47

It was after midnight when Grandpa Joe got home. He came into the cottage, pale and exhausted, his white hair dripping with rain. As soon as the all-clear had been given, he had walked all the way back to us from Dover, through the cold and rain. I thought that it was the sort of magnificent thing my Pa would have done.

‘I knew it!’ he said, when we told him about everything that had happened. ‘I knew that Baron woman was up to something. Months ago, I saw her out early in the morning, heading to the telephone box on the Dover Road. She made a habit of it, and I thought it was so odd, I even started writing it all down. Like the posters say – you know, report anything unusual or suspicious. But then a pair of monkeys turned up one morning . . .’

Mags and I looked at each other. I felt my cheeks redden as I remembered Mags scampering across the grass to steal Joe’s scribbled note.

‘The whole thing went clean out of my head after your Pa died . . .’ And he shook his head, angry at himself. ‘Why on earth did I trust her? Why did I leave you alone? You could have been killed last night, the pair of you.’

‘We’re all right, though, Grandpa Joe,’ I said. And then I thought about what he’d just said. ‘So the MB on that piece of paper was Mrs Baron – not Michael?’

Meredith Baron,’ he said. ‘There was a picture of her in the local newspaper and I’d seen her in the village a few times.’

‘Meredith?’ I’d never thought of the Baron as someone who might possess a first name. ‘And TB stood for telephone box!’ I said triumphantly.

Grandpa Joe chuckled. ‘You’ve cracked it, Pet.’

‘Hardly a complicated code, though,’ said Mags.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I could never make sense of the numbers.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Four digits and then a gap and then six more.’

‘Like this,’ Grandpa Joe wrote a row of numbers on the back of the newspaper that sat on the kitchen table. He smiled gently at the puzzle:

0032 011140

‘You should be able to get this, Pet. You help with the lighthouse logbook often enough.’

And suddenly it became clear.

‘They’re times, aren’t they?’ I said. I remembered that when Pa recorded the weather or shipping information in his logbook, he didn’t write the time in words as ‘twenty past six’, or ‘five o’clock’, and he didn’t use any dots or colons either; he wrote the time like this: 0620 or 0500. ‘So the longer numbers are the date,’ I said. ‘I remember they all ended with 40. So 0032 011140 is—’

‘Is well past your bedtime, ladies,’ Grandpa Joe said, standing up. ‘Now, are you sure we don’t need to get you a doctor, Mags?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, rubbing her head. ‘Just a bump.’

Joe smiled at the two of us with his sad eyes that shone just like Pa’s, and then he wheeled me through the passageway to the bedroom. ‘Pair of troopers, you two,’ he said quietly. ‘Pair of blooming troopers.’