I tried to tell myself that something had happened. An accident. But I couldn’t summon up any anxiety. She had simply ignored our agreement to have lunch together before we drove back to the harbour.
Eventually I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. The sun was shining when I left the restaurant. Louise wasn’t waiting by the car. I had already got in when I spotted a note tucked underneath one of the windscreen wipers. Had I been given a parking ticket? Angrily I flung open the door and grabbed the note.
It wasn’t a parking ticket. Louise had left me a message. The paper wasn’t wet, so she must have put it there after the rain had stopped — ten, fifteen minutes ago at the most.
The message was very short: Go without me.
I looked around to see if she was anywhere nearby, but there was no sign of her. I drove up and down the street, to no avail.
I drove down to the harbour. The heat of the sun was suddenly very noticeable; it was almost like a summer’s day. I parked and looked around for Oslovski. Everything seemed to be closed up. I went over to the garage; there was no one around, but something gave me pause for thought. Oslovski was always very tidy; each of her tools had its place, either on a shelf or hanging on the wall. Now they were spread all over the dirty concrete floor.
I went back to the house and did something I had never had the courage to do in the past: I knocked on Oslovski’s door. Once, twice, three times. No one came. The curtains were drawn. I put my ear to the door, but I couldn’t hear any movement inside.
I took my bags down to the boat. Margareta Nordin was sitting outside the chandlery soaking up the sun. Somehow this seemed like a betrayal of the grief she should be feeling at the loss of her husband.
‘This heat is a bit strange, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Everything is strange,’ she replied. ‘I’m sitting here trying to grasp the fact that my husband is dead.’
‘We can never make sense of death,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t obey any laws or follow any rules. Death is an intractable anarchist.’
She looked curiously at me, not surprisingly. My words sounded peculiar to me as well, even if they were true.
Alexandersson was standing smoking outside the coastguard’s office as I walked towards my boat. When he spotted me, he hurried inside, thinking I hadn’t seen him. Had things really gone so far that no one wanted to talk to me?
I tossed my bags into the boat, cast off and pushed away from the quay before I had even started the engine. I didn’t care if I got wet when I sat down; I just wanted to get away as quickly as possible.
Of course the engine decided to play up. I had almost drifted out of the harbour before it fired. I assumed Alexandersson was standing by a window watching the whole thing. I wondered if he regarded me with contempt or sympathy. I thought he probably saw me as a shady character, someone who had turned out to be a criminal.
I headed for the island. The wind was warm, considering it was a November day. I was about halfway when I slowed right down and let the engine idle.
I realised that Louise had gone. She hadn’t bothered to pack a suitcase, but I knew that when I got back to the caravan I would find that her passport was missing together with her money, her credit cards, everything she needed in order to move on. She had planned this; she had never intended to come to the restaurant. That was why she had given me the car keys; she knew exactly what she was going to do. She had probably caught a bus into town but I had no idea what she had done next, nor where she was going.
She had taken her unborn child with her. Its father was waiting for her somewhere.
I allowed the boat to drift. Her disappearance filled me with disappointment, but there was something else, a feeling, a rapidly growing suspicion.
I remembered when Louise and I had been out on the skerry. How she had brushed against me when she went to pee. When I got home and was on my way up to the caravan, I had discovered that my watch was missing.
The realisation hit me like a hammer blow. Louise had taken my watch. That must have been what happened. I had a daughter who was a skilled pickpocket.
At first I refused to believe it; it was too astonishing, too frightening. But in the end it was impossible to deny the truth. Louise was a pickpocket. She made her living by stealing. There was no other explanation.
She had asked me about my watch in the car simply because she wanted to know if I suspected anything. My answer must have convinced her that I had no idea of the reason behind the disappearance of my watch.
I swore out loud, at Louise and at my own stupidity. I no longer wanted anything to do with her. I didn’t need her, or a grandchild. She had stolen my watch and gone off to some unknown man who was the father of her child.
I moved into the prow of the boat, stretched out my legs and closed my eyes.
I fell asleep, thanks to a combination of weariness and sorrow. I had been dreaming of Harriet when I woke because the engine had cut out. She was standing by the burned-out ruins of my house, and she looked exactly the same as she had done on the day when she made her way across the ice using her wheeled walker. In spite of the fact that it was late autumn in my dream, as in reality, she was dressed for winter, complaining that she was freezing cold. When I embraced her and bade her welcome, she bit me on the arm.
Still half-asleep, I stumbled to the stern and pulled the engine cord. When I got back to the island, I went straight up to the caravan. Louise’s passport, money and various credit cards were gone. At the bottom of her bag I found my watch. I was furious; I hurled it at the wall, but when I picked it up it was still going. I put it on and lay down on the bed. The door of the caravan was ajar; there wasn’t a breath of wind.
‘Louise,’ I said out loud to myself.
Just that. Nothing else. I wasn’t calling to her, I wasn’t pleading with her or begging her to come back. I just said her name.
I decided to row across to my skerry. Settling down with the oars always filled me with a great sense of calm. It didn’t take many strokes before the unease had left me. I rowed with no sense of urgency, resting often. I pictured Louise in different situations: on a bus, on a train, walking into an airport, aboard a ferry. I wondered why she had chosen this particular day to leave. Had I driven her away by asking too many intrusive questions about how she made a living? Or was she unable to cope with the thought of her father being accused of arson?
A pickpocket. Yet at the same time she was helping terminally ill people to see Rembrandt’s paintings for one last time — it didn’t make sense.
I rested on my oars once more. Perhaps she really did believe I’d burned down my house?
I was sweating by the time I reached the skerry. I walked towards the tent, then stopped dead. Someone had been there and hadn’t managed to hide the telltale signs. Not Louise, but someone else.
I had made a fire on a pile of stones; they had been moved, and the pile had grown. I opened the tent and crawled in; my sleeping bag was in the right place, but it was zipped up. I always leave it open during the day to air.
I went back outside. Who had used the tent and lit a fire? I searched the whole skerry for further evidence but found nothing. I returned to the tent and sat down on the rock where I usually balance a plate of food or a cup of coffee on my knees. Was it my imagination? No, I wasn’t wrong. Someone had come to the skerry, rearranged my fire stones and gone inside my tent.