The Waiting Time

Chapter Nineteen

We are taking you home.’

The young man, Willi Muller, moved, dull-eyed, in the small space of the wheelhouse. She dominated him, was at his shoulder as he checked the fuel gauge where the needle was close to the red line.

‘You have not dared to go home.’

She was close behind him when he squinted down at the compass, where the needle rocked with the pitch motion of the trawler, and when he took the wheel from Josh and set the course to the west.

‘You let the fear, as a coward would, cripple you.’

She was above him when he lifted the hatch from the engine viewing box and peered with a torch down at the throbbed movement of the pistons.

‘Without me, what I give you, you wifi always cringe, a kicked dog, with the fear.’

She was with him when he walked on the swaying stern deck, among the fish carcasses, to satisfy himself that the nets were stowed, the ropes coiled, and that the bilge pumps were operating.

‘Don’t think I apologize for coming into your life. You are a witness to murder. Fight me and you are an accessory to murder. But you are a coward, you won’t fight me.’

She followed him, tracked him. Josh thought she overwhelmed him.

‘The hiding time is over. You can’t run any more. You have to have the guts now – about time – to stand. You are going home.’

He read her and he thought her vicious. He could not see in her the woman who had come to his mattress, who had loved him, who had given and shared warmth, who had kissed his mouth so sweetly. She followed the young man because she did not care to give him room to think, she tracked him so that he was never free of her. There had been a savagery in her voice and she had set herself the task to obliterate the resistance of the young man. She surprised Josh, the professional: he had thought it would be him that played hard, and she would play soft. He had reckoned she would be close to the young man and seep a gentle voice into his ear and seduce the story from him. She would, he thought, have massaged the fear from him and coaxed out the story. He wished she had…

He held the wheel, he kept the compass course, and the engine droned in his ears. A small reflex action, but he took a hand from the wheel and straightened the tie knot at his collar, and then, again, both hands, he gripped the wheel. He thought back, a long time back, when he had bullied a man to his death. In the woodman’s hut, in the heat, the mosquitoes at his face, his hands, his ankles, he had done it himself before he was his own man.

The sea swell cascaded onto the side of the trawler as they went west into the grey dark seascape beyond the window. The line of the land was a black ribbon and against the ribbon was the white of waves breaking on a sand beach. In the black ribbon, moving slowly and keeping pace with them, difficult to see but always present, were the car’s lights.

Willi Muller said, ‘I think the storm is blown out.’

‘Don’t give me shit about the storm.’

‘I think we will have a good evening, very soon. When there is a bad time in the Ostsee, it is difficult but it does not last.’

‘They will hunt you, without us, find you, without us, kill you, without us.’

‘The storm will soon, very soon, be finished.’

‘You have to chuck the fear, stop playing the coward, you have to go home.’

‘I think the storm will be finished when we reach Rerik.’

He had, Josh thought, a fine, open young face. They had taken his life and tossed it, as if into the wind and the dark of the swell, hacked into a stranger’s life.

Josh called behind him, aping her, the same bullying, cold voice, ‘You take his statement, Tracy. You write it in German. You make him sign every page. Don’t let him wriggle, Tracy, get it out of him.’

The car’s lights were now bright pinpricks in the black ribbon of the land.

Krause was tight and silent, Peters was calm and talked.

‘I could have gone – you know that, Dieter – I could have gone as Hoffmann went or as Siehl went, or Fischer. I had time to think when I was at Warnemunde, too much time, when I waited for him to return. Who would be interested in me, I thought, a simple Feidwebel who merely obeyed orders? I could have gone, but I stayed, because you made an advantage to me, you offered an opportunity. Don’t believe, Dieter, that I stayed from affection or obligation. I stayed because, when I thought, you provided an opportunity. I stayed because, if I kept you out of the Moabit gaol, I made an advantage for myself.’

They were on the narrow coast road between Elmenhorst and Nienhagen, going west from Warnemunde and Rostock. Across the beach, and the darkness of the sea, were the fore and aft navigation lights of the trawler. They crawled, minimal speed, to track the trawler.

