“Does she remember him well enough to give a description to our sketch artist?”
“Not his face, but she can describe his body posture and clothes.”
“Okay. Sort that out, then, Gordon.”
“I already have, but there’s more, Carl. I found another witness. Someone who saw Rigmor Zimmermann just before the murder. In fact, he had spoken to the investigators in homicide but hasn’t heard back since.”
“When did he contact them?”
“The day after the murder.”
“Is that in the report?”
“No. I can’t find his witness statement.”
Assad rolled his eyes, and Carl was with him. If would be a miracle if Pasgård’s team managed to solve this case.
“What did this witness see?”
“He saw Rigmor Zimmermann stop at a street corner and look over her shoulder before suddenly starting to run.”
“Where exactly?”
“It was on the corner of Klerkegade and Kronprinsessegade.”
“Okay. That’s only a hundred meters from the King’s Garden.”
“Yes, and she ran off in that direction. But he didn’t see any more because he was walking in the opposite direction down Kronprinsessegade. He lives in Nyboder.”
“What did the man make of it?”
“That maybe the rain was too much for her or that she’d suddenly remembered that she was late for something. He didn’t know.”
“Where did you find him?” asked Assad, putting his feet up on the dashboard in a position that would anger any yoga instructor.
“He found me. He heard me questioning some people where he works.”
“Good job, Gordon,” said Carl. “Bring him in so we can go through it all one more time, okay? We can be back within thirty minutes. Do you think you can get him down to HQ by then?”
“I can try, but I don’t think you have time, Carl. The commissioner himself has just been down in the basement snooping about. He said you have to report to him as soon as you’re back. He looked pretty serious, so I think you’d better do it. Something about the TV crew needing something to be getting on with.”
Carl and Assad looked at each other. Suddenly it might take much longer than thirty minutes for them to get back.
“Tell him we had a puncture and drove into a ditch.”
There was a long pause. Apparently Gordon wasn’t down with that.
35
Friday, May 27th, 2016
The first thing Rose noticed when she regained consciousness was a cutting feeling on the backs of her thighs. Jumbled sounds and images rushed through her head in snatches. A blow, hands struggling with her body, piercing voices, and a ripping sound as if something was being torn.
She slowly opened her eyes and saw a faint white glow creeping in from under a door next to her.
She didn’t recognize the room and couldn’t work out what she was sitting on.
Then the throbbing pain and pressure from the back of her head kicked in. Was it because of the alcohol, or had something else happened? She didn’t understand it. She tried to call for help, but no sound came out because something had been tied around her face, stopping her from opening her mouth.
With one attempt at maneuvering her upper body, she immediately knew her situation. She didn’t know how it had happened, but she had been tied up in a sitting position with her arms pulled up above her head and her hands fastened to something cold. Her ankles were tied together, her back was pressed up against something smooth, and something or other around her neck was stopping her from moving more than a few centimeters forward.
She had no idea what had happened.
From the other side of the door, she could hear the sound of two clear voices arguing. The women sounded young and shrill, and there was no mistaking what they were saying. They were arguing about her. About whether she should live or die.
Just kill me, whoever you are, she thought. It didn’t matter how it happened. The result would be the same: She would find peace.
Rose closed her eyes. As long as her headache was so intense, she could keep the persistent thoughts in her head at bay. All the unavoidable images of her father’s mangled body. The arm sticking out from the huge slab, still with an accusing finger pointing right at her. The deep red blood flowing toward her shoes. And she recalled the smile on her mother’s face when the paramedics dropped her off later that same day. The police were already outside the house, so she had obviously been informed about what had happened. So why was she smiling? Why did she only have the energy to smile? Why was there not a single word of comfort?
Stop! she screamed inside. But these thoughts were inside her. And Rose knew better than anyone that if she wasn’t careful, this would just be an overture to even worse images and words that could come at her like a flood any minute.
Darker images than before, words that hurt more than the previous ones, and unstoppable memories.
She fought against whatever it was restraining her arms. Moaned behind the material that was covering her mouth and making her mute.
Then she pressed forward as hard as she could against the restraint around her neck, but even these few centimeters choked her. She stayed like this until the pressure caused her to lose consciousness again.
When she came around, the two women from earlier were standing watching over her. One of them, Rigmor Zimmermann’s granddaughter, had a penetrating expression and was holding a sharp object that looked like an awl in one hand, while the other one was holding a roll of duct tape.
Are they going to stab me to death? she wondered, but rejected the thought straightaway. Why would the other one be holding duct tape if that was the case?
Rose let her eyes wander and recognized the room now. They were in Rigmor’s bathroom, and she was taped tightly to the toilet. That explained the sharp pain in her thighs.
Try as she might, Rose couldn’t look down at herself because of the restraint around her neck. But if she glanced to the left toward the sink and mirror, she could just catch a glimpse of what they had done to her.
