MacSwain frosted slightly. ‘I’m not a little boy any more.’ He forced a smile. ‘It’s getting chilly out here … would you like to come into the cabin for some coffee?’

Anna laughed. ‘Is that the best you can do? Or do you have some etchings for me to look at?’

MacSwain held up his hands. ‘If coffee is all you want, coffee is all you’ll get.’

Anna strained the muscles of her cheeks to maintain her smile. Coffee. Another hiding place for something less innocuous. ‘Okay …’

The cabin was small but bright and sleek, crafted from white moulded polymer with wood features. There were two oval portholes on either side and three in the ceiling to the deck. To the right there was a small couch moulded into a recess; a compact galley and a cubicle which Anna guessed was the ‘head’ pressed themselves into the available space on the left. A double bed spanned the bow end. The cabin was filled with a rich aroma from the coffee maker set into the galley wall. MacSwain motioned for Anna to sit on the couch. She watched him pour both coffees from the same pot and was relieved when MacSwain sat on the edge of the bed, instead of forcing intimacy by squeezing into the small space next to her on the couch.

‘You say you work for a travel agency?’ he asked.

Anna felt a chill in her chest. It was an area of her cover which she did not want to fall too much under MacSwain’s scrutiny. She dredged her memory for true emotions that her short spell in Meier Reisen had evoked.

‘Yes. It’s the most boring job on the planet. Sending the average German family on its two weeks in Tenerife or Gran Canaria and then listening to their complaints that Bratwurst wasn’t on the hotel menu … Why?’

‘Have you never sent someone to a place that they didn’t want to return from … a place that awoke an instinctive feeling within them. Somewhere they felt they truly belonged?’

Anna shrugged. ‘No … I can’t say I have …’

‘That’s the way I felt the first time I saw Hamburg. And sometimes it’s like that with people too.’ A fire ignited in MacSwain’s eyes. ‘Sometimes you meet someone for the first time and it’s like you have known each other for an eternity. Like this is just the latest variation on a theme that has been playing for a thousand years.’

‘Sounds romantic … is this a line you use on women?’

MacSwain’s expression darkened. ‘This has nothing to do with women or sex. I’m talking about something a thousand times more significant than … well … love. I’m talking about a true bond between a person and a place … between an individual and others.’ MacSwain frowned as if searching for a point of reference, a landmark, that he could indicate to Anna. ‘There’s a word in German that doesn’t translate into English …’