by Håkan Nesser
‘Shut up,’ said Erik. ‘Your childish whining isn’t going to help, anyway.’
‘I’ll gladly shut up,’ said Henrik. ‘Let me know when you’ve got the fire going.’
I saw Erik clench his fists and it isn’t impossible that they could have come to blows, if Katarina hadn’t shouted out at that instant.
‘Look! Surely that’s a boat?’
All five of us stared out across the waves and were soon able to make out that it really was a boat, and heading our way.
‘Is it them?’ asked Henrik.
‘How should I know,’ said Katarina.
‘Of course it’s them,’ said Erik. ‘What other idiots would put out in this weather?’
‘About bloody time,’ said Henrik.
‘Would you please be quiet and try to make yourself useful instead?’ said Katarina.
‘What do you want me to do?’ retorted Henrik. ‘Rub oil on your back?’
It was indeed Gunnar and Anna in the boat. It breasted the choppy waves on its way towards land and fifteen arduous minutes later we had all managed to get aboard. Erik cut his elbow and the girl sobbed loudly as she clung to the short ladder, trying to fend off the waves.
‘There’s something wrong with the engine,’ said Gunnar. ‘It took us two hours to get it started.’
‘Hope you enjoyed your trip,’ said Henrik.
It was becoming patently obvious that Henrik hadn’t the sense to keep quiet; he would soon get what was coming to him. ‘You lot go and sit in the cabin,’ said Gunnar. ‘I’m as freezing as a polar bear’s bum, but I might just as well get us home while I’m at it.’
That was a lousy simile, I thought, but I said nothing.
‘As long as you don’t trust Henrik with anything,’ said Katarina.
We squeezed into the dark, cramped cabin, Gunnar turned the boat and revved the engine. You could hear there was something wrong with it; its sound was now a low, dull throb, rather than the piercing drone it had made on the way out. We were breaching the waves sideways on and the boat took the impact hard, forcing us to hunch over slightly and hold on so we didn’t hit our heads on the low roof. Even though the more muted engine noise made conversation possible in principle, nobody took advantage of the fact. Up and down, up and down, within a couple of minutes, I was starting to feel queasy; I’d been keeping the lid on my headache for the past hour, but now it returned with renewed intensity. I was wedged between Henrik and Erik. Anna, Katarina and the girl had squeezed in on the other side of the table, to which six pairs of hands were clinging so tightly that the knuckles turned white. Up and down. Up and down. The sound of the motor rose and fell in time with the waves. Every now and then there was a sudden jolt as we slammed down from the crest of a slightly higher wave. My nausea slowly worsened and I started counting my breaths, counting the monotonous throbs of my pulse in my temples. I closed my eyes and wished I really had killed these people that first day in Bénodet. That for once I had actually converted thought into action.
All at once, the engine died. Gunnar dived into the cabin, wet through, his bulk filling the whole opening to the cockpit. ‘Sodding thing’s stopped again!’ he yelled. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
The boat heaved even more. We were rolling from side to side now, up and down, up and down, but as there were six of us in a cabin presumably meant for four, we were wedged there, held in place.
‘What the fuck do we do?’ said Gunnar. ‘My hands are completely numb.’
‘How far is it to land?’ yelled Anna. There was no external necessity to shout, just an internal one.
‘At least half an hour,’ said Gunnar. ‘But without the engine we won’t drift towards land. The wind’s from the north west, and assuming we don’t capsize, we’ll be blown down towards . . . I don’t fucking well know. La Rochelle or somewhere?’
‘Can’t you try getting it started again?’ said Anna.
‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ Gunnar snapped. ‘I’ve no sodding feeling left in my fingers. Might be time for someone else to actually do something.’
The boat rolled violently and Gunnar hit his head on the doorpost and let out a series of expletives.
‘All right,’ said Erik. ‘I’ll go up and take a look.’
He pushed his way past Gunnar, who wedged himself in to my right and groaned. ‘Fucking hell, we haven’t even got life jackets. How the hell can you rent out a boat without life jackets?’
‘Does Erik know anything about boat engines?’ asked Katarina. ‘Henrik, oughtn’t you. . . ?’
‘I’m too drunk,’ said Henrik. ‘Sorry, but you people who got us into this will just have to sort it out yourselves.’
Anna’s balled fist shot out across the table like a piston. There was a crunch as it hit Henrik somewhere in the face. I thought how impressive it was that she’d managed to land a blow with such precision in the heaving cabin, in the dark.
‘What the fuck is . . . ?’ cried Henrik. ‘You little slut!’
‘Calm down for Christ’s sake,’ roared Gunnar. ‘And just buck your ideas up, the bloody lot of you.’
I felt we had reached crunch point. The thin varnish of civilization had worn off these people, normality had evaporated and they had reverted to some crude kind of natural state, while language had mutated from a cement to a weapon. The boat lurched violently and Troaë started to cry.
