The Scarred Woman

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Marcus Jacobsen nodded. “No, not what you’d call a role model. But now that you mention it, I think our department had some dealings with the case about the man who drowned in Damhus Lake. So that was him, was it?”

  They heard a faint humming sound from the hallway. Morten and Hardy were home.

  Marcus smiled again. It was a reunion he had been looking forward to. He stood up to greet them in the doorway. It was moving to see their former uncompromising boss bending down to hug his old investigator.

  “So, how was your trip, old boy?” asked Marcus when Hardy had finally managed to maneuver his electric wheelchair over to the garden table.

  “Well . . . ,” he answered almost inaudibly as the red-eyed Morten came out to them and asked in a tearful voice if there was anything he could do for them.

  “We’re fine, Morten, thanks.”

  “In that case . . . I think . . . I’ll go and lie down,” he said, sniffling.

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked Marcus when they could no longer hear footsteps leading down to the basement.

  Hardy looked tired. “A broken heart. It’s not a good idea to go out in the sunshine in May if you want to avoid seeing people in love everywhere. He’s been wailing like an orphaned seal all the way.”

  “Well, it’s hard to remember that feeling of rejected love!” Marcus shook his head and turned to Carl. He was already back in his role as an investigator. “What do we know about Birgit Zimmermann’s husband?”

  “Nothing. But it’s one of the things we hope you’ll be able to tell us about when you’ve done some digging.”

  —

  As agreed, they arrived at the steel plant Monday morning at ten and were met at security just left of the main gate. An elderly man and a younger woman were standing behind Leo Andresen, so apparently they were taking the tour seriously.

  Leo smiled and pointed at the skinny man. “Yeah, Polle P. is the oldest former employee from here, I worked here for thirty years before retiring, and Lana here is the newest recruit at the plant, so together we should be able to answer any questions you might have about the place over the years.”

  They all shook hands.

  “Polle and I will lead the tour, and Lana is our security officer, so in a minute she’ll provide you with hard hats and safety shoes. Dare I ask your shoe sizes, gentlemen?”

  All three of them looked down at Assad’s and Carl’s feet.

  “May I suggest a size forty-five for you, Carl, and a forty-one for Assad?” continued Leo.

  “You may,” said Assad, “but if I don’t get a forty-two, you might as well kill me straightaway.” He was the only one to laugh.

  They left security, and Carl filled them in about their meeting with Benny Andersson. Judging by their reserved expressions, Andersson didn’t require any introduction.

  “He was one of the people who received compensation for manganese poisoning,” snarled Polle. “I don’t know about the others, but Benny definitely didn’t have manganese poisoning, if you ask me.”

  “Who cares? It got rid of him,” added Leo, understandably.

  “No, he’s certainly no heartbreaker,” said Carl. “But I have the impression that he was fond of Rose, so he can’t be all bad. Do you know what their relationship was with each other?”

  “Nothing, I think. He just liked women and really hated Arne Knudsen.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Most of us did, to be honest. Arne wasn’t nice to anyone, and especially not Rose. That was clear to everyone who came in contact with them. She shouldn’t have been working so closely with her dad,” said Polle, throwing out one arm in presentation as they turned a corner and the vastness of the plant appeared before them.

  The open areas around the buildings were orderly and surprisingly empty considering the enormous amount of steel that passed through the plant. Where were the three hundred and forty employees? There was no one in sight. Even though the area was the size of a small island and the buildings as huge as aircraft hangars, capable of accommodating thousands of people, three hundred and forty people couldn’t just disappear. Carl had imagined mountains of scrap, noise from every corner, and strapping men in coveralls swarming around the place.

  Leo Andresen laughed. “It’s probably not like you imagined it. Things have changed now. The plant is run electronically nowadays. Highly skilled employees sitting with joysticks, pushing buttons, and looking at monitors. That’s the way it’s been since we stopped melting scrap metal ourselves. Now it’s an export company owned by the Russians, and—”

  “And how was it in 1999 when Arne Knudsen died?” interrupted Carl.

  “Very, very different, and yet not,” said Polle. “First of all, we were more than a thousand employees. There’s another company out there on the peninsula now, but back then we were all part of the same organization owned by the investment companies A. P. Møller and EAC. And then came that damn manganese case and a lot of other stuff at the same time, making the company less profitable. In 2002, we went bankrupt. That was the end of an era.”

  He pointed at a row of stacked, thick steel slabs lying on the concrete floor in the open air.

  “Back then, we were a recycling company that bought eight hundred thousand tons of scrap metal a year, melted it, and processed it into sheets, bars, and reinforcing steel. We provided material for bridges and tunnels and all sorts. Today, we receive those Russian slabs you can see lying there, with the one aim of rolling them into sheets.”

  He opened the door into one of the production areas, which was so huge that Assad put his hand to his hard hat in shock. Carl couldn’t take in the sheer size of the place.

  “Did the accident happen here?” He pointed at the conveyor belt where the slabs were brought into position, lifted up by cranes with enormous magnets, and transported to other positions. “Was it a whopper like that which killed Arne Knudsen?” he asked.

