Depths

by Henning Mankell

  That was the end of the entry, there wasn't even a full stop.

  He put the diary back and locked the escritoire. He stood in a window and looked down at the street. A rat ran along the bottom of the house wall and disappeared through a basement window. He thought about the dream his wife had described in her diary. A dream that got the better of her comfort, he thought. It takes a lot to make her get up once she's in bed, unless she really has to. She leads a very lazy life. But a dream about visiting a cathedral, an unexpected mirror image of her own face, makes her get out of bed and make an effort.

  He paused on the words. His wife had made an effort. How often had she done that? When she dusted and polished her china figurines. But other than that?

  He tried to interpret the dream. It was like breaking and entering her in secret. He sat in a rocking chair, cognac in hand, and rehearsed the dream in his head. But he could not find a way in. The moment she stepped inside the snow-filled cathedral, the dream closed its doors.

  He drank another glass of cognac, realised he was becoming very drunk but continued walking around the apartment. He paused to listen outside the maid's door. He could hear her snoring. Very gently he opened the door and peered inside. The girl was sleeping on her back with her mouth wide open. The quilt was pulled right up to her neck. For a moment he was tempted to lift it up and see if she was sleeping naked. He closed the door and went to the room where his wife kept her china figurines. He overcame his urge to smash one of them. What an awful indictment, he thought – I am jealous of a collection of lifeless, mostly badly made china figurines.

  Their lifeless eyes stared at him in the pale light seeping in through the windows.

  CHAPTER 77

  On the morning of 17 December the city was covered by thick fog, the temperature was a few degrees above zero. He felt nervous in advance of the meeting he had to attend at Naval Headquarters. The measurements he had carried out had been conducted and reported in exemplary fashion, and he had no reason to think that they would not be pleased with his work. Even so, he was on edge.

  The invisible torpedo was still hurtling towards him.

  He went for a long walk through the town, having left home before six without waking his wife. Nor had he roused the maid, but made his own coffee. She had pressed his uniform the day before, supervised by Kristina Tacker. He strolled up the hills to Brunkebergstorg where the coachmen had set up braziers to keep warm, as usual. He crossed the bridge at Strömbron and continued through the alleys of the Old Town, where shadowy figures scuttled in all directions. He was going through everything that had happened at the Sandsänkan lighthouse. It was all there: Captain Rake, Lieutenant Jakobsson, Welander with his vodka bottles, the sailor Richter with no eyes.

  The only thing missing was Sara Fredrika.

  The woman who, day after day, dreaded catching her own husband in her nets.

  CHAPTER 78

  At eight o'clock he walked through the main entrance to the Swedish Navy Headquarters on Skeppsholmen. An adjutant invited him to sit down and wait as not everybody on the committee had arrived. A vice admiral who lived out at Djursholm had telegraphed to say that he would be late.

  Tobiasson-Svartman shuddered in the cold corridor. He listened to some bugle calls drifting in through the window, followed by the dull thud of a single artillery shot.

  After half an hour or so the adjutant informed him that the committee was ready to receive him. He entered a room with previous Admirals of the Fleet staring down at him from the walls. The committee comprised two vice admirals, a captain and a lieutenant whose job it was to keep the minutes. A chair had been placed in readiness for him, in front of the committee who were sitting in a row behind a table covered in a green baize.

  Vice Admiral Lars H:son-Lydenfeldt was the chairman. For many years he had been the driving force behind efforts to increase the Swedish Navy's operating capabilities. He had a reputation of being impatient and arrogant, and dominated all those around him by means of sudden outbursts of fury. He invited Tobiasson-Svartman to sit down.

  'Your work is impressive,' he said. 'You seem to have that rare thing, a passion for secret military navigable channels. Is that true?'

  'I just try to do my job to the best of my ability.'

  The vice admiral shook his head impatiently.

  'Every single member of the Swedish Navy does his job to the best of his ability. Or at least one can assume that there are not too many idlers and layabouts. I'm talking about something different. Passion. Do you understand?'

  'I understand.'

  'Then perhaps you would be kind enough to answer my question?'

  Tobiasson-Svartman thought about his dream of finding a depth too deep to measure.