At least an hour had gone by. We huddled there together in the dark, cramped cabin, tossed about by the agitated, wind-lashed sea. No one said anything, except for the occasional curse; the girls snivelled now and then, Erik and Gunnar took turns at the dead engine, sometimes working together in their attempt to coax it into life. They never asked Henrik or me for help. My headache came and went, and my queasiness basically remained at the same level. I counted my breaths and my pulse, wondering about the silence and why no one really had anything to say to each other in such circumstances. Why none of them made any effort to win back their humanity. Perhaps it was because the situation we were in had gone way beyond their capabilities. It rendered them mute, powerless to act, carnal and afraid. I said nothing myself, either, but then that’s my natural strategy. Perhaps they were all thinking we were about to die, perhaps it was isolation in the face of this final moment that each of them was trying to come to terms with. In their own way, as far as they felt capable, and in the cold darkness of fading intoxication.
I had just noticed that Henrik had dozed off to my left, when Katarina Malmgren directed my attention to the girl.
‘She’s going to be sick,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I . . . ?’
‘I’ll go with her,’ I said.
Katarina said something to Troaë and the girl nodded. She gave a faint moan and stretched her hand out to mine across the table. I took it and we clambered up the four steps to the cockpit. The rain was still lashing down, but the waves seemed to have subsided a little, I thought. In the far distance, you could see the lights on the shore and I realized that we were drifting in roughly the right direction after all. Or at any rate, we were not on our way out to sea. As long as we didn’t capsize, we would presumably hit land within an hour or two. Or be smashed on some rocks. Erik was clinging to the dead engine. They had removed its black plastic cover to expose its interior, and the thought ran through my mind that probably all they had achieved in doing so was to douse it in damaging saltwater. Troaë started to retch, and I helped her over to the rail and clutched her firmly with my right hand while she leant out over the water to throw up. I realized we had opted for the wrong side: she was vomiting straight into the wind and the mess of phlegm was thrown back over the side at us. She sobbed, and cried out something I didn’t understand; it sounded not so much like French as some other language entirely.
Suddenly the boat hit the crest of a wave and we were thrown off balance. I almost fell forwards, overboard, and groped wildly with my free hand for another place to hold on, but found nothing. To avoid dragging Troaë over with me, I l
et go of her hand, and almost immediately found I could grab a strut of the spray hood. I regained my balance but realized at once that it was the wrong manoeuvre. The girl screamed, flapped her arms in thin air and fell overboard.
I shouted to Erik. I don’t know what I shouted, but Erik had seen the whole thing, of course; he shouted something back at me, stood up and stared out over the waves. Troaë came into view in the water, her head and frantically flailing arms, but she was already two or three metres from the boat.
‘A rope,’ said Erik. ‘Throw out a rope.’
I looked round me in panic. There was no rope, no life-buoy. The girl cried out and vanished beneath the surface. Erik swore and shouted something to the others down in the cabin. I picked my way round the spray hood and out onto the deck. The boat was tilting violently from side to side but I hung onto ropes and stays. I scanned the deck desperately for some kind of aid, I didn’t know what, while also trying to catch sight of the girl again. After a few seconds she surfaced again, waving her arms and crying out, but this time there were no words, just a stifled, inarticulate sound issuing from her throat. Christ, I thought, she can’t even swim! I saw that Gunnar and Katarina had come up to the cockpit and were pointing and yelling.
I hesitated for a moment and then threw myself into the water. I hit my right foot on something hard and sharp, a searing pain ran up through my body and in my first few seconds in the water it was all I could feel. I went under and swallowed cold water, my throat burned, but I pulled myself together and struck out to look for the girl. I could hear Anna and Katarina shouting from the boat, and they were pointing and gesticulating, but I was carried over the crest of a wave and lost contact with them. I caught a brief glimpse of the girl as her head and arms broke the greyish black surface for a split second. Then she was gone. I dived in and tried to see under the water but it made my eyes smart and even when I was able to keep them open for a moment I could make out nothing but my own hands. I rose to the surface again, swallowed more cold water, heard Anna and Katarina and Gunnar yelling more instructions; they had evidently caught sight of the girl somewhere very near me. I swam a few strokes and dived again, trying once more to spy something down in the turbid water, but it was futile. The moment I got my head back above water and could breathe again, I saw Gunnar jump in. We stared at one another. Gunnar swore, and the pain in my foot stabbed me again. Gunnar dived, and I began to feel my strength ebbing away. I had great difficulty simply keeping myself afloat.
I don’t know how long we thrashed around in the water. It was probably only a few minutes, but it felt like hours. I had not just given up on the girl’s life, but also on my own, when I suddenly heard Gunnar shout: ‘I’ve got her!’ He was no more than a metre or two away, and the boat was a little further behind him, just going out of sight over the crest of a wave; I struggled over to Gunnar and his face looked wild and crazed, his mouth wide open and his eyes staring. ‘I’ve got her!’ he panted. ‘Help me for God’s sake!’
He got the girl’s head above water but slipped below the surface himself; I couldn’t see her eyes or mouth, only her black hair spreading like a huge patch of seaweed over her face. I somehow grabbed hold of her arm and we joined forces to start towing her in the direction of the boat. With every kick of my leg I thought and felt: this is the last one, there’s no point, this is the end, I can’t do it.
