She needed to act the way she would if her young man was late. She glanced at her watch, frowned, stood up, and walked along the path a short way as if searching for someone, trying to look hopeful and a bit annoyed, and then strolled back to the statue.
There was definitely someone there in the bushes. “Hullo?” Polly called. “Who’s there?”
A hushed silence, as if someone was holding his breath.
“I know you’re in there,” Polly said, and Eileen emerged from the bushes. “Eileen? What on earth are you doing here? Has Mike come back?”
“No. I decided to come along and see if anyone had answered your ad. I told Mrs. Rickett where we’d be, and I left a note for Mike with Mrs. Leary.”
Which didn’t explain what she had been doing lurking in the bushes, and Eileen seemed to realize that because she added, “But then I couldn’t find the statue, and I ended up in among the trees,” which was clearly untrue. The signposts pointing the way to the Peter Pan statue were the only ones in England which hadn’t been taken down, and at any rate Eileen was looking guilty of something, though Polly had no idea what.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why did you really come?”
“Eileen!” Mike called. “Polly!”
“Eileen!” Mike called. “Polly!”
He was limping up the path toward them, waving.
Mike. Oh, thank God. He wasn’t dead.
“Mike!” Eileen cried, and ran to meet him. “You’re back! Thank heavens. We’ve been so worried!”
“Tensing didn’t find you, did he?” Polly asked anxiously.
“No.”
“Then where were you?”
“In Oxford.”
“Oxford?” Eileen gasped. “Oh, God, you’ve found Gerald! Thank heavens.”
“No, no, Oxford right now. In 1940. I’m sorry,” he said, looking in dismay at her disappointed face. “I didn’t mean to get your hopes up like that. I didn’t find Gerald. I—”
Polly cut him off. “We want to hear all about your journey,” she said loudly, and then in a whisper, “but not here. Somewhere where we can’t be overheard. Come along. I know just the place.”
She tucked her arm in Mike’s and led him down the path, chattering brightly. “We thought you’d never come, didn’t we, Eileen?”
“Yes. If you’d told us which train you’d be on,” Eileen said, playing along, “we’d have come to meet it.”
“I didn’t know myself,” Mike said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “What’s going on? Was someone spying on us back there?”
Only Eileen, Polly thought. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but loose lips sink ships. Come along.”
She led them past the trenches to an open lawn with a large monument in its center. From here, they’d be able to see anyone coming from any direction. “All right,”
she said, sitting down on the monument steps. “Now we can talk.”
“What did you mean, ‘loose lips sink—’?” Mike stopped, staring at the statuary around the monument. “Jesus, what is this thing?”
“The Albert Memorial. Possibly the ugliest monument in all of England.” Polly smiled happily at the elephant, the water buffalo, the semi-naked young women clustered round them, at Prince Albert sitting on top reading a book. She felt giddy in her relief that Mike wasn’t in the Tower. Or dead.
“It’s hideous. It wasn’t destroyed in the Blitz, was it?” he asked hopefully.
“No, only minor damage, I’m afraid, though supposedly at one point someone put up a large arrow to guide the Luftwaffe to it.”
“It’s too bad it didn’t work,” Mike said, still staring, appalled. “Christ, is that a buffalo?”
“Who cares what it is?” Eileen said impatiently. “Tell us what happened and why you went to Oxford.”
“Okay. After I called you about Tensing, I went back to Mrs. Jolsom’s to pack my stuff, and she told me the room I’d rented was supposed to have been Phipps’s.”
“It was Gerald’s room?” Polly said.
“Yes. He was supposed to have come two months ago, but he never arrived, so I went to Oxford to see if I could find out whether something had happened to him on the way.”
“And?”
“He never came through. He’d made a reservation at the Mitre in Oxford for the night he arrived, but he never showed up there either.”
“The increased slippage could have sent him through late,” Eileen said, “and he decided to go straight to Bletchley instead of stopping in Oxford.”
Mike shook his head. “He’d mailed a package addressed to himself to the Mitre. He never picked it up.”
“Do you know what was in it?” Polly asked.
“Yeah, that’s why I was gone so long. It took me forever to steal it.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and laid them out on the steps of the monument.
