The seal splashed about in the water. It was trying to escape, but the bullet in its body and the onset of paralysis trapped it at the surface of the sea. Its small black eyes stared backwards. It waved a flipper.
‘I…’
She took aim and fired the rifle. The seal’s body jerked. The amount of blood in the sea grew explosively. The rifle ended up at the bottom of the boat again, while Tupaarnaq grabbed the hook and plunged it into the seal. ‘The least you can do is help me land it.’
Matthew reached out nervously. They had to employ all their strength to haul the smooth, wet body over the gunwale. The seal flopped down into the bottom of the boat in a sudden gliding movement. Its eyes were still two staring black beads, but there was no life left in them. Blood flowed quietly from the two dark holes in its skin.
Matthew slumped back in his seat, while Tupaarnaq grabbed a flipper and turned the seal onto its back, baring its speckled silver and black belly. The sun’s rays played in the hairs of the wet fur. She produced a hunting knife from her side pocket and stuck it into the seal, deep between its tail flippers. She tightened her fingers around the handle as the blade opened up the seal to its middle. The fat layer of blubber glowed pink; it looked like an open eye in the animal’s lower body. The meat was dark, black almost. Her hands delved into the warm body and pulled out a long ribbon of pink intestines. Somewhere deep inside the animal, she managed to loosen them so they came out in one piece.
Matthew watched the intestines go over the gunwale and plop into the sea. ‘You’re just going to throw them away?’
‘Well, I’ve no use for them.’ She turned to look at him. Her stare was hard. ‘You need to join in.’
‘It’s so gory.’
She gave a light shrug. ‘It’s just hunting.’ Then she turned her attention back to the seal, and carried on removing its organs and throwing them overboard. Only a quivering dark lump was dumped in the bottom of the boat.
When everything had been cut out and disposed of, she sank the knife back into the seal near its tail flippers and cut the skin around them free from the skin on its body. She did the same with the two flippers along the animal’s sides. Then she slipped the knife under the skin by its belly and started separating the skin from the fat and the body in soft movements, until only the glistening, flayed body remained. The skin itself she rinsed in the sea, then she tossed it at Matthew’s feet.
He looked at her, stunned.
‘It needs cleaning.’
‘What do you mean?’
She took out her ulo and grabbed the skin. Carefully but steadily, she used the round blade to remove any blubber still attached to it. ‘This is how you do it.’
Matthew took the ulo and bent hesitantly over the fur. The blubber was warm and greasy. Softer than he had expected, but viscous and tough to cut. It stretched, before snapping back like an elastic band.
‘You need to get right down to the fur, leaving absolutely no blubber,’ she told him. ‘But be careful. The skin is worthless if you cut holes in it.’
He hesitated. He squished a piece of skin and blubber between his fingers. ‘Do you eat this the way you eat whale skin?’
‘You mean mattak? No, this stuff tastes like shit.’ She took the ulo from him and let it glide in rocking movements along a piece of skin, leaving it clean and smooth. ‘Like this.’ She passed the ulo back to him.
‘Will you be eating the meat yourself?’ he asked, looking at the bloody body resting near him. She had even flayed its head, exposing the flesh and the sinews. The black eyes stared out at him from the flayed face.
‘No, I don’t eat meat. I’ll sell it down at Brættet. I need the money to buy a few things.’
The ulo rested in his hand. His fingers were glossy with fat and blood.
‘You need to taste the liver,’ she said, holding out a piece of the dark, quivering lump she had saved earlier.
He wrinkled his nose in disgust and felt his throat contract with nausea. ‘No, thanks.’
‘It wasn’t a suggestion,’ she snapped. ‘You can’t come home after your first seal hunt without having tasted warm liver. Those are the rules, and they apply to you too.’
‘I can’t,’ he croaked, staring at the small piece of raw seal liver. ‘I’m going to throw up.’
‘Not my problem. Eat it!’
