The reference to Harry Rogers, brother of Sharon (nee Rogers) Capel, had been a note buried in a long-neglected file. He was described, in a report on the extended family of Mikey Capel, as a freelance skipper with a master's ticket for taking out deep-sea trawlers.
Going deeper, digging with the computer bank available to him, Tony Johnson had tapped into back numbers of Fishing Monthly and had failed to find a match for Harry Rogers, but had hit gold with the weekly Fishing News. There, two paragraphs described the purchase in the Channel Islands of a beam trawler by Rogers, and its renaming as Anneliese Royal, and its registration in the Devon port of Dartmouth.
From a phone call to the harbourmaster at
Dartmouth, the detective sergeant had learned that the Anneliese Royal was never seen in West Country waters. 'Harry lives here, and I can give you his address and number, but he works the North Sea out of the east coast… Not in bother, is he? He's a very good guy.' Oh, no, not in any bother – only has the bloody spooks sniffing at his backside.
He had checked with harbourmasters from
Immingham to Harwich. Back on his familiar workload, human-trafficking (Vice), he had revelled in the extreme secrecy, imposed by Frederick Gaunt, and had done his checks late in the evening and early that morning before the pace of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had resurfaced. A laconic answer from Lowestoft had lifted him, the last call he made before the open-plan office area filled around him.
'The Anneliese Royal was here and now is not. Hold on a second, friend, and I'll give you timings from our log… Pretty rotten weather when she sailed, and not much sign of it changing. God knows why they went because there's no way they'll have the nets down.
Rather them than me… Here we are. I can be quite exact. It's thirty-six hours, and about fifteen minutes, since she went. Don't get me wrong, beam trawlers rarely sink, but it won't be any sort of comfort cruise.'
He had waited for the coffee trolley to come round, because that was when people went out on to the front pavement for a smoke.
He left the building and walked fast, didn't use the nearest public telephones. They'd break his legs if they knew that, without sanction and authorization, he was moonlighting for the spooks. Why did he do it, risk himself? Because he had entrapped Malachy Kitchen and because Ricky Capel walked top of the shit-heap and believed himself untouchable. Two reasons, each good enough.
With a handkerchief over his mouth, giving muffled disguise, he spoke to a recording machine on the number given him and told what he knew, didn't give his name and rang off. He hoped he had done something to help one man and skewer another.
When he came to the platform in the faint first light, he had seen the mass of scattered feathers.
Anger churned in Oskar Netzer. He stood beside the upright poles, straightened and nailed, of the platform and in the growing brightness he saw the devastation of the killing site. The feathers were spread about an area of mud beside the pond. At the moment of the attack the ducks would have fled but now they had returned and stayed on the far side of the water. The bird had flown off, low and hugging the dunes' shallow contours, the moment he had reached the platform, and it would have carried a last scrap of the duck's breast in its talons.
The killing bird circled high and at a distance.
It would have been aware, with its keen eyesight, of him standing beside the posts. It wanted to feed, to take more of the flesh of its victim… Oskar saw the remaining eiders, innocent and without protection, and seemed to hear the voice of his mother as she read the letter that had been left with a lawyer by his uncle, who had driven the lorry from the camp at
Neuengamme to the school at Bullenhuser Damm. He saw the killer struggling for stable flight in the wind and he listened as his mother read the story of the children being hoisted up for the ropes to be dropped round their necks. Was it in the blood? Did it run in Oskar Netzer's veins, as it did in the harrier's – an instinct of barbarity? The demons tugged at him. His uncle Rolf had not intervened, had sat in the cab of the lorry as the atrocity was done in the school's cellars
… He would break a rule of the island's wilderness.
He would turn his back on a law of Baltrum's nature park. The harrier was the cock: it fed and savaged for two; the hen would be on the nest, eggs under her warmth. Alone, a little of the madness of old times ravaged him. He strode away.
The anger, and the demons, gripped him.
He knew, to within ten metres, the location of the marsh harriers' nest.
His uncle Rolf had done nothing to save the innocents. He would.
He would find the nest in the reeds on the land side of the island, and he would ignore the screaming of the harriers over him and he would stamp his boot down on the carefully woven bowl of fronds – and see no beauty in it – and would break the eggs and see the yolks splatter out of them. He would do it to escape the demons, and to save the eiders.
Tugged at by the wind and spat at by the rain, he was a slight, solitary figure moving among scrub and between the low trees that were crushed and stunted by the weather. He slipped into the reed bed. Beyond its expanse was the sea's inner channel, the Steinplatte, but he would not see the mainland, which was shrouded in mist and cloud. What he found was a track made by men.
Confusion smacked his mind.
The track was not clean, but blundered across the route he took to approach the nest.
He stopped. Who was the greater enemy? The harriers that killed his ducks or strangers who broke the peace of paradise? He turned away from the direction of the nest where a hen bird sat upon eggs, and felt relief swamp him that rules and laws would stay inviolate. He began to follow the track of snapped-down reeds. None of the island's residents, he knew, would have walked through the reed beds and made a track that led towards the heart of the island from the land-side shore of Baltrum.
He walked the track.
He could recognize the prints left by rabbits, different gulls, oyster-catchers, divers and ducks, and it was not hard for Oskar Netzer to follow a trail left clumsily by two men coming in darkness. New purpose came to him, and the image of demons – of children's swinging feet – was killed. He saw the tread of a pair of boots preserved in mud and the smooth sole shapes of street shoes, and he went where they had gone. Old eyes, but sharp, identified the route two men had taken when they had come out of the reed bed and on to the sand of the lower dunes and he saw the flattened grass where they had sat, then two places where they had gone in the night into the scrub thorn. At one a handkerchief had been tugged from a pocket and hung as a marker on the scrub's barbs, and at another he spotted the fibres of a coat. He imagined them cursing, trying to force a way through, twice turning back and searching for a new way. He moved now with greater care, as if he were the harrier, and tested each footstep, as if he were the hunter. The wind sang noisily around him but Oskar's movement was silent. He froze when he heard a long, hacked cough and a man spluttering phlegm from his throat, then went closer.
First he saw the shoes.
They were shoes for a city's pavements. They were sodden wet and mud-stained and had been hung on scrub branches above a small grassed hollow that was sheltered from most of the driven rain. He thought it a futile gesture to try to dry them because the wind did not come into the hollow.
A man slept there. He was on his side, his back to Oskar, hunched, knees drawn up. He thought the man had coughed in his sleep. Beside him was a plastic bag and its neck guttered in the light wind in the hollow.
He saw the firearm, a loaded machine pistol, and a metal box… On his way home, he had stopped at the cemetery at the edge of Ostdorf, and he had sat by the grave. He had told Gertrud of the young woman who had helped him rebuild the viewing platform, of her kindness, her interest in him and her sweetness – so different from the many who abused and sneered. He saw one of two strangers, and a machine pistol, and his eyes showed him the path taken by the second man, who had the heavy tread of strong boots.