He got up and put on his coat. There was no telephone in the house, so if he wanted anything done, he would have to go out. He picked up the projector and put it in the cardboard box in which it had arrived. He put the films down alongside it.
The cold bit his face hard. The wind had increased again; given the density of the darkness, a thick cloud cover must have crept over the headland. The frost and the whirling snow cut his face, so he struggled to see. His eyes were smarting and his cheeks hurt. He carried the box in both hands, and was constantly on the verge of stumbling because he couldn’t see the road.
Before he reached the police station, he tripped and fell to his knees three times, sinking into the snow. His fingers were numb even though he was wearing gloves. From time to time he carried the box with one hand only, so he could wiggle the fingers on his free hand and get his circulation going again. In summer the walk from his house to the police station took only a few minutes, but on this pitch-black winter’s night in a snowstorm, it took him more than a quarter of an hour.
The police station was just as dark as the night, but unlike the sky it stood out in clear contrast to the white snow, which covered everything around the long, dark-brown wooden building. Jakob took the last few steps up the stairs, set down the box and got his breath back. Then he tried the door. It didn’t even budge. He had hoped that someone would be there. Anyone. Even Mortensen. He tried a few more times, then started banging on the window frame.
He waited several minutes, but all he could hear was his own breathing. Then he picked up the box and walked down the steps. He waded through the deep snow and looked through some of the windows. The station was dark and empty.
His boots were filled with snow under his trousers. His gloves were covered in lumps of ice. He continued past Mortensen’s house, which lay close by, but it was just as dark as the police station. In the end he was forced to walk all the way back home. He would have to wait until tomorrow. Besides, they couldn’t start looking for the container until it got light.
Back in the house he took off his icy outdoor clothing and put the cardboard box away in the sideboard. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself a brimming glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label. He opened a drawer and took out the big chef ’s knife. Another remnant from the days of the previous tenants. It was heavy and felt good in his hand. Its blade was almost as long as his forearm.
He picked up the glass with his left hand and sipped the cool whisky. He pulled a face and took another slug, then returned to the living room and the armchair, where he sank into the soft upholstery and placed the knife on the armrest. There was an icy draught from the damaged front door.
51
Jakob woke when his empty glass fell to the floor, but it was something else that had caused him to drop it in the first place. He coughed hard, inhaled deeply through his nose into his lungs, and felt the cold air clear the sleep from his thoughts.
The chair squeaked feebly beneath him. He straightened his stiff back and extended his legs along the floor until they were so taut that they started to quiver. Slowly he reached for the knife on the armrest, but his fingers found only wood. He fumbled along the armrest and continued down to the floor. Nothing.
The darkness moved and Jakob froze.
‘Can’t you find your knife, Dane?’
Jakob recognised the Faroese accent immediately, and heard contempt and hatred drip from every syllable.
‘I decided I’d better look after it for you. A little Dane like you can’t handle a big knife like that.’
Jakob sat up straighter in his chair and stared blindly about the room.
‘What’s that?’ the man from the Faroe Islands said. ‘You can’t see me? Let me help you.’
Jakob jumped when the man turned on the lights. The muscles in his arms and legs contracted.
‘There! Better now?’
Jakob rubbed his eyes.
‘You’re very quiet, Dane.’
The voice now came from behind him. Jakob turned around in the armchair and saw the red-faced man standing by the door to the bedroom. He was leaning against the doorframe, and had folded his arms across his chest, which was covered by a thick, patterned jumper in shades of white and brown. In one hand he held the chef’s knife, with the edge pointing away from him.
‘What are you doing here?’ Jakob demanded, slowly getting up from the armchair.
The Faroese dropped his arms by his sides, while the knife rotated once in his hand, so its edge was now pointing downwards. His thumb seemed to caress the top of the handle.
The man’s ginger hair flowed like his beard. His face was freckled. His shoulders broad. His arms seemed as strong as ship’s timber. Jakob didn’t doubt for one second that the man was stronger than him.
‘Yes—what am I doing here?’ The Faroese took a couple of calm but carefully measured steps forward. His eyes were locked on Jakob’s.
‘I imagine your friends sent you?’
‘Friends?’ The man looked at him with scorn. ‘I’ve no friends here.’
‘You’re right about that,’ Jakob said. ‘You’re just as finished as I am, given how much you know.’
The man let out two short laughs, which sounded more like grunts. ‘This concrete village doesn’t scare me.’ He shook his head. ‘And neither does a Danish lawyer whose balls have yet to drop, or a Greenlander whose balls never will.’
Jakob heaved a deep sigh. ‘Just tell me where you’re keeping Najak, and I’ll forget about everything else.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? Your job was to keep your mouth shut and close the case. The girl is already dead. But there are three more girls, remember?’ He looked around the room. ‘Where have you hidden the films? I’ll find them sooner or later. If you tell me now, I’ll let you die quickly.’
‘You don’t want a child’s blood on your hands,’ Jakob said hoarsely.
‘All blood tastes the same, you pathetic little Dane.’
