There was, perfectly for children hungry for adventure, one source of menace. At the far end of the beach an old house with a vast thatched roof stood elevated on the dyke. This was where the ‘Old Nazi’ lived: a cantankerous old man whose rejection of contact with his neighbours bordered on being a hermit. He was certainly old enough to have been in the war – and in the Nazi Party – but the epithet of ‘the Old Nazi’ had been given him by one of Sylvia’s younger sisters after overhearing her parents describing the recluse as such. From this unsubstantiated snippet, the children had built an entire history for the old man, including a rationale for his anti-social attitude: he was, they had worked out, hiding from Nazi-hunters who had scoured the globe for him, from Sweden to Brazil. He sat sullenly, they had decided, under a tattered and dusty photograph of Adolf Hitler and waited for the Israeli snatch-squad to break down his door and whisk him off, drugged and in a cargo crate with a Tel-Aviv dispatch note on it. The old man himself did not seem to represent that much of a threat, but the danger lay in his dogs: two snarling, barking beasts, one an Alsatian, the other a Dobermann, who kept anyone who wandered too close to the house at bay.
All this mystery and menace, of course, gave the old house at the far end of the beach an irresistible attraction for the children, who would taunt ‘the Old Nazi’ and his dogs with their presence. After the incident on the beach, there had been accusations that ‘the Old Nazi’ had deliberately let his dogs loose, commanding them to attack, probably in the same way he had ordered his men on the Russian Front. The truth was a little more prosaic.
There was a small nick in the dyke, where a finger of sand penetrated the rough reeds and grass and offered a little shelter from the brisk sea breeze. The smaller children had been playing down by the water, building sandcastles. Sylvia’s nascent feminine intuition had clearly picked up on Oliver’s interest in her body, and she had been doing her best to taunt him with it. She had encouraged him to come and splash around in the water. He had been reluctant at first but she had made a pout that had given him a tingle down below. The water made Sylvia’s T-shirt cling revealingly to her breasts and the white cotton shorts cleaved to her ample backside. After a few minutes she complained that it was too cold and ran back to the nick in the dyke. It had taken Oliver a while to follow as he waited for his erection to subside even a little. In the end he had walked, his hands clasped in front of his groin as casually as he could manage, to join Sylvia. She was sitting, leaning back on her elbows and arching her back as she let the sun play on her face. Oliver looked at her, savouring every curve, every swell of firm flesh. She turned to him and looked down at his groin. Wordlessly, she placed her hand on where his erection protested against its confinement by his shorts.
At that moment the snarling head of a Dobermann appeared above them, over the edge of the dyke. Oliver didn’t move: he was still overcome by what had just happened with his cousin, and the ghost of her touch brought the heat in his loins to boiling. But she jumped up, screamed and started to run. Her fleeing figure awoke the attack instinct in the Dobermann and it leapt from the dyke. After a couple of bounds, it clamped its jaws on Sylvia’s backside. Oliver saw the dog’s teeth sink into the firm flesh of her buttock and her still-damp cotton shorts became blotted with blood. Simultaneously, Oliver shuddered in intense orgasm.
The ‘Old Nazi’ had come running and shouting after his dog. It was clear to Oliver that he had simply been walking his dogs along the dyke and the Dobermann had become startled by the unexpected presence of two young people half-hidden in the grass. The injury to Sylvia’s rump had been a lot less severe than everyone had at first thought, although it was expected that there would be a scar. The mark left on Oliver, however, had been much more permanent.
Oliver had met Sylvia again only two months ago at a family wedding. It was one of the greatest moments of disillusion he had ever experienced. It wasn’t so much that his North Sea Venus, his icon of femininity, had crumbled before him. It was more that she had partially melted. The firm, full flesh had sagged; the round glory of her breasts had succumbed to twenty years of insistent gravity; the summer-burnished golden gleam had faded and her complexion had, perhaps because of so many summers outdoors, aged prematurely and had assumed the same pasty, blotchy paleness that Oliver remembered in her mother. And, worst of all, the firm, full roundness of Sylvia’s large, beautifully sculpted bottom had given way to a generalised, waistless bulk. Oliver had wondered, as he chatted to her about nothing in particular, if she still had the scar, and the image of it, dimpled and white in a mass of soft, formless flesh had made him feel sick. But the encounter had not cured him of his strange obsession. The idol might have been shattered but the zeal had remained.
Oliver was sipping his overpriced cocktail and contemplating the fall of his idol when he became aware of someone by his side.
‘Are you Herr Meierhoff?’ she asked in a foreign accent that Oliver took to be Russian or Polish. He smiled and nodded but his heart thudded in his chest. If it had not been for the accent and the lack of a summer tan, she could almost have been the Sylvia of his youth. No – she was actually much prettier. But prettiness wasn’t the criterion that she had to meet for Oliver. There were plenty of pretty girls whom he could have. The girl beside him was about twenty-two, Oliver figured. She had reddish-blonde hair, crystal-blue eyes and a fresh complexion sprinkled with pale freckles. Oliver found himself involuntarily scanning her from head to foot. She was wearing a blouse that hung loose around a tiny waist yet which was stretched taut by the fullness of her upper arms and breasts. She turned slightly sideways, smiling coyly, knowing what he wanted to see. She wore a pencil skirt which narrowed towards the knee yet which accentuated the fullness of her upper thighs and her magnificent, massive buttocks.
‘Am I what you were looking for?’ she asked. ‘Do I please you?’
‘You, my dear,’ said Oliver with a broad, handsome grin, ‘are sheer perfection.’
6.
Having travelled down to Cologne from Hamburg by train, Maria didn’t have her own car with her. It was part of her strategy: her car was an older Jaguar XJS – in an uncharacteristic moment of flamboyance she had bought it deliberately to turn heads. And that made the XJS far too conspicuous for the type of surveillance work that she intended to carry out. Maria had therefore spent much of her first morning in the city looking for a rental car. Even the small economy models were too obviously new and shiny. Cologne had been sulking under a leaden sky that refused to unburden the snow it had been threatening all day. Maria’s mood matched the weather and her feet hurt. She could simply have phoned around from her hotel room but she knew she needed to see the car that she would use.
It was about three in the afternoon and the sky was already dimming from dull to dark when she left the last rental place. It wasn’t one of the main national or international rental companies and was attached to a servicing garage and second-hand car showroom. The girl behind the rental counter was confused when Maria asked her if she could rent the dark blue Citroen Saxo parked on the lot. A phone call brought to the office a salesman who looked to Maria as if he should still have been at school. He explained that the car could not be rented; it was for sale. Perhaps it was because Maria glanced out at the car through the rental office window that he decided to launch into his pitch, promising Maria that it was an exceptional car for its age. When Maria asked him the price he began his prepared build-up.