No, Polly didn’t know he’d told Eileen to wait there …
A hand grabbed his sleeve. Mike turned, expecting it to be Polly, but it was a thin, dazed-looking man. “This is where I work,” the man said urgently, pointing at the still-standing door in the wreckage behind Mike. It hung in its frame, held up by two blackened supports. The rest of the warehouse was completely gutted. “What do I do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Sorry,” Mike said, trying to pull away.
“It’s past time for them to open.” The man held up his wristwatch for Mike to look at. It read nine o’clock.
Nine o’clock. It had taken him two and a half hours to get out of the hospital and over here. The fire watch would have gone off duty long since and gone back down to the Crypt.
That’s where Polly and Bartholomew will be, he thought, breaking away from the man’s grasp and starting across the courtyard, picking his way over fire hoses and around ash-edged puddles.
The man trailed after him, murmuring, “It’s gone. What do I do now?”
Mike reached the foot of the steps. A score of people sat slumped against the steps, like the soldiers on the Lady Jane at Dunkirk, sooty, worn out, unseeing. And he’d been right. Polly was here waiting for him, sitting halfway up the steps next to two ragged children. And so was Eileen. Beside her on the step was a charred mark, like a deformed star. The incendiary.
Eileen caught sight of him. She stood up and started down the steps to tell him what had happened, why John Bartholomew wasn’t there, but he already knew. One look at Polly’s face had told him everything.
“I didn’t make it in time,” he said.
Eileen shook her head. “The dean said he left an hour ago. He—”
“The door’s locked,” the man said, clutching at Mike’s sleeve. “What do I do now?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said, and sat down on the wet steps next to the girls. “I don’t know.”
God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.
—CHRISTMAS MESSAGE OUTSIDE THE RUINS OF
ALL HALLOWS BARKING CHURCH, ON WHICH
SOMEONE HAD UNDERLINED THE WORD
“NOTHING” IN SOOT
St. Paul’s Cathedral—30 December 1940
POLLY SAT THERE ON THE BROAD STEPS OF ST. PAUL’S, looking at Mike standing below her and Eileen. He looked as exhausted as she felt. He was in his shirtsleeves, and there was a bandage on his arm. She wondered what had happened to his coat.
“Bartholomew’s gone?” he repeated blankly, looking from her to Eileen. “Maybe we can still catch him. He can’t have got far in this mess. If we can find out which way he went—”
Polly shook her head. “He took the tube.”
“From Blackfriars? Maybe he’s not to the station yet. If we hurry—”
“From St. Paul’s.”
“St. Paul’s? You mean the drop’s here at the cathedral?”
“No, he left from St. Paul’s Station.”
“But last night it wasn’t—”
“It’s up and running this morning,” Eileen said.
“I bet we could catch ’im,” Alf said, and Binnie nodded.
“We’re quick.” They stood up as if ready to dart off after him.
Mike looked over at them and then back at Polly. “Do you think—?”
She shook her head. “He’d been gone nearly an hour when we got here.”
“Did you ask the fire watch if Bartholomew said where he was going?” Mike asked. “I mean, not where he was really going. But he might have told them where his—”
“Yes,” she said, cutting him off before he could say “his drop” and looking pointedly over at Alf and Binnie, who were all ears. “He told them his uncle in Wales had sent for him.”
“Did you ask them what else he said? He might have dropped some hint about where he was really going —”
Where he was going was Oxford. “Mike—”
“Did you ask them which train he was taking? That’ll at least tell us which direction he was heading.”
No, it wouldn’t. St. Paul’s was only two stops away from access to every other line on the Underground. “Mike, it’s no use. He’s gone,” Polly said, but he was already striding up the steps and into St. Paul’s.
Polly scrambled to her feet and went inside after him. He was already halfway to the transept, his footsteps echoing in the deserted nave. She called, “Half the fire watch has already gone home, and the other half’s gone to bed. Mike!” She ran after him.
It was last night all over again—her running endlessly after a man she couldn’t catch—and she was suddenly too weary to try. She stopped and walked back down the dank, smoky nave through the charred scraps of paper that lay everywhere, the flaming orders of worship that had danced through the air last night. Now they littered the
