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 centre 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 moustached 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 old 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.

Chapter 16

16

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.