His hair was plastered to his face, and he was sweating profusely. His eyes shone as if he were in the grip of a violent fever. ‘She killed my father…She killed all of them…Piss off, you Danish bastard.’
‘Get away from her,’ Matthew yelled. Everything inside him was shaking, and he raised the harpoon. ‘Get away from her, you psycho! You’re sick in the head!’
‘She needs to be fucked,’ Ulrik shouted back, his shoulders heaving and sinking rapidly.
Tupaarnaq spiralled her lower body violently and Ulrik was temporarily thrown off-balance.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you cunt?’ he screamed, turning back to her. He raised the knife and jammed it into the tattooed leaves on her left side.
She cried out behind the gag. Her body arched from the bed like a bow and twisted in agony from the blade, which was now buried deep under the roots of the plants. Her scream ebbed away, but rose again when Ulrik pulled out the knife and raised his arm to strike again.
Matthew roared at the top of his lungs.
The sound hung still in the air.
Ulrik’s upper body jerked. His arm with the knife flopped onto the bed. His other hand travelled across his skin, and his fingers felt the bloody harpoon tip sticking out of the right side of his chest. For a moment he gritted his teeth and pressed his eyes shut, then he got up from the bed. The harpoon’s wooden handle seesawed behind his back.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ he growled, and transferred the knife to his left hand.
Matthew could see Tupaarnaq turn and bend a leg, ready to kick. He clutched the ulo in his hand. The kick hit Ulrik’s lower back and sent him flying. He let out a roar and nearly keeled over, but stayed on his feet. He raised his knife and lunged at Matthew, who managed to avoid the stumbling man and at the same time swung the ulo with all his strength in front of Ulrik. The soft, diagonal arc of the blade was stopped halfway by Ulrik’s neck.
Ulrik fell to his knees, clutching his throat. The blood poured out between his fingers and his lips. Somewhere in his throat his breathing started to bubble. His gaze travelled in short leaps up to Matthew’s face. His eyes were crazed. The noises coming from his throat grew sharper. Then they turned into hoarse gurgling.
There were voices coming from downstairs. Abelsen howled like an animal.
Matthew pushed Ulrik over with his foot. He dropped the ulo and heard it clatter onto the floor. Ulrik’s arms and chest were covered in blood. His eyes were closed.
‘Are you badly hurt?’ Matthew whispered as he knelt down at the side of the bed to remove the gag from Tupaarnaq’s mouth.
‘Cut me free,’ she croaked. She was sweating.
He reached for the ulo and rose to cut the strips that were keeping her restrained.
She wrapped the leaves of her arms around herself so they merged with the dark foliage of her body. ‘Cover me up.’
Her voice was drowned out by the sound of boots stomping up the stairs. Matthew grabbed a blanket and put it around her shoulders.
The noise of the boots stopped and became movement in the air. ‘Hello?’ a voice called out from the stairs.
‘I’m not going back to prison,’ Tupaarnaq whispered, clutching Matthew’s jumper.
He looked at the blood on the bed, and then into her eyes. ‘Just hang in there.’
The heart-shaped freckle on her nose glowed, while her eyelids closed.
SKIN
67
NUUK, 16 AUGUST 2014
Matthew raised his head when the door opened. He looked around in confusion, then sighed into the mattress, where the side of his face was still outlined in the sheet.
Ottesen closed the door softly behind him. ‘The doctors say she’s still unconscious. Were you asleep?’
‘No,’ Matthew said from the chair, then he shook his head and tilted his neck from side to side. ‘Yes, maybe I was.’ He looked up at Ottesen, who was wearing jeans and a black training top. ‘I don’t think she has woken up yet.’
‘She will,’ Ottesen said quietly, and came closer to the bed. ‘You don’t seem to be answering your mobile today, so I decided to stop by to see how you were. I thought I might find you here.’