‘I cannot save him. I know what he is to you and to the Army, but I cannot save him and you cannot.’

The photographs were scattered on the minister’s desk in front of him, and in front of the GRU General who leaned his weight on the desk. They were the photographs taken that morning, in the street outside the apartment, and the photographs from the file of Mrs Olive Harris. They were, beyond dispute, photographs of the same woman. She talked in the street with Pyotr Rykov, she was listed in the file as deputy head, Russia Desk. He looked from the photographs and into the face of the General.

The General murmured in the minister’s ear, ‘I have tried, I have tried with all the assets at my disposal, to protect him. I cannot counter this and I do not wish to, and nor should you. Without the photographs I would not have believed it, with the photographs I cannot argue against it. He has destroyed himself.’

The minister knew that Colonel Pyotr Rykov had been turned away from the doors of the ministry that morning and told that his ID was no longer valid. He knew that Colonel Pyotr Rykov had twice, that afternoon, telephoned the direct number in the outer office, and had been refused by the secretariat his shouted demand to speak with his minister. The Colonel of the intelligence service, who had couriered the photographs to Defence, stood, grave-faced, behind them, at the back of the room. The minister stacked them carefully, then closed the file on the British intelligence officer, Mrs Olive Harris.

‘So be it.’ He condemned his man.

They might take him on the street, throw him into a car. They might go to the apartment and knock down the door with sledgehammers and drag him away down the stairs. He would miss, desperately, the man on whom he leaned, but could not save him.

The minister handed the photographs and the file to the waiting Colonel.

The wind had slackened. Josh stood at the wheel. The trawler churned on, the bow dipped and rose, and spray broke across the glass of the windows.

They were on the floor of the wheelhouse. She sat with her back against the sink cupboard. He was crouched down across the wheelhouse from her.

Josh listened. Tracy wrote on her pad.

Willi Muller said, ‘I was at the boat with my father. We were working on it in the evening because there was a problem with the transmission in the engine, and my father said it was necessary to make the repair then. We heard the shooting at the base across the water of the Salzhaff. It was just after the planes had flown over and then there were flares fired there. The base was a closed place to the people of Rerik, we had no contact with the Soviet military there. Because we had no contact we did not know, my father and I, at first, whether this was an exercise or something different. We continued to work at the engine. The shooting seemed to move across the base, from the Ostsee shore, through the middle of the base, through the buildings, and then to the shore of the Salzhaff. They were using the red tracers and the flares. I said to my father that I was frightened, that we should go home, but my father was definite that the repair to the engine must be finished. We worked on. We finished the repair. Two cars came. They were Stasi, from Rostock. The superior told my father that he needed the boat, it was an order. He had a beard, cut narrow on his cheeks and cut close on his chin. They said my father should take them out on the Salzhaff, but my father, and it was a lie, said that his back was hurt, that I would take them. I could have said what my father did not dare to, that the engine was not repaired, but I did not.’

She finished the page. She passed the notepad to him and he signed his name on the page, a fast, nervous scrawl.

He pushed himself up and he studied the course Josh held, took the wheel from him, and made an adjustment to the west. He went out of the wheelhouse door, stood on the open pitching deck, and looked towards the black ribbon of land.

They were on the road between Nienhagen and Heiligendamm. There were stretches of road that veered inland, where they had to strain to see the navigation lights on the sea. On those stretches, Krause drove faster, and when he came back to the sight of the sea and the slow progress of the lights he stopped and waited until the lights of the trawler were level with the car.

‘We had, Dieter, a society that was disciplined. We did not have organizations, we did not have opportunities. We lived in the tedium of discipline, and the best we hoped for was a summer vacation at some stinking campsite in Bulgaria or Romania – it was the ultimate of our aspiration. You, I, could not buy advantage. The discipline suffocated us. The Wall came down, the wessis came to look at us as if we were some theme-park amusement, and they laughed at our discipline. Do I complain, Dieter? I can buy a tax inspector, I can buy an official in the department that issues import-export licences, I can buy a policeman, a politician, a priest. I can behave like a Sicilian, the discipline is gone. I can buy a former Hauptman and the purchase will bring me the protection of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. You do not hear me complain, Dieter, do you?’