Her pants and underwear were pulled down around her knees, and there was duct tape tied tightly around her thighs and the toilet, and around her waist and the cistern behind her. Her hands were elevated, tied with a couple of Rigmor’s belts to the grab rail screwed into the wall. She recognized one of the belts as a present she had given Rigmor for Christmas. It was a slim yellow belt that Rigmor had used more out of politeness than pleasure over the Christmas period and then never used again.
There was duct tape around Rose’s mouth, and a rope made from silk scarves around her neck, tied at either end to the two grab rails on the wall.
Now she remembered that she had tried to strangle herself but had to concede that it was impossible, however hard she might try. Every time she managed to lose consciousness, she would just fall back again, loosening the grip around her neck and allowing the blood to flow back to her brain.
If she had been capable, she would have told the two girls that they could let her go. That she was totally uninterested in them, and that she couldn’t understand why it was necessary to do this to her. So she tried to signal with her eyes that she was willing to cooperate, but they ignored her.
What could they have done that she was such a threat to them?
“Should we just leave her sitting there until we make our getaway, Denise?” said the one with the duct tape.
Denise? Rose tried to concentrate. Wasn’t her name Dorrit? Or had Rigmor once mentioned that her granddaughter had changed her name? Rose seemed to recall that she had.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” asked Denise.
“We’ll call someone and say where she is when this is all over, right?”
Denise nodded.
“But if she’s staying there, where are w
e supposed to pee?” asked the other one.
“You’ll have to use the sink, Jazmine.”
“While she’s looking at me?”
“Just pretend that she’s not there. That’s the general idea anyway. I’m in charge of her, okay?”
“But I can’t do a number two in the sink.”
“Then you’ll just have to go next door. The door isn’t locked.”
Denise looked directly at Rose. “We’ll give you something to drink once in a while, and you’ll stay calm; otherwise, I’ll knock you out again. Got it?”
Rose blinked a couple of times.
“I mean it. And it’ll be harder this time, okay?”
Rose blinked again.
Then she held the pointy object toward the tape around Rose’s mouth. “I’m going to poke this through to make a small hole. Part your lips if you can.”
Rose tried her best, but as soon as the awl was poked through the tape, she could taste blood.
“Sorryyyyy!” said Denise as the blood seeped out of the hole. “But it’s for this, so you can drink,” she said, holding up a straw of the type used in hospitals.
She stuck the straw through the hole. Rose winced in pain as the injured skin from her upper lip was pushed into her mouth. She swallowed blood a couple of times before she could suck up the water from a toothpaste-stained glass.
As long as they gave her water, they would let her live, she reasoned.
Even though the weather had been so hot lately that it was regarded as a heat wave in Denmark, it was cool in the bathroom. After a few hours, Rose began to feel cold. Perhaps mainly due to the restraints on her blood flow.
If I can’t move I’ll develop blood clots, she thought, tensing her calves so that her calf muscle pumps wouldn’t stop completely. All in all, her situation was terrible. She knew that much. In this position, she would probably survive for a few days, but maybe the girls didn’t need longer than that before they disappeared. And they had said that they would call someone and let them know where she was. What would happen then?
Would she be committed again? The person they called was likely to find her mother or sisters, and then her sisters would come rushing, and who could then prevent them from finding the suicide note and the razor blade? That wasn’t good. If she had reached the point where she was going to commit suicide, the psychiatrists wouldn’t let her go willingly this time. So wasn’t it better to die in here?
I’ll keep perfectly still. Then I’m bound to get a blood clot sooner or later. Those girls don’t know anything about that sort of thing.
She waited with her breath wheezing out from the straw, wondering why the otherwise persnickety Rigmor had left her dirty laundry in the washing machine, and why despite her age she still kept sanitary pads on the shelf above the tumble dryer, and why she had some old panty hose on a hook even though they were ripped down one side. Did she repair her ripped panty hose? Was that even possible?
She closed her eyes to imagine skilled hands threading the thin fabric, but the image was interrupted by one of her father’s face frothing at the mouth and with hate emanating from his eyes.
“You come with me when I tell you to, girl,” he hissed. “You will come with me and if I tell you to leave, you’ll do that too. Understood?”
The face grew larger and larger, and the words hung in the air in eternal repetition. The image made Rose’s heart pound violently in panic. Her cheeks filled with air, and the wheezing in the straw hit a note like the scream Rose wanted to let out but couldn’t.
And right there on the toilet she relieved her bladder. Exactly like on that terrible day when she had felt the vibrations from the pager in her pocket.
—
The next time Denise brought her water, Rose was dripping with sweat. “Are you too hot?” she asked, turning the thermostat on the radiator all the way down before leaving the bathroom with the door ajar.
There was still some daylight in the hallway, although it was dim. At this time of year it was hard to determine what time it was because it didn’t really get dark until around eleven. And it couldn’t be that late yet.
