The Girl without Skin

by Mads Peder Nordbo

  Matthew massaged his sore shoulder gently and glanced up at the deserted balcony, the girl’s name echoing in his thoughts. He put down the notebook, pulled his woollen jumper over his head and made a pillow of it against the rock so that he’d be more comfortable while reading the notebook properly from the start. He would have to delve right down between each line to get to the bottom of Jakob’s life and musings, and rather than go home or to the newspaper office, he might as well do it while sitting here in the sun.

  BREATHING ICE

  19

  GODTHÅB, 4 NOVEMBER 1973

  ‘There’s a well-known saying that a fairy is born whenever a child laughs, and yet few of you know what happens when an angel cries. But I do because I’ve seen it. Whenever the tears of an angel touch a newborn child, that child becomes special. The angel cries because it knows that this child’s life will be so hard that the child is unlikely to survive. So the angel weeps its strength and love into the tender soul, grafting the divine power of love into the infant. A power that will one day lead that poor, damaged child from the darkness and into a brighter life.’

  Jakob looked up from his folded hands as the vicar’s words pierced his tired mind and demanded his attention. Rarely had the vicar’s sermon been so true and so pertinent to his own life. He was up to his neck in damaged children, and yet he rarely saw them.

  He took his eyes off the vicar and looked up at the wooden ceiling of the Church of Our Saviour in Kolonihavnen. The vicar knew the truth, as did Jakob. Knew without a shadow of a doubt what it was like for the children here. For the girls. The girls suffered the most.

  Jakob stood up and sat down automatically as the vicar spoke. He let the last hymn seep out between his lips without singing the words.

  Outside the red wooden church the snow was falling heavily, but not a breath of wind was stirring. Godthåb was already covered in a thick, white blanket.

  Jakob turned his face towards the city, obscured by grey fog, and shook thousands of soft snowflakes off himself. His skin tingled every time a snowflake landed on it. He pressed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. The air felt cold. Alive.

  Two days earlier he had been summoned to the first murder. You can deal with it, Pedersen, the chief of police had told him, and Jakob hadn’t minded. No one else had thought it warranted much attention. Probably just a couple of drunken locals having a go at each other, Benno had piped up, shaking his head. Let them sort it out among themselves. They always do.

  But there had been more to it, and Jakob had had a bad feeling from the moment he learned the name and address of the deceased.

  The man they found in the apartment had been cut open from his groin to his chest, and the skin had been flayed from his body. His guts were spilling onto the floor around him, not in a neat pile but spread out like a halo, the intestines circling his body. His skin was missing from the scene, and so far they had had no luck finding it.

  Lying next to him they had found an ulo: a crescent-shaped flensing knife used by the local women to scrape the blubber from the inside of a sealskin. Jakob had picked up the knife and immediately knew it was the murder weapon. The raw, undulating cuts to the man’s tissue and muscles made that clear. This bloodstained ulo had been plunged into him and cut him up so badly that his insides could be ripped free and pulled from his body. It was a brutal execution, like something from the darkest years of the Middle Ages, a time when removing the skin and disembowelling a person still alive was a favoured method of torture.

  Jakob had brought Karlo Lange, a Greenlandic colleague, to the crime scene. Karlo was one of the few police officers who took his job seriously and genuinely cared about the lives and the safety of all residents in the district. The two men had quickly agreed that the killer had to be a man. Although the ulo was traditionally used by women, there was a rage and a force to the killing that they couldn’t see coming from a woman—and besides, a Greenlandic woman would never dare commit so violent an act as to cut open a man.

  I think, Karlo had said, that it was probably a confrontation between local men, but it’s certainly not just another stabbing. I’ve never in all my life heard of someone up here gutting another human being as though he were an animal. And then he had added something to which Jakob had paid extra attention: You must remember that we never kill an animal except when we have to. We only kill what we eat and need. We respect the creatures around us and we apologise whenever we take a life. Even that of a fish. This killing hasn’t been followed by an apology.

  But no matter how disturbing that might be, it wasn’t the most distressing aspect of the case as far as Jakob was concerned.

  Just under a week ago, Jakob and Karlo had visited the very same apartment, and had filled in a survey together with the parents and their eleven-year-old daughter. Now the girl was missing. She wasn’t at home. She wasn’t at school. She wasn’t in the neighbourhood. She appeared to have vanished into thin air. They had fifty volunteers out looking for her all over Nuuk and in the surrounding area, but they had found no trace of her. The police had even dispatched a helicopter, but the girl had proved impossible to find. The heavy snow and sparse daylight didn’t help.

  20

  The moment Jakob turned up at the station the next day, he was summoned by Mr Mortensen, the chief of police, whose office, as always, was foggy with grey smoke from the cigars in the ashtray on his desk near the room’s only window.

  ‘Pedersen, God damn you,’ Mortensen grunted. ‘What have you got us mixed up in this time?’

  ‘I don’t quite follow…Good morning, sir.’

  ‘And good morning to you too. They’ve found another one. Another dead man. His skin gone and his stomach cut open. This is turning into a real mess. And it’s not for this sort of thing that we’re up here, is it?’