His eyes sought refuge at the bottom of the boat. His sneakers were soaked with salt water and smeared with blood and guts. Her knee slipped into the picture, and when he looked up, she was squatting down right in front of him. A distant yet also present smile was playing on her lips.
‘You either eat it yourself or I shove it down your throat.’
‘Okay, okay, okay. I’ll eat it. Relax.’ He exhaled, then he frowned. ‘Have you ever tasted it?’
‘We all eat it. Some even by choice. As if it were candy.’
He took the liver from her hand. It felt soft, grainy and delicate between his fingers.
‘It’s just blood,’ she said, and she ran two fingers down his face, leaving broad, dark traces on his skin.
The liver grew in his hand. His eyes were drawn to the flayed, dead body of the seal. The skin and the blubber at his feet. The ulo. The intestines. The seal’s belly as it had surrendered to the knife and sprung open in a fleshy wound.
He started hyperventilating. He swallowed saliva that wasn’t there. Suppressed his nausea. His fingers found their way to his mouth. The liver went in. His teeth cut through the soft, jelly-like substance. The meat burst. A taste of metal filled his mouth. His throat tightened.
‘Go on, spit it out,’ Tupaarnaq said with a short grin. ‘I need you to be able to walk. You’ll be carrying half the seal to Brættet.’
He spat into the sea. ‘I think I just failed your test,’ he spluttered. ‘No, you didn’t. I don’t want a companion with a taste for blood.’
Matthew looked at what was left of the seal with a frown. ‘But you…We just…’
She nodded grimly. ‘It’s the easiest way to make money right now. It’s how I was brought up.’
28
The black plastic bag with the large chunks of freshly killed seal weighed heavy on Matthew’s back. He could feel the bones from the animal digging into him through the plastic and pressing into his back. His shoes and trousers were stained with salt water and seal blood, and he had no idea whether he had successfully washed the blood off his face.
Tupaarnaq walked alongside him in her old, thick jumper, with a bag similar to his slung over her shoulder. Rust-coloured patches were drying on the light-grey wool; her rifle hung from the same shoulder and bounced slightly with every step she took.
‘How far is it?’ he said. The weight of the meat was sending jolts of pain up his crooked neck. He gave in to it and shifted the bag, so that it rested against his shoulder.
‘You don’t know where Brættet is?’
‘Is it next to Brugseni?’ he ventured.
She nodded. ‘We’ll be there in a few minutes.’
He only had himself to blame. He had refused to get on the bus with the bags. Blood was dripping from their seams, and the thought of sitting on the bus and watching blood run across the floor was more than he could handle. When she told him how far it was to walk, she hadn’t mentioned how many rocks and steps they would be going up and down. He was worn out already, and his back hurt as much as his neck.
Sweat trickled down his forehead and under his jumper. He looked back at the path they had walked. When he’d switched shoulders, more blood had run out of the bag, leaving on the gravel a small, dark puddle of death.
Brættet was busy when Matthew and Tupaarnaq entered through the glass door. To their left were several steel tables with big lumps of dark meat, and very close to them lay two heads and the fins from a couple of porpoises. To their right were several white plastic crates with different kinds of semi-gutted fish.
‘I’ll just find a buyer for this,’ Tupaarnaq said.
Matthew let the b
ag slip from his shoulder so it dangled from his hand and arm. There was blood on several of the steel tables. Puddles on the floor below them. The two small whales looked as if their heads had been chopped off with one violent blow. The display seemed to have been set up so that you could see the porpoises’ smile. Further into the market was a seal, gutted like theirs. Its bloodstained body had been spread out into flat halves.
Tupaarnaq was busy talking to a man, who rummaged around in her bag.
The biggest tables were at the back of the market, and on them lay large chunks of dark meat. He had never before seen such big, firm pieces of meat without any bones in them. They looked like the thigh muscles of a dinosaur. On a sign taped to the table he read the words ‘fin whale’. The man behind the desk had a solid hold of a chunk the size of his own torso while he spoke to a woman in Greenlandic. He nodded and started slicing the meat with a long, thin-bladed knife.
