‘I’m sure I’ve seen worse,’ said Lárus, taking the cigarette he had been shielding in the palm of his hand, pinching the glowing end between finger and thumb, and putting the stub in his pocket.
‘Come on then,’ said Ezra reluctantly.
They went inside and crossed the shed to the filleting tables. To Ezra’s intense relief, Jakob had not moved. He lay flat on the board, arms at his sides, face to the ceiling. Lárus walked right up to him and made the sign of the cross over his body, then stood there. He appeared to be saying a prayer over the dead man. Ezra looked frantically from Jakob’s eye to his lips, then to Lárus standing over him. Time stood still.
‘He was all right,’ said Lárus suddenly, turning to Ezra. ‘A mate.’
‘Yes,’ said Ezra. ‘I know.’
‘His number must have been up,’ said Lárus. ‘He was meant to go. Everything has its time and place.’
Ezra’s attention was fixed on Jakob and he could have sworn he had opened his eye again. Lárus, whose back was turned, didn’t notice.
‘I expect so,’ he heard himself reply automatically.
Lárus glanced back at Jakob. Ezra dropped his gaze to the floor. Surely he must notice that Jakob had half opened one eye. He kept expecting to hear Lárus exclaim in horror but nothing happened. He raised his head slowly. Lárus was still looking at Jakob.
‘He could be a bloody menace as well,’ he said loudly.
Ezra was silent.
‘A bloody menace,’ Lárus repeated, giving Ezra a significant look, before striding briskly out of the building.
When Ezra had finished constructing the coffin, he took hold of one end and dragged it into the ice house. The wood scraped over the concrete floor and he dropped the casket with a crash beside the filleting board where Jakob lay. Jakob didn’t move, although Ezra studied him for some time. He went back outside for the coffin lid.
Then he went and fetched the nails.
50
Ezra had come to a decision. It had been reached while he was collecting the planks and building the coffin, but had germinated during the years after Matthildur vanished. Jakob must pay for his crime. Ezra would try and force him to reveal Matthildur’s whereabouts. If he was successful, all well and good; his long ordeal would be over. But that would not alter Jakob’s fate. His days were numbered. He should have died when the boat broke up on the rocks. The only way Ezra could justify his deed was to convince himself that he was merely finishing what a higher power had begun.
After it was over, Ezra was perturbed to realise that his decision to deny Jakob help had been reached without a struggle. On the contrary, it seemed the logical consequence of what had gone before. He hardly even stopped to think that he was commiting murder, a criminal act, a sin. Perhaps he had suppressed the thought deliberately, avoiding giving the correct name to his intention, because it sounded sordid, merciless, brutal.
When he came back, he discovered that Jakob had opened his uninjured eye fully and was looking around as if he sensed danger. One of his arms that had been at his side now lay across his chest. A puff of breath, so tiny as to be hardly visible, emanated from his nose and mouth. Jakob had been teetering on the brink of death for an eternity but he had turned a corner. His tenacity defied belief.
‘Tell me about Matthildur,’ Ezra stooped and hissed in his ear. ‘What did you do with her?’
The eye stared at him. Under the clump of dried blood the other was now trying to open.
‘Where is she?’
Jakob’s eye, wide open now, was fixed on him. His lips trembled. Ezra put his ear to them.
As he did so, Jakob’s deathly cold arm hooked round his neck and weakly tried to drag his head down as he gasped out:
Go
to
hell
Ezra tore himself free and Jakob’s arm fell back lifeless to his side as he lost consciousness again.
Ezra found two fairly large crates to put under the coffin, then hauled the man off the filleting table and let him fall into the casket. There was a heavy thud as he landed on the bottom.
Then he fetched the lid and, taking one nail after another from his pocket, hammered it down. He avoided thinking about what he was doing. The fact that he was killing a defenceless man. He would have to fend off that thought for the rest of his life.
Ezra was hammering in the final nail when he heard approaching voices. Jakob’s uncle had arrived with the boat owner to fetch the body.
The owner rebuked Ezra for nailing down the lid before the uncle had had a chance to see the dead man and ordered him to go for a crowbar immediately.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see him?’ the owner asked Jakob’s uncle, an elderly man, inadequately dressed in an old leather jacket and rubber boots. He did not seem notably troubled by his loss.
Ezra gaped at him. It had not crossed his mind that he might want to view his nephew’s body.
‘There’s no need,’ the uncle replied finally, and Ezra was overwhelmed with relief. ‘I didn’t know him that well.’
The uncle had enlisted the help of a Djúpivogur neighbour who owned a boat, and with Ezra’s assistance they carried the coffin on board and tied a tarpaulin over it.
It was over. The wind had dropped considerably and the boat set off across the choppy fjord, bearing the coffin. The owner clapped Ezra on the back and thanked him for taking such fine care of Jakob. Ezra mumbled a reply. They said goodbye and went their separate ways.
51
Now that Erlendur had got what he wanted, he was no longer sure if he had been justified in putting such pressure on Ezra. Or whether he had really needed to hear the whole truth. He had sat quietly through the old man’s account, noting that Ezra had decided to leave out nothing but to tell the unvarnished truth at last, however uncomfortable or painful. But it was obvious to look at him that finally confessing to his crime had been one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.
Erlendur waited for him to resume his tale but Ezra sat silently in his wicker chair in the corner, his mind no longer in the kitchen, in the house, or even in this world. He was holding the picture of Matthildur and caressing it with his finger as if he longed to touch her one more time.
‘For what it’s worth — ’ Ezra broke off. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he tried again, ‘I’ve been filled with remorse ever since. As soon as I’d done it I was in two minds about whether to tell. I half hoped they’d leave it a few days before burying him, so he could attract their attention. I did nothing to save him. But I prayed for him — that he wouldn’t suffer. I prayed to God that he wouldn’t have to suffer. I couldn’t bear the thought of him writhing around in his coffin. But that wasn’t on my mind when I shut the lid on him. And I never really had to wrestle with my conscience because I never knew what had happened after I closed the lid. Over the years I’ve become reconciled to my God. All I had left was to die. Then you appeared.’
Ezra looked up.
‘You come in here claiming to have dug him up. You say you’ve seen scratch marks on the coffin lid. You put his teeth on my kitchen counter.’
‘I’m sorry if — ’ But Erlendur was not allowed to finish.
‘That was the first time it really hit home what I’d done.’ Ezra looked back at the picture. ‘You must utterly despise me.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ said Erlendur.
‘You say that now. But if you hadn’t haunted me like a ghost from the past, I’d never have dredged all this up.’
‘I can believe — ’
Ezra interrupted again. ‘You’re the stubbornest bastard I’ve ever met.’
Erlendur did not know how to take this.
‘Anyway, I’ll be dead soon and that’ll be an end to it,’ said Ezra.