The old Makharov pistol lay on his lap as he drove. It was dulled from the years it had lain buried in the plastic bag inside the rubbish bin. He had checked the pistol and believed he would use it that night.

Tracy shouted at him, waved for him, through the door. He looked again at the lights on the shoreline and ducked back inside the wheelhouse.

‘When we were out on the Salzhaff, the flares were fired over a part of the water that was half-way between the Wustrow shore and the Rerik shore. At first I could not see the target, but the man with the beard directed me to that place. There was a contact with the base on the radio and they told the base that the firing should finish. We had a small spotlight on the boat. They told me to switch it on, and then they directed it onto the water. It was when I saw him. He was trying to swim away from the light, but he could not swim strongly. They held the light on him. We went close to him and circled him. I was ordered to go very slowly. He went under, but he must have had the desire to live, because he came again to the surface. They pulled him onto the boat and I could see that he was hit. There was a wound in his upper body and there was a second wound in his leg. He lay on the deck of the boat and he was very still except that he breathed hard. I remember that the men, there were five men from the Stasi, were all excited, and they kicked him on the deck and called him a spy and a saboteur, but I did not hear him say any words. He lay on the deck and he did not defend himself when they kicked him. I was fifteen years old, I was a patrol leader in the FDJ, I believed everything that I was taught at school about the hostile espionage units of the Americans and the British and the Fascist government in Bonn, and I hoped he would die. I hoped he would die, not because he was a spy or a saboteur, but so he would not feel any more the kicking. I brought the boat back to the pier at Rerik. The man with the beard held a pistol close against my face and he told me that I had seen nothing and that I knew nothing. They pulled him from the boat and onto the pier. He was very weak and it was difficult for him to walk and they dragged him along the pier towards where their cars were. I saw his face then, as they dragged him past me on the pier. He was tired, he was weak, he was in pain but, and I remember his face clearly, he did not drop his head. I remember that… They took him towards the cars..

She passed the notepad to him. Its page was covered with her neat close-packed writing. He held her pen and his hand shook. Her eyes never left him. He signed.

Josh did not think, himself, he could have played so cruel cold with the young man. There was no sympathy, no charity, and he tried to hope that it was merely the strategy she had chosen. She took the page back, and the pen.

Josh held the wheel steady on the course. The swell had dropped. He thought him more frightened of the animal cruelty, the bullying, of Tracy, than of the car that tracked them along the shoreline. He could not fault the strategy.

The young man stood beside him and flicked his finger against the dial of the fuel gauge and always it bounced on the red line.

He went out onto the deck. A rope lashed a fuel can to the port side. He slipped among the fish carcasses. He untied the rope, lifted the engine hatch and funnelled the remaining fuel down into the tank.

Josh thought the young man could have denied that he had the necessary fuel, and he thought his courage was supreme. Without the fuel they would not reach Rerik. She had given him, cruel and bullying, the courage to go home.

They were on the road between Heiligendamm and Kuhlungsborn. There was flat swamp ground between the road and the beach, few trees, the cloud had lifted and the wind had dropped. Away across the sea, the lights of the trawler were sharp, bright. The voice beside him dripped on.

‘With the ending of the discipline, with the coming of the wessis, so many more opportunities have arrived. I am not talking, Dieter, about running cigarettes out of the East, as the Vietnamese do, and I am not talking about shipping a few cars into the East, as the Poles do, or the trading in immigration from Romania, or keeping whores on the streets, as the Turks do. I am talking, Dieter, about the big opportunities that can be taken from our partnership. Weapons, Dieter. The East floats on weapons. Not rifles, Dieter, not pistols. Weapons that can be bought cheap and sold expensive. Missiles, air-to-air and air-to-ground and ship-to- ship. Heavy mortars. Artillery pieces. Armoured vehicles. If you have dollars they will clear out an armoury for you, you can buy anything. You can go south, to Libya, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Algeria. You can name your price. Chemical, nuclear, anything can be bought in the East and anything can be sold. But, Dieter, I do not want eyes watching me. I wish to be protected. I think we have a good partnership.’

