“I do hope he hasn’t left,” he fretted, starting back along the choir aisle. “I did so want you to meet him. I’ve told him all about you. Such a nice gentleman. Do you know what he said the first time he saw The Light of the World? He said, ‘He looks as though he could forgive anything.’ So interesting, isn’t it, what people see?
Each time one looks at it, one sees something diff—”
“If not an air-raid warden, then some other Civil Defence job—”
“Mr. Hobbe—that’s the gentleman I want you to meet—has only just got out of hospital.” He peered into the dim recesses of the south transept. “He’s had rather a hard time of it, I’m afraid. He was wounded in a bomb blast, a head wound, and he’s still not entirely recovered. Let me just check the north transept,” he said, though Mr. Hobbe obviously wasn’t there—they’d just come from there.
The sailors weren’t there either. They must have seen their chance and fled.
“Mr. Hobbe is almost as fond of Captain Faulknor’s memorial as he is of The Light of the World,” Mr. Humphreys said, which Polly doubted. She wondered if he’d fled, too.
“Last week I found him here after the sirens had gone,” Mr. Humphreys went on obliviously, “sitting against one of the pillars, looking at Captain Faulknor’s statue.”
Which is impossible, Polly thought. It’s covered in sandbags.
“And when I began to tell him about Captain Faulknor’s tying the two ships together, he knew all about it. ‘It bound them into one,’ he said—”
“I think Mr. Hobbe must have gone home,” Polly said, “and I must go, too. If you could just tell me the name of someone I could speak to about getting hired on by Civil Defence, I—”
“But he can’t have gone home. I don’t believe he has one. I think it may have been destroyed in the same bomb blast. I’ve found him here at night several times since then.”
“At night?”
“Yes, and that first night, when I said I’d have one of the watch accompany him home—he’s not well, and I hated to think of him out in the blackout—I asked him where he lived, and he said, ‘It doesn’t exist.’ ”
“It doesn’t—?”
“Yes, dreadful, isn’t it, to think of him bombed out in this weather, with only a shelter to—”
“You said he’s been coming in every day,” Polly said. “For how long?”
“Several weeks,” he said, walking back out to the dome. “He began coming in shortly before the New Year. I’m afraid you’ve just missed him. What a pity. I did so want you two—”
“What does he look like?”
“Look like? He’s my age, or perhaps a bit older. Tall, thin, spectacles. I think he may have been a schoolmaster. He knows all about the history of St. Paul’s. He’s clearly troubled about something. I fear his family may have been killed in the bombing, he looks so sad. That’s partly why I wanted you to meet him. I thought your being interested in The Light of the World, too, might cheer—”
He stopped in midsentence. “I know where he’ll be,” he said. “He never leaves without taking a last look at it.” He started across the nave, but Polly had already passed him, running toward the south aisle, praying he was still there.
He was. He stood in front of the painting, his hat in his hands, his shoulders slumped tiredly, looking up at Christ’s face under its crown of thorns.
“One sees something different each time one looks at it,” Mr. Humphreys had said, and it was true. This time Christ looked not bored, not frightened, but infinitely sorry for both of them.
Polly stepped forward and put her hand on Mr. Dunworthy’s sleeve. “It’s all right,” she said, and began to cry.
“But you do know, don’t you,” he said, “that you committed the murders?”
—AGATHA CHRISTIE, THE ABC MURDERS
London—Winter 1941
POLLY LOOKED AT MR. DUNWORTHY STANDING THERE IN front of The Light of the World, and for a moment she thought she must have been wrong, as she had been wrong that night outside St. Paul’s, and it wasn’t him after all, but only someone who resembled him.
He seemed far older than the Mr. Dunworthy she knew, and his shabby coat, his worn hat, had an authenticity Wardrobe could never have managed. And he looked so weary. Mr. Humphreys had said he was “troubled” and “not well,” but it was far worse than that. He looked exhausted, broken. Defeated. Mr. Dunworthy had never been defeated by anything in his life.
But Polly had known even before she saw him that it was him—and worse, that the man she’d seen looking up at the dome of St. Paul’s that night had been him, too. And the reason he looked so defeated, so … beaten, was that he was as trapped and helpless as she and Eileen were. He wasn’t here as a rescuer. He was a fellow castaway.
But the mere fact that he was here at least meant that Oxford still existed. They hadn’t altered history and lost the war. And Oxford hadn’t been destroyed in some catastrophe. Everyone there wasn’t dead. And even if Mr. Dunworthy was shipwrecked, too, he was here, and she was overjoyed to see him.
