The Girl without Skin

by Mads Peder Nordbo

  ‘But they’re not going to do that if they believe you did it. They’ll just keep looking for you until they find you.’

  ‘Then I’m going to have to find the killer myself.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s like I told you. Our cases are connected. Oh, shit.’

  ‘You mean they’re connected to the murders in the seventies?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. He…arghhh!’

  Matthew looked at her. Sitting in the recliner she suddenly seemed smaller than ever. ‘What will the police find at your place, if they discover the body themselves?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, staring vacantly into the air. ‘What will they find?’ She got up and went over to the balcony door. ‘This is so messed up. His hands and feet are nailed to the floor, like some crucified Jesus. A sock was stuffed into his mouth, and he was blindfolded. He’s completely butchered.’

  The sofa felt cold and dead under Matthew.

  ‘His stomach was cut open,’ she continued. ‘Right from his groin and up to his breastbone. His skin had been pulled out to the sides, and everything in his abdomen had been ripped out and thrown onto the floor around him.’

  ‘Was there an ulo?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t. And he wasn’t killed with an ulo. The cuts are far too straight and clean.’

  ‘And he’s lying there now?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I don’t remember locking the door behind me. I just grabbed my stuff and got out of there.’

  ‘And where are your things now?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She narrowed her eyes and rubbed her scalp. ‘Mind if I have a shower? I…it’s gross. All of it. I…I’ve been kicked twelve years back in time.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, and got up immediately. ‘Let me get you a towel and a T-shirt.’ He hesitated. ‘I accidentally smashed the door to the bathroom, so it doesn’t close properly.’

  ‘Idiot. Well, I’m still going to have a shower, but don’t you dare come near me, do you hear?’

  ‘I’ll go for a walk,’ Matthew said, handing her an old black T-shirt. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘You can’t leave while I’m here,’ she said. ‘Or I won’t be able to stay. The police might turn up. Anything could happen.’

  He slumped and looked down. ‘I was just going down to the cemetery to smoke a couple of cigarettes.’

  ‘You can smoke inside, if you like. But if you leave now, I’ll leave too. I have to.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he replied with a nod. ‘It was a stupid idea. I…I’m just shocked.’

  ‘Smoke your cigarettes in here. It’s your apartment.’ She tried to fix him with her eyes. ‘So are you staying or what?’

  ‘Yes…Yes, of course.’

  ‘Okay. Then I’ll have a shower.’ She finally made eye contact with him. ‘And you stay in here or you’re finished.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He waited behind the recliner until he heard the water being turned on. Then he took out his cigarettes and lit one. His hands were shaking so much that the tip of the cigarette quivered.

  Matthew had only just flopped onto the sofa when he remembered that he hadn’t given her a towel to take to the bathroom.

  The door hung crooked on its hinges and revealed most of the bathroom. The shower was concealed behind a thick pane of glass that reached from the floor to the ceiling. The steam had already clouded the glass, so he could only see her silhouette. He looked at the towel in his hand. He could see her body in the mirror.

  It wasn’t just her arms, shoulders, chest and neck that were tattooed. Everything had colours. Her body was completely covered by flowers and leaves. Not delicate and pretty, but lush and winding. Camouflage.

  Her toes were free. Her feet almost. The growth started around her ankles where it blossomed, reached out and covered most of her. Concealing her. She wasn’t there. She didn’t exist. There were just plants winding and curving. The flowers breathing. The shadows and the two mouths of death. Everything was covered up, and the dark didn’t release its grip until her neck. That was her existence. She was two feet, two hands, and a face. That was all. The rest was a dark wilderness.

  The water in the shower must have been boiling hot, given how much steam it generated. She stood still under the jet. Picked up the soap and started soaping herself. She covered every part of her body before she grabbed a razor and let it grip her. She followed the movements of the plants along her muscles and shaved her legs, her groin, her belly, arms, armpits, her throat, her face and her scalp. She scraped away the outer layer of herself in slow, viscous movements, and let it wash away down the drain.

  Only the colours remained.

