Free A Necessary Action by Per Wahlöö Page B

brother’s face clouded. When he noticed that Willi Mohr was looking at him, he laughed again.
    ‘You played well today,’ said Dan Pedersen magnanimously. ‘I slackened off for a while, I know, but you played well all the same. But you concentrated too late.’
    They shook hands and Santiago smiled, not very convincingly.
    Dan Pedersen put the chessmen away, got up and took the set into the bar.
    Siglinde irritably changed the position of her legs again and let her eyes follow him.
    It was quiet in the puerto and everyone was waiting for the small cool breeze from the sea. Only a few people were still sitting outside the cafés facing the harbour. It would soon be one o’clock and the bar-owners with no more customers had begun to close up.
    ‘I know what we ought to do now,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘We ought to go and bathe once more and then go to bed.’
    ‘Out by the lighthouse in that case,’ said Santiago.
    ‘Aren’t there a lot of civil guards out there?’
    ‘Only one or two. They patrol the mole and the shoreline. It’s usually quite easy to see where they are.’
    ‘We haven’t any bathing-costumes,’ said Siglinde.
    She didn’t say it in protest. She was simply being informative about the fact.
    ‘That doesn’t matter, does it?’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘We all know each other, and anyhow it’s dark.’
    Siglinde shrugged her shoulders. It really did not matter.

2
    Siglinde came out of the water last. She was swimming in a wide circle with long lazy strokes and the luminescence of the sea floated in fine phosphorescent streaks along her body.
    She and Dan and Willi Mohr were bathing farthest out by the lighthouse, where the breakwater ended in a circular pierhead made of concrete and large, crudely cut blocks of stone. Santiago and Ramon, who had swimming trunks, were a few yards farther in. To appear without a bathing-costume was a punishable pleasure and the risk of being caught not worth taking.
    The night was thick and black and inpenetrable, but every sixteenth second the light from the lighthouse swung round over their heads. Each time it brought with it a pale uncertain light, weak and nebulous, but still sufficiently strong that one could make out objects round about.
    They had left their clothes on the parapet.
    Dan Pedersen had climbed up on to the parapet and all that could be seen was the glowing tip of his cigarette.
    Willi Mohr was standing right up by the edge of the pier, looking at the distant lights of the puerto.
    They enjoyed the pleasant coolness as the air slowly dried their skins.
    There was no sign of Siglinde, except the thin pale green tracks in the darkness showing that she had swum towards the shore.
    Soon afterwards the water could be heard pouring off her body.
    ‘Help her up, will you,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘The stones are hellish sharp down there.’
    When Willi Mohr heard Siglinde trying to find a foothold on the rocks, he took a step down the stone stairway and put out a hand in the dark.
    She found it at once, and her hand was cold and wet and firm. He pulled her slowly until she had her balance and he felt very clearly the well-trained elasticity in her body as she thrust off with her foot and swung herself up on to the flat stones.
    Willi Mohr could not see her, but he knew she was standing just beside him on the stairway.
    At that moment the light from the lighthouse cut through the darkness above and for one or two seconds he saw her in the light of its trailing reflection.
    She was standing with her feet apart, her toes turned slightly inwards, her arms hanging loosely, and she was holding her head to one side to shake the water from her ears and to get the short blond wisps of hair away from her forehead. Her shoulders and breasts and forearms were covered with circular drops of water, which looked so firm and definitively shaped that one ought to be able to pick them off one by one without breaking them and collect them in one’s hand like small glass