The Girl without Skin

by Mads Peder Nordbo

  ‘But I thought the ice cap was larger back when the Norsemen were here?’

  The curator looked up. ‘Yes, it was, and that’s what’s bothering me. My theory is that there might have been a mountain cabin somewhere nearby.’

  ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that he was found naked and wrapped in fur in a crevasse…’

  ‘You’re still fishing for a violent death?’

  Matthew nodded. ‘He could easily have been killed fighting an Inuit, or been chucked into the crevasse as a sacrifice, couldn’t he?’

  ‘A human sacrifice that late in the Middle Ages would be atypical, but living conditions were probably extreme in the last few decades the Scandinavians were here, so we can’t rule it out.’ He combed his dense beard with his fingers. ‘When times are hard, people sometimes throw morality and ethics overboard.’

  ‘But what about a battle?’

  ‘You’re suggesting he might have been killed by an Inuit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It just so happens there were no Inuit anywhere in south-west Greenland when the Norsemen arrived, so it was actually their country rather than the Inuit’s, but the Norsemen’s many trips to the north attracted the Inuit, who began coming south, and so in that respect the Inuit came closer. It’s possible that the Inuit developed a taste for the Norsemen’s sheep, which were easy to catch and very tasty…so different from the fish and seals which the Inuit had lived on for generations. And yes, it’s also possible that it might have been the Inuit who expelled the Norsemen from their settlements.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Matthew said, taking out his mobile. ‘Let me just make some notes in case we go for that angle…great. Okay, so you’re saying that the Danes, who came later, didn’t take the land from the Inuit, seeing as the Inuit had themselves stolen it from the Norsemen three hundred years earlier?’

  ‘It’s a plausible theory, but we can’t prove it. Besides, if I kick you now, it doesn’t give you the right to kick me in twenty years, does it?’

  ‘So the Inuit arrived in Greenland after the Norsemen, and then they wandered down and into the land of the Norsemen?’

  ‘Yes, that part we can prove. It’s just the business with battles and wars which is dubious, even though the Historia Norvegiae states that Norse hunters came across small men in the north, whom the Norsemen named skrællinger, and that these small men got “white wounds” if they were slightly injured, but would bleed violently when fatally wounded.’ He gave a light shrug. ‘You might well ask yourself why it was so important to pass on to posterity the bit about superficial and fatal injuries, unless it was because it related to battle, especially if we bear in mind that the same passage states that these skrællinger used walrus tusks and sharp stones for weapons.’

  ‘Hello, Ottesen?’ The pilot’s voice could be heard over the headsets, and attracted everyone’s attention. ‘Ottesen, could you come over here and take a look? I think we have a problem.’

  The three Danish archaeologists started to look around the cabin, whispering and nodding.

  ‘Is something wrong with the engine?’ Matthew wondered aloud.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Malik said quickly. His face was pressed against the window, his eyes aimed in the direction they were flying.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘Look down.’

  Matthew was aware of the curator leaning over him to get a look too, and moved his head close to the window. They were near the edge of the glacier. Beneath them the sea was dense with pack ice. In front of them the endless whiteness stretched out as far as the light and the eye could reach. It hurt his eyes. Millions of white crystals. Except in one place. One spot. Right where the Norseman mummy had been found and Aqqalu had kept watch. There the ice was glossy red.

  There was silence in the cabin. The only sound was the chop-chop of the rotors.

  ‘Is that…’ Matthew’s voice trailed off. ‘Is that Aqqalu?’

  ‘I know Aqqalu,’ Malik stuttered. ‘We were at school together.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I don’t know, but who else could it be?’

  The curator sank back into his seat. ‘Do you think it’s him? But what happened?’

  ‘Nanook,’ Malik whispered. He didn’t take his eyes off the ice beneath them. ‘I kept saying I should have played my drum before anyone slept here. You can’t just pull an old, dead soul into the light like that.’

