The British had bombed Cologne to a pile of rubble. So much so that there had been a serious suggestion at the end of the war that the city shouldn’t be rebuilt. Just moved. But the cathedral had remained standing to remind everyone that this was Germany’s oldest city and deserved a new life. So they had rebuilt Cologne. Unfortunately, whole chunks of the city were brought back to an artificial and sterile form of life. Chorweiler was a perfect example of the kind of place architects and city planners at dinner parties would boast about creating, but would never themselves contemplate living in.

When Maria thought about Slavko and his countrymen, she couldn’t believe that they thought that Chorweiler, with its towering clumps of multi-storey apartment blocks, was really the end of the rainbow. Chorweiler lay to the far north of the city and Maria reckoned that Viktor would start his Saturday pick-up run here and work his way back toward the city centre. She was pretty sure she had worked out which of the high-rises contained Slavko’s flat and she parked the Saxo some distance down the street from the block and sat with the engine switched off.

Contrary to its depiction in American movies, surveillance from a car was not always the best way of keeping tabs on someone’s movements. Most of the time people would walk by a car and not notice anyone sitting in it, but once they did they would notice every time they passed. Maria was dressed in her grungy clothes and she had slumped slightly in the driver’s seat so that her head did not project above the headrest. Her main disadvantage was that she had no photograph of her surveillance target. She didn’t even have much of a description of Viktor from Slavko to go on. At about eleven-thirty an Audi pulled up and a big-built man of about forty went into the apartment building. Maria noted down the time and the make, model and licence number of the car. She had brought a small digital camera with a half-decent zoom, and she took a photograph of the man as he went into the building, then again as he came out with a younger man. Maria could tell that this was not her man and she didn’t follow the Audi when he drove off. She settled back down. The clothes she had bought were too big for her, but they were warm and comfortable. More importantly, the body she hated became lost in their bagginess.