There was a very odd moment of calm. The moon was visible – large and low – and its pale light made the parachute into a ghost. The seconds were slower, the skies were silent, and the parachute floated down through the smoke, towards the silver sea.

What’s that? I put the telescope to my eye again quickly.

In the shallows, just off the south beach, I saw the shape of a rowing boat, and two oars dipping and rising, dimpling the dark water.

Someone else must have seen the dogfight too. Someone else must have watched the bomber go down and the slow drift of the ghostly parachute. Whoever it was must be going out to rescue the Luftwaffe pilot.

I squinted hard through the telescope, and adjusted the focus.

Then I stopped breathing.

It was too dark to see the name King Edward on the prow of the little boat, but I didn’t need to. I knew the shape of its hull, the pattern of its painted stripes.

But it wasn’t the boat itself that had made my lungs tighten so painfully; it was the tall, square-shouldered silhouette that was rowing it out to sea.

Pa?

Chapter 30

30

Idon’t know how I did it, but I did. My limbs prickled with pins-and-needles and my breathing was dangerously fast and gasping, but I managed to stagger down the lighthouse stairs and out of the cottage.

I knew that it couldn’t possibly be Pa in the rowing boat – how could it be? – but I needed to see. If it wasn’t Pa, then who was it? I could believe that the light flickering up on the north cliff had been some sort of illusion, but could I really have hallucinated a whole boat, and a person rowing it too?

I half-ran, half-fell all the way down the cliff path to the harbour. There were points at which I was aware of the ground thudding beneath my numb feet, and points at which I felt I was almost flying through the darkness. If Mrs Baron had seen me, racing along with a torch after the blackout, I would have been in serious trouble, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

I arrived at the beach, blood pounding, muscles burning. I stopped, hands on my knees and breathing hard, beside a huge crater in the sand. The bomb had missed the harbour, and it had missed the army buildings on the clifftop too, but it had blown a hole in the barbed wire over fifty yards wide. It looked as if a gigantic sea monster had taken a bite out of the beach.

Then I saw a long, thin groove in the sand. This is where he launched from. The groove ran all the way down to the water. There were footprints too – man-sized boots.