Depths Page 6

  'Bosun Rudin?' Tobiasson-Svartman asked. 'How is he?'

  'I'm afraid he died during the operation,' Rake said. 'It's very sad. He was a good bosun. Besides, with his death my personal statistics look less good.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman suddenly felt sick. He hadn't expected Rudin to be dead, and for a moment he lost his self-possession.

  Rake was watching him intently. He had noticed the reaction.

  'Are you not well?'

  'I'm fine, thank you. It's just that my stomach has been a bit upset these last few days.'

  Neither of them spoke. The shadow of Bosun Rudin passed through the cabin.

  They took another glass of brandy before Tobiasson-Svartman left.

  CHAPTER 33

  On 31 October, early in the afternoon, the central east coast of Sweden was struck by a storm that forced the hydrographers to stop work. It was not without a degree of satisfaction that Tobiasson-Svartman ordered the launches back to the mother ship. Early that morning, when he had checked the weather, all the indications were that a storm was approaching. At breakfast he had asked Jakobsson what he thought about the weather prospects.

  'The barometer is falling,' Jakobsson said. 'We might get a strong southerly wind approaching gale force, but probably not until after nightfall.'

  More probably by this afternoon, Tobiasson-Svartman had thought. And the wind is going to be more of an easterly. And it will be storm force. But he said nothing. Neither at breakfast, nor when the storm hit them.

  The Blenda tossed and turned in the rough seas. The engines were at full throttle, to keep the ship heading into the wind. He was alone at the meal table for two days. Lieutenant Jakobsson suffered badly from seasickness and did not appear. Tobiasson-Svartman had never had that problem, not even during his early days as a cadet For some reason, that gave him a bad conscience.

  CHAPTER 34

  The storm blew itself out during the night of 2 November.

  When Tobiasson-Svartman came out on deck at dawn ragged clouds were scudding across the sky. The temperature was climbing. They could restart their depth sounding. His overall plan had incorporated time to make up for delays and he was confident that they would still finish on time. He had allowed for three severe storms.

  He checked his watch and saw that it was time for breakfast.

  Then he heard a shout. It sounded like a lamentation. When he turned round he saw a rating leaning over the rail, gesticulating wildly with his hand. Something in the water had attracted the sailor's attention.

  Lieutenant Jakobsson and Tobiasson-Svartman hurried to where the sailor was standing. Half of Jakobsson's face was covered in shaving foam.

  There was a dead body bobbing up and down in the water by the side of the ship. It was a man lying face downwards. His uniform was not Swedish. But was it German or was it Russian?

  Ropes and grappling irons were used to hoist the body on board. The ratings turned him on his back. The face was that of a young man. He had blond hair. But he had no eyes. They had been eaten by fish, eels or perhaps birds. Lieutenant Jakobsson groaned out loud.

  Tobiasson-Svartman tried to grab hold of the rail, but fainted before he could reach it When he came round, Jakobsson was bent over him. Some drops of the white lather dripped on to Tobiasson-Svartman's forehead. He sat up slowly, waving away the crew members who were trying to help him.

  Feelings of humiliation were swelling up inside him. Not only had he lost control of himself, he had shown weakness in full view of the crew.

  First Rudin had died, and now this body had been pulled up from the sea. That was too much, more than he could bear.

  Before today Tobiasson-Svartman had only ever seen one dead body in all his life. That was his father, who had suffered a massive heart attack one evening when he was getting changed. He had died on the floor beside his bed, just as Tobiasson-Svartman had put his head round the door to tell him that dinner was ready.

  At the moment of death Hugo Svartman had pissed himself. He lay there with his stomach uncovered and his eyes wide open. He was holding a shoe in one hand, as if to defend himself.

  Tobiasson-Svartman had never managed to forget the sight of that fat, half-naked body. He often thought that his father had decided to punish him one last time by dying before his very eyes.

  The dead man was very young. Lieutenant Jakobsson bent down and placed a handkerchief over the empty eye sockets.

  'The uniform is German,' he said. 'He belonged to the German Navy.'

  Jakobsson unbuttoned the dead man's tunic. He produced some soaking wet documents and photographs from the inside pockets.

  'I don't have much experience of dead sailors,' he said. 'That doesn't mean of course that I've never fished dead men out of the sea. I don't think this man has been in the water all that long. He doesn't appear to have any wounds to suggest that he died in battle. Presumably he fell overboard by accident.'

