All Clear

by Connie Willis

  Which seemed to satisfy Mike, at least for the moment, and when Polly said they needed to go now or they’d run into people on their way to church—which was true, even though St. George’s was no longer there; the rector was conducting services at St. Bidulphus’s—Mike agreed to leave the dig and let her take him to the drop.

  She felt guilty over it—it was raining harder than ever, and even with the Burberry Miss Laburnum had got him, he’d freeze sitting on the cold steps. But she had to have time to find out the truth about the fatalities.

  And Mike didn’t seem dismayed by the rain. “At least there won’t be many contemps out in this,” he said, “so there’ll be less chance of the shimmer being seen.”

  He was right about no one being out in the rain. The streets were deserted. Polly led Mike through the partially cleared rubble to the alley and over to the passage which led to the drop. The rain had washed away the chalked messages she’d scrawled on the walls and the barrels, but the ones on the door were still there, and she was glad to see that the overhang had largely protected the steps and the well.

  “It seems fairly dry in here,” she said. But it was also untouched. The dust, leaves, and spiderwebs were all still there.

  “You put this ‘For a good time, ring Polly’ here?” Mike asked, pointing at the door.

  “Yes, and I put an arrow on that barrel,” she said, pointing, “and Mrs. Rickett’s address and the name of Townsend Brothers on the back, though I imagine the rain’s washed them away. I thought if the retrieval team came, it could help them find me.”

  “It was a good idea,” he said. “I had one like it when I was in the hospital.”

  “You were going to put messages on your gun emplacement?”

  “No, in the newspapers. We could put an ad in the personal column.”

  “An ad? What sort of ad? ‘Stranded travelers seek retrieval team to come and get them’?”

  “Exactly. Only not in those words. They’ll have to look like all the other personal ads, but be worded so someone from Oxford would recognize them as being from us and know what they mean.”

  “ ‘Wounds my heart with a monotonous languour,’ ” Polly murmured.

  “What?”

  “That was the coded message they sent out over the BBC to the French Resistance the day before D-Day. It’s from a Verlaine poem. It meant ‘Invasion imminent.’ ”

  “Exactly,” Mike said. “Coded messages.”

  “But that could be dangerous. If they decide we’re German spies—”

  “I’m not talking about ‘The dog barks at midnight’ or ‘Wounds my heart with’—whatever the hell you said. I’m talking about, ‘R.T. Meet me in Trafalgar Square noon Friday, M.D.’ ”

  Polly shook her head. “Meetings in public places are nearly as suspect as ‘The dog barks at midnight.’ ”

  “All right, then, we’ll make it ‘R.T. Can’t wait to see you, darling. Meet me Trafalgar Square noon Friday. Love, Pollykins.’ ”

  “I suppose that might work,” Polly said thoughtfully. The personal columns were full of messages to and from lovers, and from people who’d gone to the country or been bombed out, notifying their friends and relations of their new addresses. “But there are dozens of London newspapers. How will we know which one to put the message in?”

  “We’ll work that out later,” he said. “In the meantime, we need to replace the messages you wrote here that have washed off.”

  “They’ll only be washed off again.”

  “Then we’ll have to buy some paint.”

  “And hope this rain stops,” Polly said, looking up at the rain dripping from the overhang. “Do you want me to bring you an umbrella?”

  “Not if it’s that bright green one of Eileen’s. It can be seen for miles. I’m trying not to be seen, remember?”

  “Mine’s black. I’ll bring it,” she promised. “And something to eat.” And a thermos of hot tea, she thought.

  But not till I see Marjorie.

  Visiting hours weren’t till ten, and in spite of everything they’d already done this morning, it was still only half past eight. But if she went back to Mrs. Rickett’s, Eileen might be awake and want to come with her. And perhaps this early the stern admitting nurse who’d refused to answer her questions wouldn’t be on duty yet.

  She wasn’t. A very young nurse was. Good. “Have you a patient named James Dunworthy here?” Polly asked her. “I was told he was brought here night before last. From Padgett’s?”

