Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,33

was still keeping in the shadows.

'You can stay here, of course,' she said from the darkness. 'I wouldn't turn anybody away in weather like this. But don't expect anything.'

She sat on the bunk along the wall. It seemed to him that she was concealing herself in the darkness, like an animal.

'I read in an old tax register that people used to live on this island,' he said. 'One, possibly two families settled here. But in the end it became too hard for them, and the skerry was uninhabited from then on.'

She did not reply. The wind was crashing into the walls. The cottage was draughty, although he could see that she had tried to fill the gaps in the walls.

'I can remember word for word what it said in that tax register,' he said. 'Maybe it wasn't a tax register, but rather an official letter from an enforcement officer. I think his name might have been Fahlstedt.' He recited from memory: "'They live on a barren skerry at the mercy of the sea, they are blessed with neither fields, meadows nor forest, but compelled to derive from the open sea, many a time in peril for their lives, all things they eat and require for apparel, or otherwise are in need of."'

'It sounds like a prayer,' she said. 'Like a priest.'

She was still in the dark, but her voice had come closer. Her voice had that special timbre that comes from being at sea and shouting from boat to boat, shouting in gales and headwinds. Her dialect was less pronounced than he had heard in others from these parts. There were sailors on board the Blenda who came from this section of the archipelago, one from Gräsmarö, and another was the son of a pilot from Häradskär. There was also a stoker from Kättilö and he spoke exactly as she did, like the voice from the dark.

Suddenly she emerged from the darkness. She was still sitting on the bunk, but she leaned forward and looked him in the eye. He was not used to that, his wife never did that. He looked away.

'Lars Tobiasson-Svartman,' she said. 'You are a naval officer and wear a uniform. You row around in stormy weather. You have a ring. You are married.'

'My wife is dead.'

It sounded perfectly natural, not the least bit strained. He had not planned to say that, but on the other hand, he was not surprised at it. An imagined sorrowful event became reality. Kristina Tacker had no place in this cottage. She belonged to another life that he was keeping at a distance, as if looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

'My wife Kristina is dead,' he said again, and thought that it still sounded as if he were telling the truth. 'She died two years ago. It was an accident. She fell.'

How had she fallen? And where? How could he bring about the most meaningless of deaths? He decided to throw her over a cliff. The woman sitting here in the darkness would understand that. But he couldn't let her die alone. Inspiration was flooding into him with irrestible force.

She would have a child with her, a daughter. What should he call her? She must have a name that was worthy of her. He would call her Laura. That was the name of Kristina Tacker's sister, who had died young, coughing her lungs away with tuberculosis, Laura Amalia Tacker. The dead gave the living their names.

'We were travelling in Skåne. At Hovs Hallar, with our daughter Laura. She was six years old, an angel of a girl. My wife stumbled on the edge of the cliff, and happened to bump into our daughter, and they went hurtling down. I couldn't reach them in time. I shall never forget their screams. My wife broke her neck in the fall, and a sharp piece of rock dug deep into my daughter's head. She was still alive when they raised her up the cliff. She looked at me, as if accusing me, then died.'

'How can you bear such sorrow?'

'You bear it because you have to.'

She put some cut branches into the fire. The flames seemed to gather strength from the green wood.

He noticed that he was enticing her closer. It was as if he were directing all her movements. He could see her face now. Her eyes were less watchful.

It had been very easy to kill his wife and his daughter.

The storm was roaring into the cottage walls. There