The Waiting Time

Chapter Eighteen

He sat very still.

He had drawn back the curtain and a dreary light seeped into the room. He sat on the hard chair and he held in his hands the Waither PPK pistol. He had stripped it and cleaned the working parts with the duster that he kept with his shoe-polish tins, and reassembled it. He held the pistol tight in his hands as if the feel of it would give him strength. He had taken each of the bullets from the magazine and then he had reloaded it because it was his experience that the breech mechanism of the Walther PPK could jam if the rounds were left too long in the magazine.

He sat on the hard chair and looked down the length of her bed. He could see only the red autumn of her hair. She lay on her side and the bedclothes were close around her. Beside him was his grip bag and her rucksack, packed. It would be finished before tonight. After he had buffed his shoes, especial attention to the toe-caps, and after he had cleaned the working parts of the pistol and reassembled it, he had put the duster into the cloth sack, closed his grip bag and locked it. He had started, then, on her clothes. They had been scattered, haphazardly, on the rug and on the linoleum, and he had handled each item of her clothing with care as if it were precious. On the dressing table, neatly folded, were a sweater for her, a T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse motif, the bra she had worn the day before, the last of her clean knickers, the final pair of unused socks and the best of her jeans. He had left her wash-bag on top of her filled rucksack for when she woke, and her anorak. He had cleaned the room with his handkerchief, wiped each surface, sanitized the room. At the end of the morning, they would go, leave the room, and it would be as if they had never been there. His mattress and the pillow and blankets were already in the room next door, and the bed was made. He wore the good suit he had brought with him, a clean white shirt, the green tie and the polished black shoes. He had shaved with care so that he did not cut himself and had used a fresh blade. He had combed his hair and left an exact parting. It had seemed important to him. He sat and watched her and held the pistol. He did not understand how, at the dawn of the last day, she could sleep in such peace and calm… but he understood so little of her. He loved her, and knew nothing of her. The pistol was gripped in his hands, and the light of the last day settled on her hair.

‘Aren’t you going to shave today?’

He had come home late in the night. They had lain in the bed, separated. Sometimes, early in the morning, he went downstairs and brought her a cup of decaffeinated coffee, and sometimes a grapefruit juice, not that morning. He had dressed, he had shouted for Christina and told her it was time for her to be up. He was wearing the trousers he had used the day before, dirty and dried out from scrambling up the river’s bank, and the same shirt.

He reached up and lifted down from the top of the wardrobe the suitcase, good leather, which they had bought him for his journey to England, and dumped it on the bed. He thought it necessary that he should pack it now. He did not know when the day would be finished, or how it would finish. She kicked her legs out of the bed.

She sneered, as she left the room, ‘Are you going to take the appearance, on your last-chance day, of a refugee migrant?’

All the clothes that he packed in the suitcase were new, and the shoes. They had chosen everything that he packed, walked in the stores with him and told him what was suitable. Raub had cleared his old wardrobe and drawers, Goldstein had taken the old suits, shirts, ties and shoes to a charity shop on Doberaner Strasse. The schedule was in his mind – what he would wear when they came off the plane at Washington, what he would wear at the Pentagon and at the Agency and at the Rand Corporation. He packed the suitcase. He heard Christina’s radio playing loud, and he heard her in the bathroom. Raub had shown him, with the superior grimace, how he should pack so that his new shirts were not creased in the case. He closed it and fastened the combination lock.

He took the Makharov pistol from the drawer beside the bed, put the spare magazine in his coat pocket, checked the safety, and armed the weapon so that the first bullet was in the breech. He carried his case down the stairs. He remembered, when he was in the hallway putting the case down by the street door, that he had not picked up the photograph of Eva and Christina in the silver- plate frame from beside the bed, but he did not go back up the stairs for it. He went into the living room.

