I have lived here once. In this place. Drawn every breath of the North Atlantic air and sought refuge in a stone cottage—half buried in the ground with grass growing across its roof. I have lived here once. Slept under heavy blankets and furs. Felt the cold dance on my face and sear my lungs, spreading to every fibre of my body. I have lived here once. Lived with a new god in my thoughts, but with the words of the old gods pulsating in my veins. I have lived here once—marked by nature’s toughness. Allowed myself to be shaped by the wind, the breeze and the frost. Loved the mountains and the sea because they were my body and my blood. Loved the fog because it was my breath. Loved the cold because it was the grey and blue colours of my eyes and the soaring wings of the soul. I have lived here. I live here.
Matthew flicked back to the list of the four men and the names of the girls. The girls had to be their daughters, if Leiff’s comments about sexual abuse were to be believed. The men had to be those mentioned in the newspaper and the post-mortem reports, and there was also something about two of the daughters that hinted at a link. Jakob had put a cross and a question mark next to the name of the first victim’s daughter, Najak Rossing Lynge, which made Matthew wonder if Jakob had had his doubts about whether or not the girl was in fact dead. There were no marks by the names of the next two victims’ daughters, while a small heart had been drawn beside the last one, Paneeraq Poulsen. There was nothing by the men’s names.
Matthew’s fingers found the final page, and carefully unfolded the drawing. In the background were two sombre, slate-grey mountains, and between their round, worn peaks a sky of grey clouds, with the odd long streak of a delicate, endless turquoise. A porous fog floated over the blue and black sea at the foot of the mountains, a third peak erupting through the mist from the dark grave of the deep. It wasn’t a mountain like the others, though. It was a woman. Her shoulders lay beneath the mirror of the sea, but she was visible from her collarbones up. Her neck was arched, and her head leaning backwards, exposing her throat. Her blue-black hair flowed like wide rivers from her head and merged with the sea, right where the tops of her shoulders could be made out as they broke the surface. Her eyes were two bottomless wells, and her lips as black as her eyes. Her skin glowed grey and yellow, like smoke. She looked like a craggy mountain. Like a dead body found in the icy sea. But she was alive. At the bottom right-hand corner, someone had written Najak.
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
‘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.