Strange Shores

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.