Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

“So you tried to take it back?” Verity said.

“Yes. And I went and saw Shoji and made him tell me as much as I could about incongruities without making him suspicious. It was all bad, but the worst was that he told me they’d been able to adapt the net to safeguard against them, and weren’t we lucky one hadn’t happened before we did, we could have caused the collapse of the entire space-time continuum.”

I looked over at Verity. She was watching Mrs. Bittner, her beautiful face sad.

“So I hid the swag, as they say in the mystery novels, and waited for the world to end. Which it did. The cathedral was deconsecrated and sold to the Church of the Hereafter and then turned into a shopping center.”

She stared into her sherry. “The irony is that it was all for nothing. My husband loved Salisbury. I had been so convinced that losing Coventry Cathedral would kill him, but it didn’t. He truly meant that about churches being only a symbol. He didn’t seem to mind even when they built a Marks and Spencer’s on the ruins.” She smiled warmly. “Do you know what he said when he heard Lady Schrapnell was rebuilding the old cathedral? He said, ‘I hope this time they get the spire on straight.’ ”

She set her glass down. “After Harold died, I came back here. And two weeks ago James telephoned and asked me if I could remember anything about the drops we’d done together, that there was an area of increased slippage in 2018, and he was afraid it was due to an incongruity. I knew then it was just a matter of time before I was found out, even though he had the wrong incongruity.” She looked up at us. “James told me about the cat and Tossie Mering. Did you manage to get Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother married to the mysterious Mr. C?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “She did marry him, but it was no thanks to us.”

“It was the butler,” Verity said, “under an assumed name.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Bittner said, clapping her veined hands together. “The old solutions are always the best. The butler, the case of mistaken identity, the least likely suspect—” She looked at us both meaningfully, “—the purloined letter.” She stood up. “I hid it in the attic.”

We started up the stairs. “I was afraid moving it might make things worse, she said, taking the steps slowly, “so I left the loot here when we went to Salisbury. I made certain it was well-hidden, and I took care to rent the house to people without children — children are so curious, you know — but I was always afraid someone would come up here and find it and do something that would change the course of history.” She turned back, holding onto the banister, and looked at me. “But it already had, hadn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything more. She seemed to be concentrating all her effort on climbing the stairs. When we reached the first floor, she led us down a corridor past a bedroom and opened a narrow door onto another, steeper flight of stairs. “This leads up to the attic,” she said, panting a little. “I’m sorry. I need to rest a bit before going on. There’s a chair in the bedroom.”

I ran to fetch it, and she sat down on it. “Would you like a glass of water?” Verity asked.

“No, thank you, dear,” she said. “Tell me about the incongruity I caused.”

“You weren’t the only person who considered the bishop’s bird stump indestructible,” I said. “So did the chairman of the Flower Committee named—”

“Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said.

I nodded. “She had been there the night of the raid, standing guard by the west door, and she knew the bishop’s bird stump couldn’t have been carried out. When it wasn’t found in the rubble or among the things the fire watch had saved, she concluded it had been stolen some time before the raid and that the thief must have known about the raid in advance, knowing he could get away with it. She was quite vocal with her theory—”

“She even wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Coventry papers,” Verity put in.

I nodded. “This next part is only a theory, like Miss Sharpe’s,” I said. “The only evidence we have is Carruthers’s testimony, the list of ladies’ church committees for 1940, and a letter to the editor that wasn’t in either of the Coventry papers.”

Mrs. Bittner nodded sagely. “The incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The Nazis made it a practice to obtain and read Allied newspapers, looking for any intelligence information that might be inadvertently revealed. I think Miss Sharpe’s letter and the words ‘advance warning of the raid’ must have caught the eye of someone in Nazi intelligence who was worried about the Nazi code system being compromised, and that inquiries were subsequently made, inquiries that revealed the High Command had dispatched RAF fighters to Coventry that night and had attempted to jam the pathfinder beams.”

“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 tennis rackets and a lot of other things.”