  The admitting nurse checked the records. “No, we’ve no one by that name.”

  “Oh, dear,” Polly said anxiously, calling on the acting techniques Sir Godfrey had taught her. “My friend was certain he was brought here. She works at Padgett’s with Mr. Dunworthy, and she asked me to find out for her. She was a bit banged up and couldn’t come herself. She’s terribly worried about him. Mr. Dunworthy would have been brought in early in the evening.”

  “I wasn’t on duty that night. Let me see what I can find out,” the nurse said, and went off. When she returned, she said, “I spoke by telephone with the ambulance crew who handled the incident, and they only transported one”—a fractional hesitation—“injured victim to hospital, and it was a woman.” And the pause meant the “injured victim” had died on the way to hospital, just as Marjorie had said.

  “But if he wasn’t brought here, then that means—” Polly said, and clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no, how dreadful.”

  “You mustn’t worry,” the nurse said sympathetically, and looked quickly round to make certain no one was in earshot. “I asked the ambulance crew about fatalities, and they said both the others were women, too.”

  Three fatalities, not five. “Did they work at Padgett’s?” Polly asked.

  “No. They haven’t been identified yet.”

  So there was still a possibility that they might be the retrieval team. If it was Polly’s or Eileen’s, they’d almost certainly have sent women to blend in at a department store, though they usually only sent two historians to retrieve. But what if they were Polly’s and Eileen’s teams?

  At least it wasn’t a discrepancy. “Oh, my friend will be so relieved!” Polly said truthfully. “There must have been some sort of mix-up.”

  She thanked the nurse profusely and hurried out of the hospital and down the steps, where she nearly collided with a pair of young nurses in dark blue capes coming on duty. “Last night I went to an RAF dance and met the most adorable lieutenant,” one of them was saying. “He’s a pilot. He’s stationed at Boscombe Down. He said he’d come to see me on his next leave.”

  Boscombe Down. Could that be the name of Gerald’s airfield? It was two words, one beginning with a B and one beginning with a D. It had to be it.

  She’d expected to need to spend the entire day tracking down the information about the casualties, but now that she’d solved both her problems, she could actually do what she’d told Eileen she intended to do and go visit Marjorie. It would mean one less lie she could be caught in.

  But it wasn’t ten yet, and at any rate she couldn’t go in the front door when she was supposed to be hurrying off to tell her Padgett’s friend that James Dunworthy was all right.

  She knew which ward Marjorie was in from when she’d attempted to visit before, so she wouldn’t need to ask, but if the admitting nurse saw her going up …

  She found the emergency entrance and waited out of sight till an ambulance pulled in, bells clanging, and began to unload patients, and then walked purposefully past them and the attendants coming out to help.

  From there, she darted up the first flight of stairs she saw to the fourth floor, and into Marjorie’s ward. And found she needn’t have gone to all the trouble of inquiring after a fictitious patient to find out what she needed to know. She could have simply asked Marjorie.

  “I was wrong about five people being killed. There were only three,” Marjorie said, sitting propped against her pillows, her arm in a sling. “None of them worked
at Padgett’s. They’ve no idea who they were or what they were doing there. Like me. If I’d been killed, no one would have known what I was doing in Jermyn Street either.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I went to meet Tom,” she said, and at Polly’s blank look she explained, “the airman I told you about. He’d been after me to go away with him, and I wouldn’t, but then when you were nearly killed at St. George’s, I thought, why not? I might be killed tomorrow. I’ve got to snatch at life while I can.”

  Polly’s heart began to pound. “You changed your mind because of me?”

  “Yes. When I saw you that morning, your skirt torn and your face all covered in plaster, it brought it home to me that you might have died—that I could die at any moment. And that working at Townsend’s would have been all there was to my life. And I decided I wasn’t going to die without ever doing anything, so the next time Tom came in—it was the Friday you went to see your mother—I told him I’d go away with him.”

