His editor nodded: ‘If you want something to keep you occupied, there were some brutal murders here back in the 1970s that might be worth looking into. It was before my time, obviously, but someone mentioned them to me a few years ago. They’ve more or less been forgotten. I couldn’t find anything much when I looked into them, but the archives are a nightmare up here. Paper only. For every decade you go back, it’s actually more like a century. But there’s something about the death of Aqqalu that made me think of them again. Check with Leiff downstairs, if he’s in. He must have been a very young man back then, but he’s been with the newspaper for a hundred years. At least.’
‘Leiff? Okay. I’ll head down there now and see if there’s something in it. If there is, can I write about it?’
‘Yes, I should think so. I mean, it’s unlikely to create much of a stir after all these years, but if you find some hard evidence it might drag a few skeletons out of the closet and help make your name up here. After all, it’s still one of the most violent unsolved murder cases in the Arctic.’
‘Thanks,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll head down now and take a look.’
His editor nodded and rubbed one eye. ‘Sure, but don’t get your hopes up. Sometimes it can be good to just lose yourself in a cold case. That’s what I do when I want to take my mind off other things.’
Matthew turned his gaze back to his screen.
His editor patted his shoulder. ‘How are things going otherwise? I mean, here in Nuuk?’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Matthew said, glancing up at the chubby man’s pale face. ‘I take it a day at a time. It’s so different here. Amazing landscape.’
‘That’s good to know. And the apartment is okay?’
‘Yes, absolutely. It’s great. Thank you.’
‘Let me know if you need anything, all right?’
Matthew nodded and grabbed his mouse. He googled the 1970s murders but found nothing, and sighed as he pushed his keyboard away.
If there really had been murders in Nuuk back in the 1970s that bore similarities to what had happened out on the ice, then he wanted to know more—if for no other reason than to have an angle when the time came to write about the murder of Officer Aqqalu.
9
Leiff was on his perch as always. No sooner had Matthew mentioned the murders than Leiff nodded, glanced around and suggested that the two of them go for a walk. That suited Matthew fine. He knew that, whatever Leiff told him, he could only benefit from the older man’s years of experience with the newspaper.
Soon afterwards, the two men passed the big, rust-red Tele-Post building, and they continued along past the newest part of Brugseni supermarket. From there they took the pedestrian crossing between the supermarket and Hotel Hans Egede. The sun had moved well over the town and was bouncing off the long row of hotel windows, which flashed gold in the sun.
‘When I was ten years old, they built a huge apartment block over there.’ Leiff pointed to a large area of wasteland between the city centre and a row of shabby grey residential blocks. ‘Ambitions were high—back then it was the biggest housing development in all of Denmark. Two hundred metres long, and with three hundred and twenty apartments. But, as is so often the case, ambitions failed to allow for real life.’
The area was now covered with colourful skateboard tracks, mounds of earth and climbing frames. At the far end were six light-grey housing blocks that had to be nearly as old and shabby as the one that had been demolished. On the end of one of the blocks someone had painted the giant face of a wrinkled, smiling old Inuit in shades of blue, turquoise and grey.
‘Many of the families who were moved to Nuuk,’ Leiff continued, ‘came from small villages, and they never settled in the claustrophobic apartment blocks miles from where they were born. I think it must be Denmark’s most disastrous policy ever, wanting everyone in Greenland to be Danish. The Inuit were used to being at one with nature in their villages. It was where they lived, where they caught their food, where they could breathe freely. They couldn’t breathe here, and the idea of living in a box high above the ground was foreign to them. Most people kept their windows open day and night, and some even lit fires in their living rooms. They were refugees in their own country.’ He stopped. ‘I know you didn’t ask about that, but it’s all connected.’
‘That’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘I want to know more about Nuuk’s history and its people, and nothing beats a guided tour like this… So what happened to the apartment block?’
‘Many of the old apartment blocks in Nuuk are still standing, although they’re falling apart. They’re all numbered, except for the giant that used to be here. It was called Block P, and it became a troubling symbol of Nuuk’s problems. It was demolished in 2012, so not all that long ago—but still fifty years too late, in my opinion.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘Have you had anything to eat today? You look a bit peaky.’
‘No, I didn’t have time, but it doesn’t matter. I want to know how Block P is connected to the murders I asked you about.’
Leiff nodded and pointed to a cafe by Pisifikk supermarket on the corner of Hotel Hans Egede. ‘Let’s go to Cafe Mamaq.’ He scratched his nose. ‘It was in the early seventies, I believe… Yes, it must have been, because I turned eighteen that winter, so we’re talking late 1973. That was already a year of chaos. Everyone was up in arms about Greenland having to join the European Community as a part of Denmark, and about the oil crisis and everything else that was happening. But the murders still came as a bolt out of the blue, and it traumatised our small community. People were used to violence taking place behind closed doors, not out in the open for all to see. They found four men in their prime, flayed and gutted from their groins to their rib cages… their intestines ripped out of their bodies.’ He frowned. ‘When I think about it now, it was madness. Only it’s so long ago that few people remember.’
‘Flayed,’ Matthew echoed. His thoughts had screeched to a halt at the word. ‘Can you really flay a human being?’
‘Well, I didn’t see them for myself,’ Leiff said. ‘But, yes, the rumours were that they’d been flayed. The skin had been removed from their bodies with an ulo—a kind of flensing knife—and then pulled off them. And, like I said, their insides had been cut out.’
‘Gutted and cleaned like a hunting trophy,’ Matthew said. ‘Just like Aqqalu.’
‘Exactly, but he wasn’t flayed—not as far as I’ve been told.’
Matthew shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t look like it.’
‘Nor do I think anyone else here has been, since those four men in Block P.’ Leiff furrowed his brow. ‘But it’s a long time ago, and I believe the point of those killings in 1973 was to cover something up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They were never solved, but I think the murders were motivated by revenge.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Yes, because two girls also went missing in ’73.’
‘And was this all part of the same investigation? I mean, the one with the dead men?’
‘Yes, it was. Two girls aged ten or eleven years, as far as I recall. They were never found.’
‘So why did people think the murders were related?’
‘Because two of the dead men were the girls’ fathers.’
Leiff and Matthew had reached the glass door to Pisifikk and Cafe Mamaq, and Leiff pushed it open. In the doorway Matthew brushed shoulders with a young woman with a shaved head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, briefly making eye contact with her. He could see no hint of make-up, but she wore an angry scowl. She looked him up and down. Did the same with Leiff. Then she pressed her lips together and marched on without a word.