  'It is exciting to record things that cannot immediately be taken in and comprehended.'

  The vice admiral looked doubtfully at him, but decided to accept the answer.

  'What you say is understandable. I thought something similar myself in my younger days. But what you thought in your youth, you forget in your manhood and only recall it in your old age.'

  The vice admiral sat up straight and held up a chart.

  'Our commander-in-chief will receive the chart with the new stretches of channel at Sandsänkan in the new year. A couple of our frigates will test them out during night manoeuvres in differing weather conditions.'

  He reached for another chart.

  'Gamlebyviken,' he said. 'The approach to the narrow bay. Cramped, existing depth soundings doubtful, constant silting up that hasn't been checked since the 1840s. Well, Commander Svartman, have you been informed that we are counting on you to undertake this mission in the new year?'

  'Yes, I have been informed.'

  'In our judgement this mission is important and will be given priority. Other measuring operations will be postponed for the time being, since the war means that vessels are needed for other duties.'

  'I am ready to start at once.'

  'Excellent. You will receive your instructions immediately after Christmas.'

  The vice admiral glanced at the lieutenant who was keeping the minutes.

  'On 27 December, 08.45 hours,' the lieutenant said.

  The vice admiral nodded.

  'So, that's that. Has any member of the committee any questions?'

  Captain Hansson, who was the oldest person present, with experience dating from the age of sailing ships and always overlooked when it came to promotion, raised his hand.

  'You seem to be surrounding yourself with a series of peculiar deaths,' he said. 'It's not exactly commonplace for dead sailors to be fished up out of the sea, for regular bosuns to pass away and ships' captains to fall down dead on deck.'

  'I didn't catch the question,' Tobiasson-Svartman said.

  'It wasn't a question,' Hansson said. 'It was just a comment that doesn't need to be recorded in the minutes.'

  'Can I declare the meeting dosed, then?' Vice Admiral H:son-Lydenfeldt inquired.

  Tobiasson-Svartman raised his hand.

  'I have a question. There will probably be a layer of ice at the approach to Gamlebyviken in January. Is it the intention that I should make soundings through boreholes?'

  'All your work will be concentrated in an area less than half of a nautical mile,' the vice admiral answered. 'Which means that boring holes through the ice will be a satisfactory method of proceeding.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman nodded. The vice admiral smiled.

  'I've bored holes through the ice myself in my time,' he said. 'I remember when we were sounding a channel in the far north of the Gulf of Bothnia. The ice was a metre thick. It was so cold that the lines froze stiff in the boreholes. It's strenuous work, but you can console yourself with the thought that your task will only take three to four weeks at the most'

  The meeting was over. Everyone stood up. Tobiasson-Svartman saluted and left the room. The adjutant handed him his black overcoat. He left through the front door of the headquarters building and felt mig
htily relieved.

  But Captain Hansson's words gnawed away inside him. Was it mere coincidence that he had been surrounded by so many peculiar deaths? Or was there a message involved? A warning?

  Stockholm was still enveloped in fog.

  CHAPTER 79

  Something strange happened on the Sunday before Christmas. Tobiasson-Svartman was bewildered by it, and also by Kristina Tacker's reaction.

  It was as if, out of the blue, she had leapt ahead and left him far behind her.

  They had gone for a walk to the traditional Christmas market in Stortorget. They left home late in the afternoon, as it was rapidly getting dark. It was mild, a week of freezing cold weather had been followed by a thaw. They left their flat in Wallingatan even though the streets and pavements were slippery and covered in slush. Kristina Tacker insisted, they needed some exercise and he did not want to disappoint her even though he would have preferred to take the tram or a cab.

  In the Old Town the square and all the alleys were swarming with people. They examined the goods for sale at the various stalls, his wife bought a little goat made of straw, and after strolling around for an hour they decided to make for home.

  When they came to Slottsbacken they suddenly heard a little girl screaming. In the shadow of the royal palace, a man was smacking his daughter. He raised his heavy hand time and time again and smacked her. Kristina Tacker ran up to the man and dragged him away from the girl. She was yelling something neither the man nor her husband could make out, and wrapped her arms round the girl who was howling in pain and fear. She let go of the girl only when the man had promised faithfully not to beat his daughter any more.

