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“And the Nazis realized we had Ultra,” Verity said, “and changed the Enigma machine.”
“And we lost the campaign in North Africa,” I said, “and possibly the D-Day invasion—”
“And the Nazis won the war,” Mrs. Bittner said bleakly. “Only they didn’t. You stopped them.”
“The continuum stopped them with its system of secondary defenses, which is almost as good as Ultra’s,” I said. “The one thing that didn’t fit in this whole mess was the slippage on Verity’s drop. If there hadn’t been any slippage, that might have meant the continuum’s defenses had somehow broken down, but there had been. But not enough to fit Fujisaki’s theory that incongruities occur when the slippage required is more than the net can supply. The net could easily have supplied fourteen minutes of slippage, or four, which would have been all that would have been necessary to keep the incongruity from ever happening. So the only logical conclusion was that it had intended for Verity to go through at that exact moment—”
“Are you saying the continuum arranged for me to save Princess Arjumand?” Verity said.
“Yes,” I said. “Which made us think you’d caused an incongruity and we had to fix it, which is why we arranged a séance to get Tossie to Coventry to see the bishop’s bird stump and write in her diary that the experience had changed her life—”
“And Lady Schrapnell would read it,” Verity said, “and decide to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and send me back to Muchings End to find out what happened to the bishop’s bird stump, so I could save the cat—”
“So I could be sent back to return it and overhear a conversation about mystery novels in Blackwell’s and spend a night in a tower—”
“And solve the mystery of the bishop’s bird stump,” Mrs. Bittner said. She stood up and started up the stairs. “I’m glad you did, you know,” she said, leading the way up the narrow stairs. “There is nothing heavier than the weight of a secret crime.”
She opened the door to the attic. “I should have been found out soon at any rate. My nephew’s been lobbying me to move into a single-floor flat.”
Attics in books and vids are always picturesque places, with a bicycle, several large plumed hats, an antique rocking horse, and, of course, a steamer trunk for storing the missing will or the dead body in.
Mrs. Bittner’s attic didn’t have a trunk, or a rocking horse, at least that I could see. Though they might easily have been there, along with the lost Ark of the Covenant and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Bittner said, looking round in dismay. “I’m afraid it’s more The Sittaford Mystery than ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”
“Agatha Christie,” Verity explained. “Nobody noticed the evidence because it’d been stuck in a cupboard with a bag of golf clubs and te
“A lot of other things” was putting it mildly. The low-raftered room was crammed from end to end with cardboard cartons, stacked lawn chairs, old clothes hanging from an exposed pipe, jigsaw puzzles of the Grand Canyon and the Mars colony, a croquet set, squash rackets, dusty Christmas decorations, books, and an assortment of bedspread-draped furniture, all stacked on top of each other in sedimentary layers.
“Could you reach me down that chair?” Mrs. Bittner said, pointing at a Twentieth Century plastiform atrocity perched on top of a washing machine. “I have difficulty standing for very long.”
I got it down, disentangling a trowel and several coat hangers from its aluminum legs, and dusted it off for her.
She sat down, easing herself into it gingerly. “Thank you,” she said. “Hand that tin box to me.”
I handed it to her reverently.
She set it down beside her on the floor. “And those large pasteboard boxes. Just push them aside. And those suitcases.”
I did, and she stood up and walked down the little aisle my shifting the boxes had made and into darkness.
“Plug in a lamp,” she said. “There’s an outlet over there.” She pointed at the wall behind an enormous plastic aspidistra.
I reached for the nearest lamp, a massive affair with a huge pleated shade and a squat, heavily decorated metal base.
“Not that one,” she said sharply. “The pink one.”
She pointed at a tall, early Twenty-First Century fringed affair.
I plugged it in and switched on the hard-to-find knob, but it didn’t do much good. It lit the fringe and Verity’s Waterhouse face, but not much else.
Apparently Mrs. Bittner thought so, too. She went over to the ornate metal lamp. “The Masqued Murder,” she said.
Verity leaned forward. “Evidence disguised as something else,” she murmured.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Bittner said, and lifted the pleated shade off bishop’s bird stump.
It was too bad Lady Schrapnell wasn’t here. And Carruthers. All that time we had spent searching for it in the rubble, and it was here all along. Removed for safekeeping, as Carruthers had suggested, and not a mark on it. The Red Sea still parted; Springtime, Summer, Autumn, and Winter still held their respective garlands of apple blossoms, roses, wheat, and holly; John the Baptist, his head still on the platter, still stared reproachfully at King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Gryphons, poppies, pineapples, puffins, the Battle of Prestonpans, all of it intact and not even dusty.
“Lady Schrapnell will be so pleased,” Verity said. She squeezed down the aisle to look at it more closely. “Good heavens. That side must have been facing the wall. What are those? Fans?”
“Clams. Clams inscribed with the names of important naval battles,” I said. “Lepanto, Trafalgar, the Battle of the Swans.”
“It’s difficult imagining it changing the course of history,” Mrs. Bittner said, peering at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. “It doesn’t improve with age, does it? Like the Albert Memorial.”
“With which it has a good deal in common,” Verity said, touching an elephant.
“I don’t know,” I said, cocking my head to look at it sideways. “I’m begi
“He’s time-lagged,” Verity said. “Ned, the elephant’s carrying a howdah full of pineapples and bananas to an eagle with a fish fork.”
“It’s not a fish fork,” I said. “It’s a flaming sword. And it’s not an eagle, it’s an archangel, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Or possibly the Zoo.”
“It is truly hideous,” Mrs. Bittner said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. After all those trips, I was probably a bit time-lagged myself. And there was a good deal of smoke.”
Verity turned to stare at her, and then at me.
“How many trips did you make?” she said finally.
“Four,” Mrs. Bittner said. “No, five. The first one didn’t count. I came through too late. The whole nave was on fire, and I was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation. I still have trouble with my lungs.”
Verity was still staring at her, trying to take it in. “You made five trips to the cathedral?”
Mrs. Bittner nodded. “I only had a few minutes between the time the fire watch left and the fire got out of hand, and the slippage kept putting me later than I wanted. Five was all I had time for.”
Verity looked disbelievingly at me.
“Hand me down the bandbox,” Mrs. Bittner told her. “The second time I nearly got caught.”
“That was me,” I said. “I saw you ru
“That was you?” she said, laughing, her hand on her chest. “I thought it was Provost Howard, and I was going to be arrested for a looter.”
Verity handed her the bandbox, and she took off the lid and began rummaging through the tissue paper. “I took the bishop’s bird stump on the last trip. I was trying to reach the Smiths’ Chapel, but it was on fire. I ran across to the Dyers’ Chapel and got the bronze candlesticks off the altar, but they were too hot. I dropped the first one, and it rolled away under one of the pews.”