“They keep going on and on, Denise,” said Jazmine a bit later from the sitting room. “They’ve shown that clip with Michelle all day now,” she continued.
“Then turn off the TV, Jazmine!”
“They know that she was at the nightclub when we committed the robbery and Birna was shot, and they know that she was there with two other women. They seem to suspect that Patrick guy, and he knows our names, Denise. He heard them at the hospital.”
“Did he? But it isn’t certain that he can remember them, is it?”
“He can describe us—I’m dead certain about that. The police are looking for us. I just know it, Denise.”
“Cut it out, Jazmine. They don’t know where we are and no one will recognize us when we’ve finished with this, will they? Let’s go to the bathroom now.”
The conversation slowly made sense to Rose despite her inner chaos. Her experience as an investigator blocked out the terrible thoughts, and she was only too eager to let them go.
Jazmine had mentioned a robbery and someone called Birna who had been shot outside a nightclub. Did the girls in there think she knew anything about it?
Rose thought back to the moment when she had first stepped into the apartment and found them. What was the last thing she had said? That she would report them for breaking into Rigmor’s apartment.
So that was why. They were afraid of her. She was the enemy and that was why she was sitting here. They would leave her here when they made their escape. No one would call anyone. That was the most obvious conclusion.
The two girls came into the bathroom together, and Rose closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. The last thing she wanted just now was for them to think she had overheard their conversation.
Denise immediately sat in the sink and peed while Jazmine took off her clothes and got in the shower.
They had both cropped their hair. It was a complete transformation.
“I hate this, Denise. It’s taken me more than five years to grow my hair this long. I want to fucking cry,” said Jazmine as she squeezed hair dye over her scalp and drew the shower curtain.
“Once we’re in Brazil, you can have all the hair extensions you want for next to nothing. So stop whining,” Denise said, laughing as she jumped down from the sink. She took a couple of sheets of toilet paper from the roll next to Rose, wiped her crotch, and threw the paper in the basket where Rigmor used to keep her laundry. So that was why her laundry had been thrown in the washing machine.
Rose followed Denise’s every move through her half-closed eyes, but Denise didn’t look in her direction. Was she already dead in their eyes, or did Denise actually think she was asleep?
Then Denise turned toward the mirror and looked at her short hair while shaking the bottle of hair dye. Rose opened her eyes a little more. There were three scratches down Denise’s back—not a pretty sight on such a perfect body.
“Are you sure that Anne-Line won’t recognize you, Denise? And what if she doesn’t let you in?” came Jazmine’s voice from behind the shower curtain.
“I’ve fooled smarter people than her, Jazmine. I’ll bring her down before she knows what hit her,” answered Denise, spinning around.
She was staring directly at Rose as if she had sensed her eyes on her.
Rose didn’t have time to shut her eyes.
36
Sunday, May 29th, and Monday, May 30th, 2016
Marcus Jacobsen waved a hand to decline the can of beer Carl placed in front of him on the garden table at his home in Rønneholtparken. “No, thank you. I’ve gone cold turkey, so no cigarettes or alcohol for me. I’m trying to look after myself these days.”
Carl nodded and lit a cigarette. Statistically, miracles were bound to happ
en once in a while. But this was a Carl’s Special beer. Could it get any better than that?
“Well, Carl, have you looked at my notes?”
Carl clenched his teeth, shaking his head. “I haven’t really had time, but I will do it. I promise. I have them on my desk.”
Marcus looked disappointed, and he had every reason to be. After all, he was the one who had taught Carl all he knew about investigative work, and then Carl hadn’t taken his advice seriously. It really wasn’t okay.
“Okay, Marcus, I might as well confess. I had my doubts about you and the case. You were so obsessed with it back then that I thought it might be wishful thinking on your part to link the two cases. But as I said, I promise to look at them now. That’s actually why I’ve invited you.”
“Hmm! So it wasn’t just for my sake you invited me. What are you after, then?”
Carl sighed more than he had intended to, but maybe the effect would be beneficial. “As you know, we’re a bit worked up at the moment because of Rose, so I thought that you might be able to lend us a hand.”
Marcus smiled. “With a case that isn’t yours, I assume?”
Carl watched as his cigarette smoke rose in the air. Of course he knew that Marcus wouldn’t stab him in the back, but the question was still a bit too forward for his liking.
“You know the drill, Marcus. You get all these conflicting and confusing gut feelings, and I for one hate that. And then there’s the business with Rose. We normally rely on her when we need to delve deeper into a case, but she’s not able to help us now, is she? We need her more than any of us could have imagined.”
Marcus smiled. “So what is it you’d like me to ‘delve deeper into,’ Carl? What are your gut feelings telling you?”
“That I need to know everything about the Zimmermann family and their background. We already know a good deal about Rigmor’s husband, and he definitely wasn’t a saint.” He told Marcus what they knew about Fritzl Zimmermann’s shady past, his later life, and his demise.
The Scarred Woman Page 31
