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  It was a short letter. He sealed the envelope and left the hotel.

  It was a hot day. Only when he came to the path meandering along the river did he feel anything that could remotely be described as cool.

  CHAPTER 161

  As he sat on the stone in the clearing, he started thinking. Should he extend his mission and make it longer than he had at first intended? The path next to the river, the warm, damp smell of mud, led his mind to other continents, perhaps Africa, or Asia. A courier could take his letters and post them in Sweden. Kristina Tacker would be worried about distant dangers, diseases, insects and snakes. There again, the distance would make his secret all the bigger, she would never tell anybody, not even her father. Besides, she knew nothing about naval ships. If he told her that there was a ship that could sail at the prodigious speed of eighty knots, she would not question it.

  Kristina Tacker never questioned secrets.

  He sat on the stone and played with the thought of expeditions to distant countries.

  He made a measurement he had never attempted before. How far from the truth could he transport a fantasy before it collapsed in ruins?

  There was no answer to that, of course. He also imagined transforming his sounding lead into a diving bell and descending into the depths himself. How strong a pressure would he be able to tolerate? Would the shell hold or would it shatter so that he was sent shooting back up to the surface and the real world once more?

  It was already late afternoon when he left his stone and continued walking towards the mouth of the river. He imagined himself trudging along a path somewhere inside a steaming rainforest in a tropical land without a name.

  CHAPTER 162

  The boat was the same type as Sara Fredrika's, but the sail was patched and the farm labourers drunk. They were asleep, tangled together among the empty herring barrels and baskets in the bottom of the boat. It was six o'clock when he woke them up. One of them, the older one called Elis, asked Tobiasson-Svartman if he had brought the aquavit with him. He showed them the bottles but said he had no intention of handing them over until they were south of Finntarmen and preferably had reached their destination.

  And what was the destination? It was the younger man, Gösta, who asked.

  'It's secret. A military operation,' he replied. 'I am to be dropped on a skerry and I shall be collected from there by a naval vessel.'

  'Which island?' Gösta wondered.

  'I'll show you when we get close to it.'

  The men were hung-over and starting to moan, and wanted to wait until the next day before leaving the mouth of the river. But he cajoled them into setting out to sea right now, there was no time to waste. There was a following wind that would take them out of Slätbaken before they lay up for the night. Gösta sat at the tiller and Elis kept an eye on the sail. He cursed every time he tightened the sheet or let it go.

  Tobiasson-Svartman made himself comfortable in the bows. He had his rucksack with the sounding lead between his legs. There was an acrid smell coming from the sea. He recognised it from his time aboard the Blenda.

  They anchored for the night in a creek on the edge of the approach to Slätbaken. He had spent a night with Sara Fredrika on the other side of the narrow channel.

  He suddenly felt pangs of guilt. It was as if he were no longer being taken south, but was descending the sounding line inside himself. He found it difficult to breathe.

  It was not until the fire had died out and the farm labourers had fallen asleep that he could feel his panic subsiding.

  He looked at the sleeping labourers. I envy them, he thought. But between their lives and mine is a distance that can never be bridged.

  CHAPTER 163

  They were between Rökholmen and Lilla Getskär when Gösta asked once again where he wanted to be put ashore.

  The wind had freshened during the night and they were making good progress after a night's rest.

  'Halsskär,' Tobiasson-Svartman told him.

  The man looked at him in astonishment.

  'That bare bit of rock near the open sea? Near the lighthouses and the seal rocks?'

  'There is a Halsskär south of Västervik and another way up north off Härnosönd. But I'm hardly going to be going all that way.'

  'What the hell are you going to do on that godforsaken bloody place? A madwoman lives there. Is that who you're going to see?'

  'I don't know anything about the island being inhabited. I have my orders. That's where I'm going to be collected from.'

  The fisherman seemed amused.

  'They say that all the bloody Finnish hunters without a licence wandering around the outer archipelago stop off there to get a bit of leg-over on the way out and again on the way back,' Elis said.

  Tobiasson-Svartman was cold as ice. But even if he could have killed them, he wanted to know about the rumours.

