back and forth off the rocks.
'Who is she?' asked Sara Fredrika again.
'She's telling the truth. I am married to her, I have not yet concluded the divorce proceedings.'
'But you said she'd fallen over a cliff, and your daughter as well?'
'That was my first wife. I haven't told you everything about my life. I work on top-secret missions, and it's infectious, I end up by being top secret even to myself.'
She backed away from him, he could see that she was frightened.
'What's she doing here?'
'I don't know. She came here in the sailing dinghy.'
Kristina Tacker came back. He tried to embrace her and calm her down, but she avoided his grasp.
'I don't want you to touch me, never again.'
She turned her back on him and started talking to Sara Fredrika. 'Who are you?'
'I live here with him.'
'With him?'
'Yes, I just said so. What's it got to do with you? It's my life, not yours.'
'But I'm the one who's married to him. Can't you hear what I'm saying?'
'He's not married. He lives here with me, and he's going to take me away to a new country. I want you to leave here.'
Another voice joined in the argument, from the far distance, a baby crying. It was clearly audible in the silence. Kristina Tacker looked round wildly before she grasped the truth. She started shaking and then she collapsed.
'It's my baby,' Sara Fredrika said. 'My daughter. She's called Laura.'
Kristina Tacker started whimpering and crawled away, trying to force her way into the thorn bushes.
'Is she out of her mind? She'll cut herself to pieces on the thorns.'
'She's ill,' he said. 'She's very ill. She needs help.'
He tried to pull Sara Fredrika away, but she beat him off with enormous strength.
'Don't you dare lay your hands on me. I don't know what's going on here, I'm hearing things that I refuse to believe. Don't you dare touch me, and don't touch her either.'
Sara Fredrika squatted down by Kristina Tacker's side. Kristina Tacker was wrestling with the thorn bushes.
Tobiasson-Svartman looked at his wife. She was like a wounded animal. He was the one who had pulled the trigger, but he had not been able to give her the coup de grâce, he had only wounded her. Sara Fredrika pulled her away from the thorn bushes. Kristina Tacker did not resist. Despite the darkness he could see the blood running down her face from where the thorns had pierced her skin. She was hanging like a dead body in Sara Fredrika's powerful arms.
He was motionless. The cat was still observing proceedings from a distance. Four metres, he thought. The shadows make it hard to be precise about the centimetres. But the cat is sitting four metres away from me. Kristina Tacker and Sara Fredrika and the baby are a few metres further away. But in fact the distance between me and them is infinite, and it is growing all the time. The lines have been cut and the current and the wind are propelling us in different directions.
He was reminded of the ice. The open channels, people falling in and meeting their fate in the black cold of winter.
But most of all he was reminded of the drift net he had seen the previous summer, when the sun's rays were beating down on the water, the drift net with all the dead ducks and fish. At that time he had interpreted it as a symbol of freedom. But he was not the net, he was one of the dead fish. What he had seen then was his own downfall.
He started running along the path, running away. He stumbled and hit his face on a rock, cutting his lips. It seemed as if the whole skerry had made him its enemy and was attacking him.
The sailing dinghy was at anchor in the inlet. He waded into the cold water and scrambled aboard. But the sail was furled tightly round the mast and a locked chain prevented him from unfurling it. The tiller was also locked: she had prepared for all eventualities, she knew him far too well to leave anything to chance. She had cut off his escape route even before they had started shouting at each other in the freezing cold water. He tried to break the chain with a hammer he found in one of the pigeonholes in the cockpit. But it refused to yield, and he could see that he would break the tiller if he kept on trying. He threw the hammer into