Our Castle by the Sea Page 7

  Pa was in the middle of us, holding our hands—Magda’s and mine—and we descended the steps slowly, looking down. We did not want to talk to the chattering crowd that waited for us.

  Mrs. Baron was there on the steps too. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry, girls, but our hands were absolutely tied.” She hugged Mags, and then she hugged me too. But I didn’t want hugs from Mrs. Baron; I wanted my Mutti. I was so frightened I could hardly breathe. For some reason, all I could think of was the grip of the gas mask, the choking bitterness, the suffocation …

  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 that fight she had got into just a few months before; 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 onto a kitchen chair, his face slack with shock.

  The thin man in the pin-striped 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 before. 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 was pinned a collection of drawings and paintings that Mags and I had done when we were little, and the pin-striped policeman stopped to look at them now. He leaned 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 colored 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 like he could barely move. So it was down to me. I stood up rather unsteadily.

  “Watch the first step,” I said, unbolting 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 in there 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 pin-striped 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, awe-struck, 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. He wasn’t a very pleasant-looking chap, I thought: He had an oily mustache 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 onto 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?

  The second policeman 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 pencil drawings. 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 into 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 mustache 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 mustache 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 oilcans.

  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 center 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 mustached 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 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.

  The weather that night was fierce. I remember the wind howling around the lighthouse, ripping at the long grass on the clifftops and whipping up the wildest waves I had ever seen. The sea surged in huge black breakers, exploding in ice-white spray half a mile high. Each one of those waves could have swallowed a ship.

  Sitting by the fire in the cottage, we turned off the wireless and just listened to the wind as it screamed through the cracks in the window frames. Mags sat in Mutti’s armchair and stared into the fireplace, hypnotized by the hell-red glow of the last burning log. It smoldered angrily, and so did my sister. She had been out all afternoon and had barely said anything since she’d gotten back. I still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving me to face the policemen alone.

  Pa looked up, and we heard a tile grate and clatter its way down the sloping roof. “It was a storm to raise the dead,” he whispered to himself, as if he were remembering the beginning of an old ghost story.

  The thing is, on our bit of coastline, storms actually do raise the dead. There are hundreds of wrecked ships buried within the Wyrm. Hundreds of them. Every now and then—once or twice in a lifetime perhaps—a heavy storm churns up the ocean floor, causing the sandbank to shift and convulse so that it spits out a rusty trawler, or the rotten corpse of a lost sailing ship. Sometimes they stay drifting there for a few days and can be recovered, but more often than not, the sandbank sucks them back down again—hoarding its grim trophies beneath the waves.

  At the very lowest tide, you can see what looks like a forest of dead trees sticking up out of the shallow water. But they are not trees at all—they are the masts of ships long buried in the sandbank. They are skeletons in a watery graveyard. The remains of the Wyrm’s prey.

  As I tried to sleep that night, I thought about my Mutti, spending her first night away from us, locked up in an internment camp. I wondered if the storm was keeping her awake too. I remembered the German lullaby she used to sing to us when we were little and couldn’t sleep, the one about the moon rising—“Der Mond ist aufgegangen.” I sang it silently in my head and tried not to cry. I didn’t want Mags to know how frightened I was.

  Sleeping was like falling into a series of shallow black holes; I woke over and over again, yanked up into consciousness by the wind tearing at the tiles on the roof, or the blast of waves pounding into the cliff face below my bed. When I was awake, I thought about the faces of the people who had turned against Mutti in the courtroom—people who needed her to be the enemy so that they could do something with all that anger and fear and hate they had inside. I thought about the Nazis creeping closer and closer to us through the darkness; I thought about U-boats hanging there in the murky-green gloom, far below the churning surface of the Channel. All through that long, stormy, miserable night, visions of the Wyrm writhed wildly in my mind.

  “Are you all right, Pet? Pet?”

  My sister’s voice. Her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake.

  It’s not real, then—the sea-dragon squeezing and scraping its way up the lighthouse steps, the hiss of its rotten-fish breath, hungry jaws filled with row after row of teeth … I don’t have to hide anymore—it’s not coming for me. It’s not real …

  “Pet.”

  “Uh?” My breathing was quick, dizzy. My pillow felt wet under my cheek.

  “I think you were having that nightmare, Pet. That one you used to have when you were little. You were sort of …”

  “I was what?”

  “Whimpering.”

  I sat up in bed. Our room was still dark, the ugly blackout curtains drawn tightly together. “Is it morning?”

  “It’s early. Five o’clock I think.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “I was awake anyway.”

  I squinted at the dim outline of my sister. “Are you dressed, Mags?” She didn’t appear to be wearing her usual striped pajamas.

  “Yes. I’m going out. I’ve had an idea.”

  “What?”

  “If Mutti didn’t do those drawings,” she whispered, “then someone else did. And if we can find out who the real spy is, we’ll be able to prove Mutti is innocent. Come with me, Pet.”

  I sat there in the darkness. The last of the storm was over us now, and rain spattered rhythmically on the window.

  “Right now?” My nightmare had left me shaken and frightened. I didn’t think I’d be able to move.

  But Mags was not afraid at all. “Come on, Petra,” she said. “For Mutti.”

  The rain was easing as we set off, pulling on dark-colored clothes and tucking our hair up into old woolly hats. Mags wore her satchel. She had packed a torch, an emergency jam sandwich, Pa’s brass telescope (the police still had the binoculars), and a notebook and pencil to write down the exact details of everything we saw. What we really needed was a camera, but we didn’t have one. We crept out of the h
ouse without turning any lights on and closed the door softly so we wouldn’t wake Pa.

  In the spring, our clifftop was usually bright with blossoming gorse, the new grass nibbled by a hundred baby rabbits, but now it was a thorny gray wilderness of metal and concrete. The government had reinforced the coastline with trenches, barbed wire, pillbox guard posts. Perhaps this should have made me feel safer, but it reminded me of how close the enemy really was now—a bit like when you’re playing tag and you slam the door behind you and shove a chair up against it in a fit of panic. The wind had dropped now, and it was eerily quiet outside. As we made our way up the dark, wet path to the south cliff, my imagination conjured the sound of enemy boats landing on the beach below us, the crunch of enemy boots on the sand.

  “Where are we going, Mags?”

  “Not far. Not far at all now …”

  Spooky Joe’s cottage loomed ahead of us—a low, dark, square shape—from a distance, it could almost have been one of the pillbox concrete bunkers. I was reminded of that misty morning just a few months before when I had followed Mutti up onto the south cliff.

  “Quiet now,” Mags hissed. “We don’t want him to know we’re here.”

  Her plan suddenly became clear.

  “Spooky Joe?” I breathed. “You think he’s the spy?”

  Mags nodded. “Think about it, Pet,” she whispered as we left the path and tiptoed behind the cottage. The blackout blinds were still down. “He moved here just before the beginning of the war. He’s got this amazing view out over the Channel—it must be nearly as good as our view from the Castle. And he’s virtually a recluse—no one really knows anything about him.”

  I considered her arguments. They certainly seemed to make more sense than Mutti being the spy.

  Mags and I took up our positions behind a gorse bush.

  “What are we going to do, Mags?” I whispered.

  “I’m not sure yet,” she replied, taking the bag off her shoulders and rummaging inside for Pa’s telescope. “Let’s just see if he …”