The lightness of the robe and the sheer silk of the nightdress lay on her legs and on her breasts and on her hips. She had the old photograph album in her hands. There was little enough in the new house of their old life, but the album with the frayed and disintegrating cover was from the past. He walked behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. She turned the pages of the album for him as if to taunt him… Dieter Krause and the wife of Dieter Krause and Pyotr Rykov and the wife of Pyotr Rykov, in the kitchen of the commanding officer’s house on the base with bottles on the table and the used plates, glasses raised. She turned the page. At the picnic site on the south side of the Malchiner See, the men in shorts and the women in swim costumes, and he did not have his arm around Irma Rykov and she had her arm around Pyotr Rykov, and they were laughing… Another page. His fingers were hard on the bones of her shoulders… Pyotr Rykov standing behind her, close, and she held the fishing rod, he guided her cast of the lure, and they were laughing… His fingers ground at the bones of her shoulders, but she did not cry out… Pyotr Rykov in his best dress uniform with his arm around Eva Krause, and they were laughing at the man who held the camera… He held her so that he would hurt her. She looked up at him and she taunted him.

‘He was your friend.’

He loosed his fingers from her shoulders. He scraped the photograph, Pyotr Rykov with his arm around Eva Krause, from the album, tore it into small pieces and dropped them on the new carpet.

‘You boast that he was your best friend… and you betray him.’

He destroyed the photographs. He tore to tiny broken pieces the images of his wife and Pyotr Rykov as they laughed.

‘You take him on the street. You are like a pimp with a whore. You sell him.’

What he had done was for her. Krause laid the album with the empty pages back on her lap. From the first day he had always told himself, he had gone to Cologne for her, and made his statement. He went to the wooden cabinet beside the television set for which he had the only key. He took the video-cassette, knelt and slotted it into the recorder. He switched on the recorder and the television. He would say to himself, and he would believe the lie, that everything he had done was for her.

He stood, again, behind her, his hands heavy on her shoulders, and watched, as the old clothes were ripped from her body, her kneeling in front of his friend, her loosening the belt and trousers of his best friend, her taking Pyotr Rykov in her mouth… She did not fight him. She did not turn away her head or close her eyes.

The week after he had shot dead Hans Becker in the small square near the church at Rerik, he had been called into the office of the Generalleutnant in the building on August-Bebel Strasse and he had been given the video-cassette. He left her watching the monochrome images of loving and laughter.

He told Christina that her mother was not well and should not be disturbed. He drove his daughter to school, and they talked in the car about the tennis match in the evening.

The station chief drove.

She had dressed herself that morning with particular consideration. Olive Harris had left in her bag, stowed in the locked boot of the station chief’s car, her scarf and the hat that was a memento of her previous times in Moscow. They would have obscured her face and the profile of her head, would have hindered recognition of her features. It was her style to leave utile to chance.

A light snow squall fell on the street. She peered between the wipers, recognizing what she had reconnoitred the night before. The shops were still shuttered but the first queues of the day had formed. The first market stalls were being set up and the vegetables laid out. She made the gesture for the station chief to slow. The shift duty of the watchers was changing. They should allow the new surveillance team time to settle and absorb. Two hundred metres down the straight street, blurred by the snow squall, was the old apartment block that she recognized where the target of consequence lived. They had not spoken that morning. He had been waiting in the hallway of the embassy for her. She had no need to speak to him. If the fool cared to sulk… They drove past the new surveillance car, three men, and the front passenger had a camera slung loose on a strap hanging from his neck. She pointed to where he should park ahead of the car, splitting the distance between the surveillance position and the street door of the apartment. The car would have a clear line of sight on them.

They waited. She had expected that a ministry car would be outside the street door. She had the photograph of him. He would be wearing uniform. She had no doubt that she would recognize him.

She checked again, for the third time, that her ticket and British Council diplomatic passport were in her bag. He gripped her arm, his face was cold and hostile, and he pointed. It annoyed Olive Harris that she had been looking in her bag and had needed to be alerted.