  And when she went to meet him, she’d been hit, buried, nearly killed. And I did it, Polly thought. I’m the one who put her there.

  She’d been assuring Mike that he hadn’t saved Hardy, that Hardy would have seen the boat even without Mike’s pocket torch or been rescued by some other boat, but there was no other reason why Marjorie would have been in Jermyn Street that Friday night. No other reason for her broken arm and cracked ribs, for her having spent all those hours in the rubble, for her nearly having been killed.

  But that’s impossible, Polly thought. Historians can’t alter events. The net won’t let them.

  Unless Mike’s right. And suddenly she thought of the UXB at St. Paul’s. What if it hadn’t been an error in the historical record that it had been removed on Saturday and not Sunday? What if the time difference was a discrepancy?

  One does not conduct deceptions merely to deceive. It is a kind of game, but a kind of game played in deadly earnest for compelling reasons and with dangerous consequences.

  —WORLD WAR II BRITISH SECRET

  INTELLIGENCE SERVICE MANUAL

  Kent—April 1944

  “THE QUEEN?” ERNEST SAID. “I CAN’T VISIT THE QUEEN. Cess and I have been up all night inflating tanks. I need to go to Croydon and deliver this week’s newspaper articles and letters to the Call. I’ve already missed the Sudbury Weekly Shopper’s deadline. I can’t afford to miss another one.”

  “Your royal sovereign,” Prism said, “is far more important than—what is it you were writing up yesterday? A garden party?”

  “Tea party. For the officers of the Twenty-first Airborne, newly arrived from Bradley Field. That’s not the point. The point is that these stories must go in on schedule or the troop movements will have to be completely redone.”

  “Prism will help you,” Moncrieff said. “And at any rate, this will only take a couple of hours. We’ll be back in plenty of time for you to deliver your stories.”

  “That’s what Cess said about the tanks last night.”

  “Yes, but this is quite nearby. At Mofford House, only a few miles beyond Lymbridge.”

  “Can’t Chasuble go instead? Or Gwendolyn?”

  “He’s already there setting up. And Chasuble’s over at Camp Omaha, rigging up a chimney for the mess tent.”

  “What does the mess tent need a chimney for? There’s no one there to cook for.”

  “But they must look as if they are,” Prism said. “And you must go. You’re the one who’s going to write this all up for the London papers.”

  The London papers meant the story would get a good deal more notice than an article in the Call, particularly if there was an accompanying photograph, and it was a chance to meet Queen Elizabeth, which any Fortitude South agent—or any historian—would give his eyeteeth for. Plus, it looked as if he was going to go whether he wanted to or not. “Do I need to bring my camera?” Ernest asked.

  “No. The London papers will have their photographers there. All you need is your pajamas,” Prism said. “Now come along, we’re late.”

  “If it’s not too much to ask,” Ernest said once they were in the staff car, with Moncrieff driving, “why am I meeting the Queen in my pajamas?”

  “Because you’ve been wounded,” Moncrieff said. “A broken foot would be appropriate, I think.” He looked back at Ernest in the backseat. “We’ll put you in a plaster and on crutches. Unless you’d rather have a broken neck.”

  “Have you any idea what he’s babbling on about?” Ernest leaned forward to ask Prism.

  “We’re attending the ribbon cutting for a hospital,” he explained. “They’ve turned Mofford House into a military hospital to deal with the soldiers who’ll be coming back wounded from the invasion.”

  “Which hasn’t happened yet. So how can we be invasion casualties?”

  “We’re not. We were wounded at Tripoli. Or Monte Cassino, whichever you prefer.”

  “But—”

  “We’re window dressing,” Prism said impatiently. “The newspaper stories you’ll write will say that the hospital has only a few patients at present, but that its capacity is six hundred, and that it’s one of five new hospitals which will open in the area over the next four months.”

  “Which plays nicely into the scenario that the invasion’s scheduled for mid-July,” Ernest said. “So the Queen will be seen visiting the wards?”

