My sister looked at Pinstripe. ‘Yes.’ But she didn’t address what followed to the detective, she looked at me instead. ‘I joined the search for Michael after the bomb, just as I said I would, right after the ambulance took you away, Pet. I was the first person to find him. He was up on the clifftop in the middle of the gorse bushes – he must have been thrown backwards by the blast. His leg was broken. Michael begged me not to call for help. He said if I called the police, he would be arrested for sabotage. He told me that it was you who had cut the telephone line, Pet.’

‘Me?’

My sister was embarrassed then. Worse than embarrassed – ashamed. ‘Yes. And that he’d tried to stop you.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘No. Maybe for a while.’

Pinstripe looked at her unblinkingly. So did Mrs Baron. And so did I.

‘Yes. I believed him.’ She couldn’t look at Michael. ‘It was easier to believe that my innocent little sister had been manipulated by someone – got herself tangled up in something stupid – than to believe that—’

I finished the sentence for her. ‘Than to believe that your boyfriend was a Nazi.’

Her eyes filled up with tears. ‘Yes.’

‘So you hid him.’ And I knew where. I had seen the mud and the chalk on the policeman’s uniform. ‘In Dragon Bay Cave.’

Mags looked at me almost gratefully. ‘Yes. Mrs Baron and I moved him there together. She agreed it was best for Michael not to come here – just in case the police believed Petra’s “spiteful nonsense”.’

I shot the Baron a look, and then turned back to Mags. ‘And you’ve been taking him food from the lighthouse,’ I continued, the riddle of my poor dwindled sister making sense at last. ‘You’ve been sharing your rations with him. That’s why you’ve got so thin, Mags.’

A tear ran down the side of my sister’s face. ‘I wanted so much to believe that he was innocent. He was very ill – I went to see him every day to look after him. But then, as he got stronger, he started telling me things – things that he thought about the world, about the war. He had persuaded me to take him out in the boat several times before the bomb. He had asked me about the sandbank, and the lighthouse, about the tides. I thought he was just showing an interest in boats because he liked me, but—’

Mrs Baron interrupted her then. ‘But he was just using you for information. You were useful,’ she sneered. ‘Michael and I planned exactly how to get what we needed from you. You were so easy to manipulate. Just like your pathetic father.’

If my legs had worked, I’d have flown across the room and clawed her nasty red eyes out.