  Polle shook his head. “No, and it didn’t happen here either. It was down in the old part of W15. This one is a twenty-ton slab, but the one that killed Arne was only half as heavy.” He shrugged. It was still more than enough.

  “If Rose still worked here, she’d probably be in that office now,” he said as they reached the corner of the hall where a glass partition separated the imposing raw area from a typical factory office. He pointed inside at a pretty young woman wearing blue coveralls looking at a computer screen. They waved at each other. “That’s Micha. She’s a feeder operator—the same job Rose was apprenticed to with her dad. He was a feeder operator too. They’re the people responsible for the numbered slabs being processed in a specific order. Everything in here is preordered. We know exactly when and what to deliver, and who it’s for and where it’s going. We mark the individual slabs with white numbers and letters, heat them up, and roll them into sheets in the desired dimensions. But you can see all that in a minute.”

  As they neared the end of the hall, the light changed from cool and efficient to dim and yellowish.

  This part of section W15 was much more primitive and more like Carl had imagined. Ingenious iron constructions, bridges, pipes, steel staircases, hoisting devices, slide bars, and a furnace that almost looked like a futuristic miniature version of the silos on his father’s farm.

  Leo Andresen pointed up at one of the cranes above their heads, hanging from a mass of steel wire, a huge machine by Demag. “It lifts the slabs up from the ground and over to the conveyor belt, which transports them directly into the pusher furnaces. Look, the hatch is opening now so you’ll be able to feel the heat. We heat it up to twelve hundred degrees, enough to produce molten slabs.”

  The group was all silent as they watched the magnet. “That’s the one that dropped the slab on Arne Knudsen,” said Polle. “It was a chance power cut, they said, but how much you can put it down to chance, I don’t know.”

 
; “Okay. And who operates a machine like that?” asked Carl as he stepped back from the almost unbearable heat emanating from the furnace. Now he understood why the end wall in the hall led directly out into the open air.

  “The people who operate the control panel in the control cabin on the other side of the pusher furnace.”

  “And who was sitting there on that day?” asked Assad.

  “Yes, that’s the question. It was in the middle of a shift handover. To be honest, this shouldn’t be possible, but we don’t know exactly who was sitting in there.”

  “We asked Benny Andersson, and he says it wasn’t him in the control cabin.”

  “Okay, but I don’t remember anything about that. Around that time, he was here and there and everywhere, manning different posts in the plant.”

  “But if Rose and Arne Knudsen were normally up in the office you just showed us where the young woman was sitting, why were they down here when it happened?”

  “Oh, you must have misunderstood. That part of the hall with the new feeder operator office where Micha is sitting hadn’t been built yet. Back then, there was only this.” He turned around toward a wooden building behind them. “They sat up there in the office. And once in a while they came down to the piles of slabs here and marked the ones next in line for the pusher furnace.”

  Carl looked around. “What do you think, Assad? Does anything jump out at you?”

  He looked down at the police report. “All it says is that the magnet failed and that Arne Knudsen broke the safety regulations by standing under a slab that was being hoisted by a crane. No one was held responsible for the incident, which was determined to be an accident, even though it was incredibly seldom that the power failed. Arne Knudsen was deemed to be solely responsible and paid the ultimate price for not heeding the safety regulations.”

  “So Rose was in the office when it happened?”

  “No. Some people came running over from the front area when they heard his screams, and they found Rose right next to him as he drew his last breath. She was standing in total shock with her arms down by her sides, unable to utter a sound and her eyes staring in horror.”

  “You weren’t here then?”

  “No,” answered Andresen. “It wasn’t my shift.”

  “I was working down at the dock, which is a good bit away from here,” said Polle.

  “Can you tell us in your capacity as someone who worked with the power supply, what caused the power cut, Leo?”

  “We have computer systems that ought to be able to establish exactly that, but they couldn’t in this case. My personal opinion is that it must have been one of the employees who caused it because the cut was so brief that the magnet only just released the slab and not a second longer. If you ask me, the timing was too perfect.”

  “So you’re saying it was done deliberately?”

  “I can’t know that for sure, but it’s not something I’d rule out.”

  Carl sighed. It was seventeen years ago. How the hell could he expect anything more precise than that when neither the police nor the working environment authority reports could offer anything more?

  —

  “There might come a time when we can ask Rose about it all,” said Carl when they finally arrived back at his office.

  Assad shook his head. “Did you hear that I asked them whether Rose could have pushed her dad under the slab when it fell? Their reaction seemed very odd.”

  “Yes, I heard you. But they looked stranger when you hinted that she might’ve had an accomplice. Leo Andresen did mention that the power cut could’ve been deliberate, so they couldn’t really have expected to avoid the question.”

  “But how did they time it, Carl? There was no intercom where they were standing and no cell phones either. It all came down to a split second, right?”

  A tall shadow appeared in the doorway. “Hi there! I’m supposed to ask again from the commissioner when you’ll be back. I haven’t told him you’re already here.”

