‘Not quite,’ Matthew protested. ‘After all, I’m writing about it now.’
‘But not because of us girls—am I right? Because of the murdered men. Everything relating to us has been misplaced or lost, so you won’t find any evidence.’
‘Perhaps the evidence will turn up once the genie is out of the bottle. After all, you’re a witness and you can testify.’
Paneeraq sipped her coffee and moved back a little in her chair. ‘There were four of us. Me, Najak, Julianne and Nuka. We were all about nine years old when we arrived at Ammassalik. That must have been in 1969. There was a children’s hospital there and we were being treated for tuberculosis.’ She shook her head. ‘Frankly, I think it was nothing but an orphanage, but someone wanted an excuse to test pharmaceutical products on us, and TB provided a convenient pretext because no one paid much attention to little girls with a chronic cough.’
‘So you spent two years at the orphanage in Ammassalik? That’s not at all what I had imagined.’
‘Yes, I guess we were there for about two years. The days merged together. I think we had given up hope that we would ever go home again, then suddenly it happened, and on the same day the four of us were flown back to Nuuk. We were told that we had been cured, but that we would need ongoing treatment to stay healthy, and that treatment would be best provided in Nuuk. It was more than a year since I had last coughed, so it made no sense to me at the time, but today I know why. But whatever the reason, it was a huge relief to get out of that place. Or so we thought.’
‘All right,’ Matthew said hesitantly. ‘So no one had been assaulted before the murders were committed?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
The silence settled around them.
‘I wasn’t raped at home, but I was raped at the orphanage.’ Paneeraq’s eyes closed. Her face was distorted by distant pain. ‘It was a dreadful place. Rapes. Humiliation. Medical experimentation. They gave us pills and injections from the very first week. Amphetamines, I believe today. But also lots of other things—I didn’t know what they were then and I still don’t. We were never told anything, except that it was part of our treatment. Some drugs gave me such severe pain in my back and legs that I could barely walk. And we slept much more than we ought to have done. Some days we were given pills that would give us our energy back, but they couldn’t do anything about the pain.’
Matthew cleared his throat. ‘Are you telling me that being raped was a part of life at the orphanage?’
‘It was for me and those three other girls. There was an old doctor from Denmark. He had been there for years, and there was a rumour that he had once got a girl pregnant. Today, I believe that was why we were sent away when we reached the age of eleven or twelve. Not only because we were starting to understand what was going on, but also because we might get pregnant.’
‘What a bastard. Why didn’t anyone stop him?’
‘A Danish doctor in Tasiilaq in the sixties and seventies? If you’re a man, you can get away with anything in Tasiilaq. You could then and you can now.’
‘Tasiilaq? I thought you said Ammassalik?’
‘Tasiilaq used to be called Ammassalik. It’s perhaps one of the most beautiful places on earth, but only if you’re a man… or a rock.’
Matthew rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Did you ever meet the doctor again once you returned to Nuuk? Or other people? I’m thinking of civil servants who wanted to make sure you kept silent.’
She nodded with a light smile that hid behind two sad, black eyes. ‘So you do know something after all. We continued with our treatment after we came back to Nuuk. Once a week we would go to the hospital to get an injection in our thigh. I don’t know what it was for, but I was knocked out for hours every single time. Except that twice I woke up and found the doctor between my legs while I lay semiconscious in a hospital bed.’
‘The doctor from Tasiilaq?’
‘Yes.’
‘So he had also come to Nuuk?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, he had. I don’t know how that came about, but at the time I thought he must be stranded in Nuuk for the winter, because there were very few winter flights by helicopter in those days.’
‘Did he also rape the other girls after they came back to Nuuk?’
‘Yes, he did, and that was where things went really wrong because he was found out. Nukannguaq Rossing Lynge, Najak’s mother, came to pick up her daughter at the hospital after treatment one day, and when she entered the ward she saw him lying on top of her naked child. Najak was awake and started screaming and crying when she saw her mother. I don’t know if any of the other girls were also raped by their fathers. But the doctor was another matter, and suddenly all hell broke loose. Some men from the Town Hall and from Denmark turned up, but they had no intention of exposing the truth—they were there to silence us. That was when we realised that all the drugs we had been given weren’t entirely by the book. They were experimenting on us, and that was the big secret. That was the real reason for the cover-up. Not the rape of four little girls.’
Matthew had put down his mobile. ‘Do you know what happened to the other girls?’
‘Najak went missing. I think her body is hidden somewhere in Nuuk. Julianne and Nuka got ill and died as a result of the treatments we were subjected to as children—I’m sure of it. I’m the only one of us still alive, but there are hundreds of other orphanage children from those days.’
‘Do you think those men killed Najak?’
Her eyes slumped into an even deeper darkness. ‘Yes, but not with their bare hands. I think they gave her an overdose of something.’
‘And what about the girls’ fathers?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, staring down at the table and shrugging in resignation.
‘Please forgive my many questions. Only the murders were so brutal, and the events aren’t connected in the way I expected.’
‘That’s quite all right.’ She looked up again. ‘There were probably powerful reasons why the murder investigation was stopped.’
‘Those reasons being that the men who visited you at home and who were mixed up in it all were Jørgen Emil Lyberth and Kjeld Abelsen?’
‘I don’t know how you got those names, but you’re on the right track. They came to our place a couple of times and argued loudly with my father, but I’ve no idea if they murdered my parents. Most of the row was about the doctor and the years of medical experimentation.’
Matthew drummed his fingers on the table. ‘If they wanted to silence you, it makes no sense to kill only the fathers of the other girls—and why did the murders have to be so brutal?’
‘Perhaps the brutality was to paralyse people’s thoughts, and divert their attention away from the real reason.’
Matthew traced the side of his coffee cup, which was getting cold. He still hadn’t mentioned Jakob and neither had she, but he didn’t want to ask her about theories that were still disjointed in his mind. Jakob was dead and gone, and wiped from every archive. If he asked Paneeraq about Jakob or anything specific from the notebook, he would have to admit that he had it, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet. He couldn’t risk her getting upset with him for not owning up to just how much he already knew when he knocked on her door. Nor was he sure who to believe. Paneeraq’s and Jakob’s stories didn’t match. The motive for the murders—as Jakob had seen it—might be gone, but Jakob was unlikely to have known that when he made his notes.
Matthew looked at Paneeraq out of the corner of his eye. ‘Have you heard that they found the body of a man out on the ice cap?’