I looked out to sea, but there was no sign of the parachute, the pilot or Pa. There was hardly any breeze now. It was eerily still and the sea was calm. The moonlight sketched pencil-silver waves on the black silk of the surface. Then I heard the splash-and-creak of oars, quiet and regular. There was a light, faint and quivering – a lantern, perhaps – and the outline of a boat gradually became clear. It moved towards us, gliding smoothly with each pull through the water.

The figure rowing the boat was square-shouldered, just like Pa – and he rowed the boat exactly as Pa would have done, but something wasn’t quite right. The man’s hair was white as smoke in the moonlight. Was it a ghost? I shivered as the little boat drew nearer. I thought of the Wyrm lurking below the surface. I imagined the rotting masts of all those ships reaching up towards the boat like the bony fingers of the dead.

My heart was beating so fast that it just felt like a dull, dizzy buzzing in my ribcage. The wet sand sucked at my feet.

I could hear voices coming from the sea wall over by the harbour, but I couldn’t drag my eyes from the boat that was drawing closer and closer with each smooth pull of the oars.

Then it reached me, sliding up on to the sand with a gritty hiss.

The figure in the boat turned around and looked straight at me.

It wasn’t Pa – of course it wasn’t – but the floundering disappointment was shocked out of me almost immediately.

It was a face I recognized.

‘Spooky Joe,’ I breathed. Everything was so strange and so dreamlike, the words escaped from my lips before I could stop them.

The old man raised his bushy white eyebrows at me. ‘Spooky Joe? That’s what you call me, is it, Petra?’

I stared at him. How did he know my name?

My hands gripped the side of the King Edward. ‘What are you doing in our boat?’ I managed to say.

‘Your boat, is it?’ For a moment, I thought he was going to snarl at me, but then he stopped and shook his head, as if to say, That’s not important now. He turned towards the dark shape that was slumped in the bottom of the boat.

I peered in.

‘He’s breathing, but he’s unconscious,’ Spooky Joe said.

A lantern had been placed in the bow of the boat. Its feeble light illuminated the face of a young man, who lay there, perfectly still. His hair and uniform were soaked through with seawater and there was something dark running down the side of his head and neck. Blood. He can’t be much more than twenty years old, I thought. Just a few years older than Kipper Briggs or Michael Baron.