dropped at his feet. He did not see what they were at first. Then he saw the dried-out bit of rope fastening the two pins together. His ice prods. The ones he had stuck into the deserter's eyes.
He turned icy cold. He was sure he had pushed them inside the dead man's clothes before kicking the sinker into the ice hole and watching the corpse vanish into the depths.
He looked at her. Was there anything else? Was this only the beginning?
'What's that on them?' she asked.
'I don't understand what you mean.'
'They are yours, aren't they?'
'Of course they are mine. But they vanished into thin air. I don't know what happened to them.'
'Pick them up!'
He bent down. There was a dark colour dried into the light brown wood. It looked like dark brown rust. Blood, no doubt. The deserter's blood.
'I still don't know what you mean.'
'There's blood on them.'
'It could be anything. Why should it be blood?'
'Because I recognise it. My husband once cut himself with a knife. It was a deep wound, I thought it would never stop bleeding. I'll never forget that colour. Dried blood on light-coloured wood. The colour I saw when I thought my husband was going to die.'
She almost burst into tears, but managed to control herself.
'I found them on the shore. The last time I walked round the skerry before I became so fat that I dared not trust myself on the rocks any more. I shouldn't have risked it that time either.'
'I must have mislaid them.'
She was looking hard at him. He realised that it wasn't in fact the ice prods he could detect in her eyes and her voice, but her fear that he was telling lies, that there was something he had not told her.
'I saw that you had them with you every time you went out on to the ice. Then one day, they weren't there any more. And now I've found them soaked in blood.'
The lid over the abyss was parchment-thin. He tried to stop moving.
'What happened?' she asked. 'That day he died. I've never understood it, never been able to believe that he simply sank down through thin ice and met his death. Neither that, nor that he killed the cat.'
'Why do you think I would have said something that didn't in fact happen?'
'I'm saying that I don't know.'
'Are you suggesting that I killed him? Is that what you mean?'
She stood up, with considerable difficulty. 'I'm not saying that you are concealing something or that you're not telling me the truth. All I'm saying is that I found the ice prods and they were bloodstained.'
'I was trying to spare you from some of the truth. He used the ice prods to kill the cat. I found them on the ice.'
Silence.
'So you thought I told you something that wasn't true?' he said. 'Do you believe I would ever dare to do such a thing? Don't you understand that I'm scared to death of losing you?'
To his surprise he recognised that this was exactly what he was frightened of.
She eyed him up and down. Then she decided to believe him.
The lid over the abyss had very nearly given way.
CHAPTER 169
That evening and for the rest of the night, he was completely calm.
Distance had no meaning any more. He had control over himself and Sara Fredrika. The ice prods had been explained away. She was no longer worried.
As night approached they talked about the baby, and what would happen afterwards.
'When the time comes,' he asked, 'who's going to help you?'
'There's a midwife on Kråkmarö called Wester. She knows I'm pregnant. But you'll have to sail to Kråkmarö and fetch her.'
What she wanted to talk about most was the future, what would happen after the skerry. She could only associate the baby with Halsskär as the place where it was born, the place they left soon afterwards.
In his imagination he had worked out a plan for how they would leave for America. He talked about the danger from the naval fleets stalking the European shipping lanes leading to the west. But thanks to the contacts he had they would be able to travel on a Swedish ship along a secret route north of Iceland. Everything was planned. The only thing he could not be sure of was the date for their departure. They would have to wait and be ready to leave at short notice.
'You mean we'll have to wait here? Who will come to fetch us?'
'The same ship that I was on