He said, 'It's a nine-millimetre PMM self-loading pistol, updated from the Makarov, twelve-round magazine, around four hundred and twenty metres per second muzzle velocity. It's-'
'Don't wave it around, just put the bloody thing in your pocket.'
He did. He thought it weighed, in his pocket, two or three times more than the plastic toy he had carried in the Amersham. He gazed at her and she seemed amused. She let the tip of her tongue jut between her teeth, and he thought she brought danger with her.
'What is the need for insurance?'
'Not the place to start. You've done the Secrets Act stuff? Believe in it?'
'I have, I think I do… in spite of.'
'Forget the mawkish bit. That's history. We'll start with the convergence of parallel lines. It's not original, did it at university. The right-wing Christian Democrats and the left-wing Italian Communists were edging towards a coalition government – it's nearly forty years ago. Two parallel lines of political opinion, but coming together and ultimately merging.
The originator was Aldo Moro, a CD bigwig. Didn't do him much good, because extremists, from the Brigate Rosse, kidnapped and shot him. You and I, Malachy, are parallel lines but for convenience we've linked up. What I like about you, you don't interrupt.
Perhaps you're too bloody cold to bother.'
She told him, sketchily, about a man who had sent his wife a gold chain to mark his love, about a co-ordinator who had been bought time in an apartment under the roofs, about a Czech furniture factory and the link to Timo Rahman who ran organized crime in Hamburg, and she told him about an idiot who had broken into the grounds of the home of Timo Rahman and eavesdropped the name of an island – and she said they would, together, observe and possibly disrupt what her boss called a 'rat run'… and then she told him that only a serious idiot would sit in the rain in soaked clothes without protection from the wind. He took into the toilets the clothing given him.
When he returned, warmer, drier and with insurance heavy in his pocket, she was leaning against the rail at the back of the ferry, and gulls flew prettily above her. She took the clothes that Ivanhoe Manners had bought for him in a charity shop, long ago, and didn't dump them in the rubbish bin near to her but chucked them up and high, so that for a moment socks, pants and a shirt soared with the birds, then dropped into the ferry's wake.
'At least now,' she said, 'you won't stink. You did, worse than a pheasant hung too long.'
'For your consideration, Miss Wilkins, thank you,' he said evenly.
'Polly'll do… Too much formality might screw up the convergence of parallel lines.'
When the mainland had slipped away into the mist, while the shaking boat went slow up a channel marked by dead wood poles, they left the back, went to the side and leaned out. The wind ripped at their hair, and he stood close enough for her to feel the weight of the pistol in his pocket. They saw a sandbank high above the surf with seals on it, then the island's shoreline.
'Don't think I need you,' he said.
'Believe what you want to.'
Oskar Netzer snarled at the man, his neighbour,
'You'll take it with you. We don't want it here.'
He had opened his front door, pushed it wide enough against the wind's force to slip through it and it had slammed behind him. Across the sagged wire fence that divided their properties, the chemist from the mainland was putting out plastic bags by the little wicket gate at the end of his front garden path; bottle necks peeped from one. Already, with the day hardly started, he had heard the clatter of the pushed mower on the aprons of grass flanking the path and down the side of their house.
The man stood up slowly, as if that made for a more defiant pose, and gazed back at him. Oskar had a canvas bag slung on his shoulder, heavy with the tools he would need for his day's work, but he held his ground and allowed the wind to whip his face. On a point of principle he burned his own rubbish, everything he could, in a brazier at the back, letting the elements take the smoke and scatter the ashes. There was a rubbish collection each week in Westdorf and the disposal of it was a constant burden on the permanent residents and was paid for by their taxes, but Oskar Netzer, self-appointed guardian of Baltrum's purity, was considered too impoverished to pay dues to the island's council.
The woman, the chemist's wife, had come to the door of their house and stared back at Oskar. He saw her annoyance, and also that her husband's chin shook at the effort to suppress his anger. He went down his own path, where weeds grew in the spaces between flagstones, and past his own beds, where more weeds flourished: he would clear those beds only when flowers came up in the summer. Then he would cut them and take them to the cemetery in Ostdorf.
He glanced down at the neatly stacked plastic bags.
'Is that all you do, make rubbish for us to clear? You should take it with you, back where you came from.'
He walked away, almost cheerfully, up the street.
He heard only a hiss of breath from the chemist.
Should either have sworn at him, if their annoyance had exploded, it would have made perfect the beginning of the day. But Oskar had had enough from them to be almost happy, and he strode off. He would soon be out of the abomination of close-set houses and away in the freedom of the west of the island where his ducks were, and the viewing platform he would repair. It was a relief that the rain had been blown away and he expected to be able to work a full day without interruption and alone. By the time he was at the end of his street, he had forgotten them, and their rubbish.
Billy had the wheel. Harry had the chart spread on the table behind his son's back. Paul, his grandson, clung to a holding rail as if his life depended on it. The i trawler crawled forward erratically, and the course set by Harry would take the Anneliese Royal away from the east coast of England, out through offshore gas rigs, north of the Bruine Bank. A pencil line on the chart ended south of the German Bight at an island shore. She had a maximum speed of twelve knots, but they did a mere half of that. The horizon swung between white-grey cloud and green-grey sea. It was worse because Harry's course dictated that the waves' swell came from the south-west and battered against the trawler's stern, and the pinnacle of each wave drove them, aft first, into the unyielding mass of the wave ahead. They always said, skippers with experience, that a sea coming against a boat from the stern made for hell on water. The boy had already been sick and some of his vomit had missed the bucket lashed by its handle to the back of the wheel-house.
Harry had had the course, the destination in German waters, from the radio – a frequency on the extreme of the UHF band that was rarely used and therefore was unlikely to be listened to, and Ricky had given him the co-ordinates. 'What I need to know, Harry, when are you going to be there?' He'd yelled back the answer that he didn't effing know. 'That's not co-operation, Harry, that doesn't make my life easy – you going to be there tonight?' He'd heard the distorted whine in the voice, then said he'd be there when he was there, and not an effing hour before or after. He'd smiled then, grimly, to himself and had reflected that if this weather held there would be no German craft, Customs or coastguard, out of harbour and that the sea conditions would obscure the shore radar signature of the Anneliese Royal. Small bloody mercy He'd finished by cutting across Ricky's bleat to tell him that he was switching off the radio and would use it again when he was an hour or two from the rendezvous point. The sea tossed, shook and battered the trawler while his son gripped the wheel, his grandson the rail and Harry held fast to the chart table