Beside him, Peters belched.

The suitcase was at the front door of the house on the Altmarkt, packed. She was on the boat with the red and green navigation lights, and she had the power to tip the suitcase empty.

Across the seascape was the land, with the car’s headlights, always with them. But ahead, on the closing horizon, was the concentration of lights.

She was taking him home to his past. His body shook.

She reached for him. She caught the waterproof coat he wore and rammed his body back against the planks of the wheelhouse, and again. He gasped.

Willi Muller said, ‘He was near to the cars. I remember it very clearly because the clock was striking the hour. It was the moment after the last strike of the clock on the tower of the Sankt Johanniskirche that he broke from them. It was ten o’clock and he broke from them. I do not know where he found the strength, but he broke from them and ran from them. They did not know Rerik. Perhaps, if he had not been wounded, in the darkness he might have escaped from them, perhaps… I followed then as they searched. He tried to get into the house of Doktor Brandt, the school-teacher, and into the home of Doktor Gerber, the refuse administrator at the Rathaus. He was going towards the church. He tried the last time at the house of Doktor Schwarz, the engineer of the railway, he threw a stone at the window, and Doktor Schwarz came to his bedroom window and looked out at him, but did not open his door to him. Could you not have found one of them, all educated men, and taken a good statement? Why did you come for me? I thought – I remember what I thought – how was it that a spy or a saboteur had come so far from our frontier without support? Did he have no colleagues with him? He reached a small square between apartments near to the church. I cannot say whether he was attempting to reach the church. I came behind, I saw him in the square. He was puffing with his fingers on the ground as if to drag himself away, but the strength had gone from him. I watched. They ran forward with their torches and their guns to where the one who had come the fastest stood over him. I saw it..

Josh held the wheel. The page was passed and signed. It was as if he had been there, as she had been there before she had run. The young man stood beside him and took an old piece of bread from the cupboard under the sink, and chewed on it, and stared out at the lights where his home would be, and the lights of the car that were always with them.

A tractor passed them, pulling a trailerload of beet and turnip. He saw, in the tractor’s lights, that Peters’ head was back against his seat, that his eyes were closed, that he was at peace. The tractor went by them. They were close to the sea, and he saw the change in the course of the trawler, swinging to the south west and coming for Rerik.

‘You do understand – of course, you understand, Dieter – the limitations of partnership. There are partners in any commercial organization, but there is a senior partner and a junior partner. It is the same as before. There was the rank of Hauptman and there was the rank of Feidwebel. That is not difficult to understand. I reckon a seventy-thirty split, only of course when I have the need of protection, no split when I do not need the protection, but you will do well. Seventy-thirty is good for you. I think it will work satisfactorily.’

Krause stopped the car and walked to the beach. The sand was soft under his feet and the grass fronds blew against his legs. He could see, when he squinted and strained, the shape of the man in the wheelhouse. He wondered if Eva had helped Christina pack her bag, or whether Eva was in the kitchen, ironing the short white dress that Christina would wear. He felt love for them and the sand blew from the beach onto his face, into his eyes, and the tears flowed on his cheeks. He held the Makharov in his hand. He did not try to wipe the tears and the sand from his beard and from the stubble growth. He looked out beyond the beach, beyond the fall of the waves on the tideline, towards the trawler. He turned quickly and walked back to the car.

He opened Peters’ door.

Peters’ eyes were closed. He smiled. ‘Did you need to piss, Dieter? Are you frightened? Myself, I killed an Armenian and a businessman from Stuttgart, and, I tell you in truth, I did not feel the need to piss.’

He placed the barrel tip of the Makharov pistol under Peters’ chin, caught the shoulder of his coat and jerked him out of the seat. He took him, fast, across the road and onto the beach. He could not see the shock spread on Peters’ face, or the wide eyes. He heard the babble voice.

‘Eh, fuck, what’s the game? Eh, cunt, what you doing? Eh, doesn’t have to be seventy-thirty. Can talk. Try sixty-forty. You’re shit, Krause. Can’t wipe your arse on your own. Eh, Dieter, you misunderstood. Dieter, we can deal. Dieter, Dieter, please. We can go fifty-fifty, no problem… I stayed with you, no other fucker did. Dieter, please..

