Her face was very red, and her breathing sounded like Badri’s, but she answered his questions promptly and clearly. No, she hadn’t been to America in the past month. No, she didn’t know any Americans or anyone who’d been to America. But she had taken the tube up from London to shop for the day. “At Blackwell’s, you know,” and she had been all over Oxford shopping and then at the tube station, and there were at least five hundred people she had had contact with who might be the connection Mary was looking for.
It took him till past two to finish questioning the primaries and adding the contacts to the chart, none of which were the connection Mary was looking for, though he had found out that one of them had been to the same dance in Headington as Badri.
He went up to Isolation, though he didn’t have much hope of Badri’s being able to answer his questions, but Badri seemed improved. He was sleeping when Dunworthy came in, but when Dunworthy touched his hand, his eyes opened and focused on him.
“Mr. Dunworthy,” he said. His voice was weak and hoarse. “What are you doing here?”
Dunworthy sat down. “How are you feeling?”
“It’s odd, the things one dreams. I thought… I had such a headache…”
“I need to ask you some questions, Badri. Do you remember who you saw at the dance you went to in Headington?”
“There were so many people,” he said, and swallowed as if his throat hurt. “I didn’t know most of them.”
“Do you remember who you danced with?”
“Elizabeth—” he said, and it came out a croak. “Sisu somebody, I don’t know her last name,” he whispered. “And Elizabeth Yakamoto.”
The grim-looking ward sister came in. “Time for your X– ray,” she said without looking at Badri. “You’ll have to leave, Mr. Dunworthy.”
“Could I have just a few more minutes? It’s important,” he asked, but she was already tapping keys on the console.
He leaned over the bed. “Badri, when you got the fix, how much slippage was there?”
“Mr. Dunworthy,” the sister said insistently.
Dunworthy ignored her. “Was there more slippage than you expected?”
“No,” Badri said huskily. He put his hand to his throat.
“How much slippage was there?”
“Four hours,” Badri whispered, and Dunworthy let himself be ushered out.
Four hours. Kivrin had gone through at half-past twelve. That would have put her there at half-past four, nearly sunset, but still enough light left to see where she was, enough time to have walked to Skendgate if necessary.
He went to find Mary and give her the two names of the girls Badri had danced with. Mary checked them against the list of new admissions. Neither of them were on it, and Mary told him he could go home and took his temp and bloods so he wouldn’t have to come back. He was about to start home when they brought Sisu Fairchild in. He didn’t make it home till nearly teatime.
Colin wasn’t at the gate nor in hall, where Finch was nearly out of sugar and butter. “Where’s Dr. Ahrens’ nephew?” Dunworthy asked him.
“He waited by the gate all morning,” Finch said, anxiously counting over sugar cubes. “The post didn’t come till past one, and then he went over to his great-aunt’s flat to see if the parcels had been sent there. I gather they hadn’t. He came back looking very glum, and then about half an hour ago, he said suddenly, ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ and shot out. Perhaps he’d thought of some other place the parcel might have been sent to.”
But weren’t, Dunworthy thought. “What time do the shops close today?” he asked Finch.
“Christmas Eve? Oh, they’re already closed, sir. They always close early on Christmas Eve, and some of them closed at noon due to the lack of trade. I’ve a number of messages, sir—”
“They’ll have to wait,” Dunworthy said, snatched up his umbrella, and went out again. Finch was right. The shops were all closed. He went down to Blackwell’s, thinking they had surely stayed open, but they were shut up tight. They had already taken advantage of the selling points of the situation, though. In the window, arranged amid the snow-covered houses of the toy Victorian village, were self-help medical books, drug compendia, and a brightly-colored paperback entitled,
He finally found an open post-office off the High, but it had only cigarettes, cheap sweets, and a rack of greeting cards, nothing in the way of suitable gifts for twelve-year-old boys. He went out without buying anything and then went back and purchased a pound’s worth of toffee, a gobstopper the size of a small asteroid, and several packets of a sweet that looked like soap tablets. It wasn’t much, but Mary had said she’d bought some other things.
The other things turned out to be a pair of gray woolen socks, even grimmer than the muffler, and a vocabulary improvement vid. There were crackers, at least, and sheets of wrapping paper, but a pair of socks and some toffee hardly made a Christmas. He looked around the study, trying to think what he had that might do.
