He took a deep breath and got up from his desk without looking at the others.
‘So, Pedersen,’ Benno called out, ‘are you off to see Lisbeth?’
Storm leered like an idiot. ‘Get me a cup as well, will you?’
‘It’s…’ Jakob pushed open the door to the reception area. ‘There’s a little girl outside in the cold. I think she wants to talk to me.’ The door closed behind him, and he stopped talking. He didn’t give a damn about them. About any of them. Except for Karlo. Karlo was the only Greenlandic police officer there, and the only one he could trust when a case got to him.
‘Paneeraq,’ he called out, even as he walked down the front steps. The cold crept through the fibres of his knitted jumper. ‘Paneeraq, what are you doing out here in the cold?’ He looked at her red fingers. ‘Why don’t you come inside for a bit?’
She didn’t move. She just stood there. Like a pillar of stone.
He bent down and looked at her face inside the fur-lined hood. ‘It’s far too cold for you to be out here, sweetheart.’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said quietly.
‘Come inside with me,’ Jakob said again. ‘And I’ll see what I can do about it.’ He struggled to force the last words up through his throat. What if there was nothing he could do for her? What if he had to send her home, even though she had asked him for help? ‘We’ll work something out—you come inside with me.’
He didn’t dare touch her, so he sufficed by pointing towards the door. ‘Lisbeth will get you some hot chocolate,’ he said. There was no way the child could be in the office with the other officers when Karlo wasn’t there, Jakob had already decided. Benno’s frequent derogatory remarks about Greenlanders made Jakob sick.
Paneeraq didn’t say anything else, but she took some small, tentative steps towards the door.
Jakob smiled. Not on the inside, but to her. Then he smiled imploringly at Lisbeth as he explained that Paneeraq had got very cold and needed a cup of hot chocolate. He smiled when Lisbeth got up to look after Paneeraq with a maternal gaze and the promise of yummy hot chocolate. And he smiled as he walked through the door of the chief of police, closed it behind him and accepted being enveloped in the stench of cigars that lingered in the room.
He continued to smile as he told Mortensen about Paneeraq. He still didn’t tell him about the films and Najak. What if her abductors carried out their threat and killed the girl because of him? He only allowed himself to talk about Paneeraq. Who she was. Her father. His well-founded suspicion that she was a victim of incest. Her limping. Her cry for help outside in the cold. He even smiled as Mortensen started getting het up, but only because his smile was so fixed at this point that he had no idea it was still plastered across his face.
‘This case,’ Mortensen practically shouted. ‘Dammit, Pedersen, as if we didn’t have enough problems with the gutted men, and now you come here… You have to drive the girl home. We can’t keep her here, can we? What the hell were you thinking?’
Jakob rubbed the scab on his forehead. ‘But, sir, that child is probably being raped every day. We can’t just turn a blind eye. There must be something we can do for her. We can’t let her down now that she has finally plucked up the courage to come here. She’s just a little girl, for God’s sake! If we had removed Najak, then she wouldn’t have… vanished into thin air.’ He stared down at his shoes.
‘That’s what life is like up here, Pedersen. You can feel sorry for them, but that’s all. There’s nothing we can do. It goes too deep. Drive her home.’
‘Is this a police station?’ Jakob exploded. The blood was boiling in his veins. ‘Or a slaughterhouse?’
‘That’s enough!’ Mortensen screamed so loudly that his high-pitched voice slipped into a falsetto shriek. ‘Have you completely lost your mind? You solve your murders and leave the politics to the rest of us.’
‘I’m trying to prevent murders!’ Jakob said, still shouting.
‘Are you really? Are you sure about that? You’re the one stomping around a slaughterhouse. After all, the murdered men are all from your so-called school survey. Eh? You drive that girl back to her parents, who are probably out of their minds with worry, and don’t you dare go near anything that involves children from now on. If I hear another word about those girls, I’ll suspend you immediately and put you on the first flight back to Denmark. Do you understand?’
Jakob stared briefly at the small, balding man. Then he turned on his heel without saying a word. He disappeared down the corridor and went out into the reception area, where Paneeraq had just finished her hot chocolate and had pushed back her hood, so her face was visible. Her eyes were black and round. Her cheeks still red. Her hair dark, smooth and short. She smiled cautiously to Lisbeth, who had given her the hot chocolate, and handed the cup back to her. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered politely.
‘I’ve found a place where you can stay for a little while,’ Jakob said to her, and in response got the same anxious smile from the girl that Lisbeth had received.
Lisbeth took his hand gently and gave it squeeze, nodding lightly. Then she let go.
He fetched his coat, his files and the notebook from his desk and took Paneeraq with him as he left the police station. There was no help to be had there, but even so, there was no way that girl was going home to her father.
36
The heating was turned up in the small living room, where an aroma of fried sausages and boiling potatoes had spread and now lay like an enticing, transparent quilt around the girl on the black sofa at the far end of the room. She was holding her maths exercise book. Her open satchel lay by her side. Jakob had spent more than two hours helping her get started on her homework, and when she finally understood it, she had continued doing sums in the book. Jakob had wondered whether they shouldn’t move on to another subject, but in a strange way it seemed as if the logic and repetition of maths were absolutely the right thing to calm their thoughts.
Paneeraq had decided that they should have sausages for dinner. He had asked her what she would like, and after a long pause she had replied: Sausages.
The curtains were closed. Outside, the dark had settled around the house and all of the town, and Jakob had decided to draw all the curtains so that no one could look in. He had even locked the front door, something he rarely did. After the murders and the stone with the threat, security had become a priority—and now, with the girl here, it was crucial.
The sausages sizzled in the frying pan. The potatoes were nearly ready. It wasn’t often that he cooked a proper hot meal, but he had been lucky today and got fresh sausages in the supermarket.
From the kitchen he could see Paneeraq on the sofa. She wasn’t very tall—about one metre twenty would be his guess. Shorter, perhaps. She had tied back her short hair with an elastic band she had found in his kitchen. He smiled to himself at the memory. She wore a dress that reached just below her knees, where a pair of thick yellow stockings took over. There were polka dots on her dress. Big dots in different colours. The dress was buttoned right up to her neck and had a Peter Pan collar.
She was too short to sit the way she did. Her feet couldn’t reach the floor, but stuck out into the air under the coffee table. Her eyes were deep into the maths book. One hand held the book, while the other controlled the pencil from sum to sum. Jakob was delighted to see her working. She was a bright child, and he was surprised at how swiftly she had picked up the logic behind her homework.