Jakob’s eyes scanned the room frantically. There was no escape. He took a step back towards the upended coffee table, and then another one, all the while keeping his eyes pinned on the Faroese, although without looking him directly in the eyes. When his foot touched the edge of the grey rug, he spun around and in the same movement snatched two big rocks from the floor, and then stood up again. The rocks, the size of a man’s fist, now weighed heavily in his hands. His fingers clutched their rough surface and found a grip in the small hollows.
‘What’s this?’ the Faroese said. ‘You want to play with rocks now?’ He pointed to the wound on Jakob’s forehead. ‘I thought you’d had enough of that.’
Jakob’s arms were slightly bent. Ready to attack. ‘Go back to your masters and tell them that I’m not one of their dogs.’
The man from the Faroe Islands grunted angrily. ‘I have no masters, Dane. Don’t you get it?’
‘Just piss off home to your masters,’ Jakob hissed, and bashed the two rocks together in front of his chest. ‘You’re nothing but a miserable lackey.’
The red-bearded man’s eyes burned with rage. ‘I’m from the Faroe Islands,’ he shouted, taking two long strides towards Jakob, brandishing the knife. ‘I’m my own master.’
Jakob took his movement as an attack, and lunged at the man. He swung his right arm, but the Faroese had stopped. Jakob’s hand with the heavy rock continued through the air, pulling him with it and exposing him to his opponent. He only had time to make a half-turn with his head before a hard blow collided with his temple.
52
Jakob’s head was pounding so fiercely that he could barely open his eyes. The light from the ceiling lamp cut him like the repeated slashing of a sharp blade. Mixed with the pain and the metallic taste that filled him to bursting, the light triggered a wave of choking nausea in him. He felt the air going in and out in gusts between his lips. He tried to swallow the viscous lumps of saliva in his throat. He gulped again. Pressed his lips together until they grew white.
> He opened his eyes a little. Two narrow slits. Pupils sweeping across the floor. He recognised the floorboards. The grey rug. The furniture. One side of his face lay flat against the floor. It was one with the floor. His body felt heavy. As if it was stuck to the floor. Everything was spinning. His nausea surged and he had to tighten his throat and hold his breath in order not to give in to it.
Not far from his face, he could see a hand. It was alive. Or it seemed alive. It reacted when he thought. The fingers twitched. Not much, but enough. His eyes closed. His gaze contracted behind his eyelids into two black points surrounded by burning red. Then he looked again. Shifted his focus. In little gusts. Like his breathing. Blood was growing from the floor close to the hand. Behind the blood lay an ulo. Its blade was stained with dried and fresh blood. The handle was completely dark.
His thoughts were alive.
He could see and feel.
He was able to breathe.
His gaze followed the floor. Past the hand, the ulo and the blood. Until it reached the body. The body, which lay so far from his face that it couldn’t be his. His concentration failed him. His gaze zoomed helplessly in and out as he attempted to focus. The blood. The pale body. The red hair. The beard. The bloody lumps along the white skin.
He tried to work out if he was still in one piece. It felt like it. Stuck but intact.
The sound of something living pierced his thoughts. Footsteps. Shoes moving across the floor not far from him.
His gaze searched the floorboards again until it found the shoes and the two legs moving them around. He looked up. Two hands drying themselves on one of his tea towels. The face. The dark eyes.
FOSSILISED LIFE
53
NUUK, 13 AUGUST 2014
Matthew briefly considered going home and changing his clothes, but decided against it. Instead he walked straight from Radiofjeldet and down to Block 2. As he walked, he texted Tupaarnaq about Else and Arnaq. She replied straightaway that it was probably better to have a sister than a father, given that fathers were invariably idiots.
A few minutes later Matthew had reached the address Ivalo had given him. The long building was almost as derelict as Block 17, but it was constructed differently: each front door here opened out onto a shared gallery that ran the full length of the block.
On entering from the yard, he noticed a round sign in red and white with a red line across a black outline of a man taking a piss. The message could not be misinterpreted, and yet a strong stench of urine still lingered.
The front door was blue. The paint was cracked and discoloured, but what he could see of the apartment through the windows looked fine. There were floral curtains in the windows on either side of the door; through one window he could see right into a clean and neat kitchen.
The second time he knocked, the door was opened by a petite woman in her early fifties, who peered out from the crack between the door and the frame.
‘No junk mail,’ she said wearily when she saw his face.
‘Junk mail?’ he echoed, perplexed.
‘Yes—that’s what you’re handing out, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ He frowned. ‘I’m a journalist and I have some questions for you.’
‘Oh, are you? I thought you were one of those parents who go round with their children raising money for school trips because they think it’s too dangerous for the children to be out on their own.’
‘My daughter is dead.’ Matthew felt his heart plummet inside him so fast that his knees nearly buckled. He had no idea where the words had come from, and he wished he could take them back. ‘I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. My name is Matthew and I’m looking for Paneeraq Poulsen. Do you know her?’
‘Yes,’ she said tentatively. ‘That’s me.’
‘I work for Sermitsiaq and I’m investigating an old case—four murders committed here in Nuuk in 1973.’
Paneeraq said nothing, but she studied him closely.
