The light was changing now – the black dissolving into a rusty grey. The sun must be rising. But there was a light ahead of us too – a pale, yellowy glow – then it was gone again, like a door or a curtain opening and closing. And then I remembered. There was something else up on the south cliff: Spooky Joe’s cottage.

Spooky Joe had moved into the crumbling little house at the beginning of the previous summer. Everyone had assumed he was renting the cottage for a holiday, but months later he was still there.

I’d never actually seen him – he kept himself to himself and was rarely seen in the village. Pa had told us about him – said that his name was Joe and that Mags and I should ‘leave him well alone’, so naturally this made us all the more intrigued, and we started making up stories about him being a smuggler or a murderer or a spy. I can’t remember which of us came up with the nickname Spooky Joe, but it seemed to have stuck.

Whenever we walked up this way, we always kept an eye out for him, but he was never more than a shadow at the window, a puff of smoke from the chimney, or a pair of black boots disappearing through the doorway.

When Mutti was about fifty yards away from the cottage, she stopped quite suddenly and ducked behind a gorse bush. It was then that I realized we were not alone on the clifftop. There was another figure too, just ahead of Mutti. It was a wraithlike shape, distant in the mist. Then the bizarrely comical truth of the situation became clear.

I had been following Mutti, but she had been following someone else.

Chapter 8

8

I didn’t ask Mutti what she was doing that foggy morning, and I didn’t ask her who she had been following. I couldn’t find the right words without sounding as though I was accusing her of something terrible. And I couldn’t admit that I had followed her. We had always been such a close family, we had always trusted each other, but secrets had started to seep into the gaps between us. And now, like water freezing in the cracked surface of a stone, those secrets were growing colder, harder, starting to force us apart.

The very next morning, Pa and Mutti sat us both down at the kitchen table and told us that we needed to have ‘a serious conversation’.

My stomach cramped with guilt – Am I in trouble? I always feel like that when a grown-up says they need to talk to me about something serious. It happened a lot at school: the headmistress, Mrs Baron, could make me feel quite sick with one of her penetrating stares. It was usually Mags who was in trouble, not me, but I’ll bet Mags has never had a guilt-cramp in her life.