‘Turn,’ she said.
‘Turn to where?’
‘I was wrong. I must bring him up. I must bury my husband.’
Her fear had now become despair.
‘There’s no sign of the net,’ he said. ‘But I know where the place is.’
‘How can you know when there’s nothing to see?’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s my special skill. I can read the sea, see what isn’t visible.’
He turned the boat round, rowed nineteen strokes, then changed direction slightly to port and rowed twenty-two more strokes.
They had a little drag anchor in the boat. He knew that the depth here was between fifty-five and sixty metres. The anchor rope was only thirty metres long.
‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘But the rope is too short. I can’t reach the bottom.’
‘I must get him up.’
‘I know where it is. We can come back to this very spot. You have a length of rope in the inlet and we can tie it to the anchor rope. That would give another forty metres, which would make it long enough.’
He didn’t wait for her to answer but started rowing back to Halsskär. She sat quietly on the stern seat, hunched up, as if she’d just been exerting herself.
When they got to the inlet he fetched the rope and put it in the dinghy.
‘Let me do it,’ he said. ‘Let me bring the net up. You don’t need to be there.’
She said nothing. When he rowed out again she stood watching him.
Chapter 136
He let the anchor sink to the seabed.
He felt something at the fourth attempt. He stood up and pulled in the rope. The net reappeared, and in it the bits of bone and the piece of leather. It was part of a jackboot, with a rusty stud still attached to it. He pulled the net on board. There were fish wriggling away in it, a sign of life amid all the death. He removed the fish and the seaweed, and threw the net back into the water.
He was reminded of the piece of drift net he’d seen that morning on board the Blenda. The soundless, lifeless movements, the freedom that meant always being on the move. Now another net had achieved freedom.
He examined the pieces of bone. There was part of a forearm, a broken rib and the remains of a left foot.
The foot upset him. There was something shameless about this well-preserved section of a man’s skeleton, the only thing to remind an observer so vividly that this person had drowned in a state of inconceivable terror and loneliness.
He rowed back to Halsskär. At one point he stopped rowing and felt his forehead to feel if he had a temperature. His forehead was cool.
When he got back to the cottage he found it empty. He put the bones down, walked back to the spring and drank deep. Then he went to look for her. She must be there somewhere. Even so, he suddenly felt all alone on the skerry.
Chapter 137
He found her at the far north end of the island. She had crawled into a crevice, pressed herself down into the heather, lay with her eyes wide open but seeing nothing. He sat down beside her.
There is nothing so easy as taking control of suffering people, he thought. People totally lacking in resistance. He remembered his mother, weeping, alone in one of the dark rooms that comprised his childhood home.
A flock of crows was cawing somewhere in the distance. The sound died away. He waited. Thirty-two minutes passed. Then she stood up and hastened away. She walked back to the cottage. He was about to follow her in when she came out and hurried down towards the inlet.
He stood quite still. Should he allow her to be on her own? There was nowhere she could disappear to, there were no hidden doors in the rocks that could open up.
Then he saw smoke and could smell tar. When he got there he found she had set fire to a tar barrel and was stuffing nets and eel traps into the flames.
‘You can burn yourself!’ he yelled. ‘You can get burning tar all over you!’
He pulled at her, but she refused to budge. So he smacked her, hard, in the face. When she stood up he hit her again.
This time she stayed sitting on the ground. He knocked the barrel over and kicked it into the water. The barrel sizzled, the smoke stank. She was lying on the ground now, stained with tar and blood, her skirt pulled up way above her stomach. He reminded himself that there was a baby inside there, a baby that existed even if it couldn’t be seen.
The burning tar slowly went out. There was a thin layer of smoking grease on the surface of the water. He helped her up.
‘I must get away,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay here.’
‘We’ll leave the island. Soon. But not yet.’
‘Why do we have to stay here? Why not now?’
‘I haven’t finished my task.’
She examined her tar-stained hands.
‘I salvaged the bones and cut off the floats,’ he said. ‘The net has gone.’
‘It’ll come floating up again.’
‘It will be driven by the currents down deep in the water. It will never come up to the surface again. Not here at least.’
She looked around.
‘The bones are in the cottage.’
‘I have to bury him.’
She set off. When they got to the door he took hold of her again.
‘I found something else.’
‘His head! God, I can’t take this.’
‘Not his head. But a foot.’
‘They were big and dirty. His feet were only important for him, not for me.’
She collected the remains on the ground in front of her and squatted down. She was murmuring, conducting a whispered conversation between herself and the bones. He leaned towards her to hear what she was saying, but he could not make out any words.
Then she stood up and fetched the fur from the mad fox. She rolled up the bones and the piece of leather inside it, and asked him to bring a spade.
The grave was a shallow hollow in one of the rocky ledges towards the west of the island. She did the digging, would not allow him to do it for her. When the spade struck rock she put the pelt in the hole and covered it with the soil. That evening she took the pipe and threw it into the fire. It seemed to Tobiasson-Svartman that she did that for his sake, removing the last trace of her husband. That night she clung tightly to his body. Her hands made it clear to him that she never intended to let go.
Chapter 138
The next day, in the evening, he told her that Halsskär was a sort of haven. A remote outpost in the sea for people with nowhere to go.
‘It’s like a church,’ he said.
She had no idea what he meant by that.
‘This skerry from Hell? A church?’
‘Nobody commits a crime in a church. Nobody sticks an axe into his enemy’s head in a church. It’s a haven. In the old days outlaws were able to seek sanctuary in a church. Perhaps Halsskär was that kind of place for you and your husband? Without your realising it?’
She looked at him in a way he did not recognise. It was as if her eyes were turning away.
‘How did you know about her?’ she asked.
‘Know about who?’
‘The woman who sought sanctuary on this island. The goddess. I heard about her once from Helge. A storm had blown up and I let him stay overnight. That was when he told me about the winter’s night in 1843. You can’t always believe what Helge says, but he tells lovely stories. He has many words, just as many as you have. It was a severe winter that year, the ice was so thick that they say it roared like a wild animal when it formed pack ice. But there was an open channel from the sea way out near Gotska Sandön, and a woman came floating along in that channel, she must have been a goddess because there was a sort of halo all around her body. She had been thrown overboard by a drunken sailor. She was transparent and freezing cold and the open channel froze over once she had passed through it. But she reached here, and she hid herself on the skerry. The following year a dead sailor drifted ashore, he had cut his own throat. It was the sailor who had thrown her overboard, and now it was his turn to be washed up here. Helge had heard the story from his father. I sometimes think that she and I are the same person.’