Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,94

her. A really filthy little scrubber. You'd have to be as randy as hell if you wanted to shag that.'

'Does she have a name?'

'Sara. Though some people say Fredrika.'

The men had nothing to add. The dinghy was making good headway. He was beginning to recognise the islands now, the channels were opening out, the ice that had covered the water was a distant memory.

He imagined the farm labourers dead, deep down at the bottom of the sea.

Late in the afternoon the sailing dinghy steered into the inlet where Sara Fredrika's boat was moored. He handed over two litre bottles and jumped ashore.

'If anybody asks, you had no passengers with you from Söderköping,' he said.

'Who would ask us?' Gösta said. 'Who cares if a couple of bloody farm yokels have anybody in the boat with them?'

'There's a war on, and what I'm doing is top secret. If you say a single word once you get back on shore you could end up in prison for life.'

He watched them go, heading south. They were talking eagerly, but he did not think they would say anything about him. He had frightened them.

He looked at the nets, corves, sinkers, all the other equipment. The boat was securely moored, it did not need to be beached when the water level was high. He looked towards the path and all the greenery clinging to the little crevices and along the sides of the rocks.

He tried to build a room around himself, but no walls wanted to rise up.

CHAPTER 164

The first thing he saw by the cottage was a cat, staring at him with watchful eyes. He had the impression it was the same cat as he had killed in his fury.

He despised the supernatural. Human beings worked constantly to make their gods unnecessary. He was an individual who made scientific measurements: one day time and perhaps also space would be measured and controlled by scales of measurements hitherto unknown. The supernatural was shadows dancing in the remains of a childhood fear of the dark. Normally he could always resist the supernatural. But the cat scared him.

It ran away as he approached the window.

Sara Fredrika was asleep on the bunk. He contemplated her enormous stomach.

She must have heard him, or sensed movement outside the window, turned her head to look, and squealed in delight. He opened the door and took her in his arms. She was warm and sweaty, steam was rising from her body. He immediately abandoned all thought of Kristina Tacker and Laura.

Now he was able to build the walls. There was nothing outside Halsskär, nothing that he could no longer control. He held all distances in his hands.

'How did you get here?' she asked. 'I didn't hear anything. I didn't sense anything either.'

'I sailed here with some farmhands from an island further south. From Lofthammar, they said.'

'Sailing this way? Where from?'

'Norrköping.'

'How did you find them?'

'In the harbour. They had bought a sailing dinghy, or got it in exchange, I couldn't quite work out what they did. But I was lucky. I'd have had to go to Söderköping otherwise.'

Not even the farm labourers belong to my story, he thought. I'm walking on water, leaving no tracks behind me.

'You've got a new cat,' he said.

'I got it from Helge. I hadn't asked for a similar one, and Helge said he hadn't seen the one I had before. It's good company. But it misses its mice, there aren't any on this skerry. And it's frightened of the snakes.'

They went indoors. Everything was as he remembered it. Nobody else seemed to have been in the cottage since he left. Nevertheless, he had a strange feeling of uneasiness, a suspicion that, even so, everything had changed since he was last here.

It was a while before he saw it.

Her eyes had changed. She looked at him in a different way.

Something had in fact happened.

CHAPTER 165

He asked her that evening.

A storm had blown in from the west, the thunderclaps were so strong that the cottage walls shook. She had a pain in her back and lay down on the bed.

'Nothing has happened,' she said. 'They threw the cat ashore from the boat. I've been waiting for you, nothing else.'

He listened carefully and could detect a change in her voice. Something had happened, but what? He ought not to ask any more, not just now.

During the night he had the feeling that she was keeping her distance. It was barely noticeable, but it was a fact. She was suspicious, maybe unsure. But