‘So you too were imprisoned in the shipping container?’
‘Yes—I’ll never forget it, though I wish I could.’
‘Was the light flashing inside?’
She nodded. ‘There was a bright light bulb in the ceiling. It kept coming on and going off. All the time, although I soon lost any sense of day or night. There was only light or darkness. I was so scared of what they were going to do to me. Everything broke down inside me. And outside. In the end I wasn’t even sure whether I was alive or dead because everything was a blur. I think I wanted to be dead.’
Matthew stared at the floor.
Tupaarnaq had sat down next to Paneeraq. ‘Can you remember where it was?’ she asked gently.
Paneeraq nodded. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was hoarse. Almost gone. ‘I think so. I think maybe it was in Færingehavn. I’m not sure.’
‘You should have told someone,’ Jakob muttered from his chair.
‘I know,’ Paneeraq said. Now tears were streaming down her cheeks.
‘Rubbish,’ Tupaarnaq protested. ‘She was eleven years old and trying to escape her monsters.’
Matthew looked at Jakob. ‘Might it have been Færingehavn?’
‘Yes, it sounds about right. Both in terms of the distance from Nuuk and their Faroese lackey. And no one would bother them out there.’
‘We sailed for a few hours,’ Paneeraq said. ‘It wasn’t that far away. I remember there was a whole little village of wooden houses there, and the harbour was made from the biggest timber logs I’d ever seen in my life. It went on forever.’
‘That’s definitely Færingehavn,’ Jakob said.
‘I spent some days in a big grey house.’ Paneeraq stared at a distant point in space. ‘I could see some huge round buildings on the far side of the fjord.’
‘That will be Polaroil,’ Jakob said. ‘Those silos are still there… Everything is still there.’
‘Including the shipping container?’ Matthew said with raised eyebrows.
‘I’m almost sure of it,’ Jakob said. ‘The town of Færingehavn wasn’t abandoned until the early eighties, and since then everything has pretty much been left to rot.’
‘Doesn’t anyone live there?’
Jakob shook his head. ‘Færingehavn was a fishing station that the Faroese were allowed to build in 1927. I don’t know how many people lived there in its heyday, but it was quite lively the few times I visited it in ’71 and ’72. Today the place is deserted and the buildings are derelict.’
‘So why do you think the shipping container would still be there?’
‘Because everything was left behind. The inhabitants moved away over the course of a decade, and the last person to leave just turned the key and sailed off. It was too expensive to bring anything other than a suitcase. It’s like that up here. When people move away, most of their stuff is left behind. It costs a fortune to clear a village or a town, and Greenland is so big that no one sees the rot.’
Matthew looked at Tupaarnaq. ‘Can we gothere? To Færingehavn?’
Tupaarnaq nodded. ‘I don’t know where it is, but yes, I guess we can.’
‘Are you going to look for the shipping container?’ Jakob asked.
‘Yes,’ Matthew said, turning his attention back to the older man. ‘It’s probably a long shot, but if everything really was left behind, it might still be there. And if we can identify it, we might find traces of the girls and connect them to Abelsen.’
Jakob straightened up. ‘It’s worth a try. And there’s no statute of limitations for murder. You have a boat?’
Matthew shook his head.
‘We’ll get one,’ Tupaarnaq said. ‘It’s not a problem. I just need the coordinates so I can find the location.’
‘Shouldn’t we contact the police?’ Paneeraq said. ‘So you don’t go out there alone?’
‘We can’t.’ Tupaarnaq looked at Matthew. ‘No police—they… that’ll have to wait.’
‘That will have to wait,’ Jakob echoed. ‘But you should leave now if you want to get there before dark.’ He turned to Tupaarnaq. ‘Take a rifle. Just to be on the safe side.’
She smiled briefly. ‘I never go anywhere without one.’
61
The bottom of the boat hit the waves hard as it ploughed its way across the water, bump by bump. Tupaarnaq was pushing hard—their speed had been around thirty-five knots most of the way.
The sun had broken through the clouds, but had also crawled closer to the horizon during the final stretch of their voyage, and when they turned into Buksefjorden, they only had a few hours of proper daylight left. The mountains soon enclosed the sea, and less than fifteen minutes into the fjord, the first big Polaroil silos came into view. Shortly after that, on the opposite shore, they saw Færingehavn’s long timber quay.
‘It really does look trashed,’ Matthew said as his eyes scanned the quay and the warehouses. ‘It’s amazing that such places exist.’
The boat keeled slightly as it turned. Tupaarnaq peered at the shore. ‘I don’t think we can dock here. The quay is too high, and I can’t risk ripping a hole in the boat by sailing too close to the rocks.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘You drop the anchor, and I’ll release the rubber dinghy.’
The anchor sank into the sea with a hollow plop and quickly hit the bottom. Matthew looked at the shore again. Most of the houses were medium-sized, made from wood and one or two storeys high, painted grey, red or green. They looked like old Swedish farmhouses. At first glance they seemed in good shape, but all the windows were smashed, the glass having been broken by bad weather or vandals. The wooden walls were peeling and dry. The metal roofing sheets were rusty and cracked in several places. Some sheets were missing altogether; Matthew could see the naked, pale wooden skeleton of one house whose rafters were exposed like a rib cage.
‘Grab this!’
Matthew took the rope Tupaarnaq was holding out to him. She freed the dinghy and turned it over in the air so that it hit the sea the right way up. ‘After you?’
He looked down at the water and nodded, then climbed into the small, grey rubber dinghy. It gave under his weight, and he could sense the sea through its soft bottom. He shifted to make way for Tupaarnaq.
‘I’ll row,’ she said, placing her rifle on the floor of the dinghy. ‘I want to get to that rusty ramp at the end of the quay.’
Matthew looked in the same direction as her. The end of the quay was thirty metres wide. Above it was a large, pale-grey building, partly constructed on huge iron posts immersed in the sea close to the shore. The metal roofing sheets were reddish-brown from rust. Several rusting oil barrels were stacked against the end of the building, and down by the rocks in the corner of the quay lay a torn green trawler net.
The iron ramp Tupaarnaq was aiming for wasn’t far away, and the moment the rubber dinghy touched it Matthew jumped up on the ramp. Tupaarnaq followed him and pulled up the dinghy high enough to stop it being taken by the tide, which could come in swiftly.
‘Do you think she’s here?’ she asked, as she pushed the boat under a rusty iron girder.
Matthew rubbed his chin, where his stubble felt increasingly dense, simultaneously soft and coarse. ‘I don’t know—it seems unlikely… Wow, this place really is a dump.’ He shrugged. ‘My friend Leiff told me it’s not unusual to turn a shipping container into a house, or build one around the container.’