Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,43

the swell. He had the feeling of being a large animal padding round a cage. The cold night made him shiver. He set off round the ship. The sailors on watch saluted him, and he nodded in reply. Suddenly he found himself outside the door of Jakobsson's cabin. Now that the ship's master was dead he no longer felt he needed to use his title when he thought about him.

He wondered where Fredén was sleeping. Until now he had been sharing a cabin with Jakobsson.

The dead man was still there. There was a lantern on the table, he could see the light under the door. He opened it and went in. Somebody had placed a white handkerchief over Jakobsson's face. The pipe had been taken from his grasp before his hands had been crossed over his chest. Tobiasson-Svartman contemplated Jakobsson's chest, as if there might be a trace of a forgotten breath.

He opened the drawer in the bureau attached to the wall. It contained a few notebooks and a framed photograph. It was of a woman. He looked furtively at the photograph. She was very beautiful. He stared at the picture as if bewitched. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. On the back was the name Emma Lidén.

He sat down and started thumbing through the notebooks. To his surprise he saw that Jakobsson had been keeping a private diary in parallel with the official logbook.

Tobiasson-Svartman glanced at the man lying with a handkerchief over his face. It felt both dangerous and amusing to penetrate his private world. He leafed through to the date when he had joined the ship.

It took him an hour to read to the end. Jakobsson had made the last entry only a couple of hours before he died. He had noted 'a pain in my left arm, some slight pressure over my chest' and reflected on why his bowel movements had been so sluggish these last few days.

Tobiasson-Svartman was shaken. The man who ended his life with a worried comment about a stomach upset had been in possession of colossal strength, of both love and hatred.

Emma Lidén was his secret fiancée, but she was already attached to another man and had several children. The diaries were full of notes about letters exchanged and then burned, of a love that exceeds all bounds, that is a blessing without equal, but can never be anything but a dream. The phrase 'woke up in tears again this morning' was repeated at regular intervals.

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to picture it. The man with the pipe and the shrivelled hand, weeping in his cabin. But the image was no more than a blur.

He could never have imagined that Jakobsson had hated him so intensely, but the lieutenant had taken a dislike to him the moment he stepped on board. 'I will never be able to trust that man. Both his reserved manner and his smile seem to be false. I have an illusion on board.'

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to recall the moment when he had met the Blenda's master for the first time. His own impression had been quite different. Jakobsson must have been a man turned inside out. He had not been who he was.

Tobiasson-Svartman read every diary entry for the period that he had been on board. Jakobsson never referred to him by his name, only as 'the sea-measurer', a term exuding deeply felt contempt. It sounds like a grub, he thought. A beetle that hides in the cracks of his ship.

The hatred that emerged from the diary was shapeless, like a lump of mud that spread out over the pages. Jakobsson never vouchsafed the reason for his antagonism and hatred. Tobiasson-Svartman was no more than 'a mud-dipper, repulsive, stuck-up and stupid. He also smells like sludge. He has mud in his mouth, he is a man rotting away.'

It was almost one thirty by the time he closed the last of the diaries. A half-empty bottle of brandy was sticking up out of a jackboot. He removed the cork and drank. He pulled the handkerchief aside and tipped some drops of brandy into Jakobsson's nostrils and eyes. Then he opened Lieutenant Jakobsson's trousers, eyed his wrinkled, shrivelled penis and poured brandy over that as well. He put the bottle back in the jackboot, put the handkerchief back in place and left the cabin with the diaries in his hand.

Once back in his own cabin he took out the oilskin pouch he used for his sounding notes, put