Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,58

to make out a narrow wisp of smoke rising from the skerry.

She was still there. But she was not expecting him.

CHAPTER 92

It was starting to get dark as he approached Halsskär.

His first impulse was to hurry over the ice and go straight to Sara Fredrika's cottage. But something stopped him, he hesitated. What would he say? How would he explain his return? What would happen if he changed his mind the moment she opened the door?

He squeezed the questions into a little clump: why was he out on the ice, why had he lied to set up this journey, what was he really looking for?

He reached the skerry as dusk fell without having found an answer. Sara Fredrika's boat was on land, upside down and resting on large pieces of driftwood. The nets had been taken in, an abandoned herring barrel was brimful of snow.

He made a shelter in a crevice between the inlet and the rocks where he could not be seen from the cottage. He knew the way from there, he would be able to walk it in the dark. That was the only thing he had managed to decide, he would wait for it to get properly dark and then creep up on her. He wanted to look through the window and see what she was doing, only then would he know how to take the final steps.

He crept down into his sleeping bag. Night fell, and still he waited. The clouds dispersed, the sky was full of stars, the narrow sliver of a new moon. When he eventually got up it was nine o'clock. He made his way to the edge of the rock and looked out to sea. There was no sign of the Sandsänkan lighthouse. He screwed up his eyes, momentarily confused and wondering if he was completely disorientated. Then he realised that the light had been switched off as part of the increased security operation along the Swedish coast. The war had brought its darkness here as well.

He waited for another hour. The wind had dropped altogether, the ice continued so far out that he could not even hear the sea. He groped his way along the path. There was a faint light coming from the window. He made a start when something rubbed against his leg. It was the cat. He bent down and stroked it. The cat that did not exist.

He was careful where to tread as he approached the window. Despite the hoar frost on the pane he could see into the room, a fractured image.

He moved away from the window. The cat went with him, rubbing against his leg. He looked again through the window. Sara Fredrika was squatting in front of the fire. She was wearing a woolly cap and was wrapped in blankets.

But she was not alone. Sitting on the floor next to the hearth was a man in uniform.

He had seen a similar uniform some months earlier. Then it had been on a dead German soldier floating in the sea next to the gunboat Blenda.

The picture sent a shudder of pain through him. There was a German sailor sitting in Sara Fredrika's cottage. A German sailor barring his way.

The cat was beside him, rubbing against his leg.

PART VI

The Adder Game

CHAPTER 93

Someone had taken his place, his fox pelt.

He could hear the sailor's voice through the wall. It was hard to make out all his words, he was speaking in a low voice as if he suspected or feared that there was somebody close at hand, listening.

The German Tobiasson-Svartman had learned during his hated school years was not good enough for him to understand fully what was being said. In addition, the sailor was speaking dialect, he seemed to slur words, some consonants were almost inaudible, as if he had swallowed them.

Tobiasson-Svartman pressed his cheek against the cold wall. What he really wanted to do was to smash the windowpane with his fist, kick the door open and throw the man squatting in front of the fire out into the night. But he did and said nothing, and stayed in the darkness by the cottage until the fire had almost gone out. She was lying in the bunk, and the sailor on rags and old pelts on the floor, just as he had done.

He returned to his crevice. He was very tired, his joints were aching from the cold. A wind was getting up. At dawn he obliterated all traces he had left in and around the