She must have known she was dancing with the devil, he thought. Watermen have a strong sense of community and a confined world; word of her indiscretions was bound to make its way back to her father’s ears. But before that could happen, she’d fallen pregnant. What surprised him, now he came to think about it, was that she hadn’t got rid of him. It wasn’t that hard to come by an abortion in Hamburg in the mid-1970s. She must have wanted to keep him very badly if she was prepared to withstand the wrath of her father.

According to Gunther, she managed to hide the pregnancy for the first five or six months, swaddled in baggy sweaters. When her father had found out, he had been enraged almost beyond speech. Life on board had been hell for a few weeks, the old man in the foulest of tempers and the crew unable to do right for doing wrong. He could imagine only too well what it must have been like, and felt grateful to have missed it.

There followed an ominous silence for a couple of months. Then one morning, after a three-day lie-over in Hamburg, the old man had arrived at the quayside in a laden car. The crew had watched open-mouthed as he had calmly unloaded a crib with two full sets of bedding, several carrier bags of baby clothes and a box containing bottles, formula and sterilizing tablets. Finally, the old man had wheeled a pram up the gangplank. It contained a baby.

No one had the nerve to ask the old man what had become of Inge, and they’d sailed before rumours could reach them. But when they’d next hit their home port, Gunther had made a beeline for the bars to garner what gossip he could. As he’d suspected, the old man had come home to find Inge ensconced with the baby. He’d thrown her bodily out of the apartment, tossing her clothes down the stairs after her. He’d changed the locks and set about bringing up baby himself.

Inge, it was reported, had left town. One of her ex-boyfriends worked on a cruise ship and he’d found her a job on board, waitressing. When the ship came back to Hamburg, Inge was gone. She’d handed in her notice in Bergen and walked off into the Norwegian night without a forwarding address. That was the last anyone in Hamburg had heard of her, as far as he could tell.

He wondered what had become of her, but in a remote, unemotional way. Even as a child, he had never entertained fantasies of rescue. It had never occurred to him to dream that his mother would sweep on board, wrapped in mink and dripping with diamonds, to take him away from his personal hell and envelop him in the lap of luxury.