Meet me by Nipisa Friday evening at 10 o’clock. I won’t be in Nuuk until then. It’s about a notebook belonging to Jakob Pedersen, which you claim to have. I would like to see it. I haven’t heard his name for a long time. Regards Jørgen Emil Lyberth.
The email had been sent only ten minutes ago.
‘Bad news?’ Leiff asked him.
‘No, it… Sorry, it just threw me.’
‘Was it work?’
‘No, it was someone I haven’t heard from in a long time, so it caught me off-guard. Never mind—it really doesn’t matter.’ He felt a shiver run down his spine.
‘Yes, that can give you a bit of a shock,’ Leiff said, smiling, while he took out a note and handed it to Matthew. ‘I left this on your desk today, but as you didn’t come into the office, I brought it with me instead.’ It was an address scribbled on a piece of paper, just like Ivalo’s note, and below it the words: I think your father lived with this woman for a long time.
‘Eh?’ Matthew burst out. ‘Are you serious? He… I…’
‘Give it a try,’ Leiff went on. ‘It’s just an address, but you never know.’
41
Less than thirty minutes later Matthew was dropped off outside his building with two pairs of boots in a bag. A pair made from black leather and a pair of blue Sorels that had never been worn. Leiff continued to the office to let them know that Matthew would be working from home on his story about the information they had unearthed from the Town Hall archives. This was technically true, but the moment Matthew got in, he put on the Sorel boots and went straight to Tupaarnaq’s apartment. The addresses on the two pieces of paper were burning a hole in his pocket, but they could wait. Or they could wait more than Tupaarnaq and the recently deceased Lyberth, who was apparently still sending emails.
Rather than walk back through the town, around Tele-Posthuset and down Samuel Kleinschmidtip Aqqutaa, he took the footpath behind the blue community hall and emerged close to Lyngby-Tårbæksvej, which ran past a large area of low, white apartment blocks before reaching Block 17.
The weather was still bad, and he soon felt the water penetrating every opening in his clothing. He wasn’t even halfway there by the time his jacket and trousers were soaked. Only his feet in his new boots remained dry.
He could see the Atlantic Ocean most of the way, but it was grey and hazy due to the dense rain that fell between the houses from moisture-rich, foggy clouds. The water soaked his head and dripped from his hair and nose.
It was only one o’clock in the afternoon, but the cloud cover over Nuuk was so thick that it felt more like early evening. Water swept in from all sides. The wind tossed the fog and the water around. It tore at his jacket and he had to lean into the gusts so as not to be knocked over.
The rain and the wind also tore at the damaged doors and howled up the stairwell leading to Tupaarnaq’s apartment. On the first floor, where some of the glass in the door to the gallery was missing, there were puddles of water on the floor. There was a heavy, clammy smell. Like damp cardboard, or wet mortar.
The fingers of his right hand closed around the cold steel handle on the door to Tupaarnaq’s apartment. The handle responded. It moved down with a quiet, light click as the locking mechanism let go of the doorframe.
Matthew’s heart was pounding. His blood was roaring, swelling the veins under the skin on his hands and arms. He swallowed a couple of times and forced himself to slow his breathing.
The hallway was bleak. As empty as if no one had ever lived in this place. On either side of him were two closed doors, while the middle door was open. It was from there that the sparse light entered the small space. He closed the front door behind him, almost without making a noise, and listened for any sounds. The wind was still howling, but not as crazily as out in the stairwell.
He wanted to leave. Reverse out of the door. Walk backwards all the way down the stairs and far, far away.
The apartment smelled of sewage. Sewage and damp. He closed his eyes and listened. He stood very still, taking deep breaths. It was so quiet. So empty. He couldn’t imagine how anyone else but him could be here. And certainly not a dead body. Nor could he smell death. Death smelled differently. It was dry. Medicinal. Not rotting. It is an indeterminate smell seeping out of every pore only minutes after the blood has stopped circulating. Colour fades from the skin. Everything turns grey. Then the smell arrives. He had seen it with Tine in the wrecked car. Felt it in the ambulance. He was getting that sensation now.
A door slammed in the stairwell and he almost jumped out of his skin. He looked over his shoulder in order to see the front door. The sound of stomping boots on the stairs grew louder, then rapidly faded. Matthew turned back towards the light in the living room and entered it.
Without thinking, he took out a cigarette from the packet in his jeans pocket and lit it. The warm smoke slipped deep into his lungs. ‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered, and took another drag so deep that he ended up coughing up the smoke.
Lyberth was positioned like a Christ figure, with a big nail bashed through each palm. His palms were facing upwards and were filled with dark, congealed blood. The flesh around his nails was frayed.
He had been a short, compact man with stumpy legs and a fat belly. Now he had been gutted. His skin, fat and flesh had been pulled aside and nailed to the floor so that his belly opened up like a crater. Inside, only the pale bones and the muddy, dark flesh remained. Everything else was gone. A coagulating brown lake surrounded the body. But no intestines. When Tupaarnaq had told him about the dead Lyberth on her floor, his abdomen hadn’t been nailed to the wooden floorboards; she had described how the dead man’s intestines were lying around him. Nor had she said anything about there being a sock in his mouth or a piece of fabric draped over his eyes. She had said that his mouth had been smeared in blood and saliva, and the blood vessels in his eyes had burst.
A flimsy fraying cloth was flapping outside on the balcony. It had probably hung there in all kinds of weather for years. The light played with the holes torn in the sun-bleached fabric and cast fleeting shadows and patterns across the wooden floor around Lyberth. Apart from the shadows, there was nothing in the living room. This apartment stood empty, as did so many others in these blocks, which had been condemned due to mould.
Suddenly Matthew caught a glimpse of a face on the balcony. For the second time he nearly jumped out of his skin, and he ducked immediately. The face was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and the flapping curtain had obscured every recognisable feature in the brief second the face had been visible.
Matthew turned and stared at the front door. He knew that the balcony reached as far as the kitchen door, and that it was possible to reach the hall that connected the living room and the front door through the kitchen.
His eyes swept across Lyberth’s bloated and emptied abdomen.
Footsteps in the kitchen caused him to look up. They were rapid. Running feet. His heart beat wildly in his chest.
‘Hello?’ he called, and cleared his throat. ‘Tupaarnaq?’
The front door slammed. Matthew ran towards the noise. The hall was empty. The kitchen was empty. He ran outside to the gallery. Somewhere below him he could hear footsteps jumping down the stairs.
He bent down and picked up a damp cloth lying on the gallery floor, then went back to Tupaarnaq’s apartment, where he opened the door he guessed led to the bathroom. He dropped his cigarette butt into the toilet bowl and lit another one. Then he tore off a large wad of toilet paper from the roll and started walking through the apartment and wiping off any possible fingerprints. Every handle, door surface, kitchen cupboard. Including Lyberth’s skin. He looked in every cupboard in every room, but found no trace of Tupaarnaq. Not one. Finally, he flushed the cigarette butts, the toilet paper and the cloth down the toilet.