‘Give your bag to that guy over there.’
Matthew jumped. He spun around and looked at Tupaarnaq. ‘Okay. Did you manage to sell everything?’
‘Yes. As I expected.’
Matthew turned back to the man with the big lumps of meat. ‘Is he cutting whale steak?’
‘Yes, and we can buy one, if that’s what you fancy.’ She took the bag from his hand. ‘Only not for me—I’m not having any.’ Then she went over to the man who had bought her seal meat and chucked the bag on the table next to the other one.
The man in the white coat pushed down the plastic bag to get a good look at the reddish-brown lumps of meat. He picked up a broad piece with the ribs exposed and turned it over a couple of times, then nodded contentedly and looked at Tupaarnaq. He put the meat down on the table again, where it left a bloody outline on the steel.
Tupaarnaq nudged Matthew’s shoulder. ‘You’re completely away with the fairies. You’re quite sure you don’t want some whale?’
He shook his head slowly without turning to her.
‘Just ask the guy over there if you fancy trying some. He’ll cut you a steak…my treat.’
‘I…’ Matthew hesitated as his thoughts moved back and forth between the dying seal in the sea and the flayed, fleshy skulls staring emptily at him from the steel tables. ‘No, not today. I think. Neither seal nor whale.’
‘Okay—it’s up to you. You can always come back another time.’ She nudged him again. ‘I’m off. Are you coming?’
‘Yes,’ he gulped and raised his eyebrows. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m going home,’ she stated firmly. ‘Alone. I’m not used to being outside, so I need some time on my own now.’
He smiled and followed her out of the door.
She turned to him outside in the square. ‘I just need to get a few things.’
‘From Brugseni?’
‘Yes, but I’ll do it on my own.’ A short grin crossed her lips. ‘I’m glad you tasted the liver today. If you hadn’t, I would have thrown you into the sea.’
She was smiling but he wasn’t at all sure that she was joking. His gaze moved to the small, simple stalls put up on the square outside Brugseni. Low tables, rugs and cardboard signs. The hawkers sold everything from figures carved out of reindeer antler to knitwear, seal mittens and old DVDs. They also sold pink frozen prawns, and one sold second-hand toys.
‘Why did you give me the USB stick?’
‘You wanted to know who you were going hunting with.’
‘But the articles don’t tell me that, do they?’
She exhaled deeply and looked him in the eye. ‘I gave it to you because you wanted to understand about murder and what it means to kill. And that was also why I took you with me today. Perhaps it’ll make sense when you switch off your light tonight.’
He frowned.
‘Causality,’ she went on. ‘If you want to understand why a ball is rolling, you need to find out what set it in motion. The rest is nothing but effect, and the effect is visible to everyone. The explanation is found in the cause.’
29
The smoke seeped slowly out of the corner of Matthew’s mouth. He was lying on the floor with a pillow under his neck near the balcony door, and could feel the cool air creep in around him. In one hand he held an almost empty Musk Ox beer, and a cigarette rested between the fingers of the other.
Tine was never a fan of smoking. Everything reeks of smoke, she would say when they had been among smokers.
He took a deep drag and let his hand flop back to the floor.
He had bought his first packet of cigarettes the day after the accident. He had been standing by the till, looking at his shopping, and when the cashier had smiled to him he had asked her for a packet of twenty Prince. With or without filter? she had asked. Back then he had still worn his ring.
To begin with, he had been so numbed by the smoke that he experienced a mild rush. Even the smoke filling his lungs had a calming effect he had never expected. He couldn’t explain it. Sometimes he would take a break from smoking for several days in order to experience again the feeling of getting high on the smoke.
His mobile buzzed in his pocket, and he leant over to drop the cigarette butt into the beer bottle and read the message.
Are you home? Tupaarnaq. That was all it said.
Yes, he replied, and pressed send. He heard nothing for several minutes. Why? he added eventually.
