a bit more work up this way.'
Gunther made a noncommittal sound. 'We don't get home enough these days.'
'What's in Hamburg that's so special? You're divorced, you never see your kids even when we are in port.'
Gunther looked up from his book. 'My mates are in Hamburg.'
'You've got mates everywhere,' he said, walking off the bridge. He didn't want to lose Gunther, but finding a new crew member wasn't the hardest thing in the world. If Gunther didn't like the routes his mission had thrust upon them, he didn't have to stay. Of course, there weren't that many good jobs on the barges these days. Somehow, he didn't think he'd be looking for a replacement any time soon. But he wished Gunther hadn't started on about Hamburg now. It was too much like a hook pulling him back into the past, when he was so intent on moving forward into his future.
Now, that future lay here in Bremen, a few miles away. His was a good cover story, he had to admit. He had worked long and hard on it. At first, he had thought of posing as a colleague, but realized that he would be too easily found out. Academics were always meeting at conferences and conventions; there was a high risk his victim might actually know the person he was pretending to be. And in these days of easy email communication, it would be too easy to check. But what else would make them agree to a meeting?
Vanity, that was the key. They all loved to talk about themselves and their work. They were so sure of themselves, convinced they knew best about everything. But how to exploit that?
The answer had to lie in the new technology. It was easy to wear a mask there. They already had a computer on board, of course; so many of their consignments and movement orders arrived that way these days. He was intrigued by its potential for assisting him in his mission. So, he'd sent the boys back to Hamburg, laid the barge up for a week, bought a laptop computer and taken a crash course in the internet and website design. He'd registered the domain name of psychodialogue.com and created a website announcing the imminent arrival of PsychoDialogue, a new on-line magazine dedicated to the dissemination of current thinking in experimental psychology. He'd culled enough jargon from his own victim research to make it look like the real thing, he thought.
Then he had business cards printed up announcing himself as Hans Hochenstein, managing editor of PsychoDialogue. He had e-mailed his victims to arrange appointments to talk about their work, and the rest had fallen beautifully into place. One of the tutors on the computer course, a self-confessed former hacker, had even shown him how to send emails containing a logic bomb that would make them automatically erase themselves from the host computer after a predetermined period of time had elapsed. So even that potential fragment of evidence was gone. "*?
Tonight, Dr Margarethe Schilling would pay for her cruelty and her vanity. He checked the directions she'd given him, savouring the irony of her willing contribution to her own downfall. Then he set off.
The street where she lived was on the outskirts of the city. Here, fingers of countryside clung on to the land with an arthritic grip, a stranded straggle of trees and scrubby grass the only reminders of what used to be there. These last remnants of nature formed divisions between the housing developments, giving their owners an illusion of being country dwellers. They could look out at the darkling woods and imagine themselves lords of all they surveyed, ignoring the fact of their ugly square houses with their two reception rooms, three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms and a fitted kitchen replicated Like some grotesque multiple birth all along the street. He couldn't see the attraction. He'd rather live in a tiny apartment in the heart of the city than reproduce ugli- ft ness along with space. Better still, to be cabined on a boat, a moving world that travelled with you and allowed you to change your view on a daily basis.
He drove slowly along the street, lights on against the gloomy drizzle of the evening, checking the house numbers. There was nothing to distinguish Margarethe Schilling's home from those of her neighbours. Although the colours of doors and the patterns of curtains varied, somehow they all merged into one amorphous identikit. Her car was parked in