Sitting by the fire in the cottage, we turned off the wireless and just listened to the wind as it screamed through the cracks in the window frames. Mags sat in Mutti’s armchair and stared into the fireplace, hypnotized by the hell-red glow of the last burning log. It smouldered angrily, and so did my sister. She had been out all afternoon and had barely said anything since she’d got back. I still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving me to face the policemen alone.

Pa looked up, and we heard a tile grate and clatter its way down the sloping roof. ‘It was a storm to raise the dead,’ he whispered to himself, as if he were remembering the beginning of an old ghost story.

The thing is, on our bit of coastline, storms actually do raise the dead. There are hundreds of wrecked ships buried within the Wyrm. Hundreds of them. Every now and then – once or twice in a lifetime, perhaps – a heavy storm churns up the ocean floor, causing the sandbank to shift and convulse so that it spits out a rusty trawler, or the rotten corpse of a lost sailing ship. Sometimes they stay drifting there for a few days and can be recovered, but more often than not, the sandbank sucks them back down again – hoarding its grim trophies beneath the waves.

At the very lowest tide, you can see what looks like a forest of dead trees sticking up out of the shallow water. But they are not trees at all – they are the masts of ships long buried in the sandbank. They are skeletons in a watery graveyard. The remains of the Wyrm’s prey.

As I tried to sleep that night, I thought about my Mutti, spending her first night away from us, locked up in an internment camp. I wondered if the storm was keeping her awake too. I remembered the German lullaby she used to sing to us when we were little and couldn’t sleep – the one about the moon rising – Der Mond ist aufgegangen. I sang it silently in my head and tried not to cry. I didn’t want Mags to know how frightened I was.