  Jakob picked at one of his shirt buttons, not sure how he was supposed to respond.

  ‘Don’t just stand there fidgeting, man. Do something!’ Mortensen slid a piece of paper across his desk towards Jakob. ‘It’s Block P—again. Here’s the address.’

  Jakob picked up the note and stuffed it into his trouser pocket.

  ‘Take Karlo. He understands all that local hullabaloo. Now get out of here. One skinned and gutted man we can handle, but two? Whatever next?’

  ‘I’ll handle it, sir. If the two deaths are connected, we’ll know and we’ll intensify our search for the killer.’ He hesitated. ‘Any news about the missing girl? Najak?’

  Mortensen shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘But we’ll dispatch people to look for her again today, won’t we?’

  The fat, balding man nodded and picked up one of his stumpy cigars from the ashtray. ‘Yes. Of course. I’ll see to it.’

  Mortensen had come from Horsens, a provincial town in Denmark where he’d been a superintendent, before ending up in Godthåb as chief of police.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Mortensen growled, and puffed on his cigar, smoke trailing down his chin like heavy evening clouds over a mountain range. ‘I’ll have the bloody mayor and the provincial council on my back before the day is over.’

  Less than thirty minutes later Jakob and Karlo had reached Block P, where, as expected, a crowd of locals had gathered outside one of the stairwells in the long concrete building.

  Karlo led the way and told the onlookers, whose number included young children with grimy faces and big black eyes, as well as toothless old women and men, that they needed to keep back. When that didn’t have the desired effect, he added that the killer was still at large and might summon evil spirits from the underground.

  Whether it was his words about the killer or the bit about the evil spirits that made the dark eyes and red cheeks disperse and seek refuge behind posts, doors and curtains, Jakob couldn’t tell, but scatter they did. Karlo pressed on, taking long strides up the steps to the apartment where the new victim had been found.

  He swore loudly the moment he went through the door. Jakob was close behi
nd him. The living room seemed filled with dark shadows and deep, brief cries, as if they were being attacked by demons, but it took Jakob only seconds to realise that it was just a couple of black ravens flitting around the room. Karlo was trying to shoo them out. The birds seemed angry, but Karlo managed to herd them out of the open windows.

  ‘Bloody birds,’ an agitated Karlo yelled across Store Slette. ‘Who leaves their windows open in this weather?’ He shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps the killer let the ravens in?’ Jakob ventured.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Karlo said. ‘But I don’t think so. It’s just so typical. Many of the residents don’t understand these big apartment blocks. My grandmother lives here, and she often has the heating on full blast in the living room while leaving all the windows open.’ He shook his head again and closed one of the windows. ‘I’ve told her that it’s stupid and a waste of money, but she just says that she misses the feel of the wind and the scent of the sea, which always came into her house back in the village. Here the walls are too thick and solid.’

  All this time Jakob’s gaze was fixed on the flayed body on the floor. It was a Greenlandic male, like the one they had found yesterday. Muscles, sinews and fat glistened through membranes of congealed blood.

  ‘He was killed in the same manner,’ Jakob said quietly, and he squatted down on his haunches next to the mutilated corpse. He carefully placed his fingertips on the man’s exposed chest muscle. ‘He hasn’t been dead for very long.’

  ‘He’s been cut open just like the other one,’ Karlo said. ‘But this is messier.’

  ‘I think we can blame the birds for that,’ Jakob said, picking up an ulo. It was smeared with a red and brown substance. ‘My guess is that the intestines were laid out as they were with the first victim, until the ravens helped themselves.’

  Karlo straightened up and looked around the living room. ‘So we’ve got our very own Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘We might have.’ Jakob put down the ulo. ‘Except Jack the Ripper’s victims were women. But it’s true he cut open their stomachs and took out their intestines.’

  Karlo knelt down by the bloody corpse too, slowly nodding to himself. ‘Whoever did this knew what he was doing. This skin wasn’t pulled off or hacked off by some amateur.’ He looked at Jakob. ‘This man’s skin was removed by someone who has been doing it for years. It’s routine work. Smooth, clean cuts. If we had the skin, I’m sure we would find that it was intact and without holes. Ready to be tanned.’ He looked down. ‘Pardon my choice of words, but that’s what it looks like.’

  Jakob felt a shiver down his spine. The skinless face stared at him. The bared teeth. The holes that had once been the nose. The big, staring eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it unusual for a hunter to be that good at skinning?’

  Karlo nodded. ‘It is. Every hunter knows how to do it, but most regard it as women’s work.’

  Jakob sighed. ‘So all this was done by a steady hand, someone completely unaffected by death?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Karlo said. ‘But it’s good, solid work. They’ve even left the skin behind on the victim’s hands and feet.’ He looked at Jakob again. ‘When this man was flayed, he was nothing but a dead seal in the killer’s hands.’

  Jakob was still staring at the corpse’s raw face. ‘When we leave, would you please ask if anyone has seen this man’s daughter today?’

  Karlo got up from the floor and nodded. ‘As far as I know, the rest of the family is with one of the wife’s sisters. She lives right over there, in Block 6. I can follow it up if you want me to?’

