‘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.’

Chapter 48

48

Itried to sleep, but all night long there were noises drifting up to the Castle from the bay below: voices and engines – blurred sounds amidst the shushing of the waves and the rain. Then, at last, silence. Pinstripe had said the military would be dealing with everything now. He had said not to worry. But I needed to know what those sounds meant.

Had any of the landing craft made it to the shore? Had our men got there in time?

It wasn’t until the next morning that we found out what had happened. Mags ran down to the village at first light to ask Edie what she had heard, but she knew nothing about any of it, and nor did anyone else. She said she knew Kipper’s fishing fleet had gone out as usual. In the end, Mags went to the police station and found Pinstripe.

It turned out that the planned landing was not the glorious invasion that Mrs Baron and Michael had anticipated: there were only three landing boats, and they had all turned back as soon as I had changed the signal from the lighthouse. The U-boat had melted away into the dark water.

‘It’s as if it never even happened,’ I said to Pinstripe.