Matthew grabbed a handle on one of the double doors and pulled it open. ‘I’m pretty sure we’re wasting our time here as well,’ he told Malik wearily. ‘They’re never going to tell us anything about a suspect they’ve just arrested for the murder of one of their own.’
‘We’ll get something, don’t you worry. I’ll just ask for Ulrik.’
Matthew nodded and wandered over to a noticeboard covered with leaflets and posters. He still wasn’t able to write about the murder of Officer Aqqalu, and the whole business with the iceman was so bizarre and confusing that it would take a miracle to get an actual story out of it—at least until he knew more about the dead man than he did now.
Malik soon returned. ‘We’re out of luck. Ulrik appears to be off sick today.’
Matthew nodded. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. He’s had a rough few days.’
‘He’s not normally such a wuss,’ Malik said. ‘But you’re probably right. He’ll need to man up if he wants to climb the greasy pole as far as Lyberth has.’ He looked towards the door leading to the offices. ‘Ottesen will be out in a moment, though. They told me he has something for us.’
‘For us?’
‘Yes, I asked yesterday if he knew anything about those gruesome murders back in the seventies. I guess it must be about that.’ Malik walked up to a vending machine. ‘Fancy a brew?’
‘No, thanks, and definitely not coffee.’
‘I think I’ll have a hot chocolate.’ Malik sounded undecided.
‘I still think I’ll pass,’ Matthew said. His thoughts felt muddled. About the 1970s case, the mummy, even the hot chocolate. But it was the woman who had been arrested for the murder of Aqqalu he couldn’t stop thinking about.
‘Oh, shit…’
Matthew looked at Malik, who was flapping one hand in the air while holding a steaming cup in the other.
Malik smiled towards the woman behind the reception counter. ‘I’m sorry, but this hot chocolate is really…well, hot.’ His face contorted in a grimace of apology. ‘Sorry.’
The door to their left opened and Ottesen appeared. ‘Hi, guys, good to see you again. This way, please.’
They walked down a short corridor to an office.
‘I’m glad you’re here because I’ve come across something you might want to take a closer look at.’ Ottesen produced a brown leather notebook from a buff envelope and placed it on the desk between them. ‘I was in our archives earlier, and I found quite a lot about the murders from 1973, but I can’t give you access to our files because some of the information relates to people who are still alive. Relatives, witnesses and so on.’
‘Of course,’ Matthew said.
‘But I found this,’ Ottesen continued. ‘It wasn’t filed as a part of the report or logged as evidence or anything like that. It’s a private diary.’ He leaned forward. ‘It contains notes on the case, but nothing official. It’s just one man’s thoughts, interspersed with various observations about nature and life in Nuuk in 1973.’
Ottesen slid the notebook towards Matthew, who opened it carefully and flicked through it. All the pages were yellow and densely covered with pencil.
‘Just pop it back in the envelope before you go, will you?’ Ottesen said. Then he added: ‘I can’t wait to see what you’re made of, Matt.’
‘Thanks,’ Matthew said, his voice uncertain. ‘Who’s the author?’
Ottesen glanced towards the door, then looked back at Matthew with a determined expression. ‘His name was Jakob Pedersen. He was one of the first police officers to investigate sexual assaults of girls up here. I think he’d worked on similar cases in Denmark, because men with that sick urge are found all over the world. Jakob became obsessed with the case of the men who were cut open, but he disappeared without a trace at the same time the murders stopped.’
Matthew tapped the notebook a couple of times, nodding to himself. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘You’re welcome, but you didn’t get it from me. I don’t care what you do with it or what you have to say about it. Only you didn’t get the information from this building—are we clear?’
‘Of course,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ll invent a source. An uncle or something. But can I ask you about the woman you’ve arrested in connection with the current case?’
Ottesen got up. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’ The others took their cue from him and stood up too. Malik shook his hand and said something in Greenlandic. Ottesen’s reply was brief.
