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.