He was on the pavement. Quite small, but heavy in the Army greatcoat. His cap seemed to her too big for him and was low on his head. There was a woman with him, wrapped well against the cold: she carried two large shopping bags and a piece of paper. In between looking up and down the street for his driver, he checked the paper with her… God, how pathetic, a ranking colonel close to the greatest power in the Russian state was looking over his wife’s shopping list, pitiful… He kissed her cheek, awkwardly because of the depth of the peak of his cap, and she walked away.

Olive Harris felt no emotion. She checked that her bag was fastened. She sensed, beside her, the contempt of the station chief, but when she was back in London she would bury him, deep, so he squealed. Colonel Pyotr Rykov was isolated, alone, on the pavement in front of the street door.

She walked from the car. When she crossed the road she made certain that she looked up the street towards the surveillance car. They should see her face clearly from it, and her greying hair that was gathered in a clip above the nape of her neck.

He looked once more at his watch. She was sufficiently close to him to see the annoyance on his face. It was always a precious moment, exciting to her, when the face of a target replaced a photograph’s image.

She walked forward slowly, looked furtively behind her, then hurried towards him. He was trying to wave down a taxi but it swept past.

She reached him. Olive Harris stood in front of Colonel Pyotr Rykov. She spoke to him. She stood at the angle which guaranteed that the long lens in the surveillance car would have a sharp view of her face. She asked him about the weather and about the price of heating oil, and saw his bewilderment. She took his hand, and saw his confusion. For a moment she held his hand… She spun on her heel and did not look back at him. She was in full view of the long lens in the surveillance car. She dropped her head, and held her arm up and over her face, as if to shield it from any long lens. She swept open the door of the car.

The station chief sat stolid beside her and stared ahead. She slammed the door shut.

‘Well, come on, get a move on. Don’t hang about.’

He recited quietly, ‘Nescio quis teneros oculus mi/u fascinat agnos…‘

‘What the hell’s that?’

The station chief drove away. He said, ‘I could see it in the mirror, the camera was up, they’d have banged off best part of a roll

… It’s Virgil, from his Bucolics, it’s the evil eye that has the power to bewitch lambs. It’s evil destroying innocence… The airport, Mrs Harris?’

She brushed the snow off her shoulders and off her hair. He had gone three blocks when he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a gummed-down envelope with no name and no address on it. He handed it to Olive Harris.

‘It’s my resignation letter. Please, be so good as to deliver it to the head man. Of course, I’ll be expelled after this little charade, but I’d like my letter in first. I have to believe, Mrs Harris, that we’re all answerable for our actions. One day. I hope, one day, you feel true shame. The airport, right?’

She put the envelope in her bag. She looked out at the streets of the Moscow morning. She wanted to see them, remember them, because she would never return.

He was unannounced.

A marine guard escorted him from the hail, up in the elevator, along the corridor, past another marine and through the bombproof door, to the rooms used by the Agency.

‘What the hell’s with you?’

‘I’ve seen, Brad, what I call the evil eye. Sorry, it’s not the time for riddles, sorry.. I feel rather sick, and I’d quite like to hit someone. You have the resources, we do not, so I’m here with the begging bowl. The evil eye – sorry, again, sorry – has fallen on Rykov. We expect, don’t ask me details, that Pyotr Rykov, in the next few hours, will be arrested.’

‘You kidding? You know that? How the hell do you know that?’

‘We’d like to know when it happens – your resources are so much better.’

‘What’s the charge?’ the Agency man asked, distant. ‘If Rykov is arrested, what’s the charge?’

‘Espionage.’

‘Are you saying he’s your man? Holy shit! That’s not true. Not your man?’

‘We’d like to be told, like your resources, to watch for it. I’ll be out of here in a day or so, and we won’t meet again. I don’t wish to evade responsibility. Yes, we’ve done that.’

He could not look into the eye of the man who had been his colleague. He shuffled for the door. He would go home and he would tell his wife that the children’s things should be packed, that they were going home, that the future was uncharted. He would tell his wife that he had not been able to look into the eye of an honourable man.