Back at reception, Matthew stopped in his tracks. The woman he had bumped into outside Cafe Mamaq was standing at the counter. She was wearing the same tight black clothing. The same scuffed boots. The tattoos wound their way up and down her arms, over what he could see of her back and around her neck. Her head was just as smooth as the first time he’d seen her, only this time she wasn’t armed.
Matthew tugged Ottesen’s arm. ‘I’m sorry—who is she?’
‘Her?’ Ottesen said. ‘She’s the woman you were just asking about. We arrested her in connection with the killing on the ice cap, but we had no evidence against her except her past, and the items we confiscated turned out to be clean.’ He shrugged in exasperation. ‘She’s a wild animal. I’d like to keep her here but I can’t, and she seems to know the law inside out.’
He said something in Greenlandic loud enough for the woman to hear. She didn’t look up, but Matthew could tell from her back that she had heard it.
Ottesen fixed his eyes on Matthew’s. ‘If anyone asks, you came here today to talk to me about her, and I told you that you can’t write anything yet. That’s it.’
The woman disappeared through the door, showing absolutely no sign of acknowledging them, yet Matthew was convinced that she had noted every feature on their faces. He felt as if she’d looked inside him and penetrated his thoughts.
‘Who is she?’ he asked again.
‘Her name is Tupaarnaq Siegstad,’ Ottesen replied. He sighed. ‘She’s been in the care of Danish Social Services and the Prison Service ever since she shot and killed her mother and her two younger sisters and stabbed her father to death at the age of fifteen. They say she just sat in the middle of the carnage, covered in blood, clutching her mother’s ulo. She had pretty much ripped out her father’s guts. That’s why we brought her in. She only moved back to Greenland a week ago, straight from serving a long sentence in Denmark. Oh, and one of the first things she did when she returned to Nuuk was to buy a rifle and an ulo.’
‘Did she kill her family here in Nuuk?’ Matthew asked.
Ottesen shook his head. ‘No, that was in Tasiilaq, on the east coast. Her father had shot a polar bear three days earlier. I don’t know why I remember that bit. He’d also shot a walrus that same month. He was something of a local hero over there. A highly respected hunter and fisherman who ignored quotas and restrictions. Then again, global warming is a far greater threat to polar bears and walruses than hunters are.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’ve got work to do.’
They said goodbye to Ottesen and left through the doors in the middle of the long, black and brown building.
‘What did Ottesen say just as Tupaarnaq left?’ Matthew wanted to know.
‘That it was a woman who had injured Ulrik during an arrest, but they’d had to let her go.’
Matthew frowned. ‘Injured? How?’
‘Search me,’ Malik said, throwing up his hands. ‘I think he only said it so that she would hear it.’
Matthew nodded.
‘Do you want a lift home?’ Malik offered.
‘No, I’m happy to walk.’ Matthew’s eyes followed Tupaarnaq Siegstad down the street. Her back was straight, her footsteps hard and firm. He shook his head. ‘I need to get a couple of things over at the Nuuk Centre.’
‘Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow, then. You take care, won’t you?’
‘Yes, you too…Oh, hang on. What did you ask Ottesen about when we were in his office?’
‘I asked him why he gave us the notebook.’
Matthew looked at him quizzically. ‘And?’
‘He said, “Karlo was my father.”’
‘Karlo?’
‘Yes, Karlo. Apparently he’s mentioned in the notebook.’
17
As soon as Malik had left, Matthew tried to catch up with Tupaarnaq. She walked briskly and steadily, her stride long and determined. Even from a distance he could sense how hard her heels hit the road.
She had a jumper tied round her waist. The rays of the sun played with the colours of her tattoos.
She turned down the road that led to the apartments on the edge of the headland. To their left was a series of more modern, six-storey blocks with impressive, colourful decorations the full height of the buildings, while to their right, where the rocks sloped steeply down to the icy waters of the North Atlantic, lay clusters of wooden houses of various colours, sizes and shapes.
Matthew was forced to jog to get closer to her. He was well aware that his noisy footsteps had long since given him away and she knew she was being followed. Her back spoke its own language. Everything she didn’t show or say was expressed through its muscles and movements. It listened. It watched. He guessed that the tattoos also covered the skin under the black clothing. Perhaps not a single inch of her body was free from the chokehold of the plants.