  'You mean there's a trollop living on the skerry? How on earth did she end up there?'

  'Her husband drowned,' said Gösta. 'How else could she make a living? I've seen her. A really filthy little scrubber. You'd have to be as randy as hell if you wanted to shag that.'

  'Does she have a name?'

  'Sara. Though some people say Fredrika.'

  The men had nothing to add. The dinghy was making good headway. He was beginning to recognise the islands now, the channels were opening out, the ice that had covered the water was a distant memory.

  He imagined the farm labourers dead, deep down at the bottom of the sea.

  Late in the afternoon the sailing dinghy steered into the inlet where Sara Fredrika's boat was moored. He handed over two litre bottles and jumped ashore.

  'If anybody asks, you had no passengers with you from Söderköping,' he said.

  'Who would ask us?' Gösta said. 'Who cares if a couple of bloody farm yokels have anybody in the boat with them?'

  'There's a war on, and what I'm doing is top secret. If you say a single word once you get back on shore you could end up in prison for life.'

  He watched them go, heading south. They were talking eagerly, but he did not think they would say anything about him. He had frightened them.

  He looked at the nets, corves, sinkers, all the other equipment. The boat was securely moored, it did not need to be beached when the water level was high. He looked towards the path and all the greenery clinging to the little crevices and along the sides of the rocks.

  He tried to build a room around himself, but no walls wanted to rise up.

  CHAPTER 164

  The first thing he saw by the cottage was a cat, staring at him with watchful eyes. He had the impression it was the same cat as he had killed in his fury.

  He despised the supernatural. Human beings worked constantly to make their gods unnecessary. He was an individual who made scientific measurements: one day time and perhaps also space would be measured and controlled by scales of measurements hitherto unknown. The supernatural was shadows dancing in the remains of a childhood fear of the dark. Normally he could always resist the supernatural. But the cat scared him.

  It ran away as he approached the window.

  Sara Fredrika was asleep on the bunk. He contemplated her enormous stomach.

  She must have heard him, or sensed movement outside the window, turned her head to look, and squealed in delight. He opened the door and took her in his arms. She was warm and sweaty, steam was rising from her body. He immediately abandoned all thought of Kristina Tacker and Laura.

  Now he was able to build the walls. There was nothing outside Halsskär, nothing that he could no longer control. He held all distances in his hands.

  'How did you get here?' she asked. 'I didn't hear anything. I didn't sense anything either.'

  'I sailed here with some farmhands from an island further south. From Lofthammar, they said.'

  'Sailing this way? Where from?'

  'Norrköping.'

  'How did you find them?'

  'In the harbour. They had bought a sailing dinghy, or got
it in exchange, I couldn't quite work out what they did. But I was lucky. I'd have had to go to Söderköping otherwise.'

  Not even the farm labourers belong to my story, he thought. I'm walking on water, leaving no tracks behind me.

  'You've got a new cat,' he said.

  'I got it from Helge. I hadn't asked for a similar one, and Helge said he hadn't seen the one I had before. It's good company. But it misses its mice, there aren't any on this skerry. And it's frightened of the snakes.'

  They went indoors. Everything was as he remembered it. Nobody else seemed to have been in the cottage since he left. Nevertheless, he had a strange feeling of uneasiness, a suspicion that, even so, everything had changed since he was last here.

  It was a while before he saw it.

  Her eyes had changed. She looked at him in a different way.

  Something had in fact happened.

  CHAPTER 165

  He asked her that evening.

  A storm had blown in from the west, the thunderclaps were so strong that the cottage walls shook. She had a pain in her back and lay down on the bed.

  'Nothing has happened,' she said. 'They threw the cat ashore from the boat. I've been waiting for you, nothing else.'

  He listened carefully and could detect a change in her voice. Something had happened, but what? He ought not to ask any more, not just now.

  During the night he had the feeling that she was keeping her distance. It was barely noticeable, but it was a fact. She was suspicious, maybe unsure. But what could have happened?

  He was afraid. Somehow she knew now that he was married, that no woman and no daughter had fallen over a cliff.

  He slid out of bed cautiously, but she woke up.

  'Where are you going?'

