Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,18

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