The road ended abruptly after a few hundred metres, but Tupaarnaq carried on across the glittering blue-grey rocks and the tufts of grass between them. The sun was low in the sky, and Matthew watched his own shadow jump from rock to rock.
The two long housing blocks at the edge of the headland were shabby, bordering on derelict. The facades were patchy and stained from decades of neglect. A scaffold-like structure of concrete, red-painted wood and iron railings ran alongside each block, providing every apartment with its own narrow balcony. These blocks stood in stark contrast to the new ones further up the road, where everything was attractive and beautifully maintained. These dying buildings were known as Blocks 16 and 17, and Matthew remembered reading about several violent incidents here. Fires and a murder in 2013, when a young man was thrown from Block 17 and broken by the bedrock in front of it.
Tupaarnaq walked on across the rocks. Her stride had grown longer and more aggressive. Then she stopped and turned around. She wasn’t very far from Matthew. She stared right into him.
‘Tupaarnaq?’ he asked tentatively, to break the awkward silence and to give himself a vague alibi. If all else fails, his editor always said, just play the dumb Dane.
Tupaarnaq was still silent, but she continued to stare at him. Her face was tilted slightly forwards.
He didn’t look away, although he desperately wanted to. He had such a powerful urge to look at her, and yet at the same time couldn’t bear to.
She stepped towards him. ‘You reek of man,’ she said angrily. ‘Get lost, you disgusting pig.’
‘My name is Matthew,’ he began. ‘I work for Sermitsiaq and I’m investigating an old case where some men were murdered and cut up with an ulo.’
Her eyes burned into his; the feeling was so intense that he could no longer keep his eyes fixed on hers. His gaze drifted over her face, over the pale freckles around her nose and on her cheeks. Her eyes were not black, but brown. A shade of brown so deep that, up close, they gleamed like polished teak with a hint of gold.
‘Why are you telling me that?’ Her voice was low—it felt as if it were crawling along the ground and wrapping itself around his legs.
‘Because…’
The corner of her mouth twitched briefly. ‘Tell me,’ she snarled.
‘Because you know what happens when a man is killed with such a knife.’ His thoughts stumbled over one another. ‘How long it takes him to die. The agony.’
In a flash, she reached out and pinched the sinew stretching from his neck down to his left shoulder. He slumped to his knees instantly, his face contorted in pain. Her fingers dug into his flesh.
‘I damaged my neck in an accident,’ he managed to croak.
She merely tightened her grip in response. The muscles in her arm tensed all the way to her shoulder and across the sinews of her neck before she released him.
He curled up, then, after a moment, rested one hand on the ground and tried to push himself up.
‘This conversation is over,’ she snapped, yet she stayed where she was, watching him as he struggled to a sitting position. ‘You dropped your notebook,’ she added, nudging it towards him with the toe of her boot.
‘Take a look at it,’ he said, his voice still strangled.
She hesitated, but turned her gaze from him to the brown notebook on the ground beside him. ‘Why?’
‘A police officer here investigated four murders committed with an ulo. He ended up being the prime suspect, and then disappeared into thin air. I’m wondering if it’s his body that has just been found on the ice cap—if he was murdered too.’
She pressed her lips together and inhaled deep into her lungs. Then she leaned forward and picked up the notebook. ‘Four unsolved murders,’ she whispered to herself. Carefully she opened the notebook, and her fingers trailed its pages as she skimmed them, pausing at certain sections. ‘Read it yourself, and you’ll find your killer.’
Matthew looked up at her in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I know who did it,’ she said, tossing the book down to him. She turned around and started to leave.
‘Wait,’ Matthew called out. ‘Will I see you again?’
‘Maybe.’ Her back did the talking. Her face was done with him for today.
He watched her walk to the corner of Block 17, where she disappeared behind the grey and white concrete. Shortly afterwards, she reappeared on a second-floor balcony. She didn’t look at him. Only at the sea.