  Her body was slim. Sinewy. The muscles in her arms tensed. They stood out in all the colours that were her. That was all she was. Muscles and colours.

  Matthew took a step forward in order to leave the towel just inside the open door. She reacted to the movement and turned her gaze on him at that very same moment. It burned. Forcing him to the floor.

  ‘You’re finished,’ she hissed.

  Matthew disappeared into the living room, where he turned on the TV and ended up watching an English TV series.

  He could hear Tupaarnaq muttering harshly while she got dressed, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Not until she came back to the living room.

  ‘You’re no better than the rest of them,’ she said, hurling the damp towel at him. ‘Fucking pig. You’re a bunch of perverts…all of you.’

  He wanted to say something. Defend himself. But she was gone.

  THE LIGHT OF DARKNESS

  30

  GODTHÅB, 13 NOVEMBER 1973

  A spell of milder weather had arrived, something that Jakob had not expected, but which in an ideal world would have occurred a few hours earlier, when he had stupidly sat by the broken window and the dead radiator and nearly frozen to death in his own living room. He glanced at Karlo. If it hadn’t been for his colleague’s prompt response, he might easily have died. Just before they left, Mortensen had added insult to injury by asking them not to mention to anyone that the two of them had been practically naked under the same blanket. Two men. Police officers at that. The people of this town shouldn’t start having thoughts like that about the forces of law and order. We’ll keep all of that in-house. Their boss had been unable to look at them as he spoke.

  Jakob slipped in something outside the stairwell they were about to enter, and Karlo grabbed his arm.

  ‘Where on earth did that change in the weather come from?’ Jakob said. ‘And thank you.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll be frost again in a moment,’ Karlo said, sniffing the air. ‘I think we’ve escaped the big chaos of the melt for now.’

  Jakob smiled and looked up at Block P. ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s on the second floor.’

  ‘Have you been up there?’

  ‘Not yet, but the door has been locked and I have a key. His wife and children have gone to stay with her parents.’

  ‘Including his daughter?’

  ‘Yes, she’s in the same place.’

  ‘Only now she’s safe,’ Jakob muttered quietly. It troubled him that he hadn’t ignored the rules and Mortensen’s words about the girls, but what else could he do? It was winter. There was nowhere to move them to.

  Jakob remembered the apartment clearly. As he did all four apartments where he believed the police must take immediate action to save a minor from abuse. He sighed to himself. Save was the wrong word. These girls were already damaged for life, but at least they could have stopped any further abuse.

  And now it had stopped for this man’s daughter, and for one of the others, while Najak had gone missing and Paneeraq was still trapped in her living hell. He patted his trouser leg and said, ‘Right, what have we got here?’

  ‘It’s exactly the same,’ Karlo said. ‘The ulo is lying in the middle of his intestines. He’s covered in blood. And he has been flayed. The Nuuk Ripper strikes again.’

 
; The dead body had indeed been flayed like the other two; it looked like a bloody hunting trophy someone had tossed on the floor. The flayed face stared back at them. The bared teeth. The muscle fibres. Pale sinews. Blood. The belly had been brutally slashed open in the most agonising way that Jakob could imagine. The ulo wasn’t a stabbing tool or a knife to cut something open with. It was a tool designed to remove fat from skin, and the nature of the cuts to this man’s stomach indicated that the blade had ripped up his skin and flesh in slow, tearing movements. But it had been operated by a skilled hand. A hand that knew precisely where every cut should be made. The pain must have been excruciating.

  Jakob got up and did a tour of the apartment’s two bedrooms. His stomach lurched when he looked at the beds in both rooms. Right there, the man’s little daughter had had to submit to her own father’s adult body, and no one had said or done anything to help her. No one. Except one person. And now it was Jakob’s duty to catch this someone and put them behind bars.

  ‘Doesn’t Anguteeraq Poulsen live nearby?’ He looked towards Karlo.

  ‘Two stairwells from here,’ Karlo replied, getting up from the floor, where he had been setting out small numbered flags for the forensic pathologist from Denmark, as well as for the photographer who would take pictures of the dead body before it could be moved.