The marine, waiting outside the door, escorted him back to the embassy hallway.

‘Where is he, Frau Krause?’

They had come to the house in the Altst-adt. Raub had rung the bell beside the door. The house was luxury compared to the home he could afford in Cologne. Goldstein had banged with his fist on the door’s panels. No answer, and they had gone to the window. She had been sitting in the chair facing the television. Raub had called through the window glass and Goldstein had rapped it, but she had not moved from the chair. The door had been unlocked. They had entered without invitation and gone into the living room.

‘It is important, Frau Krause, that you tell us where is your husband.’

The light material of the robe had fallen away from her legs and sagged on her chest. She faced the television. Raub flushed. Goldstein stared at the clean shape of her legs under the silk smooth nightdress and the darkness at her groin and the hang of her breasts. She stared at the snowstorm television picture. Goldstein thought a video had played on the television and reached its end.

Raub said, ‘It is critical for your husband’s future and your future, Frau Krause, that you tell us where we may find him.’

Her eyes were pale, without lustre. Her hands moved, clasping and unclasping. On the carpet was a photograph album with blank pages. She did not acknowledge the questions. Torn scraps of photographs were on the floor, ripped too small for Goldstein to recognize their content. She did not look at Raub. He went to the television and turned it off. She still stared at the screen.

Raub barked, ‘It gives me no pleasure, Frau Krause… but, then, I have no pleasure in working with your husband. I despise your husband. I work with your husband because that is my duty

Now, Frau Krause, it gives me less pleasure to remind you that we own you. We own everything of you and your husband. Where is he?’

The blood ran in Raub’s cheeks.

‘You are nothing, Frau Krause, without us. You are back in the gutter with the other Stasi scum dirt without us. Without us he is driving taxis, sweeping streets, selling insurance on commission, guarding building sites at night. Where has he gone?’

With slow, deliberate movements she eased two rings from her fingers – Goldstein remembered paying for the rings that Krause had chosen – and they sparkled in the palm of her hand. She unhooked the clasp of the gold bracelet – Raub had paid for the bracelet when he had first come to debrief Krause in Rostock – and it folded into the palm of her hand. She fiddled with the fastening of the strap of her wrist-watch – Raub and Goldstein had both been with her, on the orders of the senior official in Cologne, to buy the watch as a mark of his appreciation at the end of the first month of the debrief – and she let it fall into the palm of her hand.

‘The last time, Frau Krause, or it goes badly for you, or your attitude is reported, or you go back where you belong in the gutter. Where is he?’

She threw the two rings and the bracelet and the wrist-watch with the gold strap on to the floor, near Raub’s feet. She never looked at him. Goldstein knelt and pocketed them. He was close to the photograph scraps. He recognized the face. It would be magnified behind the jewel in Washington, as it had been behind the jewel at the barracks in England. He thought the life was gone from her eyes.

They went out into the street. Raub followed Goldstein. He left the street door wide open. They hurried against the wind towards the car.

‘Heh, Ernst, if – hey, if – we get the shit bastard to America, what then?’

‘Dumped.’

‘Hey, Ernst, but he thinks he comes on the payroll, he thinks he’s permanent.’

‘Dumped, when he is no longer of use. Dumped.’

They had sat in the room all through the morning.

Earlier, when she had woken, the sound of the vacuum cleaner had seeped up the stairs, along their corridor and through their door.

She had gone to the bathroom, then dressed without shyness in front of him. She had talked, a long time back, through her plan and he had nodded his agreement. He was a man more comfortable when he was alone and he did not believe in talk that was not necessary. With their own silence, with their own thoughts, they killed the morning. They would talk afterwards, when it was finished. He had sat all morning with the pistol in his hand and she had sat on the bed and picked imagined dirt from under her fingernails.

Josh stood. He broke the silence.

