Strange Shores de-9

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘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.

  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.

  ‘I can believe it’s been hard for you to live with,’ said Erlendur. ‘An honest man like yourself.’

  ‘Yes, well, so much for honesty,’ said Ezra. ‘I’ve tried to do my best, tried to atone for it in my own way. And you mustn’t forget what Jakob did to Matthildur. There are times when I justify my crime. I blame Jakob. Then I feel better for a while. But it never lasts.’

  ‘As I said, it’s not the first extraordinary story of survival I’ve heard,’ said Erlendur. ‘People who’ve been written off as dead. Man has a phenomenal instinct to live.’

  ‘I’ve often wished he’d simply died in the shipwreck,’ Ezra went on. ‘It would have been. . it would have been simpler, purer.’

  ‘Life’s never simple,’ said Erlendur. ‘That’s the first thing we learn. It’s never straightforward.’

  ‘Are you going to take action?’ asked Ezra.

  Their eyes met.

  ‘Not unless you want me to.’

  ‘You’ll leave it up to me?’

  ‘It’s not my concern. I just wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery.’

  ‘But you’re a policeman. Isn’t it your duty. .?’

  ‘One’s duty can be complicated.’

  ‘Not that it really matters to me what you do. Though a few people around here would revise their opinion of me, not that I really care. But I’d be grateful if the story of Matthildur’s fate could be left unchanged. There’s a certain poetry to it. Though it’s a damned lie, there’s something in the idea of her striding over the Hraevarskörd Pass that I’d like to be allowed to live on in people’s memories. Unless they’re all dead by now.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s asked after Jakob in all these years?’

  ‘No. You’re the only one.’

  ‘And he never told you what he did with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you still have no idea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’d been able to save his life, might he have told you then?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t have made any difference,’ said Ezra. ‘I’m convinced of that. Even if I’d helped him, he’d never have let on.’

  ‘Jakob seems to have been rallying when you put him in the coffin,’ Erlendur continued, choosing his words with care.

  ‘He was dead as far as everyone else was concerned,’ said Ezra. ‘I just put him in his coffin.’

  The justification sounded as if it had been rehearsed countless times in the intervening years. Ezra got to his feet and looked out of the window at the moor which loomed against the sky, pristine and untouched.

  ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean him to live, but if he’d shown any remorse, the slightest hint of remorse or regret. . would things have gone differently? Would I have saved his life?’

  Erlendur didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I’ve had to live with it ever since,’ Ezra whispered to the window. ‘At times the shame’s been almost more than I could bear.’

  52

  Hrund had been discharged from hospital. It was evening as Erlendur drove up to the house and spied her back in her habitual place at the window. She smiled at him and this time came to the front door to welcome him. Joining her in the sitting room, Erlendur asked after her health. She said she had come home that morning and had nothing to grumble about.

  ‘Any new discoveries?’ she asked, bringing him some freshly made coffee. ‘Any news about Matthildur?’

  Erlendur was uncertain how much to share with her about the fates of Matthildur and Jakob, or Ezra’s act of vengeance after the shipwreck of 1949. He would rather gloss over the business of his grave robbery as well. And since he was concealing these facts, he might as well keep quiet about others too. So he gave her a heavily edited account of his meetings with Ezra. Hrund sat and listened without comment until it came to what concerned her most.

  ‘I hope we can
keep this between us,’ said Erlendur. ‘So it doesn’t go any further.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Ezra’s convinced Jakob killed Matthildur.’

  Hrund regarded him impassively.

  ‘He has no proof,’ said Erlendur. ‘But he told me that Jakob had confessed to the killing in his hearing. Jakob acted out of jealousy and a desire for revenge. Some would call it a crime of passion. Matthildur was going to leave Jakob for Ezra, but he began to suspect they were up to no good and followed her to Ezra’s house one night. He saw everything and couldn’t take it — couldn’t take the betrayal.’

  Hrund’s expression was still unreadable.

  ‘Jakob invented the story about Matthildur going to your mother’s house in Reydarfjördur and getting caught in the storm. As it was, she never left home.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ whispered Hrund at last.

  ‘I have no reason to disbelieve Ezra,’ said Erlendur.

  ‘The evil bastard.’

  Erlendur described how he had gradually coaxed Ezra into telling him what he knew, how he and Matthildur had been in love, how time had stopped for Ezra when she went missing. He told her about Ezra’s encounters with Jakob after she vanished, first in the graveyard, then at Jakob’s house, where he had confessed to killing her.

  ‘How did you get him to talk?’ Hrund asked.

  Erlendur shrugged. ‘He seemed ready to unburden himself,’ he said, hoping this was not too great a lie.

  He wouldn’t dream of admitting the pressure he had put on Ezra to make him cooperate. Indeed, he rather regretted it, especially given the cost. Erlendur was not proud of the lengths he had gone to. He was worried about digging up Jakob’s grave but even more about how he had treated Ezra. He had bludgeoned the old man into confessing and now he could only pity him. He might himself be driven by an insatiable compulsion, an obsession with uncovering the truth, but why couldn’t Ezra have been left in peace with his secrets? He was no hardened criminal, no danger to his community. When they parted, Ezra had said it didn’t matter to him what Erlendur chose to do with his discoveries, but Erlendur knew better.