Cars, without slowing, sped past the green van on Kostecna.

He went in, closed the door behind him. The next evening they would start the last leg of the journey. It would end far away on a northern coastline, and there he would hug his man, kiss his cheeks and pray that God walked with him… He began to climb the stairs.

The plaster had flaked from the walls with damp and the light of the alley had been extinguished by the shut street door, but he thought only of his wife…

The Organization had ordered that he should leave his man, his work done, on that seashore.

He lived in paradise but it brought him little comfort.

All his waking hours, worry squirmed perpetually in Oskar.

As the light failed, the rain off the sea thickened and the wind whipped the white caps behind him, Oskar Netzer sat on the bench in the low watch-tower among the island's dunes. At his back, four or five hundred metres behind the tower's wooden plank wall, was the North Sea. What he studied through the tower's hatch window was a lagoon, a bog of rank water and marsh, reeds and the eiders.

The island was at the centre of what would have seemed, if seen from a high aircraft, the long-cleaned vertebrae of a great mammal but one that, in the moment of death, had tucked its legs into its body.

The islands formed an archipelago a few kilometres north of the Frisland coast of Germany. The head of this fallen beast was Borkum island, the base of the skull was Memmert, and Juist was the neck. The shoulders, the largest of the islands, was Norderney.

Then came a bump on the spine: Baltrum. Baltrum was the jewel. The long backbone continued, broken by a channel between Langeoog and Spiekeroog. The creature's drooped tail was Wangerooge, the tip Minsener Oog. Together they acted as a sea wall that protected the mainland from the worst of the winter storms blowing in off the North Sea. The islands had been created over centuries by the tides and currents pushing together displaced mounds of seabed sand.