He dragged Peters across the soft loose sand and across the hard wet sand to the sea. The chill of the water was at his waist and in his groin. Peters did not fight when he tripped him. He held Peters’ head under the flow of the waves and felt his legs thrash against his own and he did not weaken his grip.

The body floated face down. The tide had turned. Dieter Krause stood on the beach and squeezed the water from his trousers, emptied the water from his shoes. The body drifted on the tide away from the beach. He went back to the car. The last business was ahead of him. Afterwards, Dieter Krause would go to America and he would stand in front of the audiences at the Pentagon and Langley and the Rand Corporation, and hear the sweet song of their applause, and behind him, huge, would be the magnified photograph of his best friend.

He was not believed.

The photographs were held in front of Pyotr Rykov’s face, and the light shone, fierce, into his eyes. The small blood stream dribbled from his mouth. His tie was taken and his belt of polished leather and the laces of his shoes.

He tried to ward away the panic.

‘I have never seen her before. I have never met her before, never heard her name before. She came to me on the street, said something about the weather, something idiotic, and was gone. I have never had contact, in any form, with foreign espionage agents. I am a patriot, I am a true son of the great Mother Russia. I could not countenance the betrayal of my country. I do not know why she approached me.’

The panic, cold sweat on his back and in the folds of his stomach, was because he knew he was not believed.

‘I fucked the Krause woman, yes, but that does not make me a spy. She was a good fuck, and her husband was an arsehole, and I gave her what he did not give her, but that does not make me a traitor.’

They did not believe him.

They took him from the interrogation room to the top of the flight of stairs that led down to the cell block. He was pushed and fell, bouncing on the cold concrete of the steps. Stunned, frightened, he did not know why the plot had been made against him. The cell door slammed shut.

Josh felt so old, so tired, so flattened. It was what they had come to hear, it was why he had made his commitment. He listened.

‘He was turned over from his stomach to his back. The one who I think had caught him turned him over with his boot. The one with the beard stood over, stood above his feet. I watched it and I cannot forget it. They shone the torches into his face and they laughed. The superior one, the others called him by the title of Hauptman, looked down on him as if he were something to be played with. I was fifteen years old. All I knew of death at that time was what we did to the fish on the deck of my father’s boat. There was no warning of it, he kicked up into the balls of the man with the beard, and the man screamed out. Not fear, but pain. I saw it. He was doubled up, swearing. He aimed his gun down at the young man. I wanted to look away and I could not. One of them put his shoe on the throat of the young man. There was one shot. A jeep came and the lights found me where I stood. A gun was aimed at me and I had lost the chance to run. There was a Soviet officer in the jeep, and there was a big argument. The Soviet officer said they should not have shot him, should have kept him for interrogation. They threw his body into the back of the jeep, and they made me hang on the tail of it. We went back to the pier. Three lobster pots, with heavy stones, were tied to the body and I took the trawler back out into the middle of the Salzhaff and the body was put over the side. When we came back to the pier they made me show them where I lived. My father and my mother and my sister were in my house. The superior one, the bearded one, the Hauptman, said that my father would lose his boat if I ever spoke of what I had seen and what I had known. My father told him that he would send me away. My father did not fight for me, nor my mother, nor my sister. I was sent away to be with a man my father called a friend. I was sent out. I have never lost the shame.’

It was the statement of murder. He signed the evidence statement of murder in cold blood. She had the notepad. She pulled open her coat and she hitched up her sweater and T-shirt. He saw the pale skin of her stomach as she slid the notepad under the waist of her jeans. against her skin. The triumph blazed on her face.

Josh pointed up to the radio that was nailed above the cooking stove. He said, softly, ‘Who hears the radio, Willi?’

The mumbled answer. ‘Rescue, they hear it, the marine police, Customs.’

‘Can you hook into Rostock police?’

‘For a year we have been able to – they ask us to radio them if we have suspicion of narcotics’ smuggling from the sea. We can reach the police at Rostock.’

‘Do it, please – and, Wihi, thank you.’

