Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,79
to his two rucksacks. After removing the luggage labels he stood the cases at the side of a luggage van.
CHAPTER 127
The ice was softer now. But it was still there, all the way to the outer skerries. The sky was obscured by a thin mist. He walked fast.
In one of the bays near Hässelskären he came upon a shoe frozen fast in the ice. The sole was facing upwards, as if the wearer had fallen through the ice while standing on his head. It was a man's lace-up boot, big, patched, a boot for a large foot. He paused and examined the ice all around it. Nothing but the boot. No footsteps, nothing.
He continued his trek, walking so fast that he became short of breath. He would occasionally stop and scan the ice he had already traversed through his telescope. There was, of course, nobody following him.
He stopped again at Armnö: it would be the third time he had spent the night there. Somebody had been in the boathouse in the meantime. The herring drift nets had gone, and a newly tied pike net was in one corner. He ate his tinned meat and made a fire. He was impatient. The frozen-in boot puzzled him.
The next day he rose early and continued his trek over the ice. A wind was getting up, gusting from the north-east.
When he came to Uddskärsfiärden, the other side of Höga Lundsholmen, he met two people coming the other way. They suddenly appeared from behind the skerry, as if out of nowhere. He slipped out of the harness he was using to pull his rucksacks over the ice. It was like laying down his guns.
It was a man about the same age as himself and a boy, twelve or thirteen years old. The boy was deformed, with a misshapen head. His skull was far too big, and his skin was stretched tightly over his projecting cheekbones. He was also one-eyed, his left eye being no more than a shrivelled bag of skin. Their clothes were shabby, the man's face gaunt, his eyes flickering. They eyed him anxiously. The boy took hold of the man's hand.
'It's not very often you come across anybody else walking over the ice,' Tobiasson-Svartman said.
"We're on our way to Kalmar,' the man said. 'We come from t' north. It's quicker to walk over f ice, when it's strong enough.'
The man spoke a dialect he could not place.
'From the north?' he said. 'How far north? Further than Söderköping?'
'I nivver 'eard of Söderköping. We come from Roslagen, near Öregrund.'
'Then you have come a long way.'
The boy said nothing. He made a snorting sound when he breathed. He suddenly burst out laughing and tossed his head about. His father took hold of him, gripping him tight like an animal you've just caught. The boy calmed down and sank back into silence.
'His mother's dead,' the man said. 'There was nowt for us up there. He's got an aunt in Kalmar. Mebbe it's better there. She's religious, so I reckon she ought to be willing to take in young ones and ailin' folk.'
'What do you do to earn a living?'
'We wanders frae farm to farm. Folks are poor, but they share with us. Specially when they clap eyes on my lad. I reckon it's mainly so as to get shot of us quicker.'
The father raised his shabby hat, took hold of his son's hand and started walking. Tobiasson-Svartman shouted to them to stop. He took some banknotes out of his inside pocket, at first low-value ones, but then he added a hundred-kronor note. He handed them to the father who stared at the money in amazement.
'I can afford it,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'It's not only poor people who go trekking over the ice.'
He set off again. He did not turn round until he was several hundred metres distant.
The father and son were as if rooted to the ice, gaping after him.
CHAPTER 128
He closed in on Halsskär in the afternoon of the following day.
The ice was soft still. The rucksacks he was pulling behind him were sucking up the surface slush and getting heavier and heavier. He avoided going too close to the shallows, round the rocks and skerries. He stopped three times to check the thickness of the ice. The sea was getting closer, pushing up from underneath.
CHAPTER 129
He was trembling when he focused the telescope.
There was smoke rising from the chimney. He had expected that to make him feel relieved. Instead he was nervous.