Matthew fished out his cigarettes from his jeans pocket and lit one. The first drags were long and deep, until he started to calm down. Tupaarnaq was no longer on her balcony. His gaze scanned the rocks and then the sea. It travelled as far as the mountain peaks several kilometres away. Then he looked down at the notebook and placed his hand on its ageing cover. His fingers crawled right to the edge and under the leather.
18
He began by skimming through the notebook. Every now and then he would look up towards the balcony where Tupaarnaq had been standing.
The contents were as Ottesen had described them: one man’s private scribbles about the cases he had worked on, and the landscape and culture that surrounded him in early 1970s Nuuk—which back then was always referred to by its Danish name, Godthåb.
Jakob Pedersen had several theories about the killings, and gave detailed descriptions of the way each murder had been executed: where the intestines were, and how the injuries had been inflicted. At the very back a large drawing had been glued in place. Before it were some pages written in another hand.
There were several short lists dotted around the notebook; one of four male names caught Matthew’s attention. Each man’s age and address were listed next to his name, and a little further down was the name of a girl, whose age was also listed. All the girls were under twelve. The obvious conclusion was that two of the girls were the ones Leiff had mentioned. The ones who were never seen again. The names of the four men matched those in the post-mortem reports, and the three in the November 1973 newspaper article.
One page in the notebook was mostly blank, except for these words:
A box was left outside my home tonight. After the rock was thrown through my window, I think. It contained a projector and some film reels. I have viewed the first two.
That was all. There were two marks that looked as if they had been made with the point of a pencil, as if Jakob Pedersen had wanted to write more, but couldn’t.
However, there were also several other pages that Jakob had covered densely from top to bottom with beautiful, poetic thoughts and observations about nature. The more Matthew read, the keener he became to know more about the author of the diary.
I have lived here once.
In this place. Drawn every breath of the North Atlantic air and sought refuge in a stone cottage—half buried in the ground with grass growing across its roof. I have lived here once. Slept under heavy blankets and furs. Felt the cold dance on my face and sear my lungs, spreading to every fibre of my body. I have lived here once. Lived with a new god in my thoughts, but with the words of the old gods pulsating in my veins. I have lived here once—marked by nature’s toughness. Allowed myself to be shaped by the wind, the breeze and the frost. Loved the mountains and the sea because they were my body and my blood. Loved the fog because it was my breath. Loved the cold because it was the grey and blue colours of my eyes and the soaring wings of the soul. I have lived here. I live here.
Matthew flicked back to the list of the four men and the names of the girls. The girls had to be their daughters, if Leiff’s comments about sexual abuse were to be believed. The men had to be those mentioned in the newspaper and the post-mortem reports, and there was also something about two of the daughters that hinted at a link. Jakob had put a cross and a question mark next to the name of the first victim’s daughter, Najak Rossing Lynge, which made Matthew wonder if Jakob had had his doubts about whether or not the girl was in fact dead. There were no marks by the names of the next two victims’ daughters, while a small heart had been drawn beside the last one, Paneeraq Poulsen. There was nothing by the men’s names.
Matthew’s fingers found the final page, and carefully unfolded the drawing. In the background were two sombre, slate-grey mountains, and between their round, worn peaks a sky of grey clouds, with the odd long streak of a delicate, endless turquoise. A porous fog floated over the blue and black sea at the foot of the mountains, a third peak erupting through the mist from the dark grave of the deep. It wasn’t a mountain like the others, though. It was a woman. Her shoulders lay beneath the mirror of the sea, but she was visible from her collarbones up. Her neck was arched, and her head leaning backwards, exposing her throat. Her blue-black hair flowed like wide rivers from her head and merged with the sea, right where the tops of her shoulders could be made out as they broke the surface. Her eyes were two bottomless wells, and her lips as black as her eyes. Her skin glowed grey and yellow, like smoke. She looked like a craggy mountain. Like a dead body found in the icy sea. But she was alive. At the bottom right-hand corner, someone had written Najak.
The Girl without Skin Page 7