Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,52

They left their flat in Wallingatan even though the streets and pavements were slippery and covered in slush. Kristina Tacker insisted, they needed some exercise and he did not want to disappoint her even though he would have preferred to take the tram or a cab.

In the Old Town the square and all the alleys were swarming with people. They examined the goods for sale at the various stalls, his wife bought a little goat made of straw, and after strolling around for an hour they decided to make for home.

When they came to Slottsbacken they suddenly heard a little girl screaming. In the shadow of the royal palace, a man was smacking his daughter. He raised his heavy hand time and time again and smacked her. Kristina Tacker ran up to the man and dragged him away from the girl. She was yelling something neither the man nor her husband could make out, and wrapped her arms round the girl who was howling in pain and fear. She let go of the girl only when the man had promised faithfully not to beat his daughter any more.

The whole incident, from the moment his wife had run ahead of him until the man and the girl disappeared down Skeppsbron, lasted for four minutes and thirty seconds. He had switched on his inbuilt timer then stopped it when she came back to him, out of breath and trembling.

They continued walking home without exchanging a word.

They made no reference to what had happened later that evening either. But Tobiasson-Svartman wondered why it was his wife who had reacted and not him.

CHAPTER 80

Kristina Tacker's parents lived in a large apartment on the corner of Strandgatan and Grevgatan. Tobiasson-Svartman hated having dinner with them on Christmas Day. It was one of the Tacker family's fixed rituals. Kristina's grandfather Horatius Tacker, a mining consultant, had established this ritual, and nobody in the family dared stay away.

The Tacker family had a well-to-do branch that had made a fortune out of the discreditable acquisition of forests in the north of Sweden in keen competition with the better-known Dickson family, and a less well-off branch comprising a number of wholesalers, low-grade civil servants and officers, none of whom had attained a rank higher than commander.

The poor relations were browbeaten at the Christmas dinner, and the men and women who had married into the family were scrutinised as if they were cattle in a show. He disliked this dinner intensely, and knew that his wife hated it too because she could tell how much he was suffering. But nobody could escape. Those who tried were punished severely by being excluded from the family's financial circle that paid dividends every time one of the wealthy relations died and the will was read.

Kristina's father, Ludwig, had displayed proof of considerable careerist agility in the Civil Service and a few years ago had achieved the ultimate triumph of being appointed a lord chamberlain in the King's household. Tobiasson-Svartman considered him to be a clockwork doll that never stopped bowing and scraping, and his instinct was to pull the key out of his father-in-law's back. He derived great pleasure from imagining unwinding the spring as torturers used to do in the olden days with their victim's guts.

Ludwig Tacker for his part no doubt regarded him as an acquisition to the family of doubtful value. But he never said anything, of course. The Tacker family dominated by means of silence that ate into people like acid.

Kristina Tacker's mother was like the figurines on the shelves in her daughter's flat. If Fru Martina Tacker were to trip over a rug or lose her balance on a polished floor she would not simply hurt herself, she would shatter like a china sculpture.

Thirty-four persons were assembled round the dinner table on Christmas Day, 1914. Tobiasson-Svartman had been placed between one of Kristina Tacker's sisters and her grandmother. He was more or less in the middle of one of the long sides of the table, and still had a long way to go before reaching one of the sought-after places close to his father-in-law. The elderly woman on his right was asthmatic and had difficulty in breathing. She was also hard of hearing. She did not reply when he spoke to her; he could not make up his mind if that was because she had not heard, or because she did not consider it worth the trouble of responding. Now and then she would shout to somebody on