In the hospital bed between the two men, Tupaarnaq was resting under a thick, white quilt that was wrapped tightly around her. Except for the spot where Matthew’s head had dislodged it. On the other side there was a steel stand with two drips hanging from the crossbar. One contained blood, the other saline. Tupaarnaq’s pulse ran in monotonous, green jumps across a small monitor.
‘We need you to call in at the station to finalise your witness statement,’ Ottesen said. Then he nodded towards the bed. ‘The same goes for her when she wakes up.’
‘If she wakes up,’ Matthew whispered, his eyes returning to the quilt. ‘And I told you everything yesterday.’
‘Yes, I know, but…the body count is quite high, wouldn’t you say? They’ll double-check everything in Copenhagen, so I want to be sure that it all adds up one hundred per cent.’
Matthew rubbed his eyes and ran his hand over his nose and the fine, pale stubble on his chin. ‘Abelsen?’
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Ottesen said with a smile. ‘We have quite a lot on him now. When we freed him from the armchair yesterday he was screaming and shouting about the murder and mutilation of Aqqalu. He’s denying everything now, but several of us heard him so he’ll get his just deserts once we get some people up here to gather technical evidence.’
‘And Najak?’
Ottesen shook his head. ‘We found nothing out there. The shipping container had been clinically cleaned and torched with petrol. It reeked to high heaven. But forensics will be taking samples of every inch of that warehouse, so who knows.’
Matthew nodded. ‘Ulrik killed Aqqalu—you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Ottesen nodded grimly and looked past the bed and out through the window behind Matthew. ‘Jakob said it was an accident.’ He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. ‘It’s a real shame we didn’t work that out before Ulrik lost his mind. There was no need for it to go so wrong.’
‘My guess is that Abelsen was putting pressure on him, and he probably had many more skeletons in the cupboard that you’ve yet to discover.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Ottesen said, exhaling heavily between his lips. He followed Matthew’s gaze, which was fixed on Tupaarnaq.
‘Listen…’ Ottesen hesitated. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about the murders in ’73 and the mummy?’
‘The Faroe Islands man?’ Matthew asked, glancing up briefly.
‘Yes, and the other dead men. I’m starting to realise that you have a better handle on this case than I thought.’
‘If you know that he was Faroese, you know just as much as I do. Abelsen appears to be using his son, Bárdur, as his gorilla now.’
‘The son has vanished without a trace, but we’ll find him. No, I was thinking more about the other men. I want to know who killed them, because their killer might still be alive.’
‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said wearily, burying his face in his hands.
‘I think you do.’
‘It’s in the notebook.’
‘But the notebook is gone.’
Matthew raised his head and looked at Ottesen, while his hands slipped slowly down the sides of the chair. ‘Gone? How can it be gone?’
‘You said you gave it to Jakob, but he thinks you took it with you when you ran down to Abelsen, so…well, it’s gone.’
‘That training top you’re wearing,’ Matthew said. ‘Does it mean that anything I say will stay between the two of us, just like when we had pizza?’
‘I’m Karlo’s son, and I would like to know if my father…I would like to know if the killer from back then is still alive. Especially now that Jakob has resurfaced.’
‘The killer is dead,’ Matthew said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘The killer died a few
years ago, yes.’
‘Funny, that was about the time that…’ Ottesen drummed his fingers on his trouser leg. ‘Oh, okay. I get it now.’ He shook his head. ‘But they knew where she was all along. Everyone just thought that she had decided to move back to her village.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘I think you might be right…Anyway, I’d better get going. Now, you won’t forget to drop by the station, will you?’
Matthew nodded. His eyes began to close as he heard the door to the corridor open.
‘Hey?’
Ottesen’s voice made Matthew look up.
‘I hear you lost your job at the newspaper,’ the police officer said. ‘We’re still looking for a consultant, if you’re interested.’
Matthew’s eyes were focused on the green pulse, but he was staring without seeing. He nodded slowly.
‘I would actually prefer to hire you as a kind of investigative assistant.’ Ottesen smiled broadly. ‘An external consultant, I mean.’
‘I don’t think I’d make a very good Sherlock,’ Matthew said, shaking his head.