But we did. It must have taken us ten minutes to get her aboard. Everyone was shouting and cursing. Gunnar gouged his cheek on the ladder. Anna fell in but was able to get back up by herself, and all the while the rain lashed down and the waves tossed the boat, and us, like splinters of driftwood, and I can’t offer any detailed account of how we actually managed to salvage the lifeless body. That lies beyond the realms of words and reason. Beyond what is conceivable.
Once we had finally heaved her onto the cockpit floor, Katarina knelt down and started CPR. As she alternated blowing into the girl’s mouth with pressing her hands on her chest, I remembered that she was a nurse, and none of the others attempted to help; we cowered under the spray hood and silence fell again. A silence that somehow made itself heard above the sounds of the sea and the rain, and after a minute or two we also became aware that the waves were subsiding; the rain that had been drenching us throughout slowed to a whisper on the canvas of the spray hood and it’s possible I passed out for a few seconds.
A few minutes later, Katarina Malmgren straightened up. She stared at us, her desperate eyes shifting from one to another while her hands and shoulders shook with exhaustion and the tears ran down her face.
‘She’s dead,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see she’s dead?’
Commentary, August 2007
None. That was exactly how it was.
8–13 AUGUST 2007
12
Detective Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti sat in his car and glared out at the rain.
It was Wednesday evening. The weather had changed in the early afternoon, a bank of cloud having moved in from the south west and released its first heavy drops just after two, and within half an hour the dark skies had parked themselves across the entire firmament, from horizon to horizon. It had been raining non-stop ever since, a persistent and obstinate drizzle, and the temperature had sunk from twenty-five to fifteen degrees centigrade.
It felt rather pleasant, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. He could breathe, as long as he kept the window on the passenger side wound down a few centimetres. Thinking about it, that was the only positive thing he could think of saying about the current situation.
The fact that he could breathe. Over the preceding three days he had felt a shrinking of his power over the investigation, and over his work, and those words he had let slip to Marianne about considering a change of job had come back into his mind with a degree of regularity.
As if his life was somehow hanging in the balance this particular summer, that was his impression.
Hanging in the balance? It sounded a bit defeatist, it really did, but he had the feeling that this was the way he would come to look back on it. The summer of 2007. I took that decision, and that one, and then things turned out the way they did.
He also had a sense that this was how life looked in broader terms, this was its essential structure. Long periods of monotonous routine, for good or ill, and then sudden portals opening up to offer a choice of path. And if you didn’t choose in time, the gates closed. Not choosing was a choice in itself.
Or maybe that was just the kind of thought that thrived in the rain.
Well here he was, at any event, watching this house. He had asked for the assignment, voluntarily taken on this rather trivial task, just to get away for a bit. Backman had given him a slightly quizzical and sympathetic look, but said nothing. As usual, she could see straight through him, and he realized he was grateful for it. For the fact that she had that special maternal eye certain women have, the one that renders all pretension pointless.
But maybe I’m just idealizing, he thought. Maybe the fact is that some men are in need of a maternal eye, and that’s why we invent one and attribute it to some woman who seems to foster the illusion? Maybe it was the same with Marianne?
And what exactly did he mean by ‘some men’?
As for me, I certainly seem to feel the need to focus my thoughts on something other than this epistolary madman, he noted, putting two bits of chewing gum into his mouth to keep himself awake. As soon as he had parked between the neatly pruned lime trees an hour before, he had prayed to Our Lord for nothing to happen, so he could sit there in peace and quiet for a few hours and then drive away after a job well done and enjoy an undisturbed night’s sleep. He was convinced he would be able to sleep for twelve hours solid if he only got the chance. Fourteen, even.
One point, Our Lord had enquired. One point, Barbarotti had confirmed.
He had talked to Marianne for ten minutes, and it was really that conversation which was disturbing his peace of mind. In fact, if he were to venture a proper look at th
e matter, it was this that was keeping him awake. Rather than the chewing gum. She had sounded a bit . . . shut off, that was the fact of the matter; unfocused. He wondered if she’d been having some kind of disagreement with the children.
He hoped that was the case, and that the shutting off was not aimed at him. The strange thing – and just as worrying – was that he, too, had felt rather absent from the conversation. The crazy workload of recent days had done that to him, he thought. Sucked him dry of his most primary functions and needs. Love and tenderness and yearning. Leaving a vacuum, an empty hole.
And filling that hole with dejection and fatigue. And yet more work.
Gradually, after these perambulations in the slough of self-pity, it was somehow inevitable that his thoughts should find their way back to the case. Just as well, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. It was, after all, the only thing that was really going on in his life.
And had been going on ever since his return to Kymlinge the previous week, in fact. He had worked eight days in a row. And he didn’t know any more about the letter-writing murderer than he had done when he disembarked from the Gotland ferry.
Not a single bloody thing. If you worked in a sausage factory for a week, you could presumably take pride in having produced a banger or two, thought Inspector Barbarotti. Whereas you really had to ask yourself whether his seventy- to eighty-hour working week had achieved anything of any value at all. And he wasn’t alone. At least ten of his colleagues had worked equally long hours and had equally little to show for it. That was just the way it was.
