Because he was bent over the table, because his eyes were set on the island marked on the map, Ricky had not seen the piercing brightness of the eyes of Timo Rahman or the narrowed lips that signified his annoyance. 'You know what it costs, Mr Rahman, to put that boat to sea? A bloody fortune. It costs… '
A hand had slipped on to his shoulder and fingers had squeezed tighter into the flesh and the bones, and the voice had been silkily smooth: 'You bring the boat now, Ricky, for one passenger. Not next month or next week but now. That is very easy for you to understand, yes? And you will remember the many favours I have shown you, yes?'
'Yes, Mr Rahman.'
And the hand had loosened but had left behind it the pain of the pressure on the nerves, and there had been the first shout from the kitchen, and the chaos had followed.
Ricky Capel, far from home, had sat for close on two hours in the dining room. Had not spoken, had not moved, had not known what the fuck had happened.
He had heard the yelled commands and questions, the staccato orders given down the telephone in a language he knew not a word of. He had sat motionless with the map in front of him. Twice the Bear had come through the dining room, like Ricky wasn't there, with a Luger pistol in his hand. Now, from the kitchen, among the savagery of voices, a woman sobbed.
In the door was Timo Rahman. He hurled a heavy coat across the room – an overcoat, brown and with a fleck in the material. It hit the table and slithered half its length. The coat was in front of Ricky. 'You know that coat?'
'Not mine.' Ricky giggled, not from mischief or cheek but fear.
The voice was soft. 'I asked, Ricky, do you know that coat?'
'No – no, I don't.' The smell of the coat was under his nose, and made the fear acute. 'How could I?'
Timo Rahman's arms were folded across his chest, seemed to make him stronger, more powerful. Looming behind him was the brute of the man who had driven him to the house, who had served him at the table, who was always close, who still held the pistol. Rahman said, a gentle sing-song pitch, 'From England, Ricky, you come to my house as my guest. At my house, Ricky, you are given my hospitality. We agree?'
'Yes, I agree.'
'I say to you, Ricky, and you should believe me, that never has a thief or an intruder come to my house since my family and I moved to Blankenese. Any thief or intruder would prefer to attack the home of the police chief of Hamburg than risk my anger and retribution. You come, and my house is attacked, and this coat is left on my garden fence.'
'Never seen it before, Mr Rahman, never.'
On the coat, faint but recognizable, was the smell of petrol.
'My housekeeper had hold of his coat, but he slipped from it and went over the fence – and you have never seen it before?'
'It's what I said, Mr Rahman.'
'And the label of the coat is from Britain. I think Harris tweed is from Britain, and in the lining under a hole in the pocket, in two pieces, is a train ticket, Victoria to Folkestone, and they are in Britain. Ricky, what should I think?'
'Don't know, can't help you -1 never saw that coat before, honest.' His voice was shrill. 'That's the truth.'
'As your grandfather would have told you, Ricky, in Albania we live by a code of besa. It is the word of honour. No Albanian would dare to break it. It is the guarantee of honesty. Can you imagine what would happen to a man whose guarantee of honesty and truthfulness is found to fail?'
'I think I can,' Ricky said, breathy. 'Yes.'
'And you do not know who wore the coat?'
He seemed to see, from the doorway of his home in Bevin Close, the short-arm jab that dropped the man at Davey's feet, seemed to see the bundle of the man on the pavement made larger by the size and thickness of the brown overcoat. Seemed to hear Davey: Some bloody vagrant scum, Ricky. Seemed to feel the recoil in his shoe when he had kicked the face above the overcoat's upturned collar… seemed to hear, clear, Davey: On his coat, he had the stink of petrol.
Seemed to see George Wright's place, burned, and heard what George Wright, his leg fractured, had yelled about kids on the Amersham estate and a dealer, and a line from bottom to top: I want to be there, watch it, when it's your turn. He hadn't Davey at his back, and he hadn't Benji and Charlie at his shoulder
… Had no one to tell him what sort of crazy idiot, a mad dog, went after pushers and a dealer, a supplier and an importer, and turned up at the place of an untouchable who ran a city. If he had stood, his legs would have been weak and his knees would have shaken. Anyone knew, Ricky Capel knew, what
Albanians would do to enforce a contract. Himself, he had Merks on hire, from shit-face Enver, with baseball bats to kill a man who was late with payment, had seen them used on a man strapped to a chair.
'I swear it. I never seen that coat, not on anyone…
First thing, I'll do the boat, like you said. I'll get it over here.'
With their second bottle of Slovenian wine, their favourite, which they had carried off the ferry, the couple from Dusseldorf discussed their ill luck. Both had taken a week away from work to travel to their holiday home on the island of Baltrum.
The man, a chemist, said, 'The forecast is foul. You have to book vacation days away. Of course it is chance, but you are entitled to look for breaks in weather even before Easter. I spoke to Jurgen at the shop, and he says it is only storms that we can expect.
I tell you, the day we go home, it will change.'
She, the principal of a school for infants, said, 'You can't go on the roof, clear the gutters and check the tiles in this wind. You cannot paint the window-frames and the doors, which need it, in the rain. I cannot air the bedding and the rugs. It's hopeless.'
It had been the intention of the chemist and his teacher wife to open up their home and let the fresh air waft through it after its winter closure; each spring it was necessary to add a fresh layer of paint to the outside woodwork.
She drank, then grimaced. 'Have you seen him?'
His face, already sour from the prediction of the weather, cracked in annoyance. 'Sadly, he has survived the winter. I have not seen him, but have heard him. He came back through the rain after dark.
The door slammed. That is how I know he is there.'
They tried hard, both of them, to ignore their neighbour, who was one of the few twelve-months-a-year residents on the island. It was four years since they had bought the perfect home to escape from the pressure- cooker life of the city. The first summer there they had brought with them their grandchildren, two small, lively kids, who had kicked a football on their little patch of grass at the back and each time the ball had crossed the wire fence dividing their property from their neighbour's garden there had been increasing rudeness when the chemist had asked permission to retrieve it. The children had been reduced to tears and had not come during another summer.
He said, 'I wonder what he does all those months when we are not here, who he insults.'
She said, 'I think we are a recreation for him.'
'He is a man of misery, he takes happiness from it.'
'Death, when it finds him, will be a blessed relief – for us.'
They laughed grimly, chiming a cackle together.
The second summer they had left a note on Oskar Netzer's door inviting him to join them for a drink that evening. He had come, had filled their bijou furnished living room with the odour of a body long unwashed, and they had shown him the architect's plans drawn up in Dusseldorf for an extension of a garden room topped by a third bedroom and a shower cubicle. He had refused the drink, then had refused to endorse the plan – they had thought it commensurate with every environmental and aesthetic consideration. He had rubbished the architect's drawings.
Through the rest of that summer, the following winter and into the third summer, their neighbour had fought the plan in Baltrum's Rathaus committees: its size, its materials, its concept. Last summer they had consigned the plan to the rubbish bin, had given up on the project. Last year when they had been at their house, if he came out
