He’d planned to get as far as Köln that afternoon and moor up in the basin just off the main river. Instead they were stuck here at Koblenz. For the first time in his life, he felt oppressed by living at close quarters with two other men. He’d suggested to Manfred and Gunther that they might as well go home for a few days, since the river showed no sign of falling and there was nothing useful for them to do on board. He’d even offered to pay them for the days they were gone. But neither had felt like taking him up on his proposal.

Gunther kept pointing out monotonously that it was a bloody long way from Koblenz to Hamburg and by the time they got there, it would be time to come back, and none of this would have happened if they’d been working the Oder and the Elbe, where they’d have practically been on their own doorstep.

Manfred didn’t want to go because he was enjoying himself too much. With so many boats marooned there, he was in his element. He could sit around in bars all day and half the night, swapping stories with other boatmen. His capacity for drink was legendary, and he didn’t often get the chance to indulge it like this, his wife being a woman who believed that when her man was in his home port, home was where he should be.

So he was stuck with the pair of them, driving him mad with their conversations as they compared notes about where they’d been, who they’d seen, what gossip they’d picked up and where they were going next. All he wanted was peace and quiet, the chance to restore his equilibrium after Bremen. He wanted to be alone so nobody would ask him why he was buying all the papers every day and scanning their columns for details of one story in particular. With Gunther and Manfred underfoot, the only way he could search the news to see if he’d been seen and described was to read the papers on-line. Once his crewmen had realized he wasn’t spending his time on the internet looking at porn, they’d lost all interest.