Oily’s face was a pantomime of confusion. He shook his head. ‘Not sure I know who you mean by Pinstripe, miss, but I’ll pass on your “evidence” if you really want me to.’ He took the scrap of paper from me and put it on the desk without even looking at it, then he slicked down his moustache with a greasy thumb and forefinger. ‘But it would be more than my job’s worth to cause problems for the local magistrate. I’m sure you understand. I’m hardly going to risk my position on the word of a spiteful child.’ He looked me up and down – my coat was covered with mud and chalk from the tunnel. ‘And a scruffy little devil at that. I think you’d better run along home, don’t you?’ He stood up. ‘And you can take your tall tales with you.’

I made my way to the cliff path, wary of being seen by Mrs Baron or anyone else in the village who knew that I was supposed to have been evacuated that afternoon.

I drove my fists down into my pockets and fought back the angry tears. The policeman hadn’t believed me. My own sister hadn’t believed me. She had taken Michael’s side – the side of a traitor. My feet moved heavily up the hill, weighed down by feelings of misery and betrayal and fear. Fat raindrops started falling from the rainclouds that blistered the sky above. They spattered on my head and ran down the back of my neck. As I pulled up the collar of my coat, I realized I was going in the wrong direction for the tunnel. Quite instinctively, I was heading home to the Castle. As I trudged up the steepest part of the path and my home gradually emerged from the rainy haze, something else occurred to me: perhaps when I thought I had seen a dark figure reflected in the kitchen window that afternoon, it hadn’t been my imagination playing tricks on me after all. Perhaps it had been him lurking around the lighthouse, hiding behind the standing stones. ‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘Michael Baron.’

And then I froze. It was as if I had summoned him, like some sort of medieval demon, just by speaking his name.

‘Hello, Petra.’

Chapter 37

37

His voice was behind me.

I turned. Michael Baron was standing on the path that led from the south cliff. A shaft of cold, white sunlight shot down through a crack in the storm clouds directly behind him so that I was looking up at his tall, grim silhouette. He was in the same dark coat and hat that he had been wearing when I saw him in the pea field, but now his clothes were smeared with dirt and chalk, just like mine. He had definitely been through the tunnel.