The Scarred Woman

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Pasgård looked pleased while taking down notes. “You think he might have something to do with the murders?”

  “I don’t know, but I do know that he’s crazy about cars and that he was going to confront Michelle about the situation. It was about money, no doubt about that. He was very keen to get his hands on more of that, and he had complete control over her.”

  “Do you know if Senta Berger and Michelle Hansen knew each other?”

  His tone was suddenly friendlier. Were they finally on the same wavelength?

  She shook her head. “I thought about that, but I don’t think I know anything. Certainly nothing I can remember at the moment.” She paused to emphasize what she had said.

  “But there’s something else I should probably mention now you’re here.”

  “Yes?”

  “Birna Sigurdardottir is also one of my clients. She’s the one who was shot . . . outside a nightclub, I believe.”

  The inspector leaned in over the table.

  “She was, yes. We were just about to ask you about that.” She nodded. Her timing had been right.

  “I believe Michelle Hansen and Birna Sigurdardottir knew each other.”

  “What makes you believe that?”

  Anneli turned to her computer and began typing.

  “Look here. Last time Michelle was here she came in immediately after Birna. I’m sure they must have waited together in reception, and I also seem to recall that it’s happened before, but I’m not quite sure about that.”

  “And what do you make of that?”

  She sat back in her chair. “That they maybe arrived together. That they maybe knew each other more than I was aware.”

  Inspector Pasgård nodded with a satisfied look on his face. In fact, he looked almost exhilarated.

  “Thank you for the information, Anne-Line Svendsen. It’s been a great help. I think that’ll be all for now, and pardon the intrusion.” Pasgård got up before his assistant. “We’ll be checking up on Patrick Pettersson’s movements over the last few weeks. That should be simple enough if his boss has kept his paperwork up to date.”

  Anneli tried to contain her relief. “Oh, I forgot to mention that Michelle Hansen and Patrick Pettersson were planning to go on holiday. That was one of the reasons Michelle came in to see me. Of course, I couldn’t give permission when I had just discovered her fraud. But he might not have been at work lately.”

  The other policeman whistled and looked knowingly at Pasgård.

  Poor Patrick Pettersson.

  “Anne-Line, I’m devastated that you’ve been through all this without speaking to me. It was really embarrassing for me that you had to expose yourself like that. I’m terribly sorry.”

  Anneli nodded. If she played her cards right, she could probably get a few more days off out of this.

  “You don’t have to apologize. It was my own fault. You never know how you’re going to react before you actually get ill, do you? So I’m the one who needs to apologize. I should have told you everything. I can see that now.”

  Her manager smiled, looking touched. It was the first time that had ever happened.

  “Well, why don’t we put that behind us and move on. I can understand you, Anne-Line. I certainly don’t think I would have been able to deal with everyone getting involved if I was in your shoes.” She smiled, still looking sheepish. “Are you all right?” she added.

  “Thank you. I’m a little tired, but I’m doing okay.”

  “Take things easy until you feel better, okay? Let’s agree on that. Just let reception know if you need a day to yourself, okay?”

  Anneli tried to look touched. Feelings like those were always better if you shared them.

  Emotional bonding, she believed they called it.

  34

  Friday, May 27th, 2016

  Whose damn idea was it to leave so early? Wasn’t it Assad’s? he asked himself as they were driving south. Now the unshaven bandit had been snoring next to him for the last one hundred and fifty kilometers. The cheek!

  “Wake up, Assad!” he yelled, causing the guy to hit his forehead against his knees.

  Assad looked around, appearing disoriented. “What are we doing here?” he asked drowsily.

  “We’re halfway there, and I’ll fall asleep if you don’t speak to me.”

  Assad rubbed his eyes and looked up at the signs above the glistening wet motorway. “Are we only in Odense? I think I’ll take another nap, then.”

  Carl elbowed him in the side, which still didn’t stop him from nodding off again.

  “Hey, wake up, Assad. I’ve been thinking about something. Listen up.”

  Assad sighed.

  “I went to see my ex-mother-in-law yesterday. She’ll be ninety soon and has become strange and withdrawn, and yet she wants to involve me in something new every time I see her.”

  “You’ve mentioned this before, Carl,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “Yes, but yesterday she wanted me to teach her to take selfies.”

  “Hmm!”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I think so.”

  “I was thinking that Michelle Hansen’s phone must be full of photos. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d taken selfies with the girls who committed the robbery. That is, if it’s true that she was an accomplice.”

  “You seem to forget that it’s not our case, Carl. Anyway, the phone was smashed. A total write-down, Carl.”

  “Write-off, Assad. But that doesn’t matter. It was an iPhone.”

  Assad reluctantly opened his eyes and looked at Carl sleepily. “You mean . . .”

  “Yes. Everything can be found in the cloud. Or on her computer or iPad or whatever we can find. Or on Instagram or Facebook or . . .”

  “Don’t you think the team has already figured that out?”

