On entering from the yard, he noticed a round sign in red and white with a red line across a black outline of a man taking a piss. The message could not be misinterpreted, and yet a strong stench of urine still lingered.
The front door was blue. The paint was cracked and discoloured, but what he could see of the apartment through the windows looked fine. There were floral curtains in the windows on either side of the door; through one window he could see right into a clean and neat kitchen.
The second time he knocked, the door was opened by a petite woman in her early fifties, who peered out from the crack between the door and the frame.
‘No junk mail,’ she said wearily when she saw his face.
‘Junk mail?’ he echoed, perplexed.
‘Yes—that’s what you’re handing out, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ He frowned. ‘I’m a journalist and I have some questions for you.’
‘Oh, are you? I thought you were one of those parents who go round with their children raising money for school trips because they think it’s too dangerous for the children to be out on their own.’
‘My daughter is dead.’ Matthew felt his heart plummet inside him so fast that his knees nearly buckled. He had no idea where the words had come from, and he wished he could take them back. ‘I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. My name is Matthew and I’m looking for Paneeraq Poulsen. Do you know her?’
‘Yes,’ she said tentatively. ‘That’s me.’
‘I work for Sermitsiaq and I’m investigating an old case—four murders committed here in Nuuk in 1973.’
Paneeraq said nothing, but she studied him closely.
His fingertips on his left hand gently enclosed the ring finger on his right hand and started rubbing it. ‘As far as I’ve discovered, it was a case where the murder victims were possibly even more evil than whoever killed them, although the murders were brutal.’ He struggled to find the right words. ‘I got your address from a woman who works for the council, and now I’m here. It’s not an easy case to investigate. Everyone clams up like oysters.’
Her silence caused his hands to shake again.
Eventually she nodded slowly and pressed her lips together. ‘Just a minute,’ she said and closed the door.
A few doors further down, three young Greenlanders had come out into the gallery from another apartment. They were all smoking, and Matthew felt the craving for a cigarette. He went over to the gallery railings and leaned over to look down. There were only three cars parked in the yard between Block 1 and Block 2, and one of them was a wreck. Diagonally to his left, he could see a corner of the Arts Centre.
The door opened again, and he quickly turned around.
‘Do come in,’ Paneeraq said, and opened the door fully. ‘I’ve never told anyone what happened, but I’m fifty-three years old now, and I’ve nothing to live for except my grandfather. If I’m going to die, I might as well die shriven, and my grandfather is well into his eighties so he doesn’t cling to anything either.’
Matthew didn’t know what to say, so he bent down to unlace his boots.
‘We discussed it just now, before I let you in,’ she continued. ‘Once someone from the government hears about it, it’ll be common knowledge soon enough.’
‘I haven’t been talking to them,’ Matthew interjected. ‘It was an older woman I know from the council. She feels strongly about the appalling…’ He hesitated. ‘The appalling attitude towards women in so many villages.’
Paneeraq nodded with an empty smile, and then ushered him into the living room. ‘Well, let’s see.’ She pointed out a chair by the dining table. ‘We can sit there.’
The living room was divided into three small islands: the dining table, the sofa and the television, and a comfortable armchair in which an old man was dozing. He was slumped in his chair and almost hidden in an anorak like those Matthew had seen worn by the Greenlandic men who ran the stalls down on the square. A round, flat drum of the kind used for drum dancing was leaning against the armchair.
‘That’s my grandfather,’ Paneeraq said, placing two cups of steaming black coffee on the table. ‘He doesn’t say a lot these days.’
She pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Matthew. Her face was round, her eyes small and her eyebrows sparse. Her hair was thick and short, and brushed to the left. There were traces of grey in the black.
‘What would you like to know?’ she said, without looking at him.
‘I’m working on a case from the seventies,’ he began hesitantly. ‘The four murders I mentioned just now. The way I see it, the murders happened because of child abuse within the family. Now, the girls didn’t kill their own fathers, of course, but someone close to them had had enough and took action on the girls’ behalf.’
‘And you think I’m one of the girls?’
Matthew’s fingers traced the side of the hot cup. ‘Yes, I do. But it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.’
The old man in the armchair let a wrinkled hand fall from the armrest and down onto the drum, where it tapped the taut skin. Not hard, but enough for it to catch Matthew’s attention.
‘I don’t mind talking about it.’ Paneeraq interrupted the drum, which fell silent immediately. Then she got up and went over to a small, dark-brown chest of drawers, where she lit two large white candles with Christian images. On one candle was a picture of Jesus in the style of an icon, and on the other the Virgin Mary.
Matthew spotted a small, fossilised sea urchin between the candles. ‘Do you have such fossils up here?’ he asked, smiling at her.
‘No, it was given to me a long time ago by a good friend.’ She returned to her chair at the table and took a sip of her coffee. ‘What would you like to know?’
Matthew shifted in his seat. ‘When I started my investigation, I thought it was an unsolved murder case, but that has changed.’
‘Changed to what?’
‘Child abuse.’
Paneeraq heaved a deep sigh and stared at the table.
‘It really is quite all right if you don’t want to talk about it,’ Matthew said.
She shrugged. ‘Well, you’re here now.’ Her gaze moved towards the candles. ‘Every girl who is abused remains a lost and lonely child her entire life. The pain of being betrayed so profoundly by the very people who should have protected her never goes away. The pain is there every day, and it hurts just as much now as it did back when she was nine or twelve years old and crying herself to sleep every night.’
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ Matthew asked, taking out his mobile.
‘No… but if you publish your story, I would like to see it first, especially if you mention my name.’
‘I haven’t decided yet. Would you prefer me not to mention your name?’
‘Do what you think is best.’ She stared emptily at his mobile. ‘I wasn’t abused at home, but many other things happened.’
Matthew looked up. The words in Jakob’s notebook about Paneeraq, who could barely walk and was terrified of her father, had had a profound impact on him, but he didn’t want to bring up the notebook or Jakob. ‘Oh? I thought the killings were some sort of reprisal for the sexual assault of—’
‘Us girls?’
He nodded slowly.
‘They might have been, but there was more to it than that. I don’t know what it was like for the other three girls at home, but I do know what the four of us had been through and were still a part of after we returned to Nuuk, just under a year before my parents were killed.’
‘I thought you lived in Nuuk? With your parents?’ Matthew felt Jakob’s suspicions about the girls and their fathers crumbling between his fingers.
‘It doesn’t sound like you’ve got very far with your investigation, but that’s probably just as well. We’ve been forgotten. Everything has been forgotten.’