'You are joking, Ricky? Is this some sort of wind-up?'
He swung his legs over the side and dropped down on to the pontoon.
'I tell you where I am, Ricky… I am inside a damn great harbour with a damn great sea wall protecting it, and we are still being blown half out of the bloody water. What you're saying, Ricky, it's not a starter.'
He held the mobile to his face and used his other hand to steady himself against the boat's side. The pontoon shuddered under his boots. The rest of them on the boat were inside the old wheel-house, scraping seventy-year-old wood to make it ready for the first coat of varnish. Harry Rogers, alone on the pontoon where only an idiot would be, shouted into the phone:
'I'm down in the west. There's no possibility of putting to sea because there's a depression settled in, and going to be there for a week. I'm working with mates on a restoration. There's storms forecast all week, not just down here. The North Sea's as bad, maybe worse. It's out of the question – sorry and all that.'
The wind bent in arcs the rigging his friends had already replaced on the beam trawler whose hull had been laid down in a yard across the harbour – now gone and replaced by holiday apartments – in 1931. He had not bought into the syndicate owning the boat because it was fully subscribed, and his ambition was bigger. One day he would have his own.
Across the harbour, spray burst over the sea wall.
Against the pontoon, the ropes holding the boat groaned in the swell.
'I tell you this, Ricky, for nothing. No one's out, not even the fish. Not here, not in the Approaches, not in Irish waters, absolutely not in the North Sea. Try listening to the forecast. Don't take my word – listen to the bloody shipping forecast. Where are you? Don't you have a radio there?… Oh, you're in Germany, oh.
It'll be no different there, not on their North Sea coast
– could be bloody worse, frankly.'
The rain spattered on his face. It ran from his slicked hair and down his cheeks. Because he had been inside the wheel-house when the phone had rung, he had not had his waterproofs on – but it was Ricky on the phone and he'd come running from the earshot of the other men.
'I'm not being difficult, Ricky – never have been and won't start now. I'm telling it like it is… Steady. Of course I know what you've done for me. Steady on, Ricky. Listen, I deal in facts… Well, what you want and what's on the weather forecast just happen to be two different things… I'm not being difficult. When was I ever?'
He had blustered his protests, in the wind and in the rain, out on the pontoon that lifted and fell under him. Harry Rogers had known that in the end, push coming to shove, he would buckle. He would bend as the rigging did in the wind.
'You're not telling me what's so important? No, of course not.. . Best I can do, Ricky, is to get up there tonight, load up, sail on the night tide… You'll give me the co-ordinates on the VHF?… Have to be good enough, won't it?… I don't know how long it'll be.
No, I am not giving you shit, Ricky. You're looking at two-fifty nautical miles and there'll be waves over the top of us. We'll make what speed we can… No, I'm not saying you're shouting, Ricky… Been good to talk, as it always is… Yes, and you too, you look after yourself.'
He heard the call cut, the purr in his ear, and put the phone into his pocket. He slid back on to the old trawler's deck, went into the wheel-house and lied about 'something' having come up that required his attention at home. On the quay, as he walked into the force of the weather, he rang his son and found him in a supermarket – endured the disbelief – then called his grandson.
'If you obstruct me and refuse permission for the cameras – which you are entitled to do, citing a violation of human-rights legislation – then I make a promise to you. The affairs of your company – a travel agency, yes? – will undergo a most detailed inspection from the Revenue. It would be the type of inspection that you would find both time consuming and expensive in your accountant's fees, and it is from my experience inevitable that irregularities in your financial affairs will be exposed. Or you can choose not to obstruct me but to welcome my technicians to your home and allow them to fit cameras.'
Johan Konig sat in the back office of the travel agency's flagship premises. Back in Berlin, he had learned that the kaisers of the industrial and commercial world had a fear only of excessive attention from fiscal investigators. Nothing fazed them but the nightmare of tax people rooting in their affairs.
'I am sure you are aware that the Revenue are often clumsy in their dealings with businessmen to whom a reputation of probity is important. Carrying out computers and files when the front hall of a workplace is crowded with customers, attracting inevitable attention on the pavement, with the damage that creates, is often their way.. . I would much regret us going up that route.'
He eyed the man sitting across the desk from him and playing with a pencil. Konig would sleep that night, as he had for the previous week, in a police hostel for single men. In a month, perhaps, if time had permitted it, he would hope to find two furnished rooms in a street well back from the lake in St Georg.
The man spiralling his pencil over the desk lived in a mansion in Blankenese, and probably banked in a week what a policeman of Konig's rank earned in a year. He despised such men.
'A warning. Ingratiating yourself with your neighbour might be tempting, but it would not be wise. If you were foolish enough to provide information to him concerning cameras and directional microphones that we put in place, then – and this is my second promise – you will face imprisonment for, probably, seven years. Seven years in Fuhlsbuttel gaol is a long time to reflect on a warning ignored. You tell your family what you care to but the responsibility for secrecy is yours – seven years.'
The man who owned a prosperous travel agency nodded pathetic acquiescence. He was told that a delivery van would bring the equipment and a time later in the day was fixed for it. The business was done. Konig left the premises. He could not, quite, identify the mistake made by Timo Rahman, but he believed it existed. When it had been identified it could be manipulated. Later, back at Headquarters, a surveillance request would be drafted and would go to a magistrate, and the necessary paragraph of justification would describe activities of a flasher, a potential molester of women, in a residential side-street in Blankenese, and it would go through on the nod. It surprised him, when he reached his office, that there was no message for him reporting the progress of the British intelligence officer in unravelling the fugitive's story – what he did hear, in fulsome detail, was that every crew of Albanian foot-soldiers scoured the city's streets for a quarry.
She did not interrupt. She sat close to him, no longer smelt his clothes or his body.
'I left him there. He was all trussed up on the lamp post and there was no chance of him breaking the knots, and he'd the tape – half a dozen times – round his face. He couldn't shout. I put the toy gun back into my pocket, picked up what was left of the rope and the tape, and went home. I didn't feel good.
Felt sort of flat, sort of empty… In my mind I'd this picture of a ladder, and I was two rungs up it, and that was still nothing. Didn't feel I'd done anything. Knew it wasn't enough. There was this guy – don't even think about it, because I'm not telling you and you won't learn about him from me. He knew the way the pyramid was built. Above the pushers is the dealer, up higher than the dealer is the supplier. The dealer didn't give me what I needed – thought I needed.'
She could watch the main path through the garden.
From the bench, in the sunken area, through a gap in the surrounding bushes and through the light cloud of falling blossom, she saw them.
'I was told who supplied the estate's dealer. I went after him, went with a canister of petrol. I suppose, in terms of conscience, I could square it, but not easily. I didn't think I was an avenging angel – couldn't have said that what I did was the redemption road. The supplier was a target, and I needed a bigger and better target than a dealer.'