‘You ready?’

‘Ready.’

He picked up his grip bag and reached for her rucksack. She shook her head. He carried his bag out of the room and she hitched her rucksack onto her shoulder. They went down the stairs. She murmured her anthem song. He thought she murmured its words to give herself strength. Afterwards, he would hug her. He would kiss her, if they were not on trolleys in the morgue…

The man who had the overcoat and the oil-slicked hair counted their money, note by note. He leered at them as he hung the two keys on the hooks behind him, and he wished them a good day.

They went out through the doors of the pension and the sleet storm hit them.

They hurried to the car.

Josh drove.

She was small, quiet, beside him and it was hard for him to believe in her strength. He felt a humility. Her strength was love. He had, as he drove, a sense of pride that she shared her love with him at the time when there was no going back. He would fight for that love, and shoot for it, and kill to deserve that love.

Peters smoked.

The smoke, acrid, from his cigarettes, carried on the wind gusts, was in Dieter Krause’s nostrils.

The gutting shed was idle and the fleet, excepting WAR 79, was in the safe harbour. The storm winds came from the sea. The stalls were shuttered against the wind, which shook the plank sides and rattled the wood awnings. They could see the length of the quayside and there was one space for one boat. Peters looked for the young woman and the older man… Krause looked out to sea. The white sleet gathered on his coat, clung to his eyebrows and hung on the stubble bristle at the edges of his beard.

From behind, without warning, his shoulder was slapped, hard.

‘Eh, Dieter, you look like you’re dead.’ Peters laughed. They were no longer the Hauptman and the Feidwebel. They were equals. They had shaken hands on a partnership. ‘You look like you’re fucking dead.. . Wrong, Dieter, they should look, when they come, like they’re fucking dead.’

Krause stared up the length of the quayside. He waited, the old Makharov pistol in his belt.

He had spoken to Mr Fleming.

Albert Perkins presented himself at the reception desk of police headquarters.

Fleming had told him, on Secure, tangled in the wires, sitting on his bed, of the Special Responsibility peg and the elevation to grade seven. He had walked, almost a jaunty step, from the hotel.

He was escorted to the control and communications area and saw them. They had been given a table to sit at across the area from the bank of screens and the radio input equipment.

‘Morning, Doktor Raub, and good morning to you, Julius. A pleasure to see you again.’

Albert Perkins basked in a sense of mischief.

‘Come to escort your vile man across the ocean, I see. But you are here and he is not, which tells me that you don’t have control. Exasperating, yes, when control is lost?’

He walked towards them. He pulled up an additional chair and sat himself at their table.

‘To us, you understand, this is a sideshow. Because you’re way off the top table this is important to you – not to us. We already sit at the top table. Actually, I feel considerable sympathy for you, this being so important to you.’

The mischief gave Albert Perkins satisfaction.

He doubted that he would ever again in his professional life achieve such an opportunity for baiting. It would be his last throw for the recall of the good days, the old days, when the Service had stature over the BfV.

He sat comfortably in his chair and smiled kind warmth at the suppressed hostility of Raub and the undisguised dislike of Goldstein. The chance would not come again, and he milked it.

‘Forgive me if I bore you but, because it is only a sideshow to us, I feel rather relaxed today. You don’t seem to me, Doktor Raub, to be relaxed – nor you, Julius. You don’t seem to be taking today in your stride. How many bodies is it now, scattered around the countryside? It’s the messy old business of evidence, yes? If evidence is produced, if evidence of murder is laid before you, then there’s no way out. Evidence, in open court, of your involvement with a murderer would be a nasty pill to swallow. So, we’re just going to have to sit back and see what happens, what that young woman achieves, yes?’

It was, and Albert Perkins recognized and enjoyed it, a virtuoso performance in insult.

