She jogged down an aisle and then swung her legs over the railing into a pen. She dropped to her knees and crawled among the sheep. They looked bemused, but not frightened.
She noticed a leg, a human leg clad in denim. She crawled towards it. As the sheep parted, she saw Grandma and Grandpa pressed against a railing running along the back of the shed. Her grandmother was staring at her, eyes wide with alarm, mouth taped shut. She wriggled.
Her grandfather was slumped on the ground, out cold.
Oh, God! Was he dead?
Dísa was about to creep towards them and try to free them when she heard the barn door open. She raised her finger to her lips to tell her grandmother to be quiet and then crept away from her.
She slid through the railings into an adjoining pen and waited.
‘Dísa?’ It was Jói’s voice, and he was getting closer. Her hearing was returning; she could make out his footsteps as they passed the pen in which she was lying. He stopped.
The sheep around her moved. Shifting.
One of them looked down at her quizzically. She recognized the ewe: unlike Anna Rós, she didn’t know all of the sheep, but she knew a fair few of them. This one was Móey. She was one of the forystufé on the farm, the leader sheep who guided the others up on the hills in the summer. Smarter than the rest, they looked subtly different: longer-legged, skinnier. Móey had distinctive dark red patches on her wool, a black snout and a nice pair of curly horns.
She bleated. She recognized Dísa. The other sheep around her turned to look.
Dísa raised her finger to her lips. It might have been coincidence, but Móey shut up. She continued to stare.
Dísa could hear Jói moving towards the end of the barn. He was checking on her grandparents, only one pen away.
Dísa pressed her face close to the floor. The sheep seemed to gather around her.
She heard the sound of a body swinging over the rails between pens, the thud of feet landing on concrete.
She could see Jói’s trainers coming towards her. Stopping. Turning to the right. Then turning towards her again. Then stepping her way.
‘Oh, Dísa.’
She looked up. He was standing three metres away, pointing the shotgun directly at her.
She scrambled to her feet. She knew she was going to die, but she wanted to die upright, facing her brother, proud, not cowering on the floor. She successfully fought back the urge to cry.
‘Did you kill Dad?’
‘I think so. He has a big hole in his chest. He shouldn’t have done that. You were never going to get away.’
‘What now?’
‘I kill you,’ said Jói.
His voice was flat. His eyes were flat. They had lost their Jói sparkle. His expression was... expressionless.
Her brother Jói seemed to have gone. There was no one to appeal to. She couldn’t appeal to this man standing before her.
There was a rustle and a loud bleat, almost like a roar, and a black head shot out of the woollen mass like a cannonball and hit Jói in the thigh.
The shotgun went off, causing the sheep to skitter and jostle, and the whole barn erupted into panicked cries.
Jói stumbled and fell.
The shot had gone high and to the left of Dísa’s head. She leaned down to grab the shotgun and took a step backwards, pointing it at Jói.
Móey gave him another butt, this time on his arse. He swore and twisted around to face his attacker, who glared back.
Dísa gripped the shotgun. It was double-barrelled, with two triggers. Dísa thought that the second trigger would fire the second barrel, but she wasn’t sure. She assumed the second barrel was loaded.
By the look on Jói’s face, so did he.
‘OK, Jói. Stand up,’ said Dísa.
Carefully, Jói pulled himself to his feet, the ewe still glaring at him.
‘All right. We’re going to leave this pen, slowly.’
Jói stood up straight and stared at his sister.
‘Turn around and walk slowly to the railings.’
Jói didn’t move.
‘I said turn around!’
Still no movement.
In frustration, Dísa wiggled the barrel of the gun up and down in an attempt to show she meant business, that she would fire lead shot into her brother at close range.
Jói wasn’t buying it.
‘Put the gun down, Dísa,’ he said quietly.
Dísa lowered the barrel a couple of inches. Her face puckered in frustration. What could she do? She couldn’t shoot him in cold blood. She just couldn’t. And Jói knew it. He was going to escape.
Worse than that, if she put the gun down, he would use it on her.
She should pull the damn trigger! But she couldn’t.
She looked down at Móey for inspiration. But although the sheep was looking at her intently, she had no wise advice.
‘Lay the gun on the floor,’ Jói repeated.
‘Shoot him!’ The cry rang out loud from the other side of the barn, by the door.
It was the policeman, Magnús. Unarmed.
‘Shoot him, Dísa! It would be self-defence. I’m a witness. You can shoot him.’
Dísa raised the barrel of the shotgun and aimed. Yes, she could shoot him. In self-defence.
Jói’s eyes widened. He knew his sister well; he could see what she was about to do. He took a step backwards. Raised his arms. And turned towards the policeman.
‘Jói Ómarsson, you are under arrest,’ said Magnus as he approached the brother and sister.
Dísa waited until the detective had grabbed Jói, then she laid the shotgun down on the concrete floor and burst into tears.
Fifty-Five
Magnus caught a flight from Akureyri back to Reykjavík at about noon the following day.
He was exhausted. He had spent the morning on statements at the Akureyri police station before going to the hospital with Árni.
Ómar had survived: the focus of the shotgun blast had been on his left shoulder — the damage to his chest was less severe. They had operated the night before. He was awake but in a bad way.
Hafsteinn had regained consciousness but they were keeping him in hospital under observation for a couple of days.
His wife was murmuring nonsense at his bedside, flustered and shaken.
Dísa and Anna Rós were with their father. Dísa had told Magnus she was going to try to forgive him. In the end, he had risked his life for her. Plus he was the only father she’d got.
The hour after Jói had been arrested had been predictable mayhem. Árni had tried to staunch the flow in Ómar’s chest and called an ambulance. Anna Rós’s bus from school had been delayed by the accident in the tunnel, and she had arrived home at the same time as the armed police back-up to find her father shot, her grandfather unconscious, her grandmother a wreck and her brother arrested. Not surprisingly, she was distressed.
Yet in the midst of all this, Dísa had pulled Magnus to one side and asked if she could take a couple of minutes to shut down her computer.
It had been more like ten. Dísa had had a grim smile on her face as she closed the lid of her laptop.
‘All right?’ Magnus had asked.
Dísa had nodded. ‘Yes. All right.’
Magnus was impressed by the nineteen-year-old. It wasn’t only that she had risked her life to try to make amends for her mother’s folly. He suspected that despite having faced death down the wrong end of a shotgun barrel held by her own brother, that was exactly what she had just done. Made amends.
As Magnus had got off the plane at Reykjavík, Árni had forwarded him an email sent to him by a neighbour of Helga’s in Dalvík, who had been an investor in Thomocoin. The email was from Dísa the day before, giving instructions on how to set up a bitcoin wallet so she could receive her investment back.