We agree that Mitch should go and search the seabed. She does this happily, diving straight out of the window and into the sea. We go on deck and for the next few hours we keep a look out for Crowky and his scarecrows, but also for Mitch. At any moment she could swim to the surface with the Box. That would be brilliant, but it would be dangerous too, because we’re sure that Crowky is watching us. It feels like he’s watching us.

Occasionally Mitch’s head pops out of the water, but she’s just coming up for air. Eventually she climbs back on board using a long knotted rope, then throws herself into the hot tub.

“So?” I say. “Did you see it?”

Light snow is falling. Flakes land on the water and melt away. Mitch rubs her arms. I notice her teeth are chattering. “There’s nothing down there,” she says, “and I mean nothing at all. It’s just smooth sand. I’ve searched the whole bay.”

“Maybe you buried it,” says Win.

She shakes her head. “I thought of that, but how would it stay down there? There’s nothing I could tie it to, or wedge it in. It must be somewhere else.”

“And we’ll find it,” says Rose. “We just need to look again.”

So that’s what we do. We go back to Mitch’s cabin and look from Mitch’s tattoo to the window. Win wants us to go to shore and “have a dig around,” but the cove is big. There’s no way we could search the miles of forest that lie in front of us, and we know that if we leave the ship, Crowky could get us. Here we’re protected.

As the day wears on, our ideas become wilder and wilder. Win even suggests that the Box could be hidden at the top of the mountain, and that Mitch got a group of penguins to fly it up there for her. This makes Mitch throw a book at him and yell, “WORST SUGGESTION EVER, WININJA!”

It isn’t just Mitch who’s starting to lose her temper. As minutes and then hours tick by, Rose and I get jumpier too. We know that Crowky is probably doing exactly what we’re doing—staring at the tattoo and trying to work out where the Box is hidden—and possibly he’s doing it more successfully than we are. This isn’t a good thought.

“The problem is,” I say, “Crowky is clever.”

“You don’t need to keep telling us, Arthur,” snaps Rose.