  Jakobsson stood up and ordered the body to be covered. Tobiasson-Svartman accompanied him into the mess. When they had sat down, and the papers and photographs were laid out on the table, Jakobsson realised that half of his face still had shaving foam on it. He shouted for the steward to bring him a towel and wiped his face clean. When Tobiasson-Svartman saw the half-shaved face, he could not help but burst into insuppressible laughter. Lieutenant Jakobsson raised an eyebrow in surprise. It occurred to Tobiasson-Svartman that this was the first time he had laughed out loud since coming on board the Blenda.

  The idea of Lieutenant Jakobsson as a comic figure in a cinematographic farce came to him for the second time.

  CHAPTER 35

  Lieutenant Jakobsson started going through the dead sailor's papers. Carefully he separated the pages of a military pay book.

  'Karl-Heinz Richter, born Kiel 1895,' he read. 'A very young man, not twenty. Short life, violent death.'

  He was, with difficulty, deciphering the water-damaged writing.

  'He was a crew member of the battleship Niederburg,' he said. 'I think the Naval Headquarters in Stockholm will be surprised to hear that the Niederburgis operating in the Baltic.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman thought to himself: One of the smaller battleships in the German Navy, but even so it has a crew of more than eight hundred men. One of the heavy German naval vessels that could travel at impressively high speeds.

  Jakobsson was poring over the photographs. One was a miniature in a glazed frame.

  'Frau Richter presumably,' he said. 'A woman with a friendly smile sitting in a photographer's studio, never dreaming that her son will drown and have this photograph with him. A pretty face, but a bit on the plump side.'

  He scrutinised the miniature more closely.

  'There's a little blue butterfly behind the photograph,' he said. 'Why, we shall never know.'

  The other photograph was blurred. He studied it for a long time before putting it down.

  'It could just possibly be a dog. A Swedish foxhound, perhaps. But I'm not sure.'

  He handed over the photographs and the documents. Tobiasson-Svartman also thought it could be a dog, but he too was unsure about the breed. The woman, who was most probably Karl-Heinz Richter's mother, looked cowed and scared. She seemed almost to be crouching before the photographer. And she was really fat.

  'There are two possibilities,' Jakobsson said. 'Either it was a banal accident A sailor falls overboard in the dark. Nobody notices. It doesn't even have to be dark for such an accident to occur. It could have happened in broad daylight. It only takes two or three seconds to fall into the water from the deck of a ship. Nobody sees you, nobody hears when you fall in with a splash and struggle with the sea that relentlessly sucks all the heat out of you and then pulls you under. You die from hypothermia, in a state of extreme panic. Anybody who's been close to drowning talks about a very special kind of fear that can't be compared to anything else, not even the terror you feel when making a bayonet charge on enemy forces shooting at you for all they are worth.'

  He broke of
f, as if he had lost the thread. Tobiasson-Svartman could feel his stomach churning.

  'But there could also be another explanation,' Jakobsson said. 'He might have committed suicide. His angst had got the better of him. Young people most especially can take their own lives for the strangest reasons. A broken heart, for instance. Or that vague phenomenon the Germans cal "Weltschmerz?. But even homesickness is not unknown as a reason for servicemen taking their own lives. Mother's apron strings are more important than life. If you lose your grip on the apron strings, the only alternative is death.'

  He reached for the miniature.

  'It's not impossible that this woman has been over-protective as far as her son is concerned, and made his life without her impossible.'

  He studied the image for a while before putting it down again.

  'One could speculate about other reasons, of course. He might have been badly treated by his officers or fellow crewmen. I thought the lad looked little and scared even in death – he looked quite like a girl, in fact. All that was missing were the pigtails. Perhaps he couldn't put up with being at the bottom of the pecking order. Even so, it needs a special sort of courage to throw yourself into the water. Courage or stupidity. Often enough it boils down to the same thing. Especially among soldiers and sailors.'

  Lieutenant Jakobsson stood up.

  'I don't want the man on board any longer than necessary. Death weighs heavily on a ship. A crew gets nervy when they have a dead body as cargo. We'll bury him as soon as possible.'

  'Doesn't there have to be a post-mortem?'

  Jakobsson thought for a moment before replying.

  'I'm in command of this ship and so I make the decisions. We can't be certain that the man hasn't been ill. People can carry an infection even when they are no longer breathing. I'm going to bury him as soon as possible.'

  He paused in the doorway.

  'I need some advice,' he said. 'You are presumably the best qualified person to give it in the whole of the Swedish Navy.'

  'What?'

  'I need a spot that's suitably deep. Ideally somewhere close where we can sink the body. Maybe you could check your charts and find somewhere?'

  'That won't be necessary. I know a suitable place already.'

  They went on deck and walked to the rail. It was strangely silent on board. Tobiasson-Svartman pointed to the northeast.