The young man stood. He moved as if the life were beaten from him. He went to the radio, switched it on and turned the frequency dial. There was the howl and the crackle and the static. Just old, just tired, just flattened, Mantle took the microphone.

‘For Police Control at Rostock – this is Warnemunde-based trawler, identification call sign whisky alpha roger, figures zero seven nine. Are you hearing me, Police Control at Rostock? This is Warnemunde-based trawler, whisky alpha roger zero seven nine… Are you receiving?’

Albert Perkins leaned far back in his chair.

‘You people, you won’t mind me saying it, you try too hard… All this business about getting to top table, sitting down with us and the Agency, you’re trying to run before you’ve learned to walk. Don’t take offence, nothing personal.’

His feet were on the table and the soles of his shoes faced Ernst Raub. In short bursts he had, through the late afternoon and the early evening, maintained the mischief. A technician at the control desk, sharp movement, hunched forward and pressed the headphones closer to his skull.

‘Really, you’d have been better advised – and I speak in friendship to give this sort of business to the professionals. I mean, passing over all the Iranian stuff for the Saarbrucker Strasse address was ridiculous. We benefited hugely, but where did the trading get you? You’re out of your depth, and it shows.’

The technician, hand above his head, waved for his supervisor and passed him a second pair of headphones.

Raub broke. ‘Yesterday, for twenty years, because it was necessary, we obeyed your patronizing instructions. Today, for twenty years, because it is advantageous, we tolerate your arrogant postures. Tomorrow, the future, we will ignore your-’

The supervisor threw a switch on the console. The voice boomed out, from the loudspeakers, across the control room.

‘I am Joshua Mantle, British national. I am with Tracy Barnes, British national, and Willi Muller, German national. I am bringing the trawler, call sign whisky alpha roger zero seven nine, to Rerik harbour. Arrival at Rerik is estimated at twenty-one thirty hours. I require police assistance at that location for the arrest of Dieter Krause – kilo roger alpha uniform sugar echo – former Hciuptman in the Rostock offices of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, for the murder on the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty- eight of Hans Becker, formerly resident at Saarbrucker Strasse, Berlin.’

‘Oh dear.’ Albert Perkins swung his feet off the table. ‘A shame, seems tomorrow may be too late.’

The voice, distorted, had faded but came again.

‘The charge against Dieter Krause will be supported by the written and signed statement of Willi Muller, trawler deck-hand, a witness to the murder. Over. Out.’

The voice died, was gone. The static screamed through the control room until the supervisor flicked the switch and killed it.

‘Bad luck, an open transmission, so many people would have heard that. How embarrassing. Can’t shove that under the carpet, can’t ignore evidence…‘ Albert Perkins stood. He smiled abject sympathy. ‘I’d much appreciate accompanying you, hitching a ride down there.’

He drove on the road between Kagsdorf and Rerik. He could no longer see the trawler. There were high trees beside the road. It did not seem important to Dieter Krause that he could not see the lights of the trawler. He knew its destination.

‘Where is he?’

‘If he were able to be here, he would be.’

‘Stupid selfish bastard. He knows I never play at my best when he doesn’t watch me – where is he?’

Eva Krause hit her daughter across the face. She picked up the bag and the tennis racquets and threw them out onto the pavement. She dragged her daughter into the street and locked the door behind her. She wore the old clothes, taken from the one suitcase she had kept. The skirt was long and plain. The shoes were imitation leather and would let in water if it rained. The blouse was a size too small and buttoned modestly to the neck, the coat was thin and dull. She was the FDGB organizer, the woman who sat in the meetings at the Neptun shipyard and dreamed of the apartment in the Toitenwinkel district, the wife of the Hauptman who worked from the second floor of the building on August-Bebel Strasse. She tossed the bag and the racquets onto the back seat of her car, and pushed her daughter down into the front seat. The skirt, the shoes, the blouse, the coat had been the best clothes she had owned. She had seen them that day. She always wore her best clothes when she went to the apartment in the Toitenwinkel district. She had seen them on the video, scattered on the floor, that day, beside the bed.

She drove. Her daughter was sullen quiet beside her.

