He inclined his head in rueful acknowledgement. Today, he looked nothing like the serious businessman she’d seen so far. Dressed in jeans and a thick fisherman’s jersey, a woollen cap jammed over his hair, he resembled every other waterman she’d seen on the short walk from the car to the boat. Only his hands were a giveaway, smooth and uncalloused by hard work. ‘Let me show you my boat,’ he insisted, ushering her below. He stood back, waiting for her to take it in.

‘She’s a beauty,’ Carol said, meaning it.

‘I suspect she was built for someone quite high up in the Nazi party,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ve never researched it. I think I’d rather not know. It might spoil her for me if I knew too much about her past.’

‘A bit like a lover, then,’ Carol said, her wry smile taking any flirtatiousness out of the remark. The irony of his comment was not lost on her; that he too made his money from misery seemed blindingly obvious. For Tadeusz to paint himself as higher up the moral totem pole than the boat’s putative original owner was, she thought, repugnant. Such ethical blindness would make it easier for her to play her devious game, however.

‘I suppose,’ he said, his answering glance amused. ‘So, a drink? Then we’ll go up on deck and I can play at being a tour guide.’ He opened one of the wooden hatches and revealed a tiny fridge containing beer and champagne. ‘It’s too small for full-sized bottles,’ he said apologetically, holding up a half-bottle of Perrier-Jouët. ‘This OK?’

A few minutes later, they were sitting on the stern bench, champagne glasses in hand as the helmsman cruised gently out of the Rummelsbergersee into the broad reaches of the River Spree. ‘Are we talking business today, or just getting to know each other better?’ Carol asked.

‘A bit of both. I wanted to show you the city from a different perspective, and I thought maybe you could tell me something more of your plans.’

Carol nodded. ‘Sounds good to me.’

The boat swung left and turned into the mouth of a lock. As they waited to go through, Tadeusz told her tales of the commercial barges. How they’d shifted twenty thousand tonnes of rubble a day during the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz. How a routine customs inspection had revealed a bargee’s dead wife buried in the coal bunker. How the river police were called the duck police.

‘You seem to know a lot about life on the waterways,’ Carol said as they sailed on through Kreuzberg towards the Tiergarten. The trees that lined the canal were heavy with blossom, lending an air of romance to what was, after all, a commercial transport route.