Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,36

oars? Stones that move? What was she talking about?

'I'm not used to people,' she said. 'Not since I became alone.'

'Why do you live here on your own?'

'Is there more than one answer?'

'Either you have chosen to do so, or you haven't.'

'Who would choose loneliness?'

'Some people would. You can shut yourself away in a house, but you can also do it on an island where the sea is a sort of terrifying moat.'

'I don't understand that. I'm twenty-seven years old, nothing can scare me any more.'

'I just wonder what happened.'

A massive gust of wind shook the cottage to its foundations.

'One of these days it can simply collapse,' she shouted, in a sudden burst of emotion. 'I'll let it fall to bits all round me.'

She went on talking, in long sentences. She expressed herself clearly, as only people who talk a lot to themselves can. Afterwards, when she had fallen silent, abruptly, as if she regretted having spoken, he realised that he could no longer hear the wind. Had the storm blown over so soon?

He listened. She had shrunk back into the shadows again.

Then the wind started once more.

She had spoken without hesitation, known in detail exactly what she wanted to say. It was as if she had told the story many times, but only to herself, the story of why she was alone on Halsskär. Or perhaps, in the evenings, in the darkness, she had practised so that she could tell the story to somebody she hoped might one day come to the skerry.

He had the feeling that he had come to Halsskär for one specific reason. He had come so that she would have somebody to listen to her.

CHAPTER 59

The man whose pipe was here was called Nils Ferdinand Persson.

He had been Sara Fredrika's husband.

The story began several years ago when they were newly married and worked as domestic servants for a relative of hers, Axel Theodor Homeros Lundberg. He was well-to-do, owned farms in both Gusum and in the archipelago near Finnö and as far north as Risö. They did not enjoy working for Lundberg. He was miserly and vindictive, and the only things he seemed to like were his riding boots, which he was forever treating with seal fat. No one was allowed to touch them, not even his wife, who was scared stiff of getting a beating. They stuck it for a year, but left in acrimonious circumstances and went to live on one of the islands near Turmulefjärden. It was a very poor smallholding, but at least there was nobody there polishing boots and shouting at them. They stayed there for a year, then heard that there was an abandoned cottage on Halsskär. They were able to secure the lease cheaply, for practically nothing – a barrel of herring every spring and autumn, that was all.

They sailed out to Halsskär one chilly Sunday in March. It had been a severe winter and the ice had not altogether loosened its grip. Her husband said that nothing could be worse than loud-mouthed gentleman farmers. Houses could be made windproof, nets and drift nets could be patched up and repaired, but nobody could shut the mouth of a gentleman farmer who bellowed and yelled.

They moved in as summer approached, made repairs on the house and started to prepare for whatever was in store: autumn, winter, ice, isolation.

Every now and then farmers from the inner archipelago would appear, sailing along the channel known as Märsfjärden that led to Halsskär and Krampbådorna. They were heading for the herring fishing grounds or shooting birds, and were astonished to see Sara Fredrika and her husband. Hadn't Halsskär been abandoned a century ago? In 1807 an old spinster lived there, but she froze to death and was pecked to the bone by gulls and crows. Ever since then the skerry had been uninhabited. The outhouses had collapsed, the jetties in the inlet had rotted away and the houses that could be dismantled were moved, plank by plank, to the green islands closer to the mainland.

It was said that Nils Ferdinand Persson and his wife Sara Fredrika had their noses in the air, and people with noses in the air ire the first to fall.

They were also visited by people from Åland and Finland, who were hunting seals illegally. They would shake their heads and shout warnings to them in their incomprehensible language.

Autumn arrived in September. The first storm was quite unexpected, it blew in from the east in the middle of the night and