Jakob smiled. ‘My mother is eighty-one,’ he said, looking across to Karlo. ‘I believe I’m old enough to take care of myself.’
‘I know, I know. I was more thinking you might lose consciousness.’
‘Well, I’ll probably wake up again if I’m meant to.’ Jakob patted Karlo’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about me. It doesn’t feel like a concussion. But it’s kind of you to care.’
‘And we’re having pork chops tonight,’ Karlo said hungrily. ‘Big, fat, juicy ones.’
Jakob took a last look at the gutted man on the floor. ‘I’ll take a raincheck, thanks, Karlo. Once we’re done here, all I want to do for the rest of the evening is hide under my blankets.’
31
The stairwells looked pretty much identical. All were made from concrete, had the same doors and the same orange-red wooden banisters. The only difference was the names on the letterboxes and the stuff left outside the front doors or littering the communal areas. In some places shoes and boots were carefully arranged, while in others bags, clothes and fishing gear covered half the floor space.
Outside Anguteeraq Poulsen’s place, the boots were lined up neatly and they were clean, as was a pair of snowshoes, old and worn, but greased and ready for use.
‘Hello,’ Karlo said in a cheerful voice the moment the door was opened and a subdued-looking woman peered out from the crack. ‘We’re here to follow up on the police survey of children’s school habits. I’m afraid we didn’t manage to complete our form when we were here last, so we were wondering if we might trouble you with a quick visit.’
The woman closed the door as she nodded, and it grew silent on the landing as the two men stared at the closed door. Soon it opened again, and the man they had spoken to the last time they had visited popped out his head. He glared at Jakob, then turned his attention to Karlo and muttered something in Greenlandic. Karlo replied, and the two men spoke for just under a minute before Anguteeraq Poulsen finally took a step back and opened the door fully. He was wearing jeans and a stained and faded green T-shirt. His hair was messy.
‘He says he can’t be bothered to speak Danish today,’ Karlo whispered to Jakob as they entered. ‘So I’ll talk to him in Greenlandic and tell you what he said afterwards.’
Jakob inhaled the smell of the place through his nostrils. ‘Ask him if he knew the other three men, but don’t let on too much… Just ask a bit about everything.’
Karlo nodded and sat down on a brown sofa that the man had pointed to. Jakob sat down next to him, and they were each given a cup of black coffee.
The two Greenlandic men started talking, while Jakob studied Poulsen’s facial expressions and the apartment around him. Poulsen clearly resented Jakob’s presence. Anger exuded from his eyes, from the frowning of his forehead and from the restlessness of his body. In Jakob’s opinion, though, it was more than just anger. They weren’t welcome. Not just because they were police officers and because Jakob was Danish. No, they were people who had entered his home, which didn’t bear close scrutiny.
Jakob nearly burned himself when he raised the cup to his lips. He looked into the steaming coffee, before nodding politely to the woman sitting on a light-coloured chair by the door to the kitchen. There were another two doors leading from the living room, but both were closed. Between the two brown sofas was a pine coffee table, with a brass lamp above it that sent out its light through a series of yellow oval glass discs. The walls were bare except for a single, simplistic painting of a man in a kayak on the sea in front of Mount Sermitsiaq.
Jakob turned his attention back to Anguteeraq Poulsen. His trousers. His T-shirt. His gaze. The cowed wife sitting by the door, staring at the floor, her hands resting on her legs, which were pressed together.
‘Karlo,’ he sighed, ‘would you please tell Mr Poulsen that we have a few questions for his daughter, because we didn’t manage to complete the form the last time we were here.’
‘She’s asleep,’ Anguteeraq Poulsen interjected in Danish.
Jakob sniffed the air and picked up the aroma coming from the kitchen. ‘It smells like you’re about to eat.’
Anguteeraq Poulsen scowled at them both, then got up and disappeared into one of the rooms. A few minutes later he emerged with the girl in his arms. He put her down on the sofa and sat beside her, keeping his hand on her shoulder all the while.
‘She’s not quite herself,’ he said. ‘She went to the hospital today for an injection.’ For a moment his gaze seemed more apologetic than angry. The girl’s body was floppy. She wasn’t making eye contact, but just stared down at herself. Her hands were gathered like her mother’s.
‘Sorry to wake you up, Paneeraq,’ Jakob said. ‘It’s just that we forgot a few things the last time we were here, and we want to make sure that our survey is perfect so we can build the best school for you children.’
The girl nodded. According to Jakob’s notebook, she was eleven years old. Her father was the last of the four men on his list of people who should never be allowed near a girl or a woman for the rest of their lives. He struggled to contain his emotions.
‘Paneeraq…’
The silence after her name shaped a question in the air, and the girl looked up.
A shiver went down Jakob’s spine as all the blood and life inside him froze. ‘Paneeraq,’ he repeated in a croaking voice. ‘Do you like going to school?’
She didn’t say anything. She just looked down again, but she nodded lightly.
‘And if you have any problems, do you get plenty of help?’
She shook her head very slowly.
‘So no one helps you?’
‘No one,’ she whispered.
Jakob watched as tears trickled down the girl’s chubby cheeks.
Her father tapped her shoulder and her whole body flinched. ‘You asked her that the last time,’ he growled. ‘She’s tired.’
‘Sometimes you get different answers depending on when and how you ask the question,’ Jakob said, without taking his eyes off the girl. ‘Paneeraq, it’s always okay to ask for help. Don’t you ever forget that, ilaa?’
She didn’t say anything, and he realised that he had to release her from her father’s grip. ‘That’s enough. Paneeraq, you’re free to go back to bed if you want to.’
The girl got up so quickly that her father didn’t have time to stop her. She kept her eyes firmly on the floor, but shook hands with both Karlo and Jakob before she limped with some difficulty towards the door to the bedroom and disappeared.
Jakob could no longer bear to look at Anguteeraq Poulsen. His face spoke volumes now, and all of it was ugly.
‘I’ll bloody well kill him myself,’ Jakob fumed when they were back outside Block P, looking up at the closed windows of the apartment. ‘I’ll bloody well kill him and gut him myself.’ Everything whirled around in his mind, and he struggled to keep hold of the many loose ends. ‘Oh, damn,’ he then exclaimed. ‘I need to go back to Ari Rossing Lynge’s place. Do you know if his wife is still living there?’
‘You want to go there now?’ Karlo checked his wristwatch as he stepped further away from the apartment block, and his eyes moved from the watch face to the front of the building. ‘The light is on, so I’m guessing that she is.’
Jakob rubbed his face with a weary expression. ‘I have to have another look. Around the living room and the bedrooms.’
‘But—’
‘It’s all right.’ Jakob raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t have to come with me. It’s okay. I can hear the pork chops calling you.’