After the tribunal, the police came to the lighthouse. Mutti had to wait in the police car while the officers collected some personal belongings that she could take with her to the internment camp, but she wasn’t allowed in, and we weren’t allowed to go out and talk to her. I stood in the kitchen staring out at the police car. Mutti was just a silhouette in the rear window – so far away from us. I felt all buzzy and strange, as if I were lost in a bad dream.
Mags was sitting on a kitchen chair, drumming on the table with her fingers. The drumming grew louder and louder, faster and faster. Eventually she stood up, shoving her chair back so hard it fell on the floor with a crash. Then she strode out of the door, slamming it back against the cottage wall. A policeman was standing by the car and she was walking right towards him.
Pa called out, ‘Magda – WAIT!’ But she ignored him.
I remembered the fight she had got into on the first day of the war. My sister was a force to be reckoned with. What is she going to do? I wondered. Push the policeman off the cliff? Rip open the door of the police car and rescue Mutti? In that moment, striding forward, with her mess of brown curls streaming out behind her, my big sister looked ten feet tall, like some sort of warrior queen. I had complete and utter faith that she was about to save the day.
But she didn’t push the policeman or even go near the police car; she turned towards the ridge. Then she broke into a run, and stumbled up the path towards the south cliff.
She’s gone. She’s left me. I blinked a few times and shook my head, as if trying to wake up.
Pa came back inside and the two policemen came in after him.
‘Mind if we have a quick look around while we’re here?’ they asked Pa. He nodded helplessly and sank down on to a kitchen chair, his face slack with shock.
The thin man in the pinstriped suit sidled through the kitchen door too. Where had he come from? He must have been sitting in the back of the police car with Mutti, but I hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t say anything at all, just nodded politely at us and wandered around, his hands clasped behind his back. He had a very odd way of looking at things, as if he were memorizing every detail.
On the door that led into the snug were pinned a collection of drawings and paintings that Mags and I had done when we were little, and the pinstriped policeman stopped to look at them now. He leant in closely to examine six-year-old Mags’s ‘ship sinking in a strom’, and then studied my ‘JIANT SEAMONSTER IN AUTUM SUNSET’.
I stared at the familiar, brightly coloured shape that was bursting out of the blue waves – a misshapen head full of triangle teeth. This war is a sea monster, I thought. Sometimes it destroys things violently and openly, and sometimes its tentacles squeeze in through the cracks of normal life, and it strangles us silently.
The policeman touched one of the pictures, and his mouth twitched as if he were trying not to smile. Perhaps he is kind, I thought, but then he did the dry little fox-cough that I remembered from the courtroom, and asked if one of us could show him up to the lighthouse. Kind or not, he was looking for evidence – something that would prove my Mutti’s guilt. My heart stuttered in my chest.
Pa couldn’t say anything – he looked as if he could barely move. So it was down to me.
‘Watch the first step,’ I said as my trembling hands unbolted the metal door at the foot of the staircase. ‘It’s a bit wonky.’
We climbed the spiral stairs, through the service room, all the way up to the lantern room at the top. As we climbed, my mind was racing ahead, trying to remember all the things that were usually lying around up there. Could there be anything that would make them think Mutti was a spy? I led the way, so I could pause for a moment at the top of the narrow stairs, feigning breathlessness and blocking the pinstriped man’s view of the room.
I could see drawings, pencils, binoculars . . . Oh, God . . .
‘I won’t keep you long,’ Pinstripe said, and pushed gently past me into the lantern room. ‘Oh, I say – what a view!’ He stood there, awestruck for a second (as most people do when they step into our lantern room for the first time). ‘We’re up in the clouds!’
I could hear the heavy boots of the two other policemen thumping up the stairs behind me. I didn’t have time to hide anything.
‘What exactly are you looking for, sir?’ I managed to say, aware of a familiar numbness spreading up from my toes . . . I knew that feeling: I was starting to freeze.
Pinstripe didn’t reply, but the first policeman did. He almost fell upon the binoculars as he lurched into the lantern room: ‘These’ll do for a start,’ he said, examining the binoculars very suspiciously. He put them into a special bag he took from his pocket, handling them with care. Not a very pleasant-looking chap, I thought: he had an oily moustache that drooped across his top lip like a damp bootlace.
‘We’ll have to check them for fingerprints,’ he whispered to his colleague with an air of self-importance.
The numbness was spreading up my legs now, through my hips and – with a surge of nausea – through my tummy too. My fingers clung stiffly on to the handrail at the top of the stairs. Mags wasn’t here to be my fierce big sister. Pa was downstairs, in pieces. I had to be braver. Petra Zimmermann Smith, I said to myself, You are the only one who can help Mutti right now.
