Built into the lens was a narrow strip of red glass. It was a fixed light, not rotating; the red part of the beam was aimed back towards the mainland. He frowned, because there had been no dangerous shoals or sandbars that he’d seen on their way in. But he knew what it was pointing towards even before he went out onto the gantry. In the red strip stood the pillars in the sea.
Since it seemed better to do it sooner rather than later, he went back downstairs for water and then up again to clean the lamp-room windows. The wind screamed outside. He had to keep ducking back in to breathe, which was annoying, because for opaque reasons the door handles were wooden and the cold had already cracked them, so his gloves kept catching. Once it was done, he sank down at the table and puzzled over a box of four new wooden door handles, all neatly turned.
‘Or you could just use … metal ones,’ he said aloud. Feeling picky about the windows now, he scratched off a mark on the inside and then hissed when he burned himself on the steel frame. It was so cold it tore off a rag of skin. ‘Or wooden handles,’ he said, feeling stupid. He put his gloves back on and changed the door handles. The last keepers had left a screwdriver in the box.
While he teased out the screws, the sea whitened. In the distance, the land was grey; the silhouettes of the ruined towers along the wall reached up into the weather, roofs invisible. Inside, though, the arc lamp made the little room warm.
Once the handles were done, he remembered about supplies. In that at least, the Lighthouse Board had been thorough: there was a pantry stocked with everything he could have needed and a good deal more. Fish in a generous icebox, smoked meat hanging along the rafters, jars of oats, barley, rice, ordinary basic things, but a lot of them, and seeing it gave him a rush of security that made him see afresh how close to the edge they always lived at home. This was three months’ worth of food, all assured. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt sure about three months’ time.
All at once it seemed less likely that anything odd was going on, and something in him relaxed. The night was twenty hours long now, so he moved a set of bedding up to the watch room and arranged it on the iron grille floor so that he would know if anything went wrong with the lamp. He took out The Count of Monte Cristo, basking in the quiet. He could feel it would make him edgy before he got used to it, but for now, the novelty was heady.
Something moved downstairs. It sounded like a chair being dragged across the floor. Without giving himself too much time to think about it, he went straight down, away from the noise of the lamp and into the gloom. Voices came from the bedroom. Not voices that might have been the mumbling of the sea or a chance of the wind around the ledges; close. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could hear that it was English. The door was open. He tapped on it anyway and went in. No one was there.
He stood in the empty room for a long time. The voices stopped at first, but then they began again. He spun slowly, trying to find where they were loudest, but couldn’t decide. There was a smell too – rum, salt, wet clothes.
Maybe the sugar smugglers. It would make sense for them to stop here, if they were going any distance in that miserable little boat.
‘I can hear you,’ he called. ‘Look, there’s no need to hide, you can come out and we can have some tea. There’s plenty.’
Silence again.
Annoyed, he went back down to the engine room for a tape measure and a notepad, and spent the next hour measuring every wall and beam in the tower, certain he was going to find a hidden space. He did find a couple of unexpected cupboards, the doors disguised in the wainscoting, but there was nothing in them except shoes and coat hangers. The rest of the place was exactly where it was meant to be. There wasn’t an unaccounted inch, and where the walls or the floors were thick, they were solid.