‘This is what has been interfering with my signals equipment.’
‘Not any longer, sir. I took the liberty of pulling that wire out of its alternator. It won’t cause any more harm.’
‘Get Jones in here.’
‘Sir.’ Finchin stepped outside and banged on the Signals Room door.
The Commander took the box out of the fake bird’s body and turned it over in his hands. He seemed entranced. He slid open a panel on the side. It was tightly packed with small metal cogs and wheels, which ticked like a watch mechanism. ‘Such a delicate instrument,’ he breathed in wonder. ‘See these?’ He tilted the box to show Marina two small glass phials of coloured liquid linked by copper wires to a tiny pressure gauge. ‘This blue one is a gas called sentium. The silver is philium. Even a thimbleful, when mixed, could keep this machine in the air for years. It’s so simple, and yet it’s never been done before.’
‘Why not?’ Marina was fascinated by the whirring of the cogs. Behind them a small leather pouch inflated and emptied like a lung.
‘Those gases are very rare. There’s only one place in the world where they exist.’
Finchin coughed. Marina looked up to see Jones’s shocked face. Of course. He would have had his listening equipment on and would not have known what had happened to her.
‘Jones. Get on to Room 40. Don’t worry, we’ve solved the problem of the signal being jammed. Send them a message using the Nephilim code. It’s in your code book, only move all the settings to the left two spaces. Can you handle that?’
Jones nodded. He looked tense. ‘What should I say, sir?’
‘Tell them we’ve got hold of a Mordavian airborne signals device. And insist that the Admiralty launch their own top-secret Valkyrie equipment.’
‘Sir.’
When he had left, Finchin looked worried. ‘The Nephilim code, sir? I thought the Mordavians had cracked that one two days ago.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘But this Valkyrie airborne equipment –’ he looked puzzled – ‘do we want to be telling them about it?’
‘Yes we do! Especially as we don’t actually have any such equipment, Finchin. And we’re not likely to. Even if we could keep something in the air, we’d never be able to power it for long enough for it to get past a lighthouse, let alone into the North Sea. But we might as well let the Mordavians think we do.’
‘I like your play, Commander. It’s not cricket, of course . . .’
‘It’s war, Finchin. Or it will be soon.’
The Commander stood up and signalled to his First Officer to follow him outside. The door was still ajar. Marina hopped out of bed to listen to them.
‘How long was she in the sea?’ her father asked. ‘Brown’s surely got confused. He thinks she was in the water for quite a while. They had to get the net fixed to the winch and let it down into the sea. They could see her the entire time, he says. Perkins insisted that her eyes were open, staring up at them.’
‘Both of them have been wittering on,’ Finchin replied. ‘All gibberish, as far as I can make out.’
‘Did Trenchard see anything?’
‘He wasn’t on deck.’
‘Give them all double rations of rum. That should calm them quick enough.’
‘Sir. Do you think it’s time we looked again at this mission?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If that device has been following us, sir, and jamming the coded signal from your machine – well, it must mean that Mordavian Intelligence know where we are. We’ve lost our element of surprise, sir.’
‘We’re not turning round, Finchin.’
‘I understand your reluctance, Commander, bu—’
‘No ifs or buts, Finchin. We’re going north.’
Marina jumped back under the blankets. She closed her eyes as the door swung open.
‘Tired, eh?’ the Commander said as he sat next to her.
‘Not really.’ She didn’t want her father to go. ‘I’m so sorry, Father,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve put you to an awful lot of trouble.’
‘But you’re safe now. And that’s all that matters.’
‘When I was under the water—’
‘Shhhhh . . .’ He stroked her damp hair. ‘It was the strangest thing. I had a memory that I had been to the seaside. When I was very little.’ She searched her father’s face as she said this, looking for any telltale sign that he recalled the seaside too. His face looked gentle and kind but showed no recollection of the day. ‘I remem—’
‘Or thought you did . . .’
‘Or I thought I did,’ she corrected herself, although she was sure that it was a real memory, ‘that Mama carried me into the sea. And just as I remembered this, I saw a large black shape in the water, coming quickly towards me . . .’
Her father was smiling now, but in a kindly way, as if she had said something very foolish. ‘But what could you see down there, Marina? It’s too dark to see anything.’
‘I . . . I don’t know what it was. But it was big. And so black. And it was travelling through the water so very fast, as if it wanted to catch me.’
He shook his head. ‘You weren’t in the water for long enough to see anything.’ That calm, rational way her father had of saying things which made her doubt herself.
‘Perhaps,’ Marina muttered. It did sound unlikely when said aloud. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘Of course I am,’ the Commander whispered. He leant over and kissed Marina very gently on the forehead.
Marina’s eyelids fluttered. She suddenly felt bone-tired. She tried to conjure up the day at the seaside. ‘I wish, just once, Mama might have spoken to me. I know her voice was gone, but . . .’
‘And what would you have wanted her to say to you?’
In Marina’s imagined meetings, her mother would never say, ‘I love you.’ The vision Marina conjured up – pale face, dark hair and a throat roped in pearls – always refused, looking troubled and turning her head away. She would only say one word. But that word, which Marina heard resonating inside her – for, of course, her mother had no voice
