gully where the wind couldn't reach her. She had listened to Freddie Gaunt's faint voice and thought she heard his exhaustion. She had been left with the sense of a beaten man.
His back was to her. He tracked and scanned with the binoculars over the dunes and the beach, and watched the horizon; the swing of his head behind the eyepieces was the only movement he made. She did not know what the sex in the sleeping-bag meant to her, or what it meant to him. And always the bloody wind was on her, and the bloody rain… She did not know. She steeled herself, came and eased down beside him, but his hands stayed on the binoculars and he did not loop his arm round her.
Polly said, 'My people have decided what they want, Malachy. I don't know how it'll fit with you but it's the way it's going to be.'
She saw that his eyes followed the waving of the coarse grass stems on the dunes.
'You are – without belittling your achievements – outside the loop. They're all grateful in London, of course. We've moved on – there's a plan in place. It does not include you. I'm sorry, Malachy, but the concept of the plan is in concrete.'
His head tilted and she could follow the lenses' aim.
She saw the stark, empty beach, and thought he followed the flight of the gulls.
'We have the name of a beam trawler, when it left and which port it sailed from. We have the identity of the boat's skipper, and his link to Ricky Capel, the detail of the debt between the Capel family and the Rahman clan in Blankenese… More than that, we can put a face and a biography to a big player in the international game, terrorism: he's the package to be lifted off here by the trawler. We accept that parts of the jigsaw were put in place by you, but that's history.
If it sounds brutal it is not intended to – I'm just telling you how the facts play.'
The binoculars were lifted. She followed them and saw the mist haze among the furthest white splash of the waves and the grim, grey line of clouds where the horizon met the water. She had thought, before Gaunt's call, that she would go back to the swamp in the island's centre and try to make a peace with the old lunatic, the recluse who had jarred her with the story of a concentration camp and victims, and pump him for what he had seen during the day but now, after the call, she had no need of him – or of Malachy.
'Under no circumstances am I to intervene in the pickup, that is a very clear order. I watch and I report.
I do not go near them and I do not alert them. I am told they should board the trawler, however many there are, and not know they are under observation. I see, at a distance, the lights and I communicate that to London. The plan drops into place, and my role in all this is complete – your role, Malachy, is already finished – and I'm on my way home. The trawler will be tracked across the North Sea, will be under surveillance, and will be allowed to drop off our target. He's to be permitted to run – in the greater interest of national security – and lead the appropriate agencies, God willing, to those he would hope to meet and work with… I don't wish to be cruel, Malachy, but you should feel free to go back to the ferry, get to the mainland, take a shower and eat a meal, and start again on whatever life it is you want to make for yourself. Those are my instructions.'
A shaft of sunlight, low, narrow, golden, broke the cloud and fashioned a corridor over the surge of the sea, ran to the whipped sands and the grasses and lit them. His shoulders swung and he looked to his right, away from her, to the dunes.
'Damn you, Malachy… I'll not forget you, or what you've done and who you are… Can you not say something? He's to be permitted to run, we don't intervene. I have to watch and report. Isn't it enough for you, what you've already done? Have you nothing to say, nothing for me?'
She saw his forehead knitted, his concentration on the sands and grasses that made the dunes.
He was deep in holiday-leave charts, the bane of the life of a senior officer – and waiting for him were over- time dockets – when he heard the stampede of feet in the corridor. Johan Konig saw his door snap open, no knock, of which his rank should have assured him.
A detective panted, a step inside his room, and hadn't a voice, but beckoned him.
He took his time, killed the computer page, pulled his jacket from the hook and turned his back on the picture of the egret perched on a hippopotamus. He locked the door after him. He did not scurry down the corridor. It was not, in the book of Konig, good for juniors to see a ranking officer run, but he felt a rising excitement although he had no idea of its source. The detective led him to the new communications room he had demanded for his unit. His whole team, twelve men and two women, were crowded inside and their attention was on a black-and-white monitor screen.
None saw him come, and none made way for him. He elbowed his way through, pushed forward.
He saw her, a small figure. The focus was poor from the camera in the roof of the neighbouring house.
He had only seen photographs of Alicia Rahman, taken covertly for her husband's file and showing her with her children at the school gate.
He peered forward, blinked to see better. She was high on the roofing tiles of the house and her arms were looped round the width of a chimney stack. The curtains of an open window flapped below. She wore a robe, at which the wind tore, but either the buttons and the belt had not been fastened when she had come through the window and climbed or they had been ripped undone. He saw her naked body and the scars, which were vague on the picture but recognizable; long, darkened marks on her chest and on her stomach, close to the dark hair mass and on her thighs. The men and women around him – all chosen for his unit because of hardened experience – cursed what they saw.
'Goddamn animals – bastards.'
'Worse than animals, barbarians.'
'They've scraped her, flayed the skin off her.'
He turned away – he had seen enough. He tapped the shoulders of Brigitte and Heinrich, told them they would come with him and asked for a car, a van of uniformed officers, an ambulance and a fire appliance with a crane and cradle. He remembered the man on the fence, his hands bleeding from the wire and their flight up the side path, the silence of the man in the cells, and his release into the care of the agent he had trusted.
'Rahman, for all his skills, has allowed himself to be provoked into making a mistake, and the mistake will bring him down,' Konig said quietly, then swung on his heel.
'Cover yourself.' Timo Rahman cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. 'Hide yourself.'
He heard, in the distance, sirens in the streets of Blankenese. The Bear was at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, sobbing. The aunt leaned uselessly out of the open window. He had not seen them but he imagined, beyond the thick hedge and the high gates
– from the far side of the street – his neighbours gathered to grandstand and stare. What he could see was her legs – long, slim, bare and wounded – and the hair – where he and she had made two daughters
– and her stomach, the raw strips on her skin where blood seeped.
Timo Rahman yelled again, 'Come down. You have to come down. Come down to the window.'
The sirens closed on him at speed. Not when he had been stabbed, not when he had been shot had he felt that sense of catastrophe surging round him, developing as fast as the sirens' approach.
'Get to the window. Get inside. It is my order.'
She stayed. Her feet scratched for a grip on the tiles and he could see the hair and her stomach and a breast hung clear of her robe, but her arms had a grip on the chimney. Not a man or a woman, since he had come to Hamburg, had refused an order of Timo Rahman. The scale of the catastrophe facing him leaped in his mind: he saw the collapse of an empire…
He heard the crash and wrench of metal, turned from her, and saw the front of the fire engine burst the gates. The crane on it pulled down the branches of trees and snapped them carelessly. He thought, high over him and showing her nakedness to the world, displaying what he had instructed should be done to her – to clean her – that her lips moved, but the sirens destroyed the sound.
The last time, and the shriek was desperation: 'Get back in the house. Come down. You want the world to see you, see Rahman's wife?'
The world did. And what Timo Rahman saw was the fire engine's crane rising with men and women in the cradle. A policeman's gun covered him, as the Bear and the aunt were brought out of the house under escort. The cradle reached his wife, and a blanket, for modesty and warmth, was wrapped round her. A man walked towards him and swung handcuffs on their chain. He recognized him. The crane lowered the cradle.
He saw the shine of the handcuffs as they closed on his wrists. With kindness, his wife was helped into the ambulance and he watched it drive away between the flattened gates… His world was broken.