‘I meant, sincerely, the sympathy. You are dogged by the past. You have made a great nation, a nation of engineers and technicians, musicians and artists, but it is never enough to turn away the past. You are never at ease because wretched little people like me will not allow you to forget the past. Always you are condemned to carry blame for the past. The past is the bad Pfennig in your pocket, Doktor Raub, and I expect young Julius doesn’t spare you with blame for the past. So unfair… Right now, what I would really appreciate is a cup of coffee.’

The few fishermen had left their boats and gone to the shelter of the gutting shed. Peters tugged at his sleeve, pointed. The boats writhed at their moorings.

He looked across the channel, where Peters pointed.

He saw her first, and then Dieter Krause saw the man, who walked a half-dozen strides ahead of her. He saw the sharp flash of her hair.

They were on the far side of the haven channel and they went quickly, purposefully, heads tucked down, into the sleet and the snow. They walked away from the bridge that crossed the channel. He did not understand why they walked away from the bridge that would bring them to the fish quay, where the trawler would tie up. He was frozen cold in the wind on the quay, he could not think, he shivered. There was no fear in her.

She walked past the shops with their lights already bright, and past the houses with their summer balconies, and past the tourist boats that waited for the summer, towards the breakwater.

He stared. He did not understand. Peters kicked his shin and started to run. Dieter Krause followed him, past the gutting shed and the closed stalls and the moored trawlers and over the bridge that crossed the Alter Strom channel, but he did not understand.

The assistant deputy director met Olive Harris at the airport.

She came to him. With that passport she was the first of her ffight through.

He thought, his first impression, that Olive Harris was quite radiant. He thought the triumph bathed her.

‘Go well?’

‘As I had planned it.’

‘Just a bit of waiting, then.’

‘They won’t hang about. Should have it through tonight.’

‘Well done, Olive. Not that it matters, but Albert’s thing should be winding up this evening.’

‘Not that it matters. Where’s the car?’

They were by the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater. They were hunched down and the lighthouse gave a small protection from the weight of the wind gusts.

They could see out to the open sea to the east.

The big car ferry had come out, gaining speed as it cleared the Neuer Strom, from the channel at the back of the gutting shed and the fishing boats’ quay. Its lowering shape had disappeared into the blur of the merged sleet and snow. The trawler would come, rolling and staggering, from the east and they peered into the grey-white of the mist and searched for it.

When they looked down the length of the breakwater, turned away from the watch on the open water, they could see the two men. There was more snow in the sleet and the light of the afternoon was slipping. Through the sleet and the snowflakes, they could see Krause with one man beside him. Krause and the man blocked the end of the breakwater, stood where it met the beach.

Around them the waves hit the rocks on which the lighthouse was built. Close to them was the rope, jerking and slackening, holding the small, open boat. Because the breakwater curved in a shallow arc, Krause and the man could not have seen it. A family had come onto the breakwater, and a small boy had shrieked excitement when the spray had deluged him, and a little girl had clung to her father’s legs.

A bulk carrier had rolled out to sea from the Neuer Strom, and was gone.

Josh held the gun down between his legs and his hands were chilled and sea-soaked.

There was the rumble behind them, echoing in the steel-plated shaft of the lighthouse, of the automatic power. The light flashed. Its brilliance above them brought the night around them. The light rotated, spilled in a corridor, across the white wave heads, the grey-green sea, the tired, sheened concrete of the breakwater, the rocks… Josh saw it… The light caught the white and red paint of its hull. He saw the outline of the trawler. It seemed to be tossed up and then to wallow down. It came from the mist cloud that settled on the sea away to the east. The light, again, speared onto it, captured it, and discarded it. The trawler seemed to Josh so fragile, beating through the snow, the swell… The trawler was coming home, coming for the quayside…

The grotesque shadow of Tracy was thrown by the lighthouse beam over the water and the waves. She was down on the rocks, wrestling with the knot that tied the rope to the rail post. The trawler veered towards them. The rise of a wave obscured it, it rose again and the spray cloud fell above it. He saw the gulls. Incredible, in the wind the gulls held station with the trawler. He was mesmerized. When the trawler’s bow was pitched up, Josh saw the black paint on white of the boat’s identification. There was a man, stooped low behind the wheelhouse, and he threw scraps into the air. The gulls broke station and dived for them. She had loosed the knot of the rope and took the strain of the boat. He felt such fear.