  'I just need to go out for a moment.'

  'My back's hurting.'

  'Go back to sleep. It's only just getting light.'

  'How shall I be able to give birth here?'

  'I'll sail for help when the time comes.'

  The storm had subsided. The sparse grass was wet, water was running down the rocks. The cat emerged from a crack in the rock underneath the cottage and followed him down to the inlet, where he plucked a little flounder from the corf. He threw it to the cat.

  Could she have found out something about him despite everything? He tried to go back over all the many things that had happened since they first met, but he could not hit upon anything.

  It occurred to him that the deserter might have floated up to the surface or been caught in one of her nets. But that could not have been the case. The body could not have reappeared, the sinker was securely fastened. Besides, she did not have any nets that would go as deep as that.

  He walked round the island with the cat the single member of his retinue. He climbed to the highest point, and was reminded of Lieutenant Jakobsson, peeing over the rail. Distant memories, he thought. Like dreams.

  He wondered if it would be possible to sink his sounding lead through the darkness that exists below the surface of all dreams.

  On the far horizon he caught a glimpse of a ship heading north. He did not have his telescope with him and could not make out if it was a warship.

  The cat suddenly vanished.

  Still he could not understand what had happened.

  CHAPTER 166

  The heatwave continued.

  Sara Fredrika had difficulty in moving, her back ached and she complained that she could not keep cool. He went fishing and did whatever had to be done. When he was busy with the nets, cleaning fish or carrying water he was able to feel totally relaxed, the walls around him were constantly there. Occasionally he would see Kristina Tacker and the newly born baby in his mind's eye. Did she know what he had done, that he had denied her existence to another woman? Yet how could she know?

  Early one morning in the middle of August when he was on the way to Jungfrugrunden to take up some nets, he stopped rowing. There was no wind, just a gentle swell.

  He realised that he was near the spot where the two German sailors were lying at the bottom of the sea. He could row there, tie the rope in the stern of the boat round the sinker beside it, throw it and himself overboard, and it would all be over at last.

  Perhaps that was the only bottomless depth he could hope to find? Sinking towards death, unaware of what happened to him after his lungs had filled with seawater?

  He took tight hold of the oars and started rowing again.

  The net he pulled aboard contained a lot of fish. Any thoughts about death vanished immediately.

  Sara Fredrika came down to the shore to help him gut the catch. She moved with difficulty, and the pain in her back made her pull faces.

  They did not say much to each other.

  CHAPTER 167

  The next day he cleaned his sounding lead and started measuring the depths around Halsskär. He would record the reading in a notebook then lower his lead once again.

  It was as if he were listening to two voices, a never-ending conversation between sea and land. Every wave or swell brought with it a fragment of a story, every slab of rock made its contribution.

  He put the sounding lead on the floor of the boat. Before, he had always thought there was a never-ending struggle between the sea and the rocks. Now he realised that was incorrect. It was an embrace that never lost its element of lust. A slowly increasing intimacy, he thought. The elevation of the land progresses invisibly, the rocks and the sea rely on each other.

  He turned his back on Halsskär and gazed out to sea. The horizon was empty. He had the vague impression that there was something missing, something that ought to be there had vanished.

  CHAPTER 168

  When he reached home she was sitting outside the cottage, waiting.

  Her eyes were blazing.

  He stopped, not wanting to get too close to her.

  She threw two wooden sticks that dropped at his feet. He did not see what they were at first. Then he saw the dried-out bit of rope fastening the two pins together. His ice prods. The ones he had stuck into the deserter's eyes.

  He turned icy cold. He was sure he had pushed them inside the dead man's clothes before kicking the sinker into the ice hole and watching the corpse vanish into the depths.

  He looked at her. Was there anything else? Was this only the beginning?

  'What's that on them?' she asked.

  'I don't understand what you mean.'

  'They are yours, aren't they?'

  'Of course they are mine. But they vanished into thin air. I don't know what happened to them.'

  'Pick them up!'

  He bent down. There was a dark colour dried into the light brown wood. It looked like dark brown rust. Blood, no doubt. The deserter's blood.

  'I still don't know what you mean.'