Naturally, the fridge was almost empty. If she was going to feed Rolf, it would have to be with sour yogurt and eggs from God only knew when. It wasn’t exactly what he’d paid for, but who knew what he’d want when he was ready for action again?
“Is that you, Denise?” croaked a rough voice from the sitting room.
She shook her head. She’d be damned if she was going to listen to her mother’s drunken rambling at this time of night.
“Won’t you come in here? I am awake.”
Wasn’t that exactly what she was afraid of?
They both looked at each other for a moment, neither of them with any particular sympathy.
“Where’ve you been the last couple of days?” her mother asked, with dried spit in the corners of her mouth.
Denise looked away. “Here and there.”
“The coroners are finished, so your grandmother’s body will be released soon. Will you come with me to the funeral director’s?”
She shrugged her shoulders. That would have to be answer enough for now if she wanted to avoid a discussion. After all, she had a man lying in bed upstairs on the top floor.
8
Thursday, May 12th, 2016
The crumpled newspaper on the kitchen table reminded him of what he had lost. In the space of four years, he had gone from being a happily married man, with a job that demanded respect and offered exciting challenges, to this abyss of loneliness. In these four years, his reduced status and increased lack of self-awareness had become more acute in a way he couldn’t have predicted. He had been through an awful period of illness with the best friend he had ever had. He had witnessed his beloved wife wither away, holding her hand for months while she cried in agony, just as he had also held her hand when the pain shot through her one final time before allowing her to finally find peace. Since then, he had smoked sixty cigarettes a day and not done much else. Everything in the apartment smelled of stale tobacco, his fingers resembled mummified leather, and his lungs wheezed as if they had a puncture.
His elder daughter had warned him four times that if he didn’t mend his ways he would soon be joining their mother in her grave, a statement hidden in the clouds of smoke, waiting for him to act on it. Maybe that was what he actually wanted—to smoke himself to death and free his tortured soul, eat until he popped and just let himself go. What other option did he have?
But then that newspaper had turned up out of nowhere. The front page alone had thrown him off-balance. His curiosity awakened; he had put his cigarette down in the ashtray and picked up the newspaper from the pile under the mail slot. He even ventured the impossible, holding the newspaper half a meter in front of him in an attempt to read it without his reading glasses.
Marcus Jacobsen breathed heavily while reading. The time before everything terrible in his life had happened suddenly felt very present. Inadvertently, impulses shot through his brain synapses, which hadn’t been in use for years. Repressed abstractions were woven together, creating new possibilities and images over which he had no control.
All the thoughts rushing through his head gave Marcus a headache, and what good were they anyway? There had been a time, before he retired, when he had had the power to follow his whims, but now he didn’t even know if anyone would listen to him. But somewhere in his idle existence, there was still part of him that thought and worked as a crime investigator. He had had many successes in his decades on the force. And as head of homicide in the now defunct Department A, he had had a success rate that none of his predecessors had ever been able to match, so he had good reason to look back on his career with pride. But as anyone who has worked in homicide knows, it isn’t the cases that were solved one thinks about in the quiet, dark hours, but those that weren’t solved. These were the cases that constantly kept him awake at night, the ones that made him see the perpetrator around every corner. And dark thoughts about how the perpetrators of these murders of innocent victims still walked the streets among normal law-abiding citizens gave Marcus goose bumps. Sympathy for those left behind who were unable to find closure gave rise to an irrational sense of shame for having let them down, something that pained him in particular. The torment of all the circumstantial evidence that couldn’t be proved, and the leads that hadn’t been spotted. But what good did this do him?
And then he quite literally fell over this front-page story in the pile of unread newspapers cluttering the floor in the corridor, reminding him that there would be no rest so long as people and their capacity for evil were given free rein.
He skimmed the report one more time. He had been wondering what to do about it for ten days now, but something had to happen. Of course, he knew that Lars Bjørn and his team at police HQ must have tried to link this murder to similar unsolved cases, but were they on the same track as him? The coincidences that gnawed away at him between this new case and the old case were simply too obvious to be mere coincidences.
He read the article again, summarizing the facts.
The murder victim had been identified as the sixty-seven-year-old Rigmor Zimmermann. She had been found in the King’s Garden in Copenhagen, behind a fashionable restaurant, and that it was murder was irrefutable. No one could hit the back of their own head with such force.
The postmortem revealed that the victim had suffered a single but deadly blow with a reasonably broad and rounded object. The newspaper characterized the victim as a perfectly average retired woman with a quiet and normal life. Ten thousand kroner had disappeared from her handbag, which her daughter could say with certainty had been in the bag when her mother left her apartment on Borgergade, shortly before she was attacked. As a result, the motive was seen as financial, with subsequent attack and murder, often referred to as a robbery murder. It was still unclear what the murder weapon had been, and probably as a result of the downpour and cold April weather, no one had witnessed the crime, which a waiter at Restaurant Orangeriet thought must have happened between quarter past eight—when he had popped out for a cigarette—and half an hour later, when he went out for another nicotine fix and found the body.