I’ll be there in five minutes.
He got up immediately and pushed the balcony door fully open. He tossed the beer bottle into the kitchen bin and stacked his dirty cups and plates in the dishwasher.
You need to be alone. Am almost there.
He pulled out a drawer, found some pink tea lights, put them on a plate and lit them. Like pretty much everything else in the apartment, they had been here when he moved in. Now their time had come. The smell of warm candle wax began to spread immediately, and he set the plate down on the small dining table between the kitchen and the sofa.
His mobile buzzed. Let me in.
He put down his mobile and went out to the entry phone.
The pale-yellow walls and large, light-grey tiles shone more brightly than the ceiling lamps out on the landing. The lift hummed behind the steel doors, and he reached for the ghost wedding band on the ring finger of his right hand.
‘Inside,’ she commanded the moment the lift door opened.
He allowed her to push him backwards. ‘Okay…’
She had already marched past him and into his hallway. ‘I need to borrow your bathroom and a T-shirt.’
Her thick jumper was draped over her arm, but this time it wasn’t the dark tattoos on her arms and shoulders that attracted his attention. It was the blood on her fingers and hands. They had washed off the seal blood out at sea, and after Brættet her hands had been as clean as his. Now they were smeared with dried blood.
‘I’ll find you a top. What happened?’
‘You won’t be talking to Lyberth,’ she said hoarsely. ‘He’s lying on the floor at my place, gutted.’
Matthew had to grab the doorframe for support. The words echoed in his mind. ‘What?’ he managed to whisper.
‘I don’t know why he’s there, but he’s very dead.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘You’re not expecting any visitors, are you?’
‘No,’ Matthew said. Then he wondered whether it might not be wise to text Malik and tell him not to come over, in case he was planning on it, but concluded that doing so would probably arouse more suspicion, given everything else that had happened. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Yes, a T-shirt—but first let me tell you about Lyberth.’
‘And you’re quite sure that he’s dead?’
‘More sure than I was about the seal we sold down at Brættet.’ She turned on the kitchen tap, squirted washing-up liquid onto her hands and started rubbing them together under the water. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen a dead body since…’ Her back arched and her head slumped a little. ‘It has been a while.’
‘But why would you kill Lybe
rth? I mean, the two of you didn’t even know one another, did you?’
‘It just so happens that I didn’t kill Lyberth. But no, I don’t know him, and that, if nothing else, would be a requirement for my having a motive.’
‘So someone killed him in your apartment, thinking that you would be the obvious suspect and that they would get away with it?’ ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. It seems far-fetched, but then again it’s what very nearly happened when they brought me in for the murder of those two men.’
‘Aqqalu and the fisherman?’
‘Yes, of course. Them.’ She paused and carefully dried her hands on a tea towel. ‘The three murders are connected.’
‘Are you sure?’
She nodded and sat down in the black recliner at the end of the coffee table. ‘Lyberth had also been gutted.’
Matthew buried his face in his hands. ‘And he’s in your apartment right now? And no one else knows?’
‘The killer knows he’s there. As do you. But apart from that, yes.’
‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘They’ll bring me in immediately. He was killed in my apartment in the same way as…’ She ground to a halt. ‘I touched the body. I don’t know why. I’m such an idiot. I mean, I could see that he was already dead. This time I’ll get life.’
‘But you were with me all day, and—’
‘I could have killed him afterwards,’ she cut in. ‘There’ll be forensic evidence implicating me. The location. Fingerprints.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘It was exactly what happened when they found my…father.’
‘But what about motive? It was you who told me always to look for the cause.’
‘Yes, for the defence. Not for the prosecutor. There, it’s the burden of evidence that weighs most heavily.’
They were silent for a few minutes. Her upper body rocked back and forth a little.
‘If you don’t go back to your place when there’s a dead body inside it, that could also look bad during a trial.’
‘The police just need to find the killer quickly.’
The Girl without Skin Page 11