  'There is a crack in the sea floor 250 metres from here. It never gets wider than thirty metres and it runs as far as Landsortsdjupet. As you know, that's the deepest part of the whole Baltic Sea, in excess of 450 metres. The location I'm talking about is 160 metres deep. If you want anything deeper than that you'll have to sail several nautical miles north.'

  'That will be fine. On land they bury coffins only two metres deep. At sea, 160 metres should be more than enough.'

  The body was sewn into a tarpaulin. Various pieces of scrap metal from the engine room were lashed around the corpse. While the sea-coffin was being prepared, Lieutenant Jakobsson finished shaving.

  The ship moved in accordance with the instructions given to the helmsman by Tobiasson-Svartman. It struck him that this was the first time he'd been in de facto command of a Swedish naval vessel. Even if it was only for 250 metres.

  CHAPTER 36

  The burial took place at nine thirty.

  The crew gathered on the afterdeck. The carpenter had rigged up a plank between two trestles. The body wrapped in the tarpaulin was laid with the foot end next to the rail. The ship's three-tailed flag was at half mast.

  Lieutenant Jakobsson followed the ritual laid down in his instruction book. He was holding a hymnal. The crew mumbled out the hymn. Jakobsson had a loud voice, but he sang out of tune. Tobiasson-Svartman only moved his lips. The seagulls circling the ship joined in the singing. After the hymn, Jakobsson read the prescribed prayer over the dead body, then the plank was tilted and the body slid over the rail and entered the water with a muffled splash.

  The ship's foghorn sounded eerily. Jakobsson kept the crew to attention for a full minute. When they dispersed there was no sign of the body.

  Jakobsson invited Tobiasson-Svartman to a glass of aquavit in the mess. They toasted each other and the lieutenant asked: 'How long do you think it took for the body to sink down to the mud or sand or whatever there is at the bottom just there?'

  'It's mud,' said Tobiasson-Svartman. 'It's always mud in the Baltic.'

  He made a rapid calculation in his head.

  'Let's assume the body and the metal weigh a hundred kilos and the distance to the bottom is 160 metres. That would mean it would take two to three seconds for it to sink one metre. And so it will have taken the body about six minutes to reach the bottom.'

  Jakobsson thought that over for a while.

  'That ought to be enough to save my crew from worrying if he'll be coming back up to the surface again. Sailors can be as superstitious as hell. But the same applies to commanding officers if things are really bad.'

  He poured himself another drink, and Tobiasson-Svartman did not say no.

  'I shall spend a lot of time wondering about why he drowned,' Jakobsson said. 'I know I'll never know the answer, but I won't be able to forget him. Our meeting was brief. He lay on the deck of my ship under a piece of grey tarpaulin. Then he departed again. Even so, he will be with me for the rest of my life.'

  'What will happen to his belongings? The miniature, the picture of the dog? His pay book?'

  'I'll send them to Stockholm together with my report. I assume they'll eventually be sent to Germany. Sooner or later Frau Richter will find out what happened to her son. I know of no civilised nation where the procedures for dealing with dead soldiers and sailors are not meticulously observed.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman stood up to prepare for resuming work. Lieutenant Jakobsson raised a hand to indicate that he had something more to say.

  'I have a brother who's an engineer,' he said. 'He has been working for a number of years at the German naval yards in Gotenhafen and Kiel. He tells me that the German shipbuilders are considering making incredibly big vessels. With a deadweight of getting on for 50,000 tonnes, half of which is accounted for by the armour-plating. In some places that will be thirty-five centimetres thick. These ships will have crews comprising two thousand men and more, they'll be floating towns with access to everything you can think of. Presumably there'll be an undertaker or two on board as well. I suppose one of these days ships like that will come into being. I wonder what will happen to the human race, though. We could never have skin thirty-five centimetres thick, a skin that could withstand the biggest shells. Will the human race survive? Or will we end up fighting wars that never end, with nobody able to remember how they started, and nobody able to envisage them ending?'

  Jakobsson poured himself another drink.

  'The war that's being fought now could be the beginning of what I'm talking about. Millions of soldiers are going to die simply because one man was murdered in Sarajevo. Some insignificant Crown prince. Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn't. The bottom line is that war is always a mistake. Or the result of absurd assumptions and conclusions.'

  Jakobsson did not appear to expect any comment. He replaced the bottle in its cupboard, then left the mess.

  Just as he stepped out on to the deck he swayed and stumbled. But he did not turn round.

  Tobiasson-Svartman remained in the mess, thinking over what he had just heard.

  How thick was his own skin? How big a shell would it be able to resist?