There were no other real facts reported, but Marcus could picture both the body and the crime scene. The victim’s face was pressed down in the damp earth due to the force of the fall, and her body had also left an imprint on the ground. It had been a surprise attack from behind; the deceased hadn’t stood a chance. Exactly the same circumstances he had been mulling over years ago. Back then the victim had been a temporary teacher at Bolman’s Independent School, one Stephanie Gundersen; she was quite a bit younger than this latest victim, but otherwise the most obvious difference was that the first body hadn’t been urinated on.
Marcus sat for a moment, recalling the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the first victim. He thought about it a lot. And he was no stranger to convincing himself that thinking about it was pointless.
In his opinion, the murderer had struck again. The same area in the city, with only six to seven hundred meters between the two crime scenes.
He shook his head in frustration and regret. Why hadn’t they called him so that he could have seen the crime scene while it was still fresh?
For some time he stared passively at his phone, which seemed to scream at him from where it lay on the edge of the kitchen table.
Pick me up and do something about it, it seemed to say.
Marcus looked away. The case was now seventeen days old, so it could wait a while more.
He nodded to himself, reaching out for the pack of cigarettes. He needed a couple more before he could know what the heck he was going to do.
9
Thursday, May 12th, 2016
“Wow, this place is super-nice,” said Michelle, settling herself on a corner sofa and pulling her bag over.
Denise yawned, feeling the effects of last night, and looked around. She tried to see the place with Michelle’s eyes. The café was only half f
ull, and the clientele, a small but mixed group of the unemployed, students, and two women on maternity leave, were about as lively as a funeral cortege in the rain. Denise could think of cozier places than this run-down café, but this time it was Jazmine who had chosen the place.
“I really needed to get out of the house,” continued Michelle. “Patrick’s gone crazy at the moment; I almost don’t dare speak to him. We were supposed to go on vacation together, too, but that isn’t going to happen now.”
“Why don’t you just throw him out?” asked Denise.
“I can’t; it’s his apartment. Yeah, everything is his actually.” Michelle sighed, nodding to herself. She obviously knew that she was in deep water. “I almost didn’t come to meet you because I’ve got zero money and Patrick doesn’t give me any.”
Denise bent down toward the floor, pushing the bottle of wine in the bag a little to one side so she could get to her purse.
“He’s an asshole, that Patrick. Forget him, Michelle. I can give you money,” she said, pulling out her purse and noticing the expression on their faces when she opened it.
“Here, take it,” she said, putting a note in front of Michelle from a bundle of one-thousand-kroner notes. “Now Patrick can just kiss your ass for the next week.”
“Er, thanks. That’s . . .” Michelle caressed the note with her fingers. “I don’t know . . . I mean, I probably can’t pay you back.”
Denise waved her hand dismissively in the air.
“And if Patrick finds out . . . I don’t know . . .”
“There was a lot of money in that purse,” Jazmine said dryly. They clearly wanted to ask how she had come by so much money when she was on the dole just like them.
Denise scrutinized Jazmine’s facial expression. Up until now, they had met each other only three times, and although she liked the others, the question was how much they liked her.
She smiled. “Let’s just say I’m good at saving up.”
Jazmine laughed sarcastically. It was apparent that she’d heard better lies than that. She suddenly turned her attention instinctively toward the door; Denise followed her gaze.
Jazmine looked worried when she saw the first girl who walked in through the café door. Squinting eyes, jaw muscles working away under her soft skin, and a definite frown. Like a hunted animal standing on its hind legs, she scanned the movements outside the door, and when the next girls came in she leaned in toward the other two.
“Do you remember the punk who was provoking us at the benefits office the first time we met?”
They nodded.
“The girls there are called Erika, Sugar, and Fanny, and when they’re here, it’s only a matter of time before Birna arrives. Just wait and see.”
“Shouldn’t we just go somewhere else?” Michelle asked nervously.
Denise shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t give a damn about that black-clad nothing. She didn’t scare her.
“They’ve got a gang: the Black Ladies,” continued Jazmine. “They’re known in the area, and not for anything good.”
“I wonder why,” said Denise as she inspected their totally hideous clothes and makeup. Black, yes, but not ladies.
They were far from being the only people in the café who only moments later noted Birna’s arrival and the demonstrative way in which she slouched at the table with the rest of the gang. One of the women who was breastfeeding slowly put her breast back in her blouse and stood up, nodding to her friend. They put a couple of notes on the table, packed their belongings, and left without saying a word, avoiding any eye contact with the women in black, who were fidgeting in their seats, staring down everyone around them.
When their leader spotted Jazmine, she stood up from the table, staring directly at their group, making it clear that this area was out of bounds so long as she was there.
Denise took a quick drink from her cup before standing up just as demonstratively, despite Jazmine pulling on her sleeve. Standing in her high heels, she was taller than Birna, but this just made Birna clench her fists even harder.