His fingertips on his left hand gently enclosed the ring finger on his right hand and started rubbing it. ‘As far as I’ve discovered, it was a case where the murder victims were possibly even more evil than whoever killed them, although the murders were brutal.’ He struggled to find the right words. ‘I got your address from a woman who works for the council, and now I’m here. It’s not an easy case to investigate. Everyone clams up like oysters.’
Her silence caused his hands to shake again.
Eventually she nodded slowly and pressed her lips together. ‘Just a minute,’ she said and closed the door.
A few doors further down, three young Greenlanders had come out into the gallery from another apartment. They were all smoking, and Matthew felt the craving for a cigarette. He went over to the gallery railings and leaned over to look down. There were only three cars parked in the yard between Block 1 and Block 2, and one of them was a wreck. Diagonally to his left, he could see a corner of the Arts Centre.
The door opened again, and he quickly turned around.
‘Do come in,’ Paneeraq said, and opened the door fully. ‘I’ve never told anyone what happened, but I’m fifty-three years old now, and I’ve nothing to live for except my grandfather. If I’m going to die, I might as well die shriven, and my grandfather is well into his eighties so he doesn’t cling to anything either.’
Matthew didn’t know what to say, so he bent down to unlace his boots.
‘We discussed it just now, before I let you in,’ she continued. ‘Once someone from the government hears about it, it’ll be common knowledge soon enough.’
‘I haven’t been talking to them,’ Matthew interjected. ‘It was an older woman I know from the council. She feels strongly about the appalling…’ He hesitated. ‘The appalling attitude towards women in so many villages.’
Paneeraq nodded with an empty smile, and then ushered him into the living room. ‘Well, let’s see.’ She pointed out a chair by the dining table. ‘We can sit there.’
The living room was divided into three small islands: the dining table, the sofa and the television, and a comfortable armchair in which an old man was dozing. He was slumped in his chair and almost hidden in an anorak like those Matthew had seen worn by the Greenlandic men who ran the stalls down on the square. A round, flat drum of the kind used for drum dancing was leaning against the armchair.
‘That’s my grandfather,’ Paneeraq said, placing two cups of steaming black coffee on the table. ‘He doesn’t say a lot these days.’
She pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Matthew. Her face was round, her eyes small and her eyebrows sparse. Her hair was thick and short, and brushed to the left. There were traces of grey in the black.
‘What would you like to know?’ she said, without looking at him.
‘I’m working on a case from the seventies,’ he began hesitantly. ‘The four murders I mentioned just now. The way I see it, the murders happened because of child abuse within the family. Now, the girls didn’t kill their own fathers, of course, but someone close to them had had enough and took action on the girls’ behalf.’
‘And you think I’m one of the girls?’
Matthew’s fingers traced the side of the hot cup. ‘Yes, I do. But it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.’
The old man in the armchair let a wrinkled hand fall from the armrest and down onto the drum, where it tapped the taut skin. Not hard, but enough for it to catch Matthew’s attention.
‘I don’t mind talking about it.’ Paneeraq interrupted the drum, which fell silent immediately. Then she got up and went over to a small, dark-brown chest of drawers, where she lit two large white candles with Christian images. On one candle was a picture of Jesus in the style of an icon, and on the other the Virgin Mary.
Matthew spotted a small, fossilised sea urchin between the candles. ‘Do you have such fossils up here?’ he asked, smiling at her.
‘No, it was given to me a long time ago by a good friend.’ She returned to her chair at the table and took a si
p of her coffee. ‘What would you like to know?’
Matthew shifted in his seat. ‘When I started my investigation, I thought it was an unsolved murder case, but that has changed.’
‘Changed to what?’
‘Child abuse.’
Paneeraq heaved a deep sigh and stared at the table.
‘It really is quite all right if you don’t want to talk about it,’ Matthew said.
She shrugged. ‘Well, you’re here now.’ Her gaze moved towards the candles. ‘Every girl who is abused remains a lost and lonely child her entire life. The pain of being betrayed so profoundly by the very people who should have protected her never goes away. The pain is there every day, and it hurts just as much now as it did back when she was nine or twelve years old and crying herself to sleep every night.’
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ Matthew asked, taking out his mobile.
‘No…but if you publish your story, I would like to see it first, especially if you mention my name.’
‘I haven’t decided yet. Would you prefer me not to mention your name?’
‘Do what you think is best.’ She stared emptily at his mobile. ‘I wasn’t abused at home, but many other things happened.’
Matthew looked up. The words in Jakob’s notebook about Paneeraq, who could barely walk and was terrified of her father, had had a profound impact on him, but he didn’t want to bring up the notebook or Jakob. ‘Oh? I thought the killings were some sort of reprisal for the sexual assault of—’
‘Us girls?’
He nodded slowly.
‘They might have been, but there was more to it than that. I don’t know what it was like for the other three girls at home, but I do know what the four of us had been through and were still a part of after we returned to Nuuk, just under a year before my parents were killed.’
‘I thought you lived in Nuuk? With your parents?’ Matthew felt Jakob’s suspicions about the girls and their fathers crumbling between his fingers.
The Girl without Skin Page 20
