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 professionaclass="underline" 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.