“We’re leaving,” whispered Jazmine, getting up slowly. “They’ll kill us if we stay. Come on.”
Perhaps the gang misread Jazmine’s reaction, because all at once the members of the Black Ladies stood up.
An unease spread in the area behind the bar, Denise observed. The two female bartenders stepped backward toward the stockroom while the male waiter turned his back on the guests and put his cell phone to his ear.
“Come on, Denise.” Jazmine took her by the arm, but Denise shook herself loose. Did they think they could order her about? That just because she was beautiful and feminine she was weak?
“They’ve been inside for grievous bodily harm, Denise. Fanny, the one with the crew cut, has stabbed people,” whispered Jazmine.
Denise smiled. Hadn’t her granddad taught her what to do with enemies? If anyone here expected her to scamper away, they didn’t know Denise or her background.
“One of them lives just three streets from me, so they know where to find me,” Jazmine whispered again. “So let’s get out of here.”
Denise turned to Michelle, but she didn’t look scared like Jazmine, just determined.
Birna stood in the middle of the floor glaring, but this had no effect on Denise. Perhaps it should have when Birna pulled out a bundle of keys from her pocket and, one by one, stuck the keys between her fingers, making a menacing knuckle-duster.
Denise smiled wryly, stepped out of her high heels, picked them up, and pointed the stilettos directly at her opponent.
“Birna, remember our agreement!” shouted the man behind the bar, pointing his cell phone at her threateningly.
Birna reluctantly turned to face him, hesitated for a moment at the sight of the phone, and put the keys back in her pocket without batting an eye.
“You’ve got two minutes, and then they’ll be here,” warned the waiter.
The other members of the gang stared in anticipation at their leader, but Birna didn’t react. She simply turned to Denise with an ice-cold stare.
“Put your stilts back on, dolly bird,” she said in her heavy Icelandic accent. “We’ll be waiting for you, don’t you worry. Then I’ll shove those shoes so far down your throat that you won’t know what hit you. And as for you, you Neanderthal.” She turned to face Jazmine. “I know where you live, all right?”
“Get out of here, Birna. They’re on their way,” the waiter insisted.
She stared at him, giving him a thumbs-up. Then she waved her hand at her clique of girls, and they all left without closing the door behind them.
Before Denise had managed to put her shoes back on, there was a deep humming sound from out on the street, and the waiter walked over toward the café entrance.
Three large motorbikes with pumped-up riders wearing leather vests and armbands spoke with the man from the café. Then they waved to each other before the motorcycles disappeared into the distance.
The waiter looked at Denise as he walked past her. His expression was respectful but not exactly friendly, and when a couple of the regular café patrons began clapping, he sent them a look that made them stop.
Denise was satisfied with herself for having taken the lead, but when she saw Jazmine’s face, she realized that a power struggle between them might just become a reality.
“Yeah, sorry, Jazmine,” she said appeasingly. “I couldn’t help myself. Do you think it will be a problem for you?”
Jazmine scowled. Of course it was a problem. She took a deep breath, smiling faintly at Denise. The apology was apparently accepted.
“Shall we pay and get out of here?” said Denise, taking out her purse as Jazmine rested her hand on hers.
“Are we agreed that we’re friends?” she asked.
In the background, Michelle nodded enthusiastically in consent.
&n
bsp; “Yes, of course,” answered Denise.
“So we’re a team in everything, right? Decisions, actions, and what we want to do.”
“Fine by me, yeah.”
“All three of us have secrets, but it doesn’t need to be like that forever. Are we also agreed on that?”
Denise hesitated. “Okay,” she answered finally. Michelle’s consent was more unreserved, but what the hell sort of secrets could she possibly have?
“Then I want to reveal one of my secrets. And I’m paying, okay?” She waited until they had both nodded in agreement before continuing. “I’m flat broke,” she said with a laugh. “But it doesn’t normally stop me.”
She nodded in the direction of the corner. “See the one with the work pants? He’s staring at us and has been ever since we arrived.”
“I noticed,” said Michelle. “Why does he think we’re interested in him and his dirty pants? And why didn’t he stand up for us when we were being threatened by that bimbo?”
“Have you noticed how he’s been undressing us with his eyes?”
Denise turned around. The guy had a short thick neck and was smiling slyly at them from behind his half-empty beer bottle, while his friends leaned in over the table with folded arms. He was obviously the self-appointed pack leader.
Jazmine looked directly at the man, waving him over to them. He looked momentarily confused, but there was no doubting that he was interested.
“Watch and learn,” whispered Jazmine as she raised her head toward the man when he stood before them in a haze of cheap aftershave.
“Hi,” said Jazmine. “You look good. And that’s why you’re the one who’ll pay our tab.”
He looked taken aback, turning toward his friends, who sat back in their seats attentively.
He caught Jazmine’s gaze again. “Pay? Why should I do that?”
“Because you’ve been eyeing us up. Haven’t you been imagining what our pussies look like?”
He pulled his head back and was just about to protest when Jazmine interrupted.
The Scarred Woman Page 6
