policy at stake and they, too, are not in control. Our two policies are set against each other. We’re like two commanders, each on our respective high ground, looking down into a valley. That valley, into which we respectively look, was once a super-power confrontation zone – not any more. The valley, the battlefield of our policies that conflict, is the city of Rostock and the small communities around Rostock. It’s a minor provincial city, stultifyingly dull. In that valley are our respective shock troops – don’t laugh – engaged in combat to the death. On their side is Hauptman Krause, and any allies he can muster. On our side is an abject failure of a man and a junior NCO, a young woman. Either of us, on the high ground above the valley, can lose the policy we seek to achieve but neither of us can intervene. It is as if the valley were covered by the fog of war. I’ve never felt so helpless about something that matters to me. I assume my opposite number in Cologne feels precisely the same way. We must wait for that fog to clear to see who holds the valley, who are the casualties. Good to get it off my chest, Beakie, thank you. It’s a unique experience for me to feel so helpless. You’d better get back to that bloody court- room.’
Chapter Twelve
…Because he was a coward..
He walked on. Josh Mantle had never in his life hit a woman. He walked fast, tried to leave her behind him. He wished he had hit her. If he had turned to look behind him then he would no longer have seen the low buildings of Warnemunde and the breakwater going out into the water and the squat lighthouse.
‘Josh, you are being ridiculous. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t face it, he was a coward..
There were low scrub trees at the top of the beach beyond the bent grass of the dunes. He walked beside the last strips of the winter’s grey-brown ice and close to the grey-green sea that came white-flecked to the ice line. His head was down, his chin was on his chest. Sometimes he closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, but he could not lose the image of the man, or escape the terror of Jorg Brandt.
‘Josh, will you stop, will you listen… You don’t blame yourself, you blame him. He was a coward.’
He saw only the terror of the man, not that last moment of peace on his features.
But for the hectoring voice behind him, Josh was alone.
He sought a solitude. He was, had always been, his own man. He had been his own man when they had brought him home from the school in Penang to the stinking heat, wet, insect-ridden home, and his father had sat with the whisky bottle and told him that the ‘fucking slit-eyes’ had shot his mother, and had then left him alone and gone with the rest of them to wreck the Chinese quarter. His own man at barracks schools, and at the Apprentice College, alone on the train with the small suitcase, alone in the classrooms and in the dormitory. He had been, for ever, alone. He had been his own man, alone, in the I Corps postings…
Except the once when he had followed his captain and the Guatemalan had died, and he had compromised. and in the Special Investigation Branch, alone in the mess at Tidworth when he had demanded that a thief be prosecuted and branded; alone in the bar of the mess half an hour after the call for free drinks to see him on his way, after the second in command had made the speech, perfunctorily, and dumped the cheap carriage clock on his lap. His own man on the streets, alone…
Except for the meeting with Libby and marrying Libby, and better that he had been his own man, alone, because she was taken from him and the pain of it was his cross.
Each crisis that came to Josh Mantle’s life battered a message to him: better to be his own man, better to be alone.
‘Are you going to stop? I can’t help it if he was a bloody coward.’
He pounded the beach, empty ahead of him, because he yearned to be alone. If he had been alone, if she had not been behind him, if there had been no witness, if there had been only the company of the sand and the sea and the grey black clouds and the wind, then he would have gone down on to his knees. He would have talked to his Libby, would have told her everything…
‘Look at me. Bloody well look.’
He stopped.
‘Come on, look at me.’
He did not kneel.
‘Do it, Josh, turn round. Look.’
He did not know how he should escape from her. He had walked an hour and a half on the beach, round headlands, and she tracked him. He could not escape from her. As if she held him, Josh turned.
Her coat was furthest back, discarded by the ice line, a speck. He saw her sweater, left on the sand and lying across the track of their footprints. Her blouse and her bra were caught by the wind and rolled towards the grass of the dunes. Her shoes were behind her, abandoned, and her socks.
She hopped on one foot, she kicked off her jeans. He had turned as she had known he would. She threw her jeans away from her, over the bare white skin of her shoulder. She wore only her knickers. Her legs were a little apart and she stood defiant with her fingers at her hips, resting on the waistband of her knickers. She challenged him. She would strip to nothing if he did not come to her, as she ordered him to. He could not turn away. The gale came off the sea and ruffled the clothes scattered behind her and caught her hair and beat at her nakedness. He wore, against his chest, a vest and a shirt and a pullover and a jacket and his outer coat, and Josh still shivered. She did not flinch in the cold of the wind.
‘Come… Come here, Josh.’
He started to walk towards her. She stood on the beach, so still. His eyes never left her. His eyes searched across the nakedness of her body. He unzipped the fastener of his coat, peeled it from his chest and shoulders. He saw each line on her skin, each spot and blemish and mole. She held out her arms. He saw the straggling hair in the pits of her arms. He slotted the sleeves of his coat over her arms and he stood in front of her and fastened the zip, and then he buttoned the coat over the zip. He retraced their foot- marks in the sand, picked up her trousers, then hei shoes and her socks. He shook the sand from her bra and her blouse, from her sweater and her coat.
He dropped the clothes at her feet. ‘Get dressed.’
‘I’ll get dressed when you’ve spat it out of your system, Josh.’
He looked into her face. He wanted to hold her and warm her. There was no scorn in her face, only the innocence.
‘You never, ever again call a man a coward. You call a man a coward and you strip him bare. To call a man a coward is to make a judgement on him. It is the worst of arrogance to believe yourself qualified to call a man a coward. He would have been soaked from the sea, bloodstained, he would have been in shadow, incoherent, but you say that the man who slammed the door on him was a coward. Your Hans was a goddamn problem. We all do it, every day, I do it, you, everybody, we cross over the street to avoid a problem. Jorg Brandt suffered, he didn’t have the memories of love that you had, but you call him a coward.’
‘Should have stayed at home, should I?’
‘Just get dressed.’
‘Don’t fucking lecture me.’
‘I walked away from you because otherwise I would have hit you.’
She tore his coat off. She crouched over her own clothes. ‘Your wife, when she left you, did you hit her?’
He rocked.
‘When she left you, did you lecture her?’
He clasped his hands together so they should not be free to strike her.
Josh said, ‘I’ll see you at the car. You should get dressed.’ He went back, away, along the beach.
Albert Perkins walked on Kropeliner Strasse in search of a former Oberstleutnant. He was inside the old city walls. The street was a pedestrian precinct, at the core of Rostock. There was, he thought, an air of prosperity about Kropeliner Strasse, new paint, new shopfronts, new pavings, but he knew the prosperity was a mirage because the interiors of the shops were empty. Women queued to be served at the fruit and vegetable stalls and kids lounged by the fast food outlets, but the boutiques and the hardware stores and the interior furnishing businesses were empty. There were people at the well stocked window of the camera shop, but inside the shop was empty. He looked through the window, past the shelves of cameras and lenses and tripods and binoculars and
