would confront him. He observed Welander's face from a safe distance. The paleness and bloated features had gone. Welander really seemed to have overcome his addiction.
His wife was small and thin. She kept looking at her husband with a loving smile.
CHAPTER 149
Days passed. He waited, displaying the patience of a predator. The opportunity came one evening when he had been observing Welander for a week. The hydrographic engineer came out on his own. It was raining, and he set off towards the centre of town. He was walking fast, his gaze directed at the pavement ahead of him. Then he turned off on to a path running alongside the water in Riddarfjärden. The path appeared to be deserted.
Tobiasson-Svartman wrapped a scarf round the lower part of his face. In his pocket he had a hammer with an old sock round the head. He took it out and followed Welander along the path.
Yet he could not summon the courage to hit him, and he turned and ran away. He was afraid Welander would see him and follow, but there was no sound from the path behind him. He put the scarf and the hammer back into his overcoat pockets and forced himself to walk slowly.
When he came to Wallingatan he took his pulse. He did not go up to the flat until the rate had sunk to sixty-five.
CHAPTER 150
He continued leaving the flat every morning. He told Kristina Tacker that he was going to a meeting of the secret committee. He spent the days in museums and cafes. Eventually he reconciled himself to the fact that he had not dared to attack Welander. He was still furious, but unsure of where he should direct his rage.
Weeks passed. Kristina Tacker's stomach became bigger and bigger.
He tired of going to museums first, then cafes. Instead he went for very long walks. As dusk fell he would imagine the lighthouses, the ones that had not yet been switched off on account of the war. He could see in front of him a beam of light over the sea. Soon he must start measuring it. It was time to give himself the order to set out.
He thought about Sara Fredrika and the skerry on the edge of the open sea.
The sea is calm, he thought. For once the sea around me is dead calm.
CHAPTER 151
One evening it dawned on him that he was outside the building where Ludwig Tacker lived, the place where those dreadful Christmas dinners were held.
He recalled that his father-in-law went out for an evening walk every week.
Ludwig Tacker had once visited the British protectorate in southern Africa ruled autocratically by Cecil Rhodes. He never stopped telling his family about the long journey that had taken him to distant Lusaka via Gothenburg, Hull and Cape Town, and then by rail and on horseback to the copper mines at Broken Hill. He had never seen anything like it. Veins of copper were exposed on the ground in some places, so that you only needed to bend down to gather the valuable ore.
The object of his journey had been for Tacker to invest in the copper mines, but Rhodes had enough money and did not want anybody else to become involved. It had come to nothing. But Tacker was still interested in mining. That is why one evening every week he would meet a group of men roughly his own age who shared his interest in minerals. They met at the home of a mining consultant who lived at Järntorget in the Old Town.
As he walked home that evening it struck him that he might have found an outlet for his fury after all.
CHAPTER 152
The next week he followed his father-in-law through the streets to the mining consultant's home. He had no specific plan, he only wanted to find out what route Tacker took. He remained hidden in the shadows. It was a warm evening, and he waited for four hours until Tacker emerged and went back home accompanied by two other men. One of them stumbled occasionally, they were laughing a lot, kept stopping, then moving on again, all the time engrossed in talk.
That night, when his wife had gone to bed, he sat in his study and worked out a plan. On his desk were the hammer and the dark-coloured scarf. He was perfectly calm. It was like preparing for one of his expeditions. He did not notice that on two occasions his wife had appeared in the doorway, looking at him.
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