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.’
Matthew nodded slowly. ‘I’d like to see the archives after lunch.’
‘I’m sure we can work something out.’ Leiff put his hand on Matthew’s shoulder again. ‘I’ll show you where they are, but if we’re going to rake over this old case, we need to go about it quietly. A brutal murder like this one has only remained unsolved because someone important wanted it that way.’
10
The archives under Sermitsiaq’s offices were the darkest rooms Matthew had ever been inside, and he thought he had seen a few. The walls were of dark-grey concrete, and more than anything reminded him of Eastern European archives before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rows of steel bookcases stood at right angles to the walls.
Leiff had shown him where in the basement he thought the relevant material might be kept—if there was anything at all. There were no records of the files in the basement. Whoever stored something there usually remembered where they had put it, but once that person left the newspaper, their knowledge was lost for good. Leiff had some idea of where the early 1970s files were, but he didn’t have time to spend the whole day in the basement, as he had an interview to do. However, he had promised to contact both his wife, who worked at Nuuk Town Hall, and a good friend who worked at the Sana Hospital, to persuade each of them to search their archives for any information about the four murders.
After several unsuccessful hours alone in the basement, Matthew sat down on a pile of newspapers and looked about him with an air of defeat. A bare light bulb glowed above him; there was another closer to the door. Their light hung like yellow clouds of dust in the dry basement air, but further down there was nothing but darkness. He had no idea how far into the darkness the basement extended.
Next to his right foot was a newspaper facing upwards: Air Greenland expands its fleet from three to eight Sikorsky S-61, and opens new helicopter base in Ammassalik this summer. His eyes wandered upwards to the date. May 1972. He pushed the newspaper aside, reached for another pile and resumed skimming the headlines.
‘Oh, no,’ he whispered as he opened a newspaper dated 25 October 1973. A Sikorsky helicopter had crashed just south of Nuuk, killing all fifteen people on board.
His head flopped forwards, and he sat resting his elbows on his knees with his face buried in his hands. His fingers smelled of newspaper ink and cold dust. Aqqalu’s bloody body haunted his thoughts. The gutted men. The little girls who had gone missing. The helicopter. Tine and the floor of the car. The smells of accident, metal, oil and death.
His world had imploded when Tine and Emily died. It hadn’t been particularly eventful before. But without them it was completely dead.
It was a red Mercedes containing four Romanian men. They had overtaken him on a bend, but hadn’t pulled out far enough and so collided with his Golf, which was crushed against the tarmac by the Mercedes and flipped off the road and into a field. He had been conscious throughout and felt every blow to his body, neck and face as the car rolled across the ground. His scalp and one hand had been lacerated by shards of glass, although he never knew exactly where it had come from.
He had been bleeding, and had to wipe his face constantly. Tine had been quiet. She hadn’t even screamed. Or perhaps she had. It was all a blur until the car stopped rolling. That was when he saw her. Her eyes were open. She was bleeding from her ears. She was trapped. She died.
He had crawled through the window of the damaged front door, found a farm where he had dripped blood all over the floor. He remembered that vividly. And he had seen a horse. A horse in the field where the car was lying. He remembered that. And then the ambulance. The nurse at the hospital, who had picked the broken glass from his scalp without him feeling anything at all, although it had made a crunching sound like when you snap a bone to get at the marrow. He remembered the foam collar around his neck and throat. Tine’s silent, grey face during the drive in the ambulance. They had fought to save her while he watched. But her blood had stopped pumping while she was still in the wrecked car. His heart had kept beating, and his wounds bleeding.
Then the darkness arrived. Darkness where every minute felt like a day. Sleepless days, nights tormented by the pain in his neck, which had started a few hours after the accident, never to go away again. The funeral. Months of daily rehabilitation with a physiotherapist. The machine pulling his neck. The warm compresses. Ultrasound. Countless reassurances that he’d be all right eventually.
Matthew took a deep breath and felt the tears running down the palms of his hands. He raised his head and sniffed loudly. The air still felt dry, and his eyes were stinging. He got up and walked down to a new wall of newspapers piled onto the overburdened steel shelving. He lit a cigarette, then picked up a few newspapers, trying to decide where to resume his search.
Having identified and pulled out the relevant piles, he sat down on the floor to go through them. Time passed at a snail’s pace, as the cup by his side filled with cigarette butts and soon his head began to ache. Someone really ought to have transferred all the records in the basement to a digital archive, but it seemed a Sisyphean task.
When Leiff returned, Matthew was lying on the floor surrounded by stacks of old newspapers, too many to count, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The sudden and unexpected noise from the door made him sit up.
‘What time do you call this?’ Leiff said with a frown. ‘And I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to smoke down here.’
‘I haven’t checked the time, but I guess it’s late,’ Matthew croaked, quickly putting out his cigarette. ‘I think this is pointless… I’m sorry.’
‘Well, I did warn you. But listen, I’ve had a call from the hospital. They’ve found the post-mortem reports on all four men, and I persuaded them to scan and email everything to me. I forwarded it all on to you so you could print it out. You didn’t pick up when I called you, so I thought I’d better check up on you myself.’
‘There’s no signal down here, but thanks, that’s great news. Besides, I’m done here—my head is heavy from all that dust.’
‘Hang on just a minute,’ Leiff said. ‘I had a peek at the postmortem reports. Which year have you got there? Seventy-three, is it?’
Matthew looked at the newspaper in his hand and nodded. ‘October.’
‘You need November. That’s when the first victim turned up. But let’s get you something to eat. I can’t have you stay down here all night. I bet you’re thirsty too. My wife’s going out tonight, but she’s cooked spare ribs, so why don’t you have dinner with me? There are too many ribs for one person.’