‘Hell and damnation,’ repeated the boat owner. ‘You could knock up a simple coffin for Jakob, couldn’t you? You can use some of the timber over at the new building. Try and do a decent job, mate.’
Ezra nodded.
‘Then wait for the Djúpivogur lot to arrive. The uncle didn’t want any fuss. He’s going to transport the coffin by sea. Said it wouldn’t do for me to attend the funeral. They’re a rum lot. I’ll go anyway, of course. You knew him quite well, didn’t you?’
‘Er . . . quite,’ stammered Ezra. ‘We worked together on the
Sigurlína
for several seasons.’
‘Of course you did,’ exclaimed the owner. ‘Silly me. He had a fine wife in Matthildur. Such a shame that.’
‘Yes.’
The idea crystallised when Ezra heard the owner utter Matthildur’s name. He would just delay alerting people. He wanted to take a better look at Jakob first. Then he would ask him. If Jakob refused to tell, he could refuse to help him. Or at least threaten to leave him to his fate.
The owner took his leave and Ezra stood rooted to the spot, watching him disappear through the door. It was several minutes before he turned back to Jakob. Going over to the filleting table, he scrutinised him minutely. No sign of movement. Ezra crouched over him for a long time. Had he been wrong? Hadn’t he seen Jakob’s lips move after all?
Ezra had begun to believe it was all a strange trick of the eyes when Jakob’s lips quivered again. He seemed to be trying to speak, but the movement was almost imperceptible.
Ezra bent close, putting his ear to Jakob’s mouth. He could hear very faint breathing now. And every time Jakob exhaled it was like a prayer for help . . .
Help.
Help.
EZRA RAISED HIS
head in consternation. The man’s resilience was incredible. He had lived through shipwreck and raging seas, the transfer to the ice house, and, despite being battered and wounded, had managed to survive a freezing night.
‘Jakob?’ he whispered, glancing nervously at the door. ‘Jakob!’ he repeated more loudly. ‘Jakob?’
One eye opened a slit. The other was covered by the clot of blood from the wound to his head.
‘Do you know where you are?’
Ezra put his ear back to the other man’s lips.
‘ . . .
Help
. . .’ he heard Jakob breathe.
It was not his imagination. Jakob was alive.
‘Can you hear me?’ Ezra asked but received no response. He pressed his mouth to Jakob’s ear and repeated the question.
The eye opened slightly wider.
‘I’ll help you, Jakob,’ whispered Ezra in his ear. ‘I’ll get you out of here, fetch a doctor, bring you a blanket. I’ll do all that, Jakob.’
The slit narrowed.
‘Jakob!’ Ezra hissed.
The slit opened again.
‘I’ll save you, Jakob, if you tell me where Matthildur is. If you tell me what you did with her.’
Jakob’s lips moved and Ezra moved his ear closer.
‘. . . co . . . ld.’
‘I’ll save you right now if you tell me. What did you do with Matthildur?’
The eye opened wider and Ezra thought Jakob was looking at him. His skin was blue with cold, his lips dark. The teeth protruded from beneath his upper lip. His hair still had lumps of sea ice in it, and there was more on his thick, black woollen jumper and oilskin trousers. But his eye was half open and Ezra thought he saw his pupil quiver.
‘Where’s Matthildur?’
‘. . . col . . .’
‘I know you can hear me. Tell me where Matthildur is and I’ll help you.’
‘C . . . can . . .’
‘You can’t? You can’t tell me where she is? Is that what you’re trying to say?’
The eye closed again. The lips had stopped moving. Ezra thought he had given up the ghost. For a minute he dithered. Was it too late? Should he run for help? Should he do everything in his power to save this man? Jakob had killed his beloved. He had choked the life out of Matthildur and hidden her body. What mercy did he deserve?
Ezra’s old hatred for Jakob, unleashed now from its bonds, began to course through his body, bringing a hectic flush to his face. He saw Matthildur in Jakob’s hands, saw her fighting for her life, slowly suffocating, her eyes pleading for mercy. Jakob had shown none. He’d had no pity.
Ezra stood there and contemplated Jakob on the filleting table.
Then he went out to fetch the materials for the coffin.
Having locked the ice house, he took a wheelbarrow and set off to get the timber. He did not meet or speak to anyone on the way. Following the boat owner’s advice, he found some nails on the site of the new fish-processing building, then marched home to fetch his own hammer and saw. As he knocked the coffin together in front of the ice house he tried not to let his thoughts stray to Jakob by concentrating on Matthildur instead, on the times they had shared. On the life together that might have been. He often daydreamed about their future, how it might have turned out if only she had been allowed to live. Perhaps they would have had a family by now, children to say goodbye to in the morning and come home to in the evening, to read to, tell stories to. Jakob had destroyed all that when he strangled Matthildur with his bare hands.
Ezra laid out the planks lengthwise, nailed them to crosspieces, and soon had a rough-and-ready box. The weather was still bitterly cold and snowy, and only the odd passer-by stopped to ask for news. Ezra told them that Jakob’s body was going to Djúpivogur, while the Grindavík man would be taken home to the south.
Jakob had few friends in the village. Only one man came expressly to pay his respects. His name was Lárus and he approached Ezra from behind, almost giving him a heart attack as he materialised without warning through the veil of snow.
‘I hear they’re taking him to Djúpivogur today,’ Lárus said. He was a short man in his early fifties, who used to sail out to the fishing grounds with Jakob. His face was deeply furrowed, his teeth stained yellow from tar, and his shoulders rounded by hard labour. Ezra had met him about the village and knew his life had not been easy.
‘That’s right,’ Ezra replied, stopping to stretch, the hammer still in his hand.
‘And you’re making his coffin?’
‘Yup.’
‘I just wanted to see him one last time,’ said Lárus, nodding at the door of the ice house.
Ezra hesitated. ‘He’s a bit of a mess,’ he said, groping for excuses. ‘Doesn’t look too good.’
‘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.
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.
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.
‘I can believe it’s been hard for you to live with,’ said Erlendur. ‘An honest man like yourself.’