  The whole incident, from the moment his wife had run ahead of him until the man and the girl disappeared down Skeppsbron, lasted for four minutes and thirty seconds. He had switched on his inbuilt timer then stopped it when she came back to him, out of breath and trembling.

  They continued walking home without exchanging a word.

  They made no reference to what had happened later that evening either. But Tobiasson-Svartman wondered why it was his wife who had reacted and not him.

  CHAPTER 80

  Kristina Tacker's parents lived in a large apartment on the corner of Strandgatan and Grevgatan. Tobiasson-Svartman hated having dinner with them on Christmas Day. It was one of the Tacker family's fixed rituals. Kristina's grandfather Horatius Tacker, a mining consultant, had established this ritual, and nobody in the family dared stay away.

  The Tacker family had a well-to-do branch that had made a fortune out of the discreditable acquisition of forests in the north of Sweden in keen competition with the better-known Dickson family, and a less well-off branch comprising a number of wholesalers, low-grade civil servants and officers, none of whom had attained a rank higher than commander.

  The poor relations were browbeaten at the Christmas dinner, and the men and women who had married into the family were scrutinised as if they were cattle in a show. He disliked this dinner intensely, and knew that his wife hated it too because she could tell how much he was suffering. But nobody could escape. Those who tried were punished severely by being excluded from the family's financial circle that paid dividends every time one of the wealthy relations died and the will was read.

  Kristina's father, Ludwig, had displayed proof of considerable careerist agility in the Civil Service and a few years ago had achieved the ultimate triumph of being appointed a lord chamberlain in the King's household. Tobiasson-Svartman considered him to be a clockwork doll that never stopped bowing and scraping, and his instinct was to pull the key out of his father-in-law's back. He derived great pleasure from imagining unwinding the spring as torturers used to do in the olden days with their victim's guts.

  Ludwig Tacker for his part no doubt regarded him as an acquisition to the family of doubtful value. But he never said anything, of course. The Tacker family dominated by means of silence that ate into people like acid.

  Kristina Tacker's mother was like the figurines on the shelves in her daughter's flat. If Fru Martina Tacker were to trip over a rug or lose her balance on a polished floor she would not simply hurt herself, she would shatter like a china sculpture.

  Thirty-four persons were assembled round the dinner table on Christmas Day, 1914. Tobiasson-Svartman had been placed between one of Kristina Tacker's sisters and her grandmother. He was more or less in the middle of one of the long sides of the table, and still had a long way to go before reaching one of the sought-after places close to his father-in-law. The elderly woman on his right was asthmatic and had difficulty in breathing. She was also hard of hearing. She did not reply when he spoke to her; he could not make up his mind if that was because she had not heard, or because she did not consider it worth the trouble of responding. Now and then she would shout to somebody on the other side of the table, usually a line from a poem by Snoilsky, expecting to hear the next line in return.

  Nor did he manage to conduct a conversation with his sister-in-law, who was deeply religious. She was lost inside herself, and hardly touched her food.

  It was like being cast away on a barren reef.

  He drank a lot of wine in order to survive. He looked at his wife, who was sitting rather higher up on the opposite side. She was wearing a mint-green dress, and her hair was beautifully arranged. Their eyes would occasionally meet, bashfully, as if they were not acquainted.

  CHAPTER 81

  After the dessert was served, an excellent lemon cheese, Ludwig Tacker delivered his traditional Christmas speech. He had a slightly muffled, gravelly voice, his face was bright red despite the fact that he never drank much, and he put a lot of force into his speech, the writing of which Tobiasson-Svartman suspected had been his principal occupation during the past year. He lived for the speeches he gave to the assembled family. Every year he laid down the truths that everyone must acknowledge. It was like a speech from the throne, read out for obedient subjects.

  This year his topic was the Great War. Tobiasson-Svartman was not surprised to discover that his father-in-law was firmly pro-German. But Ludwig Tacker did not simply express his support for Germany in the war. He poured torrents of hatred on the English and French, and the Russian Empire was dismissed as 'a rotten ship that is kept afloat only by all the dead bodies in the hold'.