  Carl shrugged. “Probably. Terje Ploug is on the ball with most things, but maybe we should give him a heads-up. What do you say?”

  Carl nodded to himself and turned to face Assad. The big lump had fallen asleep again.

  —

  After years with Vigga and more than his fair share of years on the streets surrounded by prostitutes and pimps, Carl thought he’d built up a fairly good level of tolerance, but as he stood in Kinua von Kunstwerk’s raw gallery down at the harbor in Flensburg, his open-mindedness was put to the test. You couldn’t exactly call it porn, but it was a close call. The enormous walls were covered in huge and extremely detailed clinical depictions of female genitalia in bright colors.

  Carl caught a glimpse of Assad’s bulging eyes as an extraordinary woman waltzed into the room wearing an outfit that perfectly illustrated her eccentricity. Like a bird of paradise, she walked toward them in her ultrahigh heels, and Carl saw that Rose had certainly retained some influence from her childhood friend.

  “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome, my friends,” she said loudly enough that the suspiciously engrossed visitors in the gallery couldn’t avoid noticing her entrance.

  She kissed Carl and Assad on both cheeks a few times too many for normal north German standards. Carl was worried that Assad would fall to his knees as she stared at them alluringly with her big brown eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered to make sure when he saw the veins pumping on Assad’s neck, but Curly didn’t answer. Instead, he invested all his energy in squinting at the woman as if he were looking directly at the sun.

  “We spoke on the phone,” said Assad in a voice so smooth that it would give a Spanish crooner a run for his money.

  “It’s about Rose,” interrupted Carl before the sultry mood completely took over.

  Karoline, alias Kinua, nodded with a look of concern. “Yes, it doesn’t sound like she’s doing too well,” she said.

  Carl glanced over at a promising-looking Nespresso machi
ne, placed on a glass display cabinet underneath a scarlet-and-purple painting of a vagina during labor.

  “Do you have somewhere else we could talk?” asked Carl, slightly distracted. “With a cup of coffee, that is. It’s been a long drive from Copenhagen.”

  —

  Surrounded by the less invasive decor of the office, the self-proclaimed artistic icon assumed a more normal demeanor.

  “Yes, it’s been several years since Rose and I lost touch, which is a real shame because we were really good friends, but also very different.” She stared straight ahead for a moment, lost in her memories, and then nodded. “And we have very different careers that take up a lot of our time.”

  Carl understood. She didn’t need to underline that difference.

  “As you have probably figured out, we really need to get to the core of Rose’s current situation,” he said. “Perhaps you can provide us with a bit more detail about what happened with Rose and her dad? We know that he tyrannized her and that it must have been bad. But what did he do exactly? Can you give us some examples?”

  Karoline looked surprisingly normal while she tried to find a way to put her thoughts into words.

  “Examples?” she finally said. “How much time do you have?”

  Carl shrugged.

  “Just fire away,” said Assad.

  She smiled—but only for a second.

  “It wouldn’t be a lie to say that Rose never heard one positive or kind word from her dad. He was as cold as ice when it came to her, and what was worse, he made sure that Rose’s mom didn’t dare say anything kind to her either.”

  “But he wasn’t like that with her sisters?”

  She shook her head. “I know that Rose tried to placate him in different ways when she was a bit older. But if she cooked for the family, she could rest assured that he would empty the water jug over his plate in disgust after the first bite. If she vacuumed, he would empty his ashtray on the floor if she had missed just one speck of dust.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, but that’s nothing. He wrote notes to her school principal saying that Rose made fun of the teachers and spoke badly about them at home, asking them to instill some respect in her.”

  “And it wasn’t true?”

  “Of course it wasn’t. When her mom bought her clothes, he burst out laughing, pointed his finger at her and called her an ugly piece of shit, and said the mirror would crack if she looked in it. He threw her things off the shelves if a book was slightly out of place so she would learn to keep her room tidy. He ordered her to eat her dinner in the utility room if she withdrew into herself when he was bullying her. He called her a stinking tart if she dared to borrow a little splash of Yrsa or Vicky’s perfume.”

  Assad said something in Arabic under his breath. That rarely indicated anything favorable about the person in question.

  Carl nodded. “So what you’re saying is that he was an asshole.”

  Karoline hung her head. “An asshole? I don’t have the words to describe him. When Rose was being confirmed, he made her wear an old dress because he didn’t want to spend money on her. They didn’t have a party for her because why spend money on presents when she didn’t look after her things anyway? Do you think ‘asshole’ is strong enough for a man who treats his daughter like that?”

  Carl shook his head. There are many ways to knock a child’s confidence, and none of them justifiable.

  “I hear what you’re saying, but does that explain what I told you earlier? That she expressed her hatred for her dad every day in her notebooks?”

