene.
It was all wrong. The bodies should be under the rubble,