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
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?’