  ‘Yes, please, and I’ll deal with the report.’ Jakob looked through the windows across Store Slette, which was not only covered by snow, but also hidden by heavy clouds and shadows from the feeble setting sun.

  21

  The aroma of freshly brewed coffee spread like life in a fjord valley in the summer. Jakob looked up from his report and spotted Lisbeth, who had just entered with a tray filled with steaming mugs.

  ‘I thought you boys could do with some afternoon coffee—am I right?’

  Jakob looked around. There were five of them in the office. Him, Karlo, Benno, Fransen and Storm. A couple of the others had gone out with the police boat, and one was dealing with a domestic dispute at one of the blocks.

  As always, Benno jumped up like a peacock when Lisbeth entered the room, but she was rarely impressed by his preening. Her trips always ended at Jakob’s desk, after she’d cut Benno down to size with a few cheeky but devastating remarks.

  The mugs disappeared from the tray one after the other. Benno took his with a grunt and rolled closer to his desk. Jakob heard him say something to Storm about the snow outside his apartment.

  ‘Fancy a brew?’

  Lisbeth’s voice was very close. Jakob looked up and into her hazel eyes. She had an oval face with pale freckles, most of them dotted across her small nose and round cheeks. He reached out his hand and took the last mug.

  ‘I’ve added a dash of milk,’ she said, ‘just the way you like it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he muttered, embarrassed.

  She placed her hand on his shoulder and leaned over him so that her lips were close to his ear. ‘I brought in a cake as well, but don’t tell the others or there’ll be a stampede.’

  Jakob smiled bashfully and stared down at his desk.

  Karlo nodded in Lisbeth’s direction as she disappeared out of the door, the tray dangling beside her leg. ‘I think you have an admirer.’

  ‘Er, it’s just…just coffee and cake,’ Jakob stuttered, raking a hand through his hair. ‘No, it’s—’

  ‘We have a saying up here: a woman like that will keep you warmer than ten reindeer skins on a cold winter’s night.’

  Jakob stared at Karlo with a frown. Benno sniggered.

  ‘Thank you, that’ll do,’ Jakob said firmly, drumming his fingers on his finished report. ‘I think I’ll take this to the boss.’

  After Jakob had briefed the chief of police on the facts about the two violent deaths that had occurred only a day or so apart in one of the city’s less desirable neighbourhoods, he walked down to the small sand and rock beach by Kolonihavnen, where a couple of growlers had washed ashore. It was a little outside the season for that, yet here they were, glistening in the twilight.

  Not far from him, an old Inuit was playing a traditional qilaat drum, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his upper body swaying. He was standing on a rock worn smooth and stripy by the forces of the sea. The old man held his flat, round drum in one hand and beat it with the palm of the other while singing his mournful, quiet prayer across the icy, charcoal-grey sea.

  Jakob looked away from the drumming dancer and placed his hand on the growler in front of him. Its chill instantly penetrated deep inside his skin. He was mesmerised by the drumming and the singing.

  A hundred thousand years ago, the water that now made up the core of this huge block of ice had fallen as the softest snow over an as yet unnamed Greenland. In time the snow had been compressed into the hardest ice, pure and beautiful like nothing else.

  ‘If you breathe on the ice, you can feel it breathe back.’

  The voice had come out of nowhere, and it was not until then that Jakob realised that the singing and drumming had stopped. He turned around and looked into the eyes of the Inuit man who had sung to the sea.

  The old man nodded his head at the enormous growler in front of them. ‘Try it!’

  Jakob took a hesitant step forwards and moved his lips close to the ice. He exhaled deeply, and felt in that same moment an icy breath reach out for his face. He exhaled again and closed his eyes. The ice was alive just as as he was.

  ‘It’s the breath of life,’ the old Inuit said.

  Jakob turned and looked at him again. He was at least a head shorter than Jakob. His face was brown and wrinkled, like a prune, while his eyes were alive and seemingly bottomless.

  ‘Do you mind me asking who you were pla
ying for?’ Jakob said.

  The old man grinned from ear to ear, revealing stumpy teeth. ‘For the ice there,’ he said. ‘For the sea. The mountains. For all the life that surrounds us.’

  Jakob’s gaze shifted across the water.

  ‘Your soul is troubled,’ the old man said, putting his hand on Jakob’s arm. Jakob looked down at the wrinkled hand, the size of a child’s.

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ he sighed, shaking his head. ‘So many ugly things go on behind closed doors in this town.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the old man said softly. ‘I also know where you will find your demon, but you need to think very carefully whether catching it is the right thing to do. Demons aren’t released without good reason.’

  22

  GODTHÅB, 12 NOVEMBER 1973

  The heavy snow had come early, and the ice had taken hold long ago. First all the little brooks, then the faster-flowing waterfalls. They all froze from the outside in, and for a long time you could see and hear the water still running underneath—sometimes like babbling little melodies, which occasionally found their way up through a hole and spewed bubbles of freezing water across the ice, and sometimes as wild, whirling currents that carried off stones and gravel underneath the crystal-clear surface of the ice.