  ‘I think we ought to visit him right away.’

  ‘And warn him? He’s the last man on your list.’

  Jakob touched the cut on his forehead carefully. Then he shook his head. ‘I just want to see him.’

  Karlo checked his watch. ‘You want to go over there now?’

  ‘Yes—if it’s all right with you?’

  ‘It’s not a problem, but I’m concerned about you. Your forehead is starting to go blue—maybe you should rest? And I still think you ought to see a doctor. You could easily be concussed. Perhaps you should sleep at my place tonight so you’re not alone?’

  Jakob smiled. ‘My mother is eighty-one,’ he said, looking across to Karlo. ‘I believe I’m old enough to take care of myself.’

  ‘I know, I know. I was more thinking you might lose consciousness.’

  ‘Well, I’ll probably wake up again if I’m meant to.’ Jakob patted Karlo’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about me. It doesn’t feel like a concussion. But it’s kind of you to care.’

  ‘And we’re having pork chops tonight,’ Karlo said hungrily. ‘Big, fat, juicy ones.’

  Jakob took a last look at the gutted man on the floor. ‘I’ll take a raincheck, thanks, Karlo. Once we’re done here, all I want to do for the rest of the evening is hide under my blankets.’

  31

  The stairwells looked pretty much identical. All were made from concrete, had the same doors and the same orange-red wooden banisters. The only difference was the names on the letterboxes and the stuff left outside the front doors or littering the communal areas. In some places shoes and boots were carefully arranged, while in others bags, clothes and fishing gear covered half the floor space.

  Outside Anguteeraq Poulsen’s place, the boots were lined up neatly and they were clean, as was a pair of snowshoes, old and worn, but greased and ready for use.

  ‘Hello,’ Karlo said in a cheerful voice the moment the door was opened and a subdued-looking woman peered out from the crack. ‘We’re here to follow up on the police survey of children’s school habits. I’m afraid we didn’t manage to complete our form when we were here last, so we were wondering if we might trouble you with a quick visit.’

  The woman closed the door as she nodded, and it grew silent on the landing as the two men stared at the closed door. Soon it opened again, and the man they had spoken to the last time they had visited popped out his head. He glared at Jakob, then turned his attention to Karlo and muttered something in Greenlandic. Karlo replied, and the two men spoke for just under a minute before Anguteeraq Poulsen finally took a step back and opened the door fully. He was wearing jeans and a stained and faded green T-shirt. His hair was messy.

  ‘He says he can’t be bothered to speak Danish today,’ Karlo whispered to Jakob as they entered. ‘So I’ll talk to him in Greenlandic and tell you what he said afterwards.’

  Jakob inhaled the smell of the place through his nostrils. ‘Ask him if he knew the other three men, but don’t let on too much…Just ask a bit about everything.’

  Karlo nodded and sat down on a brown sofa that the man had pointed to. Jakob sat down next to him, and they were each given a cup of black coffee.

  The two Greenlandic men started talking, while Jakob studied Poulsen’s facial expressions and the apartment around him. Poulsen clearly resented Jakob’s presence. Anger exuded from his eyes, from the frowning of his forehead and from the restlessness of his body. In Jakob’s opinion, though, it was more than just anger. They weren’t welcome. Not just because they were police officers and because Jakob was Danish. No, they were people who had entered his home, which didn’t bear close scrutiny.

  Jakob nearly burned himself when he raised the cup to his lips. He looked into the steaming coffee, before nodding politely to the woman sitting on a light-coloured chair by the door to the kitchen. There were another two doors leading from the living room, but both were closed. Between the two brown sofas was a pine coffee table, with a brass lamp above it that sent out its light through a series of yellow oval glass discs. The walls were bare except for a single, simplistic painting of a man in a kayak on the sea in front of Mount Sermitsiaq.

  Jakob turned his attention back to Anguteeraq Poulsen. His trousers. His T-shirt. His gaze. The cowed wife sitting by the door, staring at the floor, her hands resting on her legs, which were pressed together.