  ‘We’re landing,’ Ottesen’s voice announced. ‘You all need to stay inside while I get out and secure the area. A Sikorsky will take off from Nuuk in ten minutes and fly here to meet me. You’ll stay in this helicopter and be sent back straightaway. Understand?’

  Matthew leaned close against the window. The ice was glistening. The red was glistening. Growing. The body of the helicopter turned and prepared to land on the spot where Aqqalu should have been waiting for them. Matthew didn’t know whether to look, but when Malik very slowly raised his camera and started pressing the shutter release, he too fixed his eyes on the ice beneath them.

  Aqqalu was naked. His clothes had been dumped in a pile not far from his body. He was lying on his back with his arms stretched out to the sides. He had been gutted from his groin to his breastbone. The sides of his stomach had been pulled apart, and were hanging over the ice. His abdominal cavity was black from dried blood, as were his skin and flesh, which were exposed. The bottom of his rib cage shone white amid the darkness and the red. His organs had been ripped out of him and were lying on the ice, while his intestines seemed to be missing completely. There was blood spatter a metre away from the body. In one place several metres.

  Malik gulped. ‘This was no polar bear.’

  The helicopter hit the ice unexpectedly hard, and they all jolted. Matthew’s head bumped against the windowpane.

  Ottesen jumped out and immediately signalled for the helicopter to take off.

  Matthew’s gaze settled on the small camp. He turned to the three archaeologists. ‘Did you move the mummy yesterday?’

  One of them shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s gone now,’ Matthew said, turning his face back to the cold glass. The red spot underneath them grew smaller and smaller. Aqqalu lay gutted in the middle of it, and Ottesen was kneeling close to him on the red crystals, which only yesterday had been Aqqalu’s warm blood.

  8

  Matthew was at his desk at Sermitsiaq, scrolling through Facebook without taking anything in. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had held a global scoop in his hands, only for it to slip through his fingers as it turned into a violent murder.

  His iceman article was open on the big screen, while Facebook was up on the smaller screen on his laptop in the docking station, where his mailbox was usually open. The article was ready to be uploaded, but it was impossible now. They had orders not to release any information about the two bodies. Not a single word, no photographs, about the iceman or the murder of Officer Aqqalu. These orders had come from on high, and his editor had stressed that they mustn’t compromise the police investigation.

  Matthew would still have liked to send his article about the Norseman mummy out into the world, and he had defended his position by saying that the archaeologists and the museum curator could all vouch for the discovery, but it made no difference to his editor. It’s out of my hands, Matt, he had said. This is a small community. We have to listen to one another, and right now I’m listening to the people who are trying to find a police killer. If you leak anything, he had added with a weary look, then you’re finished here.

  Matthew sighed and closed the document with the article. Someone had left a plate with a piece of cake on his desk. A large, stale raspberry slice. The pastry was pale. Just like him. He rubbed his cheek. The stubble scratched his palm. Who the hell would gut a police officer and run off with a mummy? And in a town like Nuuk, of all places. Matthew pushed aside the plate.

  Nor could they write about Aqqalu until his family had been informed, and that would apparently take
some time, given that his older brothers had gone reindeer hunting somewhere out the back of beyond and wouldn’t be home for days.

  ‘Cheer up—it might never happen.’

  The editor’s voice made Matthew look up. His boss had a habit of pacing up and down between the desks and striking up conversations here and there.

  ‘We’ll find a solution, I promise. I’m sorry I came down so hard on you. It’s just that…well, when we get orders from above, we tend to listen to them. It’s the way things are done around here.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Matthew said, looking up at him. His boss was a short man around fifty. Fair-skinned, blond hair and at least twenty kilos heavier than his shirts could easily accommodate. ‘What happened to that police officer was just awful. It…he had been gutted.’

