The mugs disappeared from the tray one after the other. Benno took his with a grunt and rolled closer to his desk. Jakob heard him say something to Storm about the snow outside his apartment.
‘Fancy a brew?’
Lisbeth’s voice was very close. Jakob looked up and into her hazel eyes. She had an oval face with pale freckles, most of them dotted across her small nose and round cheeks. He reached out his hand and took the last mug.
‘I’ve added a dash of milk,’ she said, ‘just the way you like it.’
‘Thank you,’ he muttered, embarrassed.
She placed her hand on his shoulder and leaned over him so that her lips were close to his ear. ‘I brought in a cake as well, but don’t tell the others or there’ll be a stampede.’
Jakob smiled bashfully and stared down at his desk.
Karlo nodded in Lisbeth’s direction as she disappeared out of the door, the tray dangling beside her leg. ‘I think you have an admirer.’
‘Er, it’s just… just coffee and cake,’ Jakob stuttered, raking a hand through his hair. ‘No, it’s—’
‘We have a saying up here: a woman like that will keep you warmer than ten reindeer skins on a cold winter’s night.’
Jakob stared at Karlo with a frown. Benno sniggered.
‘Thank you, that’ll do,’ Jakob said firmly, drumming his fingers on his finished report. ‘I think I’ll take this to the boss.’
After Jakob had briefed the chief of police on the facts about the two violent deaths that had occurred only a day or so apart in one of the city’s less desirable neighbourhoods, he walked down to the small sand and rock beach by Kolonihavnen, where a couple of growlers had washed ashore. It was a little outside the season for that, yet here they were, glistening in the twilight.
Not far from him, an old Inuit was playing a traditional qilaat drum, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his upper body swaying. He was standing on a rock worn smooth and stripy by the forces of the sea. The old man held his flat, round drum in one hand and beat it with the palm of the other while singing his mournful, quiet prayer across the icy, charcoal-grey sea.
Jakob looked away from the drumming dancer and placed his hand on the growler in front of him. Its chill instantly penetrated deep inside his skin. He was mesmerised by the drumming and the singing.
A hundred thousand years ago, the water that now made up the core of this huge block of ice had fallen as the softest snow over an as yet unnamed Greenland. In time the snow had been compressed into the hardest ice, pure and beautiful like nothing else.
‘If you breathe on the ice, you can feel it breathe back.’
The voice had come out of nowhere, and it was not until then that Jakob realised that the singing and drumming had stopped. He turned around and looked into the eyes of the Inuit man who had sung to the sea.
The old man nodded his head at the enormous growler in front of them. ‘Try it!’
Jakob took a hesitant step forwards and moved his lips close to the ice. He exhaled deeply, and felt in that same moment an icy breath reach out for his face. He exhaled again and closed his eyes. The ice was alive just as as he was.
‘It’s the breath of life,’ the old Inuit said.
Jakob turned and looked at him again. He was at least a head shorter than Jakob. His face was brown and wrinkled, like a prune, while his eyes were alive and seemingly bottomless.
‘Do you mind me asking who you were playing for?’ Jakob said.
The old man grinned from ear to ear, revealing stumpy teeth. ‘For the ice there,’ he said. ‘For the sea. The mountains. For all the life that surrounds us.’
Jakob’s gaze shifted across the water.
‘Your soul is troubled,’ the old man said, putting his hand on Jakob’s arm. Jakob looked down at the wrinkled hand, the size of a child’s.
‘I’m a police officer,’ he sighed, shaking his head. ‘So many ugly things go on behind closed doors in this town.’
‘Yes, I know,’ the old man said softly. ‘I also know where you will find your demon, but you need to think very carefully whether catching it is the right thing to do. Demons aren’t released without good reason.’
22
The heavy snow had come early, and the ice had taken hold long ago. First all the little brooks, then the faster-flowing waterfalls. They all froze from the outside in, and for a long time you could see and hear the water still running underneath—sometimes like babbling little melodies, which occasionally found their way up through a hole and spewed bubbles of freezing water across the ice, and sometimes as wild, whirling currents that carried off stones and gravel underneath the crystal-clear surface of the ice.
In one place the frost had taken the water so completely by surprise that it looked as if several waterfalls on their way down the tall mountainside had frozen mid-flow. Even the foam on the water had frozen, the knobbly bubbles reflecting the sun’s rays like thousands of crystal prisms in an old chandelier.
Jakob was sitting on a rock, gazing across Kolonihavnen. In his hands he held his small brown notebook and a yellow pencil.
He and Karlo had recently visited every household in Block P, on the pretext of carrying out a survey of children’s school habits. It was just a cover, but even so, such data gathering wasn’t really a job for the police. Three hundred and twenty apartments. School-age children didn’t live in all of them, of course, but as there was no register of the residents, they had no choice but to knock on every single door. Jakob and Karlo had suspected child abuse in forty-three apartments. In four of them there wasn’t the shadow of a doubt.
Jakob had made a list of the fathers in the forty-three apartments, and recorded the names and ages of any young daughters living at the same address. In addition, he had written down the names of the four worst offenders in his private notebook. Two of these men were the two victims they had found killed—the first one only a few days after Jakob and Karlo had shared the results of their survey at the police station, to Mortensen’s immense irritation. We’re not going to get involved in this, Pedersen, his boss had declared. You don’t have any evidence. If we jailed anyone we didn’t like the look of up here, everyone in this godforsaken place would be behind bars. Karlo just stared at the floor, but Lisbeth from reception had marched out of the room. Later, she had come over to Jakob’s desk and nodded affirmatively at his list of names. Her eyes had been as sad as those of the girls he had seen in Block P.
Jakob shook his head. Now two men had been killed, and an eleven-year-old girl was missing. If they had got involved sooner, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened.
23
Jakob woke up abruptly from a dream so distressing he’d almost fallen out of bed.
He staggered from the bedroom and into the living room, where he flopped into a deep velvet armchair that had been there when he moved in. He gazed out of the large windows that overlooked the bedrock between his house and the next. There were no gardens in Godthåb. All that grew here was grass, tundra flowers, dwarf willow and arctic angelica—short things.
His breath formed a faint cloud in the air. There had to be something wrong with the heating. It had never worked at night in the living room, and the closer they got to the darkest time of the year, the more he felt the cold force its way through the wooden walls of the house, as if the frost and the arctic wind were trying to eat the wood, chew it up with their toothless but steadily grinding jaws.