Josh gave the wheel to Willi Muller. He felt faint. The wind had gone and the sea had calmed. He thought he might be sick and went out onto the deck. They were coming past the peninsula that masked the lights of Rerik. The stink of the fish carcasses was around him. He reached for the spotlight, aimed it at the peninsula shore, and called to Willi to give him the power. The beam burst out across the water and onto the shoreline of the peninsula. The light found the beach where the boy would have landed, and came to the squat concrete bunker where the radar had been housed, which had been his target. The trawler edged along the coast. Near to the end, where it was little more than a spit of sand and dune grass, the beam of the spotlight settled on a low tree, broken and dead, and a big bird flapped mutely away beyond the range of the cone of light. Tracy was beside him, and put her hand on his arm.

Josh said bleakly, You’re never free of ghosts, Tracy, they cling to you and they suck you dry. You should never walk with ghosts.’

She laughed. ‘That’s right bullshit, Josh.’

They rounded the headland. The lights of Rerik were ahead of them, across the Salzhaff. He called out to Willi Muller that he should switch off the lights on the trawler, all the lights, and the night darkness fell on them… He thought the boy had died for nothing.

‘We did it, Josh, we did it together. God, I’ve been a proper little bitch to you, don’t think I deserved you. You’ve been fantastic, wonderful.’ She lifted her head, she kissed his cheek. He stared out towards the lights and the piers of Rerik. ‘You all right, Josh?’

He pushed her hand off his arm.

He took the Walther pistol from his pocket, checked it, armed it.

He called through the wheelhouse door: ‘Willi – the officer, the Hauptman, will be on the pier. He will kill to preserve your silence. I am in the front. She is behind me, you are behind her. We stand in front of you, Willi.’

They came in fast towards the piers.

He stood where the longest one rose from the shingle and weed of the beach. Josh saw him. There was a light close to the road, behind him, that outlined Dieter Krause. Josh saw that he stood motionless at the far end of the longest pier.

There was no fear, no elation.

Josh, by the wheelhouse door, said, ‘Bring her in gently, With. Bring her home like you would have brought in your father’s boat.’

Josh went forward and took the rope from the deck. They were close to the pier. Smaller fishing boats groaned and swayed in the dropping wind at the shorter, narrower piers.

Perkins saw him. He was the idiot who had gone into man-trap country. Perkins felt, a short moment, the sense of wonderment that was always there – every field officer said it – when an agent, an idiot, came through, stepped out from the man-trap country. Always that stark short moment of almost disbelief when an idiot came out of the darkness of danger, emerged from behind the fences and walls and minefields and wire.

The trawler boat nudged the pier.

Josh jumped and lashed the rope to a post. Krause stood so still and Josh saw that he held the pistol at the seam of his trouser- leg. The engine cut. There was a silence, then the clatter on the planks of the pier as Tracy came behind him and then the young man. They faced each other. Josh looked down the length of the pier.

‘You should know, Doktor Krause, that we came to find evidence and we have found it. We came for an eye-witness to murder and we have found him. You may have thought, Doktor Krause, that time washes away guilt. It does not.’

He started down the pier, towards the beach, the road and the lights in the windows of the houses, towards Dieter Krause. He went steadily, his own pace, slow steps. Krause clasped the pistol in his fist and slowly raised it. Josh walked forward.

The aim of the pistol locked.

‘Don’t, Doktor Krause, because it is over. For you, it is finished.’ Josh was a dozen paces from Krause. It was the moment he realized that Krause would shoot. Krause would have seen the slow, sad smile pass on Josh’s face, as if he didn’t care, as if he was too wearied and beaten to care. The finger, Josh saw it, moved on the trigger, tightened.

The light burst from behind Dieter Krause.

The big spotlamp beam trapped Krause, threw his shadow forward to Josh’s feet, blinded Josh. The brilliant white light was in Josh’s face. He could see nothing. He heard the clatter as the Makharov pistol landed on the planks of the pier.

The shadow forms moved warily forward, huge and grotesque, and Dieter Krause raised his hands high above his head.

Raub hissed, ‘Run, Krause, run for the darkness.’