‘Never mind…We’ll talk about it some other time.’ Ottesen drummed his fingers on the door. ‘Take care, Matt Cave,’ he said, and left.
Matthew’s mobile had started vibrating in his pocket during Ottesen’s visit. Now he took it out and looked at it. He was startled when the phone started buzzing again. He checked the number and rejected the call.
The room fell silent. Tupaarnaq lay locked in a faraway world of her own. The fluorescent tubes above them crackled faintly.
Matthew’s mobile beeped again, but this time only briefly. He got up and walked to the window, opening the new text message.
Please drop by the office for a chat, Matthew. We’ll work something out. Everyone wants to talk to you. KNR, Nuuk-TV, DR, TV2, CNN and CBC. Also Norway’s TV2. You get the picture. It’s gone viral. It’s not every day that a country is hit by such extreme and overlapping scandals. See you soon. Ideally now. It’s your story, all of it. Nothing is off-limits. We’ll print everything.
There was a second text message. Matthew hadn’t noticed it arrive.
Hi, this is Arnaq. Are you really my brother or are you taking the piss?
The light in the ward was so bright that he could see Tupaarnaq in the window. He pressed his forehead against her reflection. It was cold and she disappeared instantly in his shadow. He replied to Arnaq that they shared a father, and that he was indeed her half-brother. And that he was twelve years older than her.
As soon as he had sent the message, he put his mobile on the bedside table and went to turn off the light. The room didn’t grow very dark but it was more peaceful. Almost without making a sound, he slipped down onto the chair beside the bed and took out a small, black notebook from his jacket.
‘I’m going to read to you,’ he said softly, without looking at Tupaarnaq. He wanted to hold her hand but he didn’t have the courage. Instead, he placed his left hand on the sheet, close to hers. He held the notebook in his right hand. ‘Perhaps you’ll hear it.’
‘I’ll climb to the top of the mountain and let the serenity, the air and the loneliness enter my thoughts. Even though it might be the very loneliness and longing I’m trying to escape. But I think that’s the beauty of the mountains and their peaks. Becoming one with loneliness. My soul is old. The mountain is its body, the brook its blood and the fog its breath. I can feel its breath. Its life. Its soul in me. And then I realise that there’s no such thing as loneliness. We are all alive in the same world.’
The tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks as he read on.
‘If I stand still, I’ll turn to stone. If I stand still, life can reach me and touch me. My deepest fear and longing are encompassed in the same thought. One day I will flee so high up the mountain that its pulsating stone heart will take me in and let me feel what it means to be still. So still that I can’t hear anything. But feel everything. While turning to stone.’
He closed the notebook. ‘I’ve started writing down my thoughts to my daughter.’
He felt movement on his hand. Fingers searching. He turned over his hand and opened his palm. It was the first time he felt her skin.
MADS PEDER NORDBO is a Danish writer who lives in Greenland and works at the town hall in Nuuk. He holds degrees in literature, communications and philosophy from the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Stockholm. He is the author of five novels; his two latest books will be published in eighteen languages. The Girl Without Skin is the first to be published in English.
CHARLOTTE BARSLUND is a Scandinavian translator. She has translated novels by Peter Adolphsen, Mikkel Birkegaard, Thomas Enger, Karin Fossum, Steffen Jacobsen, Carsten Jensen and Per Petterson, as well as a wide range of classic and contemporary plays. She lives in the UK.
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Copyright © Mads Peder Nordbo and JP/Politikens Hus A/S, 2017 Translation copyright © Charlotte Barslund, 2018
The moral right of Mads Peder Nordbo to be identified as the author and Charlotte Barslund as the translator of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Originally published in Denmark as Pigen uden hud by Politikens Forlag, Copenhagen, 2017 First published in English by The Text Publishing Company, 2018
Cover design by Text
Cover photograph by Vadim Nefedov / iStock
Page design by Jessica Horrocks
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
ISBN: 9781925603835 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925626803 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
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