Will frowned. “I wonder what this person had done?”

“Charlie mentioned something about a secret hole in the wall where Conall found the letters,” I said. “He said it was in the tower somewhere. Perhaps in this room?” 257

I ran my hands over the panels, searching for any loose edges, and Will did the same. One of the panels hung slightly loose, so didn’t take long to find. It shifted beneath my hand and I gripped the edges, working it free to discover a small recess behind it.

“There’s something back here.” I reached in and my fingers closed around a pile of dry paper, the top one of which was a letter. I held it out so that Will and I could both read it.

Will and I both stared at the letter.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Will said. “I’m familiar with all the names, and there’s no record of any keeper 258named Jackson ever having been stationed here.”

“Perhaps he changed his name?” I suggested. “We know his son wasn’t executed because he was here on Bird Rock. Look, what’s that writing at the bottom?”

We both squinted at the letter. There was indeed more writing there, but it had been written in pencil rather than ink and was so faint that it was hard to read. We could only just make it out.

“Finn was the name of one of the first keepers,” Will said. “Finn Lewis. So maybe you’re right. Perhaps he changed his surname. He obviously got the boy out of the workhouse before his execution somehow. 259Perhaps he took the keeper job at Bird Rock to hide from the law?”

“If the boy was here in the lighthouse,” I said, “then what happened to him? His father must have kept him hidden from the other keeper somewhere. In his letter, he mentioned being locked in the dark, so perhaps he was kept in the basement?”

“Maybe. But surely the other keeper would have had to go into the basement sometimes to check the generator?”

Neither of us had any answers.

The other papers were more letters from Conall, and we took them with us back to the photograph room. Will dug out Finn Lewis’s logbooks while I went through Conall’s letters. They made for grim reading. All addressed to his mother, they detailed his time in the workhouse, when his father fell into debt. It sounded like a viciously cruel place. He described being ravenously hungry all the time, as well as the various punishments for even the most trivial offence. I could hardly believe the brutality.

One night, I was really bad and wet the bed. When the master found out, he strung me up from the ceiling in a sack and I 260had to stay there all night…

They made us kneel on wire netting covering the hot-water pipes…

Beaten with stinging nettles…

Head rubbed into the wet coal on the floor…