Tupaarnaq shrugged.
‘Too bad,’ Matthew went on. ‘They’re not going to get away with this. They should have been stopped forty years ago.’
58
Matthew woke on the sofa under a blanket. It was morning, and the light had pierced the blanket fibres and found him. The wind was calm again.
He took out his mobile and brought up Sermitsiaq’s website. The article had already been taken down, but he knew it had been there. Some people must surely have seen it. Tupaarnaq had put it on the front page, along with photographs of the orphanage in Tasiilaq and two of Lyberth, one of which was taken when Lyberth was accused of sexual assault by a female government employee.
His mobile had been on silent, and Matthew could see that he had seven missed calls from his editor and a similar number of voicemails.
Leiff had called too, but only once. Rather than leave a message, he had sent him a text:
Matthew, please stop by the newspaper ASAP. Before noon. I’ve heard you’ll be fired as soon as the boss is back, and you won’t be allowed to clear your desk and your computer, so if I were you I would get here pronto. There’s a parcel on your desk. It came in the post. If you’re not here in an hour, I’ll keep it for you. I believe it’s Lyberth’s handwriting on the cover.
Matthew then noticed another text from Leiff:
The other thing. The pictures you sent me. It looks like a very big shipping container, insulated on the inside. I don’t recognise the girl in the picture, but I believe that the man is a young Abelsen. Now, watch your back and be careful what you get yourself mixed up in. This looks like a matter for the police.
It was still only nine-thirty in the morning, so he had plenty of time. Matthew didn’t bother listening to the voicemails from his editor. He googled a couple of sentences from his article to see if anyone had managed to copy it before it was taken down, but found nothing.
He heard the toilet being flushed. Feet crossing the floor. He sat up and pushed the blanket to the far end of the sofa.
‘You don’t have to pretend that you were awake.’
He looked at her questioningly, and ran a hand through his hair.
‘I heard you snoring a minute ago.’
‘I don’t snore.’
‘If you say so.’
She headed for the kitchen. ‘All right if I make some coffee?’
‘Sure.’ He cleared his throat, arched his back slowly and tilted his neck from side to side. ‘If you can find some.’
‘Well, you’ve got Nescafé,’ she said, with her head halfway inside the cupboard to the right over the kitchen sink. ‘That’s good enough for me. Would you like a cup?’
‘No, thanks—I don’t drink coffee.’
‘You should try it instead of cigarettes.’
The word cigarettes sent a frisson through his body, and he couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the packet and the lighter on the coffee table. ‘I need to go to the office to pick up something before my editor returns to Nuuk,’ he said.
Tupaarnaq was standing with her back to him, stirring her cup. She nodded slowly. ‘I saw that your article has been taken down,’ she said, turning around with the cup in her hand. ‘Are they up in arms about it?’
‘I just need to clear my desk and then I’ll get out of there. I’ve got some research to do—I want to check a few more things about the films.’
‘Okay.’
‘Someone from the paper has texted me to say that the man in the film is Abelsen.’
The coffee aroma reached his nostrils and slipped inside his mouth, where it unfurled and turned into an even stronger craving for a cigarette.
‘Watch your step when you’re outside,’ was all she said.
59
It took Matthew just a few minutes to clear his desk, and as it was only ten o’clock in the morning, he decided he might as well delete his old emails as well. Not that he had anything to hide. He just didn’t like the thought of other people going through his correspondence.
His parcel was in a drawer in Leiff’s desk. It was the safest place, Leiff had texted him—and that was undoubtedly true, because Matthew soon surmised from his colleagues that they all knew what had happened.
Before lunchtime, he had finished going through his mailbox and deleting files and passwords, and he clicked Shut down. He picked up his bag and went downstairs to see Leiff, who opened the drawer and handed the parcel to Matthew.
‘Take it home with you,’ he said with a smile. ‘And if you write another story, then send it to me and I’ll try to get it published under my by-line.’ He nodded in the direction of the parcel that was now in Matthew’s bag. ‘Looks like it might be exciting. You will text me once you open it, won’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ll go through it and see what I find.’
‘Sounds good. If things go wrong, then come over to my place.’
‘Okay, thank you.’ Matthew hesitated. ‘The pictures I sent you. Do you remember anything else? Might the container still be here?’
Leiff shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It could have been set down anywhere. Only I don’t remember there being so many of that size in Nuuk in 1973. Then again, it’s a long time ago, and it might have been left somewhere off the beaten track. I happen to know someone who has a container like that built into his house over on C.P. Holbøllsvej. I mean, from the outside it looks like a house. It has a roof, a window and everything, but it’s just a shipping container with wooden cladding.’
‘Could it be the same one?’
‘No, that one came up here just under ten years ago, so it can’t be. Only they’re similar, and his is also insulated and shiny on the inside.’ Leiff nodded to himself. ‘I’ll ask around.’
Matthew’s apartment was only a few hundred metres from Sermitsiaq’s offices, but his legs and his mind felt as though it was much further away. He felt like everyone was staring at him. Did people know? Had Abelsen returned to Nuuk? Were the police looking for him? He still hadn’t given the notebook back to Ottesen. Abelsen wanted it, but might well decide to have him killed anyway. Matthew spent several minutes looking about him before he inserted the key into his front door and let himself into the quiet, dry stairwell. He took the stairs rather than the lift, so that he would see if anyone was waiting on the landing.
He had bought himself some time by confirming that he would be outside Nipisa on Friday night with Jakob’s notebook, but he was well aware that he had twenty-four hours at best in which to get Abelsen arrested, unless he wanted to end up like Lyberth and the men from 1973.
His thoughts began to calm down. There was no one on the landing or outside his door, and it took him only seconds to let himself in and lock the door behind him. He wondered whether he should go to see Tupaarnaq in the blue building across the road rather than stay in his apartment, where anyone could find him, but he decided nothing was likely to happen in the next few hours. And if the police or his editor turned up, he could always pretend to be out.
The files inside the parcel covered most of his coffee table when he had finished spreading them out. They were not at all what he had been expecting, because they weren’t related to the orphanage, the girls, the medical experiments or anything that linked Lyberth to the 1973 case.
Matthew closed his eyes and slumped back on the sofa. The files contained nothing that would either support Jakob’s case from ’73 or acquit Tupaarnaq today. He couldn’t even be sure that it was Lyberth who had sent him the parcel, although Leiff believed it to be his handwriting on the package. Matthew took out a cigarette and lit it, and then got up from the sofa and walked across to the balcony door.