  ‘Karlo,’ he sighed, ‘would you please tell Mr Poulsen that we have a few questions for his daughter, because we didn’t manage to complete the form the last time we were here.’

  ‘She’s asleep,’ Anguteeraq Poulsen interjected in Danish.

  Jakob sniffed the air and picked up the aroma coming from the kitchen. ‘It smells like you’re about to eat.’

  Anguteeraq Poulsen scowled at them both, then got up and disappeared into one of the rooms. A few minutes later he emerged with the girl in his arms. He put her down on the sofa and sat beside her, keeping his hand on her shoulder all the while.

  ‘She’s not quite herself,’ he said. ‘She went to the hospital today for an injection.’ For a moment his gaze seemed more apologetic than angry. The girl’s body was floppy. She wasn’t making eye contact, but just stared down at herself. Her hands were gathered like her mother’s.

  ‘Sorry to wake you up, Paneeraq,’ Jakob said. ‘It’s just that we forgot a few things the last time we were here, and we want to make sure that our survey is perfect so we can build the best school for you children.’

  The girl nodded. According to Jakob’s notebook, she was eleven years old. Her father was the last of the four men on his list of people who should never be allowed near a girl or a woman for the rest of their lives. He struggled to contain his emotions.

  ‘Paneeraq…’

  The silence after her name shaped a question in the air, and the girl looked up.

  A shiver went down Jakob’s spine as all the blood and life inside him froze. ‘Paneeraq,’ he repeated in a croaking voice. ‘Do you like going to school?’

  She didn’t say anything. She just looked down again, but she nodded lightly.

  ‘And if you have any problems, do you get plenty of help?’

  She shook her head very slowly.

  ‘So no one helps you?’

  ‘No one,’ she whispered.

  Jakob watched as tears trickled down the girl’s chubby cheeks.

  Her father tapped her shoulder and her whole body flinched. ‘You asked her that the last time,’ he growled. ‘She’s tired.’

  ‘Sometimes you get different answers depending on when and how you ask the question,’ Jakob said, without taking his eyes off the girl. ‘Paneeraq, it’s always okay to ask for help. Do
n’t you ever forget that, ilaa?’

  She didn’t say anything, and he realised that he had to release her from her father’s grip. ‘That’s enough. Paneeraq, you’re free to go back to bed if you want to.’

  The girl got up so quickly that her father didn’t have time to stop her. She kept her eyes firmly on the floor, but shook hands with both Karlo and Jakob before she limped with some difficulty towards the door to the bedroom and disappeared.

  Jakob could no longer bear to look at Anguteeraq Poulsen. His face spoke volumes now, and all of it was ugly.

  ‘I’ll bloody well kill him myself,’ Jakob fumed when they were back outside Block P, looking up at the closed windows of the apartment. ‘I’ll bloody well kill him and gut him myself.’ Everything whirled around in his mind, and he struggled to keep hold of the many loose ends. ‘Oh, damn,’ he then exclaimed. ‘I need to go back to Ari Rossing Lynge’s place. Do you know if his wife is still living there?’

  ‘You want to go there now?’ Karlo checked his wristwatch as he stepped further away from the apartment block, and his eyes moved from the watch face to the front of the building. ‘The light is on, so I’m guessing that she is.’

  Jakob rubbed his face with a weary expression. ‘I have to have another look. Around the living room and the bedrooms.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Jakob raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t have to come with me. It’s okay. I can hear the pork chops calling you.’

  ‘Is it really all right?’

  ‘Of course. It’s late.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I just need to check something. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Sure. Mind how you go.’

  32

  ‘Hello?’

  Jakob had only just entered the brightly lit stairwell where Ari Rossing Lynge had lived when a voice called out to him.

  ‘You’re a police officer, aren’t you?’

  The voice was coming from the first door to the right. Its white surface was ajar, and through the gap he could make out a strip of a female face. An eye, a cheek and a little of her mouth.