  “Ward,” Prism said. “They were only able to mock up one for the ribbon cutting. The hospital in Dover couldn’t spare the beds for more than that, and Lady Mofford wasn’t keen on having her entire house turned into a hospital just for one afternoon’s photographs.”

  “Afternoon?” Ernest said. “I thought you said this would only take a couple of hours.”

  “It will. There’ll be a speech welcoming the Queen, a visit to the ward, and then tea. The Queen’s to arrive at one.”

  “One o’clock this afternoon?” Cess cried. “That’s hours from now. And Worthing and I haven’t even had breakfast. Why did we need to leave now?”

  “I told you,” Prism said imperturbably. “The Queen will be there. One can’t keep royalty waiting. And we need to help set up.”

  “But I’m starving!” Cess said.

  “And I must be in Croydon by four o’clock, or my articles won’t make this week’s edition.”

  “Then they’ll have to go in next week’s.”

  “That’s what you said last week,” Ernest said. “At this rate, they won’t go in till after the invasion, and a bloody lot of good they’ll do then.”

  “Very well,” Prism said. “When we get there I’ll ring up Lady Bracknell and have Algernon take them to Croydon for you.”

  Which would completely defeat the purpose. “They’re not done yet,” he said. “I’d intended to finish writing them up last night, and instead I ended up playing matador.”

  “With a tank as his cape,” Cess said, and launched into an account of their adventures with the bull and his charging of the tank, which Prism and Moncrieff both found highly amusing.

  “Today won’t be nearly so dangerous,” Moncrieff said. “And don’t worry, we’ll have you back to the castle in plenty of time.”

  At which point, I will no doubt be sent to blow up more tanks.

  “Speaking of dangers,” Prism said, “you need to read this.” He handed a sheet of paper back to Ernest over the seat. “It’s a memo from Lady Bracknell.”

  “Warning us,” Cess said, “about”—he lowered his voice to a sinister whisper—“spies in our midst.”

  Ernest snatched the paper from Prism. “Spies?”

  “Yes,” Cess said. “It says we’re to look out for suspicious behavior, particularly for people who seem unfamiliar with local customs. And we’re not to discuss our mission with anyone, no matter how harmless and trustworthy they seem, because they might be German spies. That bull this morning, for instance.”

  “It’s not a joking matter,” Prism said. “If there’s a security breach, it could endang
er the entire invasion.”

  “I know,” Cess said. “But whom exactly does Bracknell think we’d talk to? The only people we ever see are irate farmers, except for Ernest here—”

  “And the only people I talk to are irate editors who want to know why my articles are always late,” Ernest said. He needed to get this conversation off the topic of spies. “And I doubt very much that they’ll believe I missed their deadline because I was having tea with the Queen. How are we supposed to address her, by the way? Your Majesty? Your Highness?”

  “There! You see that?” Cess said, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Unfamiliarity with local customs. Definitely suspicious behavior. And he behaved very oddly around that bull. Are you a spy, Worthing?” he said, and when Ernest didn’t answer, “Well, are you?”

  We shall fight in the offices … and in the hospitals.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  1940

  London—27 October 1940

  THE MOMENT POLLY RETURNED FROM SEEING MARJORIE, Eileen said, “Mr. Fetters rang up while you were gone. He said they’d found three bodies in Padgett’s.” Which meant Polly hadn’t had to go to the hospital after all.

  She wished she hadn’t. She’d gone there to prove the number of dead wasn’t a discrepancy so that Mike could stop worrying that he’d altered events, only to find that she’d altered them.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. Historians can’t do that. And there were dozens of reasons why Mr. Dunworthy could have got the time of the St. Paul’s UXB’s removal wrong. The newspaper could have moved the time up to throw the Germans off. During the V-1 and V-2 attacks, they’d printed false accounts of where the rockets fell to trick the Germans into shortening their range. They might have done something like that with the UXB, to convince the Nazis the bomb was easier to defuse than it had been. Or they could simply have got the time wrong, like the nurses at Padgett’s had got the number wrong.