Sail of Stone

that there aren’t so many.”

28

Will you tell the next of kin?” Craig had said, and Winter had said yes. That was part of his job, a much too large part. There was no practice for it in the police training, and entirely too much experience of it later.

He called Johanna Osvald’s cell but only got her voice mail in his ear. This wasn’t something you could tell someone on voice mail.

He looked at the clock and looked up the timetable for the southern archipelago. He looked at the clock again. He would make the 10:20 Skarven if he drove too fast on Oscarsleden.

Winter stood on the deck with the wind in his hair. Someone was fishing on the cliffs just behind the harbor. He had gotten a bite, or was about to: the gulls were wheeling in their own circles, screaming encouragingly to the man, who was wearing a wide cap for protection against the bird shit that sometimes fell like snow from the sky.

The Skarven moved out. No cafe on board. Few passengers were going out to the islands at this time of day, and at this time of year. Two months earlier there wouldn’t have been room for him on board; the archipelago boats swerved out like overloaded passenger junks in the Yellow River, brown limbs everywhere, children, strollers. Last summer he and Elsa and Angela had planned to go to Vrango but fled the boat when they got to Branno Rodsten. Too many people, like a sun-and-sea-and-salt-and-sand madness that seized the people of the city when the sun was at its warmest.

Madness. Winter tried to brush his hair out of his eyes and thought of something Erik Osvald had said when they met out on Donso.

“There’s nothing wrong with mad cow disease,” he had said. He saw everything from the professional perspective of a fisherman: “We like to see one of those crazy cows on TV at regular intervals!”

Skarven went directly to Kopstadso. There had been a strong wind out on the open sea during the journey over, as though the weather had changed. Winter could see black clouds in the west now, on their way up from the other side of the earth.

On the water down there, Erik Osvald and his three crew members were engaged in the eternal, anxious search for fish, the attempt to bring up the maximum legal amount.

There is a higher power, Erik Osvald had said, besides the Norwegian Coast Guard! It was a joke, but there was gravity to it. A higher power. If there isn’t, everything is so meaningless, he had said.

This life changes you, twenty-five years on the North Sea, all year round, all day long. It’s freedom. It’s loneliness.

It’s an old-fashioned way to live.

But we Swedish fishermen are still out one week and then home one week. The Swedes are almost the only ones who use that system, and it means that we earn less than the Danes and the Scots and the Norwegians.

And the past. He had spoken about the past: My dad went out Monday morning and came home on Saturday morning.

A life at sea until he became tired and stayed on land and listened to the weather reports when his son was out there.

Axel Osvald, if it was Axel Osvald that Craig’s men had found; if it was him, his death had been strange and tragic, strangely tragic, alone and naked next to a pitiful little lake next to another, larger lake in a mountainous inland, miles from the sea.

What had he been doing there? How had he ended up there? How had his thoughts wandered while he himself wandered up slopes and rough terrain? Winter had not been to Fort Augustus, but he could imagine what it looked like.

The sea was calm between Styrso Skaret and Donso. Winter couldn’t see Osvald’s modern trawler, the blue Magdalena. They were out for a new week, west of Stavanger and east of Aberdeen, hunting for whitefish. In six days they would put in at Hanstholm and go home in the afternoon with invoices in hand. But Erik Osvald would come home before that, and he, Winter, was the one who was coming with the information that would make the fisherman return home. Or how would it happen? Would a helicopter pick him up? Or would he set course for Scotland and Moray Firth and the harbor entrance to Inverness right away? Go through the canal in the city, the river Ness, and down into Loch Ness and down to Fort Augustus? No, not with that monster of a trawler. And no, because his father was lying and waiting in a refrigerated room in Inverness. His son could anchor in the harbor.

Skarven lay still, and Winter went ashore. The time was as the timetable had predicted: 10:55. The quay was empty. There were a few older trawlers out along the edge, and Winter wondered whether any of them had belonged to Axel Osvald. Or maybe had even existed in John Osvald’s time.

John Osvald both existed and didn’t exist. He had the unique phantom quality that people get when they disappear and are never found; their souls get no peace, and those who survive them don’t either.

But if he were alive? If John Osvald were alive? Those who still existed, those who were here… could you call them the surviving relatives, then? Was Johanna Osvald a surviving relative?

Winter asked a woman outside the store for directions to the school. She answered and pointed, a crooked movement.

He walked along a narrow street without sidewalks and could smell the sea, and he listened to the peculiar silence that is created by lots of space in every direction. The wind had disappeared in here, as though it didn’t exist. The clouds had disappeared; the sky was completely blue. He felt warmth on his face.

There were many children on the playground, more than he’d expected. He heard shouts but no words. A soccer ball rolled his way and he sent it back. It flew over the goal and the fence behind it and disappeared into the crevice of a cliff.

“Aaah-oh,” said a boy who looked like a short fisherman.

The other children looked at Winter and then at the cliffs. He understood. He went out again and around the playground and he climbed down into the crevice. The ball wasn’t there. He dug around through grass and other strange plants, maybe seaweed. To the right was a hole, like a cave. He peeked in but didn’t see anything. He started to crawl. He felt the ball before he saw it, and he wiggled himself backward and his suit stretched at the seams, protesting. Winter got up with the ball in his hands, a triumphant gesture. All the children were standing in a line up there, and they applauded. Winter threw the ball up and the little fisherman took it. He and all the others turned around when they heard a female voice:

“And what are you all doing here? The bell rang, didn’t you hear it?”

Winter saw her come up to the edge of the cliffs and look down.

“Oh… hi.”

“Hi,” said Johanna Osvald, giggling.

Winter couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t want to, not with the message he had brought.

“Is it really him?” she asked. They were sitting in a little workroom that was Johanna’s. A large Mac stood on the desk, an older version, gray. There were papers all over, and binders. More paper than in Winter’s office in the Palace. Through the window he could see the cliffs where he’d dug up the ball. She must have seen him, too, or the children who had lined up to study the fool from the mainland down there. An interruption in archipelago life.

Children’s drawings hung on the walls on both sides of the window. For a split second he thought of what it must be like to spend all your days with children but not have any of your own. Maybe it was a relief to come home; a silence to keep and to tend to.

Winter had told her as soon as there was a fitting opportunity. He had chosen his words carefully.

“It could be a mistake,” she said now.

He nodded but said nothing.

“You believe it too?”

“I don’t know anything, Johanna, no more than I’ve told you. But my colleague in Inverness also found a photograph…”