Carruthers came over, looking neither fatigued nor distracted. Good.

“Ned!” he said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“You must have been. I’ve been calling for five minutes,” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

I must have misheard that, too, or else Carruthers was more time-lagged than I’d thought. “Dookie?” I said cautiously.

“Yes, Dookie!” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

Oh, no, I was going to have to get him back to Oxford without making the verger suspicious, get him to Infirmary, and then try to get back here to finish searching the cathedral and probably end up in a marrows field halfway to Liverpool.

“Ned, can’t you hear me?” Carruthers was saying worriedly. “I said, ‘Did she have Dookie with her?’”

“With whom?” I said, wondering how I was going to convince him he needed to be taken out. Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged. “Lady Schrapnell?”

“No,” he said, very irritably. “Her Majesty. The Queen. When she commissioned us to come up here. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ and all that.” He pointed to the verger, who was heading toward us. “He asked me if she had Dookie with her when we saw her, and I didn’t have any idea who that was.”

I didn’t either. Dookie. It seemed unlikely that that would have been her nickname for the King. For her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, perhaps? No, Edward had already abdicated by 1940, and the Queen wasn’t calling him anything.

The Queen’s dog, I thought, but that didn’t help particularly. In her later years as the Queen Mum, she’d had Welsh corgis, but what had she had during World War II? A Yorkshire terrier? A toy spaniel? And what gender, if any? And what if Dookie was her maid instead? Or a nickname for one of the princesses?

The verger came up. “You were asking about Dookie,” I said. “Afraid Dookie wasn’t with Her Majesty. Up at Windsor for the duration. Terrified of the bombs, you see.”