  ‘I know. I’ve never experienced anything like the last twenty-four hours here.’ The editor arched his back. His second-last shirt button had come undone, revealing a patch of white skin. ‘We’ll be able to publish something soon. We just need to wait for the right moment.’ He turned to leave, but then he stopped. ‘Listen…if you need to talk to a psychologist, I can get hold of one.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘No…no, but thank you. I just need to find another story, something else to focus on for a while.’

  His editor nodded: ‘If you want something to keep you occupied, there were some brutal murders here back in the 1970s that might be worth looking into. It was before my time, obviously, but someone mentioned them to me a few years ago. They’ve more or less been forgotten. I couldn’t find anything much when I looked into them, but the archives are a nightmare up here. Paper only. For every decade you go back, it’s actually more like a century. But there’s something about the death of Aqqalu that made me think of them again. Check with Leiff downstairs, if he’s in. He must have been a very young man back then, but he’s been with the newspaper for a hundred years. At least.’

  ‘Leiff? Okay. I’ll head down there now and see if there’s something in it. If there is, can I write about it?’

  ‘Yes, I should think so. I mean, it’s unlikely to create much of a stir after all these years, but if you find some hard evidence it might drag a few skeletons out of the closet and help make your name up here. After all, it’s still one of the most violent unsolved murder cases in the Arctic.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll head down now and take a look.’

  His editor nodded and rubbed one eye. ‘Sure, but don’t get your hopes up. Sometimes it can be good to just lose yourself in a cold case. That’s what I do when I want to take my mind off other things.’

  Matthew turned his gaze back to his screen.

  His editor patted his shoulder. ‘How are things going otherwise? I mean, here in Nuuk?’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Matthew said, glancing up at the chubby man’s pale face. ‘I take it a day at a time. It’s so different here. Amazing landscape.’

  ‘That’s good to know. And the apartment is okay?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. It’s great. Thank you.’

  ‘Let me know if you need anything, all right?’

  Matthew nodded and grabbed his mouse. He googled the 1970s murders but found nothing, and sighed as he pushed his keyboard away.

  If there really had been murders in Nuuk back in the 1970s that bore similarities to what had happened out on the ice, then he wanted to know more—if for no other reason than to have an angle when the time came to write about the murder of Officer Aqqalu.

  9

  Leiff was on his perch as always. No sooner had Matthew mentioned the murders than Leiff nodded, glanced around and suggested that the two of them go for a walk. That suited Matthew fine. He knew that, whatever Leiff told him, he could only benefit from the older man’s years of experience with the newspaper.

  Soon afterwards, the two men passed the big, rust-red Tele-Post building, and they continued along past the newest part of Brugseni supermarket. From there they took the pedestrian crossing between the supermarket and Hotel Hans Egede. The sun had moved well over the town and was bouncing off the long row of hotel windows, which flashed gold in the sun.

  ‘When I was ten years old, they built a huge apartment block over there.’ Leiff pointed to a large area of wasteland between the city centre and a row of shabby grey residential blocks. ‘Ambitions were high—back then it was the biggest housing development in all of Denmark. Two hundred metres long, and with three hundred and twenty apartments. But, as is so often the case, ambitions failed to allow for real life.’

  The area was now covered with colourful skateboard tracks, mounds of earth and climbing frames. At the far end were six light-grey housing blocks that had to be nearly as old and shabby as the one that had been demolished. On the end of one of the blocks someone had painted the giant face of a wrinkled, smiling old Inuit in shades of blue, turquoise and grey.

  ‘Many of the families who were moved to Nuuk,’ Leiff continued, ‘came from small villages, and they never settled in the claustrophobic apartment blocks miles from where they were born. I think it must be Denmark’s most disastrous policy ever, wanting everyone in Greenland to be Danish. The Inuit were used to being at one with nature in their villages. It was where they lived, where they caught their food, where they could breathe freely. They couldn’t breathe here, and the idea of living in a box high above the ground was foreign to them. Most people kept their windows open day and night, and some even lit fires in their living rooms. They were refugees in their own country.’ He stopped. ‘I know you didn’t ask about that, but it’s all connected.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘I want to know more about Nuuk’s history and its people, and nothing beats a guided tour like this…So what happened to the apartment block?’

