It felt as if everything was against me – even the weather. As I made my way down to Stonegate, the cold rain ran down my legs and soaked through my socks and shoes. I hadn’t stopped thinking about my mother’s letter. In the light of my new suspicions about Mags, Mutti’s words about loving us, and asking us to be sensible felt strangely weighted. Did she believe that Mags was up to something? Could my sister really be the spy? Was that why Mags had been so keen to shift attention on to Spooky Joe? The disloyal thoughts hit me swiftly, one after another, like punches in the stomach. I had never felt so adrift, so alone. And the only person I wanted to talk to about all of this was the only person I couldn’t talk to.
When you share a room with a sibling, storms in teacups are never just storms – they are tempests. Every little quarrel is more cruel and more intense than it would be otherwise, and this was something much more serious than a quarrel. When I thought about going to bed that night, I was filled with dread – I could already feel that cold, electric tension, crackling in the silence between our two beds.
Thunder. I turned my head sharply towards the sea as a booming noise quivered over the grey water. It boomed again – a terrible blast of sound. Sometimes thunder sounds like an explosion in the sky, I thought, but that was usually when a storm was right overhead, and there hadn’t been any lightning yet. I walked more quickly, scampering down the path. If there was going to be lightning, I didn’t want to be the idiot standing out on the clifftop holding a big umbrella.
The high street was deserted. Everyone else was being sensible – sheltering from the storm inside their nice, cosy houses. I’ll just get to the bakery, I thought, and perhaps Mrs Rossi will be kind enough to offer me a cup of tea and a biscuit while we wait for the rain to stop.
But I didn’t get that far.
As I was going past Mrs Baron’s house, the glossy black door opened and a man came out. It must have startled me, I think, because I instinctively stopped and shrank back. Water from the gutter above splashed down on to my umbrella. I moved closer against the wall and watched as the door closed behind the man and he opened a black umbrella of his own. Then he clanked through the gate and set off down the high street towards the harbour. It was Pinstripe, the police detective. Visiting Mrs Baron, I thought, to talk about the spying investigation. They must have been discussing my Mutti.
I followed him. I didn’t know if I had the courage to speak to him, or what on earth I would say if I did, but I had to find out what he knew.
I followed him all the way down to the harbour. The rain was drumming down on my umbrella, I wove around puddles and dodged wobbly cobblestones. Eventually, Pinstripe came to a halt at the harbour wall and I stopped too – a safe distance away, lurking behind a post box while I thought about the best way of phrasing what I wanted to say. The sky over the Channel thundered again.
‘It’s a terrible sound, isn’t it?’
Was he talking to me? I waited behind the post box, not sure what to do. He can’t see me, can he? I crouched a little.
‘I can see your umbrella, Petra,’ he laughed. ‘It looks as if the post box is wearing a rain hat.’
Oh, Pet, you really are a first class idiot . . . I blushed as red as the treacherous post box, and stepped out.
‘Sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t spying on you or anything . . .’ I faltered at my poor choice of words.
He smiled and was about to speak again when the sky boomed once more.
We both looked up at the heavy grey clouds. ‘But there’s no lightning,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s because it isn’t thunder.’
I looked at him. Not thunder?
‘It’s guns.’
Guns.
‘The German artillery.’ He beckoned to me and I went to stand next to him at the harbour wall. He gestured towards the sea, towards France.
‘Just over there,’ he said, ‘about twenty miles away, there is a little seaside town just like this one, with a beach and cafes and shops and things. And right now it is being bombed to bits by Hitler’s guns.’ His voice became quieter, and the creases on his forehead grew deeper. ‘It’s remarkable how close they are now. One is so much more aware of it down here.’
I stared out over the water, and swallowed. A little seaside town just like this one . . .
‘Twenty miles isn’t very far at all, is it?’ I said, remembering some of the blisteringly long hikes Pa had taken us on over the years. ‘For an army, I mean.’
Pinstripe shook his head. ‘I came down from London on the train this morning, and that was about eighty miles,’ he said. ‘So, no. Twenty miles is not very far at all.’
We both looked out over the grey water.
‘I need to tell you something, sir.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Mm?’
‘Mutti is innocent. My mother, I mean. It wasn’t her who did those diagrams and things. It couldn’t have been.’
He nodded, but his craggy brow was all bunched up. ‘And how do you know that, Petra?’
My brain froze. If you mention Spooky Joe’s coded note, you could end up incriminating Mags instead of Mutti.
Flustered, I said, ‘She’s just not like that. She might be German, but that doesn’t mean she supports Hitler and all the terrible things he’s doing. And she has nothing to do with any of the information that passes through the lighthouse about shipping or anything. If she were to look in Pa’s logbook, I honestly don’t think she would know what any of his notes or records meant.’
A little voice hissed in my head, But Mags would – wouldn’t she? I swallowed hard, as if I could somehow get rid of the thought that way.
Pinstripe nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. He cleared his throat – that dry fox-cough. ‘Well, thank you for that information.’
‘Aren’t you going to write it down? Doesn’t it count as evidence – a character reference or something?’
Obligingly, he took a notebook out of a pocket and scribbled something down.
‘She hasn’t done anything wrong,’ I said, determined to make him listen. ‘And it’s not fair that she should be locked up just because of the country she was born in.’
He didn’t say anything.
I pressed on. ‘She’s a good person.’ I was starting to get angry. The detective didn’t seem to be listening to me at all; he was gazing out to sea again.
The rain became quieter, hardly falling now – just a damp thickness in the air. Pinstripe took down his umbrella, shook it and rolled it up. Then he looked at me. ‘I’m sorry to say this, Petra, but sometimes, good people do bad things.’
I felt a stabbing pain in my chest. Is he saying Mutti is guilty? That she is a traitor?
‘Why?’ I said, fighting back the tears that burnt in my eyes. ‘Why would a good person do bad things?’
He shrugged. ‘The world is a complicated place and war is a terrible thing. Sometimes a good person has a logical reason for doing something that is morally wrong; sometimes they feel they have no choice.’ He took a clean white handkerchief from his pinstriped pocket and offered it to me to wipe the tears away. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid this is something you are going to need to come to terms with, Petra. Very soon.’
He knew something. He knew something that must prove Mutti’s guilt, and he wasn’t telling me.
All I wanted to do then – the only thing I wanted to do – was to run straight home into the arms of my Mutti.
But she wasn’t there.
I shook my head at the handkerchief, tightening my face and forcing a sob back into my throat. ‘But you gave the drawings back.’ I remembered how kind he had seemed in the lantern room – as if he were on my side. He hadn’t let the police sergeant take Mutti’s sketches.
‘I didn’t need them,’ he said. ‘I didn’t need to take anything else.’ Then again: ‘I’m so sorry.’
He gave me a sad smile, turned away and walked back up the high street, through the dark, rushing streams of rainwater.