‘Get in,’ she hissed.

‘Christ…‘ Josh went down the rocks and his feet slid from under him, his body scraping over the weed. He looked back. She hung onto the rope. ‘Good luck.’

She shouted, ‘A man told me you have to earn luck – start bloody earning it!’

His shoes had a grip. The water came over them but the rock was firm. He launched himself. He fell into the boat. It ducked down under the impact of his weight and water slopped on his face. He scrabbled up onto his knees. He saw her. She jumped. She was beside him. She had a paddle in her hand. She pushed the small open boat away from the rocks, and they were first lifted up and then thrown down. The lighthouse beam snatched, a moment, the colour of her hair. She paddled the boat out towards the trawler.

Krause and Peters, together, the same moment, understood. They sprinted forward… They had the length of the breakwater to run. .. The little boat was bucking, weaving, in the waves, on course to intercept the trawler.

They ran, panted and heaved. Krause, frozen hands, buffeted by the wind, held the Makharov two-fisted, aimed, fired. He could not see the fall of the bullets, into the sea, among the wheeling gulls.

The drive of the snow was into his face, the force of the wind against his body. He fired until the magazine was exhausted, until the boat was lost against the hull of the trawler.

She threw the rope to the man who fed the gulls. The small open boat clattered against the wood planks of the trawler. Josh reached up and caught at the low rail. It took his weight and his feet kicked at air below him. He dragged himself over and fell onto the slithering mess of fish carcasses. She came after him. The man who held the rope had an old, beaten face, and there was another face, as old and wizened, that peered from the door of the wheelhouse. At the wheel was a younger man. The gulls screamed above him. Josh stood, fell, stood again. He took the pistol from his belt.

He shouted, against the gull cries, against the engine drive, against the wind whistle in the wires.

‘Which is Muller? Which is Willi Muller?’

A thin, aged arm, a gaunt, scarred finger, pointed to the wheelhouse.

‘Willi Muller from Rerik?’

The head, lined, unshaven and weathered, nodded.

Josh yelled, ‘He stays, you go.’

They went without argument, over the side of the trawler and down into the boat. They went as old men would who have known the authority of command, as old soldiers would have gone, too wise as survivors to confront a gun. They were cast off.

Josh was in the wheelhouse.

He was a tall young man with blond tangled hair and a lean face. He held the wheel easily. Josh had the pistol close to his head.

‘Turn her round, bring her back out.’

The wheel was swung. Josh saw, through the water spray running down the wheelhouse window, their boat moving away from them. The two men had control of it and paddled it easily, and he saw Krause on the breakwater and the man with him. The young man stared straight ahead and the trawler pitched back towards the open sea. Tracy stood behind Josh.

‘You are Willi Muller?’

‘Yes.’

‘You worked your father’s boat in Rerik? And, in November of nineteen eighty-eight you took your father’s boat out for the Stasi?’

‘Yes.’

‘You lifted a man from the Salzhaff? You saw him killed ashore?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was from your boat the body of the man was thrown back, weighted, into the Salzhaff?’

She beat the questions at him, savage, and his voice quavered the answers, afraid.

‘Yes.’

‘I want your evidence of murder. I’m taking you home.’ The shoulders of the young man shook. The colour of his face had gone. They went towards the west, beyond the small shelter of the breakwater, towards the last glimmer of the day’s light.

They watched the trawler going. They watched it head for the reddening ribbon of the dusk.

‘They are going to Rerik,’ Peters said. ‘They have been out four days, they will have little fuel left but they would have enough fuel to reach Rerik. We should meet them at Rerik.’

They walked back along the length of the breakwater.