‘Oh, yes?’ He looked around. It must have been a bit odd that he couldn’t see me. I stood up on trembling legs and waved at him from behind my gorse bush. He waved back at me, looking only slightly puzzled. ‘Are you going down to work on your boat this morning?’ he asked my sister.

She hesitated, tucking her ears firmly beneath her woolly hat. Then she smiled and said, ‘Yes. You can come too if you like, Michael.’

So they set off together and I tagged along behind, glancing back over my shoulder every now and then to make sure Spooky Joe wasn’t following us. What had he been up to? It had certainly looked like spying of some sort, but what could he have been looking at? And what was written on the piece of paper Mags had taken? I wanted Michael Baron to go away so that we could have a look and discuss it properly, but as I watched them walking along together, side by side, it became clear that any conversation with my sister was going to have to wait until later.

Chapter 18

18

‘We’ll take the tunnel,’ Mags announced, and my heart sank. She knew how much I hated the shortcut down to the beach. Was she trying to shake me off – hoping I’d leave her alone with handsome Michael Baron?

Something flared up inside me. I wasn’t going to be shoved aside. Besides, if I turned around to go back home via the cliff path, I would have to go past Spooky Joe’s cottage, alone . . .

‘Are you coming, Pet?’

I smiled as innocently as a younger sister can at moments like this. ‘Of course,’ I said.

The entrance to the tunnel was concealed by the ruins of an old lookout tower and the roots of a gnarled, wind-bent tree that grew from between the stones. Most of the children in the village knew about the tunnel. It was a secret passed amongst siblings and school friends, though our Pa had been the one to show it to me and Mags. It was a long, steep, enclosed passageway carved through earth and chalk and tree roots – an old smugglers’ route that took you from the south cliff all the way down to the beach at Dragon Bay.

We used Pa’s torch, its feeble beam illuminating the chalky burrow just a few yards ahead. Michael went first, then Mags, then me. Here at the very top, the tunnel was the entrance to an enormous rabbit warren and, as we dropped down on to all fours, we had to watch where we put our hands, as there were little piles of droppings here and there. Something blinked in the gloom, and scurried away down a narrow hole with a flash of feet and a blaze of tail.