  Kinua von Kunstwerk was in no doubt. “You have to understand that as soon as he came home from work, there wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t bullying her. For example, he loved to ask her impossible questions, which of course she couldn’t answer, and then mock her for being stupid. And if he could get away with doing it when there were other children around, all the better. She told me that when she was learning to ride a bike, which she had to because she had been moved to a new school, her dad pretended to help her keep her balance, but of course he let go of the bike as soon as she swerved, causing her to fall off and hurt herself badly.”

  She looked at Carl, trying to compose herself. “It’s difficult to remember, but now that I’ve started, it’s all coming back to me. I remember clearly that her dad forced her to stay at home when the family went on trips because he didn’t want to look at her grumpy face when they were supposed to be having fun. And he favored her sisters to the point of her disappearing entirely.

  “When she had a rare opportunity to forget about her trauma, he would corner her, like the time before her final high school exams when he made a racket all night to stop her from getting any sleep. She also said to me that he told her she would die if she had the slightest cold or was feeling a bit unwell. And when he was most cunning, he would pretend to be kind. For example, he would point at the strawberry bed in the vegetable garden and tell her which row she could pick from, only to shout like a maniac afterward that she’d picked them from the row that had been sprayed with insecticide and that she’d die in immense agony.”

  Carl stared blankly in front of him. Poor Rose.

  “Don’t you remember anything redeeming?” he asked.

  Karoline shook her head. “He never apologized, but forced Rose to do it over and over whenever she made the slightest mistake.”

  “But why, Karoline? Do you know?”

  “Maybe because Rose’s mom was already expecting her when they met each other. At least that’s my theory. Apart from that, he was a complete psycho and hated her because she never, ever cried when he provoked her.”

  Carl nodded. It definitely made sense. He wondered if her sisters knew all this.

  “And then you came into her life?” said Assad.

  She smiled. “Yes, I did. And I made her laugh at her so-called dad when he bullied her. That made him furious, but it also dampened his attacks a little bit. He wasn’t the type to put up with being the laughingstock. I also told her that she could just kill him if he started again. We laughed a lot about that idea one summer.”

  Then she went quiet, as if in hindsight she could see it all with more perspective.

  “What are you thinking about, Karoline?” asked Carl.

  “I’m thinking that he did get her in the end after all.”

  Carl and Assad looked at her quizzically.

  “She wanted to continue studying, but he got her into the steel plant instead. Of course it was where he worked himself. Where else? He wasn’t about to give up his control over her, was he?”

  “Why didn’t she just move to another city, away from her tormentor?”

  Kinua von Kunstwerk pulled her kimono tighter around her. Now she was back in the present, where this was no longer her problem, and where the doorbell in the exhibition room had suddenly become very active.

  “Why?” She shrugged. “When it came to it, he had just worn her down.”

  —

  “He’s broken her for life, don’t you think?”

  Carl frowned. How he wished that he had known years ago what they had learned today.

  “Do you think Rose killed her dad?” continued Assad.

  “If she did, it hasn’t been proven.”

  “And what if we could prove it?”

  Carl glanced out of the side window at a sea of yellow. Wasn’t it a bit early for the rapeseed fields to be in full bloom? He could never remember.

  “What do you think, Carl? What’s the plan?”

  “You heard Kinua. Maybe the best thing to do for Rose is to keep this to ourselves.”

  “Agreed, Carl. I feel the same way.” He seemed relieved.

  They sat in silence for a long time before their thoughts were interrupted by the telephone ringing. Assad pressed the green telephone icon on t
he screen.

  It was Gordon.

  “How did it go on your round?” asked Carl. “Did you manage to lose the TV crew?”

  It sounded like Gordon laughed, but you never knew with him.

  “Yes,” he answered. “They left after twenty minutes because nothing was happening. They said they couldn’t be bothered to plod around on a route I’d already done before. Apart from that they kept asking me about the nightclub and hit-and-run cases. I don’t think they’re really interested in the Zimmermann case.”

  Carl smiled. All according to plan.

  “But they left too soon, because I bumped into a guy in a café on Store Kongensgade. He lives on Borgergade, and I’d spoken with him earlier. Since then, he’d discussed our talk with his girlfriend, who had her birthday on the day Zimmermann was murdered. She remembered seeing a big guy on Borgergade on that specific day who was shuffling along the street and seemed a bit . . . she couldn’t really describe it but said he seemed very intense. As if he was agitated or worked up about something or other.”

  “So why didn’t they contact us?”

  “They intended to but just hadn’t gotten around to it.”

  Carl nodded. Every investigator knew the situation all too well.

  “Did she remember what time of day it was?”

  “She did. She was on her way to see a friend who had invited her for a birthday celebration around eight o’clock.”

  “And what was this man doing?”

  “He was just standing on the sidewalk a couple of doors down from where Birgit Zimmermann lives. And it was odd because it seemed like he didn’t notice that it was pouring down.”

  “Was she able to give you a description?”

  “She described him as relatively well dressed but dirty and with long greasy hair. Perhaps that was why she noticed him. The combination seemed a bit off, she said.”