Usually I would have left my sister alone for a while – she needed to cool down – but too much was at stake now. Too much had spiralled out of control already, sucked down into this terrible whirlpool. I had to try to forget about my suspicions, and all that stupid business with Michael Baron and Spooky Joe, and the note that was screwed up into a ball in the pocket of my coat. None of that mattered right now. Besides, how could Mags be the spy? Here she was, determined to sail across the Channel all on her own to rescue British soldiers. What sort of traitor would volunteer to do that? The only thing I really understood in that moment was the sickening fear that had wrapped its tentacles around me. My family was in terrible trouble, and if we didn’t help each other, we would all be lost.
‘Mags,’ I said, when I found her, sitting behind the lighthouse amongst the standing stones. ‘Please don’t be angry with Pa – he’s so worried about Mutti.’ My sister was right by the edge of the cliff, plucking at a tuft of grass. I sat down next to her. ‘He’s so worried, Mags, I don’t think he can bear to be worried about you too.’
‘I know,’ she said.
We sat there in silence for a while, and I sifted through the events of the past few days, trying to make sense of it all, but everything was too stirred up and muddied with fear. Mags held up her hand, letting some scraps of grass fall from her fingers. The wind blew them away from us, out over the cliff towards the cool, grey sea. Towards France.
A little seaside town just like this one . . . I thought about the German guns I had heard yesterday, and the radio announcement about the thousands of men trapped on the beaches. Just twenty miles away. I squinted at the horizon to try to see the outline of the French coast.
The sky was clearer than it had been the day before, but there was a strange haze over the water. It wasn’t a sea mist, though – it was smoke. Something rumbled in the distance and we saw the tiny silhouette of a plane moving across the sky, but it was too far away for us to see if it was ours or the enemy’s.
‘It was that newspaper article about the Treachery Act that really upset him,’ I said.
Mags nodded – she had seen the article too.
‘He thinks they are going to prosecute her,’ I said. ‘He thinks they’ll find her guilty.’
Mags shook her head, furious. ‘But what proof have they got?’
‘They don’t need proof, Mags.’ And my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. ‘They’ve got her confession.’
‘Her confession?’
My heart was beating in my throat as I passed my sister the piece of paper that I had tucked beneath my pillow.
‘What’s that? Another letter from Mutti?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s the same letter. This is the second page. I found it on Pa’s desk last night, hidden underneath yesterday’s newspaper.’
‘He hid it from us?’
‘Yes.’ I recalled the shocked expression on Pa’s face when I had walked into the kitchen, and the peculiar way in which Mutti’s letter had ended: P.S. Remember . . .
Mags read the missing second page:
‘ . . . that I have told the detective everything he needs to know. I am ready now to write everything down and sign it. I will write that I am guilty. This is really the best way. I love you all so much.
‘But she can’t be a spy! Not our Mutti . . .’
‘I know,’ I said.
When Mags gave the piece of paper back to me, I saw that her hand was shaking, just like mine.
She must have noticed the same thing. She put her arm around me and squeezed me hard. She hadn’t hugged me for months. Suddenly I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer.
‘I don’t understand any of it, Mags,’ I sobbed.
‘No,’ she said.‘But if she’s making a confession to the police, she must have done something, mustn’t she?’
Pinstripe’s ominous words echoed through me: Sometimes, good people do bad things . . . This is something you are going to need to come to terms with. Very soon.
Perhaps he had received her written confession already. I pulled away from my sister, wiped my eyes with my sleeve and sat still for a moment.
‘What do you think will happen?’
‘I don’t know.’
It wasn’t likely that the police would be looking for another suspect now – my sister, or Spooky Joe, or anyone else for that matter. They had a written confession from my Mutti – what more did they need? I didn’t say anything about Joe’s coded note or the fact that Mags’s initials had been on it; as far as Mags was concerned, the scrap of paper had been lost somewhere between the south cliff and Dragon Bay.
She took a breath. ‘We just have to wait to see what the police will do. Mutti will probably be transferred from the camp to a prison, and then there will be a trial . . .’ She stopped. She didn’t want to think about what happened after that. TRAITORS TO BE HANGED . . . The sea below us was swilling back and forth against the cliff – I was a ship in a bottle being tipped this way and that.
‘There’s nothing we can do right now, Petra.’ Mags paused. ‘Nothing we can do for Mutti, anyway . . .’ And I saw that she was looking towards France again. She was thinking about all those poor soldiers caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
‘You want to go and help them.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. Now more than ever.’
Mags got to her feet and held out her hand to pull me up beside her. We stood there together, quite still, hand in hand, looking out to sea, and I became aware of a strange, high-pitched resonance, a fierce energy filling the air all around us. Just for a moment, there weren’t four Daughters of Stone on our clifftop: there were six of us.
When we went back into the kitchen Pa was still sitting in his chair. He was bent double now, with his head in his hands. He didn’t even look up when we came in. ‘I can’t take it, Mags,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me again. I just can’t . . .’
Mags looked at him. For a moment, I was afraid that she was going to swear or storm out again, but she didn’t. She knelt down on the floor next to Pa. When she spoke, her voice was soft. ‘I want to help, Pa – we can’t just let this happen, can we? I can’t join up to fight, but I know how to man a boat. This is something I can actually do to make a difference. Please, Pa.’ She put her hand on Pa’s arm. ‘We can’t help Mutti right now, but we can do this – we can help them.’ Pa was still looking at the floor, his hands pressed over his eyes. When he looked back at my sister, I saw that his face was wet with tears. I had never seen my father cry before. A vast pit of fear opened up inside me.
‘I’ll go, then,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘I’ll go. And you can help me, Magda. Is the motor boat in working order yet?’
Mags shook her head. ‘Not really, Pa.’ I could tell she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be going too, but she didn’t want to upset Pa again.
‘Then get down to the harbour and give the old lifeboat the once-over for me.’ His voice shook and he swallowed hard. ‘I’ll set off with the tide first thing tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ Pa said. He sounded determined now. ‘Tomorrow. There’s something very important I need to do first.’