The only way to find out was to get off the beach. Which he needed to do anyway. If he was when and where he was supposed to be, the locals would think he was a German spy who’d just been put ashore by a U-boat and arrest him. Or shoot him. He needed to get out of here before full light. He put on his coat, brushed the sand off his trousers, peered over the rock in both directions, and then climbed out of the rock. He turned and looked up at the cliff. There was no one on top of it—at least the part he could see—and no way off the beach. And no way to tell which way Dover lay. He flipped a mental coin and set off toward the northern end, keeping close under the cliff so he couldn’t be seen from above and looking for a path.
A few hundred yards from the rock he found one—a narrow zigzag cut into the chalk cliff. He sprinted up it, halting just short of the top to reconnoiter, but there was no one on its grassy top. He turned and looked out across the Channel, but even from up here he couldn’t spot any ships. And no sign of smoke on the horizon.
And no farmhouses, no livestock, not even any fences, only the white gravel road he’d thought he might be on when he came through last night. I’m in the middle of nowhere, he thought.
But he couldn’t be. The entire southeast coast of England had been dotted with fishing villages. There’s got to be one somewhere near here, he thought, heading south to see what lay beyond the other headland. But if so, why hadn’t he heard any church bells last night or this morning? Let’s just hope there is a village. And that it’s within walking distance.
It was. A huddle of stone buildings lay immediately beyond the headland, and beyond them a quay with a line of masted boats. There was a church, too. With a bell tower. The cliffs must have cut off the sound of the bells. He started down the road toward the village, keeping an eye out for a car he could hitch a ride in or, if he was lucky, the bus to Dover, but no vehicle of any kind came along the road the entire way.
It’s too early to be up and around, he thought, and that went for the village, too. Its lone shop was closed, and so was the pub—the Crown and Anchor—and no one was on the street. He walked down to the quay, thinking the fishermen would likely be up, but there was no one there either. And though he walked out beyond the last house, there was no train station. And no bus stop. He walked back to the shop and peered in through the window, looking for either a bus schedule or something that would tell him which village this was. If he was really six miles north of Dover, it might be faster to walk it than wait for a bus. But the only sign he could see was a schedule for the Empress Cinema, which was showing Follow the Fleet from May fifteenth to the thirty-first. May was the right month, but Follow the Fleet had come out in 1937.
He went on to the Crown and Anchor and tried the door. It opened onto a dark hall. “Hello? Are you open?” he called, and stepped inside.
At the end of the hallway was a stairway and a door leading into what must be the pub room. He could just make out settles and a bar in the near-darkness. An old-fashioned telephone, the kind with an earpiece on a cord, hung on the wall opposite the stairs, and next to it was a grandfather clock. Mike squinted at it. Five to eight. He hadn’t come through at five, then. He set his Bulova, glad there was no one to see how clumsy he was at it, and then looked around for a bus schedule. On a small table next to the clock lay several letters. Mike bent over them, squinting to read the address of the top one. “Saltram-on-Sea, Kent.”
That can’t be right, he thought. Saltram-on-Sea was thirty miles south of Dover, not six miles north. The letter must be one that was being mailed to Saltram-on-Sea. But the two-cent stamp in the corner had been canceled, and the return address was