‘Of course they’ll have my mother’s fingerprints on them,’ I managed to say, my words catching slightly in my throat. ‘They’ll have all our fingerprints on them – they’re our binoculars!’
‘Oh, yes?’ said the second policeman, noticing me properly for the first time. ‘Your binoculars. And what exactly do you all look at through these, then?’
I rolled my eyes at the policeman’s ignorance.
‘Birds, mainly,’ I said, ‘or the moon, or boats . . .’ My throat closed up. Was looking at boats too incriminating?
He narrowed his eyes at me.
Behind the policemen was a pile of Mutti’s drawings. Would they class those as evidence? Probably. I would have to distract them.
‘You should check the doorknobs for Mutti’s fingerprints too,’ I said, swallowing hard and trying to ignore the tremor in my voice. ‘And you should probably check her toothbrush while you’re at it.’
Pinstripe made a little noise then that might have been a suppressed laugh. He was examining the speaking tube with interest. I forced another breath in through my tightening throat. As long as he was looking at the speaking tube, he wasn’t looking at the drawings.
‘That tube goes down to the kitchen so you can talk to whoever is in there and ask them to bring you up a sandwich or something.’ I was beginning to gabble now. As I spoke, my eyes flashed over to the pile of sketches. They were on a seat just a few paces away. The policemen still hadn’t seen them. ‘You talk into the tube and then put it to your ear to listen to the reply,’ I went on. ‘That brass piece is a whistle. If you attach it, people at the other end can get your attention by blowing into the tube and sounding the whistle.’ I don’t know why I was telling him so much. Once I had started, I couldn’t really stop. But there was also something about the way Pinstripe listened – tilting his head slightly to one side like a robin – that made me keep going. ‘Mags and I used to use it to eavesdrop on whoever was talking in the kitchen, until Mutti told us it was bad manners. If you listen very carefully, you can usually pick up the conversation, even if people aren’t speaking directly into the tube.’ Pinstripe raised his eyebrows. He put the speaking tube to one ear.
‘All quiet in the kitchen now,’ he said softly.
I pictured Pa, all alone, pale and sunken in his chair.
‘Is it possible,’ hissed the first policeman, ‘that the suspect could have used this device for listening in on Mr Smith’s conversations with the Admiralty?’ He slicked down his oily moustache with a finger and looked very pleased with himself.
There was a pause. The second policeman nodded, impressed, and started to write something down in a notebook he fished out of his pocket.
‘No,’ I said, as firmly as I could manage. ‘The telephone is in the service room on the floor below.’ Then, to make them feel even more stupid: ‘You walked right past it on your way up the stairs.’
The oily policeman smiled at me – a sarcastic, fleeting little smile. His moustache twitched. He put on a pair of gloves, and started turning the pages of Pa’s logbook – the official record of lighthouse activity and various weather and shipping charts. He showed it to Pinstripe. The second policeman was poking around in a cupboard full of tools and oil cans.
It was now or never. I tried to move my feet, but they felt as if they were made of solid ice and I could barely shuffle forward an inch. My hands were cold and sweaty on the handrail, and my heart was beating so rapidly against my ribs that it felt like a moth inside a jam jar. I stared at the pile of drawings, willing myself to move closer to them, but panic had turned me to stone and there was nothing I could do. My breath came more and more quickly and the room started to spin, the spiral stairway became the centre of a whirlpool. I blinked, gripping the handrail tighter. Come on, Petra, I said to myself. You need to be better than this – you need to be braver.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked Pinstripe, coming over. He looked at me closely, as if I were another item in the room to be inspected. ‘Perhaps you could go down to the kitchen, Constable? Bring up a glass of water.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The second policeman nodded and went down the stairs.
I couldn’t help myself. My gaze darted over to Mutti’s drawings again – and Pinstripe saw. He walked over, picked them up and looked through them slowly, one at a time. I held my breath. There was one drawing he stopped on for some time – a skein of wild geese flying over the lighthouse.
‘What’s that you’ve got there, sir?’ the moustached policeman asked. He was still flicking through Pa’s logbook.
‘Oh, nothing important.’
Pinstripe came back over to me and handed me the drawings without a word. I tucked them behind my back.
‘Come along, Sergeant,’ Pinstripe said. ‘Nothing more up here. Let’s have a look in the office – and bring that old logbook, will you? Just in case it’s useful.’ And the two of them went down the stairs.
My eyes closed. Just for a moment, it felt like a triumph, but then there was the sound of the police car starting up outside. I moved at last, my feet full of pins and needles but obedient once more. I walked to the window that looked inland, and I watched the police car take my Mutti away. I watched it until it was a dot on the distant hillside.
And then it disappeared.