FIELD REPORT The Wrong Side of the Water

Three consecutive nights of cross-bearings: DRIFTWOOD, the coastal net, and a mobile unit positioned at Hollow Barrow, grid 51/224. All bearings converge to within half a degree.

The fix is not east. The fix is the Cape Vane light station, decommissioned 1971 — on our own coast, eleven miles by road from the Directorate’s training school at Aldercote House. The desk is invited to consider how that sentence will read in any subsequent inquiry.

Ground reconnaissance, on foot, 7 April, posing as ramblers:

— Keeper’s cottage roofless, gulls in residence, no sign of use.
— Tower sealed and listed; door sound.
— Padlock on the lamp-room hatch: new, and oiled.
— Strung inside the old lightning-conductor run: wire that does not belong to any lighthouse. An end-fed aerial, and if you cut wire to a length, you cut it for a frequency. This one is cut for 4613 kHz.

We did not enter, and we left no trace of the visit.

Recommendation: covert watch, not seizure. A tape machine must be wound, fed, and mended. Whoever services that lamp room will come back to it, and it would be a pity to be famous before we know his face.

Appended in manuscript: “Watch approved. No entry. No local police. Report to me only. — D.H.”