Late Check-Out: No Light May ShowAt two minutes to midnight the telephone in the hall rang once, and the commandant said, to nobody in particular, that the aircraft was not going.

Two minutes to midnight

A blacked-out manor hall just before midnight: a telephone back on its hook at the foot of the stair, the blackout cloth fallen from a tall window letting in moonlight, an open book on the hall table, and a fire glowing through a far doorway. Nobody there.

You stopped the drop, at two minutes to midnight, and two agents slept in England that night.

The aircraft did not go. Its crew were told nothing, as crews never were, and went to bed.

The telephone rang once at two minutes to midnight, and the aircraft did not go.

Downstairs the set in the cellar is still open, because nobody has thought to close it, and at a minute to midnight it speaks again, slower than before. Not the fluent fist from nine o'clock. Somebody sending carefully, as if every letter cost something, and the Germans let it through, because it is only a line for a girl, and it means nothing to them:

FOR THE GIRL AT THE
KITCHEN FIRE
THE FORTY DAYS ARE
DONE

The operator brings it up the stairs in pencil and gives it to Edmund, because it does not seem to be for anyone else. Edmund reads it under his torch. Then he goes and stands in the kitchen doorway for a long time, looking at the fire that nobody lights, and he says her name.

Mrs Christie, on the stair, writes something in a little notebook, and says she shall never use it, because nobody would believe it. Then she tells you, as if it were a secret worth keeping, that she has already written the ends of two of her books and put them in a bank vault, not to be opened until she is dead. It is a comfort, she says, to know how a thing ends.

The lights come on. You are standing in the hall with the dust sheet in your hands, and your friends are staring at you. On the hall table, in the glass case beside the host's note, the ledger has gone. In its place is a school log from the war, open at a page of times and pencilled words, and the last line has a scorch mark across it.

Your phone buzzes:

You stopped them. She knew you would. P.

Part 4, Lights Out, is your last night. Check-out is at midnight. Remember the word that stopped the drop.

Linnet's set will go on sending for months in Clare's name, and London will answer it, carefully, with nothing true, so that the people sending never learn that they were found out. Nobody at Sallowmere will ever know what became of her.

Title earned: The stranger in the blackout.

Two minutes to midnight

Got out? Say so.