He heard, ahead of them, his head half turned.

Goldstein said, ‘If he runs, Raub, he runs over my dead body.’

Raub spat, ‘It was history. Too long ago. The past, the past is gone.’

Goldstein said, ‘There is no honoured history without justice. Tell a Jew that the past is gone, tell a German Jew that the past can be forgotten. He will go over my dead body.’

Krause held his hands above his head.

Perkins chuckled, ‘Well said, Julius, sensibly spoken.’

Josh stumbled, so tired and drained. He asked Tracy for the statement, and she took the notepad from under her coat, her sweater and her T-shirt. It was warm from her skin. The senior policeman held Krause’s arm and the handcuffs twisted his wrists into the small of his back. Josh led Willi Muller to the senior policeman and he identified the witness, and he gave him the notepad and showed him the written pages and the signature on each page.

‘You will go to your home, Willi?’

The young man shrugged.

‘You should g our home.’

‘For the night, taps. My boat is my home.’

‘Because you did not run from the principle of justice, Willi, I am proud to have known you.’

The voice blared, nasal, behind him. ‘Mantle, come here, Mantle.’

At the edge of the light Perkins was with Tracy, holding her hand as an uncle would have done. Perkins grinned. ‘I was just telling Miss Barnes… Hey, come on, Mantle, don’t look so damned miserable.. . Just telling Miss Barnes what a quite fantastic young woman she was. If a quarter of the snot-nosed pillock recruits coming into Vauxhall Bridge Cross had her resourcefulness our Service would be the envy of all. With a bit of help from you, you old hack, and I’m being generous, she has achieved our policy aims, bagged, packaged, wrapped .

An asset is destroyed, a public trial beckons, recriminations commence. Poor old Dr Raub, my German colleague, still walks in the time warp, thought they could slide the guilt out of sight, the modern equivalent of putting him on a boat to Paraguay. No chance. Mantle, she is fantastic. All for love. Marvellous thing, love, so they tell me. My suggestion, get back to Rostock and buy our Tracy an impressively expensive dinner. Hey, Mantle, your old pencil hold any lead still?’

Tracy took his arm. Perkins walked away and his laughter rang in the night. The cars were revving. Josh saw Krause pushed down, awkward, into the back of a car. He loosed her hand. He walked back down the pier.

The trawler rolled gently beside him. He took the Walther pistol from his waist and threw it high, far, into the water of the Salzhaff. The cars pulled away, made a convoy. He stared at the distant treeline on the shore of the base, the home of ghosts. He stood on the pier along which the boy, wounded, had been dragged. She called again. There was one car left in the road and she ran to it. It was all history, it was all gone. It was the past, it was finished. It was all for love.

He fed the message.

Status: SECRET.

Information flash – ex Moscow staffer to Russia Room. Status of info, unconfirmed, but from ‘reliable source’.

RYKOV, Pyotr Nikolai, army rank Col., current position P/A to Mm. of Def., arrested 18.00 local by Fed. Tnt. Service, and held on espionage/treason charge. Believed SIS involvement – requested we onpass to VBX, London. It’s dirty, I have a bad smell on this one.

Understand RYKOV subject of German junket at Pentagon, Langley, Rand Corp. – suggest you cancel and leave bottles corked and keep sauerkraut in the refrigerator.

My assessment: If RYKOV arrested by FIS, then he is dead in the water, irrelevant.

Bestest, Brad.

End.

The message was sent.

She had taken her bag and rummaged in it. She had changed in the lavatories. While she had changed, Josh had picked from his suit trouser legs, meticulously, the last of the fish scales.

She came through the swinging door into the hotel’s lobby. She wore her cleanest T-shirt, from the Peenemunde day, and the least crumpled of her old jeans. There was dark lipstick at her mouth and shadow colouring at her eyes, and the copper-gold of her hair was spiked up. She took his hand. She was the woman a man could love for the rest of his life, all of his life. She squeezed his hand, laughed. ‘Come on, Josh, a bloody great meal and a bloody great bottle, it’s what we’re owed.’

She led him towards the restaurant door, behind which the band played.