  “Thanks, Gordon. Good thinking. Tell him that his TV crew will have something to sink their teeth into later today or tomorrow, and that we’ll be ever so well behaved.”

  He didn’t look happy. “Anyway, I’ve spoken with that guy who saw Rigmor Zimmermann stop on a street corner and look back before rushing off, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. He hardly remembered anything.”

  “That’s a shame. But have you managed to discover Denise Zimmermann’s whereabouts?”

  “No, no luck there either. She disappeared from her home address a week ago, on May 23rd. I spoke to the other people who live in her building: some fairly odd types. And I also spoke with her mother. Well, ‘spoke’ is maybe not the word, because she’s a complete mess. I could hardly understand a word she said.”

  “You said Denise disappeared?”

  “Denise told her mother that she’d moved in with a man in Slagelse.”

  “Seven days ago?” Carl looked despondent. Would they now have to widen their search to the back of beyond? No wonder you could end up feeling a bit weary at times.

  Then his telephone rang. “Can you two post a summary on the notice board of the cases we’re working on? We can look at it together when I’m finished here.” And then he answered the phone.

  “Yes, it’s me,” sounded a listless voice at the other end. It was Marcus Jacobsen. “Have you looked at my notes, Carl?” he asked.

  “Yeah, uh, kind of.”

  “Well, can you look at them now, then? I’ll wait.”

  Carl rummaged through the paperwork on his desk before finding one of the notes. It was written in Marcus Jacobsen’s angular but easily legible handwriting:

  Notes on the Stephanie Gundersen Case:

  Hardy noticed a woman by the name of Stephanie Gundersen in the audience at a school-based crime-prevention talk.

  Check the parent lists for the 7th and 9th grades again.

  Parent-teacher meetings led by S. Gundersen together with the regular class teacher twice ended in arguments with parents—and even once with a single mother!

  What was S.G. doing in Østre Anlæg Park? She was supposed to be going to badminton.

  “Yes, I have one of your notes in front of me. It’s a list of four points.”

  “Good. Those are the four things we never managed to get to the bottom of during the investigation. We’d already spent too much time on the case, at the same time as we were being inundated with lots of other important cases. So I had to make the call that we had done all we could in relation to Stephanie Gundersen’s murder and wouldn’t make any further progress at that time. The conclusion was that we had to shelve the case even though I really hated having to do it. You know how it is. It’s terrible to shelve a case, because deep inside you know that it’ll eat away at you.

  “Anyway, I found the notes when I cleared out my office at HQ, back when I retired, and since then I’ve had them hanging on my fridge door, much to my wife’s annoyance—while she was still alive, that is. She always said, ‘Why can’t you just let it go, Marcus?’ But it doesn’t work like that.”

  Carl agreed. There hadn’t been many cases like that which he’d had to shelve, but there had been a few.

  “The way I see it, question number four is particularly conspicuous. What were you thinking when you wrote it?”

  “Probably the same as you’re thinking now: Why would you skip your weekly badminton session for a walk in the park? For romantic reasons, of course.”

  “But you didn’t find out who Stephanie met?”

  “No. Strangely enough, there was nothing to indicate that she had a partner at the time. She was a discreet girl, you know. Not someone to shove her love life in other people’s faces.”

  Carl knew the type. “So what about point number one? What was it that Hardy saw when he met this Stephanie?”<
br />
  “He’d been assigned to one of those boring crime-prevention jobs we have to do from time to time in schools, and when he was there he saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on smiling ever so sweetly at him from the far wall of the classroom. He found it difficult to concentrate. And when she was murdered, he felt frustrated, sad, and angry for days because someone had taken the life of such a lovely creature. He was really eager to help, but as you know he had enough to do with his own investigations.”

  “Stephanie was a beautiful woman. I know that much.”

  “She could throw any man off-balance, Hardy told me. Ask him yourself.”

  “Have you saved the parent lists for the seventh and ninth grades that you mention in point two?”

  “Hmm, Carl, I get the impression that you haven’t looked at the material I gave you at all. You’ll find the list of names on the other piece of paper I gave you at the café. Take a look. You might find something.”

  “I’m really sorry, Marcus. This is embarrassing. This whole business with Rose has been occupying my mind.” He looked again at the piece of paper with four points. “And what about the third point on the list? Arguments must be part and parcel of parent-teacher meetings, don’t you think? I certainly remember a few when Vigga and I exchanged words with Jesper’s teachers.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. And the two couples—the Carstensens and the Willumsens—who caused the arguments were also very forthcoming when I inquired about it. Basically, both sets of parents had the same issue, and according to the regular class teacher it wasn’t a very pleasant discussion, and also rather unusual. In the third case, involving the single mother, it was something of a more personal nature, and there were undertones that the regular teacher couldn’t gauge. The mother—Birthe Frank, I believe she was called—was causing a scene because she thought Stephanie was inappropriately influencing her daughter with all the attention she was giving her. The mother seemed jealous, according to the regular teacher.”

  “So, basically, Stephanie was simply too pretty?”