  ‘Many of the old apartment blocks in Nuuk are still standing, although they’re falling apart. They’re all numbered, except for the giant that used to be here. It was called Block P, and it became a troubling symbol of Nuuk’s problems. It was demolished in 2012, so not all that long ago—but still fifty years too late, in my opinion.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘Have you had anything to eat today? You look a bit peaky.’

  ‘No, I didn’t have time, but it doesn’t matter. I want to know how Block P is connected to the murders I asked you about.’

  Leiff nodded and pointed to a cafe by Pisifikk supermarket on the corner of Hotel Hans Egede. ‘Let’s go to Cafe Mamaq.’ He scratched his nose. ‘It was in the early seventies, I believe…Yes, it must have been, because I turned eighteen that winter, so we’re talking late 1973. That was already a year of chaos. Everyone was up in arms about Greenland having to join the European Community as a part of Denmark, and about the oil crisis and everything else that was happening. But the murders still came as a bolt out of the blue, and it traumatised our small community. People were used to violence taking place behind closed doors, not out in the open for all to see. They found four men in their prime, flayed and gutted from their groins to their rib cages…their intestines ripped out of their bodies.’ He frowned. ‘When I think about it now, it was madness. Only it’s so long ago that few people remember.’

  ‘Flayed,’ Matthew echoed. His thoughts had screeched to a halt at the word. ‘Can you really flay a human being?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see them for myself,’ Leiff said. ‘But, yes, the rumours were that they’d been flayed. The skin had been removed from their bodies with an ulo—a kind of flensing knife—and then pulled off them. And, like I said, their insides had been cut out.’

  ‘Gutted and cleaned like a hunting trophy,’ Matthew said. ‘Just like Aqqalu.’

  ‘Exactly, but he wasn’t flayed—not as far as I’ve been told.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t look like it.’

  ‘Nor do I think anyone else here has been, since those four men in Block P.’ Leiff furrowed his brow. ‘But it’s a long time ago, and I believe the point of those killings in 1973 was to c
over something up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They were never solved, but I think the murders were motivated by revenge.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘Yes, because two girls also went missing in ’73.’

  ‘And was this all part of the same investigation? I mean, the one with the dead men?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Two girls aged ten or eleven years, as far as I recall. They were never found.’

  ‘So why did people think the murders were related?’

  ‘Because two of the dead men were the girls’ fathers.’

  Leiff and Matthew had reached the glass door to Pisifikk and Cafe Mamaq, and Leiff pushed it open. In the doorway Matthew brushed shoulders with a young woman with a shaved head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, briefly making eye contact with her. He could see no hint of make-up, but she wore an angry scowl. She looked him up and down. Did the same with Leiff. Then she pressed her lips together and marched on without a word.

  She was slim and tall, her body sinewy and strong. Her black combat trousers fitted her legs tightly, and ended in a pair of scuffed army boots. She wasn’t carrying a jumper or a jacket. She wore only a black sleeveless vest that was even closer-fitting than her trousers. An old rifle with a wooden stock and a telescopic sight was slung over one shoulder. In her right hand she carried an ulo. In her left was a bottle of water.

  Matthew looked after her as she disappeared. At her rifle. Her ulo. Her muscles. The colours.

  All the skin visible from her neck down was covered by tattoos of flowers and leaves. Not delicate and pretty, but lush and winding. He’d caught a brief glimpse of the soft crooks of her elbows, where on both her right and left arm a set of teeth grew from the deep foliage. Bared, snarling teeth. The size of fingers. Clenched in rage. A frozen, graphic flash of sneering skulls.

  ‘She’s something special, ilaa?’

  Matthew felt a hand on his shoulder and turned his attention back to Leiff. ‘Yes, she…Yes.’

  Leiff patted his stomach. ‘Right, let’s get something to eat. All this running around makes me hungry.’