She smiled to him. ‘Thank you, but I’ve lived with this weather all my life.’
‘I don’t mind walking you home,’ he offered again. ‘Maybe we’ll see the northern lights.’ He had seen the northern lights many times, but she didn’t have to know that.
Lisbeth looked at his face. Then she reached up and kissed him lightly on his cheek. ‘Thank you.’
34
When Jakob returned after walking Lisbeth home, he could see from the path leading up to his house that someone had left a small bag on his doorhandle. He freed the bag from the handle and turned to look out into the night, where the snow lit up the darkness. There were too many footprints in the snow by his door for him to see if any of them were fresh. His fingers had detected immediately that the bag contained two reels of film.
Once inside, he kicked off his boots and pushed the door shut. He hung up his coat and cap on the old pine coat stand in the small hall.
‘Now, what’s going on here?’ he muttered to himself.
He picked up the box Karlo had brought in. It didn’t take him long to plug in the small grey projector and turn it on. The two reels were labelled 1 and 2, so he assumed that he should watch number one first. He glanced at the glass with Mortensen’s cheroot butt and fetched a clean glass from the kitchen. The aroma of whisky reached his nostrils before the taste spread inside his mouth and, for a brief moment, numbed his tongue before the heat exploded. He put the glass on the armrest and pressed the play button.
The film began rolling with a monotonous clicking sound, and the light flickered on the white wall in front of him.
The camera appeared to have been mounted in the corner of a large shipping container. The walls were covered with a metallic material that reminded him of tinfoil, but it was thicker, more substantial. The floor looked like plywood. Uneven sheets. From the ceiling hung a single naked light bulb that turned on and off all the time. Sometimes it would be dark for a few seconds. At other times for longer. The light was bright when it was on. Everything went pitch-black once it disappeared. It was stressful for his eyes to look at.
His fingers tightened around the glass on the armrest. The tinfoil room was completely empty. Except for one thing. In a corner furthest from the camera, a small girl was curled up. There were no sounds in the light and the darkness. Just the clicking rhythm of the projector in Jakob’s living room. The girl disappeared and came back again with the light. She didn’t have any shoes on. No boots. Only tights covering her legs. Red tights. Her dress was dark brown. It was covered by a green jacket that fitted her tightly. She held her arms close to her body. Her hands were by her mouth. She was gripping something dark and knitted. A hat. Pressing it to her face as if it were a teddy bear. She would chew the hat. Her eyes were closed. Her body twitched. The light coming and going clearly distressed her behind her eyelids.
The girl sat like this for the whole film, which lasted about twenty-five minutes. Afterwards there was darkness in his living room. The reel rotated with the loose filmstrip flapping.
Jakob was hyperventilating. He had never seen Najak but it had to be her. She had gone missing eleven days ago, and now someone had sent him a film of her. His thoughts were all jumbled up. There were no containers of that size in Godthåb right now. Very few large container ships called in here in the winter, especially given what the weather was like at the moment. Then he remembered the bag on the doorhandle. He jumped up from his armchair, found the bag and took out the second reel of film. Along with the film was a note that looked similar to the one that had been tied to the stone. If you tell anyone about this film, she dies. Stop your investigation or she dies.
He let the note slip from his hand and put the second reel on the projector. He drained his glass of Johnnie Walker in two big gulps and refilled it.
The film crackled and clicked like the first one. It was the same room. Tinfoil walls and plywood flooring. The naked light bulb dividing up the time. Najak curled up in a corner with her woolly hat pressed against her mouth. Her hair was more tangled and messier than in the first film. Her tights were stained with dirt.
Jakob jumped when the camera suddenly came to life. It moved towards the huddling girl. The light disappeared. Came back. Disappeared. She flinched even more. Shaking. The camera was very close to her now, and a hand reached out and snatched the hat from her.
Jakob jumped up, swiping the glass so hard from the armrest that it smashed against the wall.
Her mouth opened and it looked as if she was screaming. She buried her face in her hands. Her short fingers were stiff and quivering. Her lips sucked the skin on one hand. The film ended.
Jakob ran out into the hall and tore open his front door. ‘I’m going to bloody well kill you all!’ he roared.
Everything was quiet around the house. The frozen air settled around him. The night was black. The windows in all the houses were black. He looked over to where the shadow who had thrown the stone had come from. ‘I’m going to bloody well kill you all,’ he vowed quietly.
35
The frost intensified dramatically after the last hint of autumn warmth had soaked the town in slush for half a day. The cold returned with a vengeance and everything froze, even the sea around the more sheltered parts of the headland, and that meant it was a severe frost, because the morning and evening tides did their best to break up the ice and allow the moon to continue gazing at its own reflection in the black sea. And yet it turned to ice. Large, white sheets formed by layers of trapped, turquoise seawater.
The frozen water gained a foothold even in the centre of town, climbing up and down the buildings. In some places the icicles were so thick that not even a man could get his arms round them. The snow on the square between Hotel Godthåb, the police station and Brugseni was shovelled into high piles by a rusting yellow bulldozer, leaving the square itself open and clear.
Jakob took a sip of his coffee. He stared absent-mindedly at the black liquid. If he had trusted Mortensen more, he would have shown him the films, but he didn’t dare run the risk. The threats in the notes and the official indifference towards Najak made him fear that it would do her more harm than good, were he to open his mouth. She was alive for now, he kept telling himself. He didn’t know where she was. He didn’t know who she was with. But if he continued investigating the case—discreetly—he would catch a break eventually.
His eyes moved from his coffee across the many papers and files on his desk and out through the window, where his thoughts slipped past the orange supermarket walls and up towards the white peak of Store Malene and Hjortetakken’s stubby top. His gaze stopped abruptly and came crashing down to earth by the piles of snow near his window. He shifted so he could see past the mother-in-law’s tongue on the windowsill.
There was a small girl out on the square. All alone. Well hidden in a shabby, dark green coat with a hood and a black fur collar. On her back she had a black and orange satchel. Her hands were bare and as red as her cheeks, which he could just make out inside the hood.
‘Paneeraq,’ he whispered to himself, then he turned in his office chair to look at the others in the room. He wished that Karlo had been here, but he was on a job down by the harbour and it would take time to get hold of him. He looked back at the girl. She couldn’t just stand there. Why was she standing there? He knew that the other officers would complain if he brought her in, but he couldn’t leave her outside all on her own.