The Scarred Woman

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  That was the final straw. “It’s the same damn thing, Carl!” Paying no attention to the fact that Gordon and Carl were shaking their heads, he continued his tirade. “I’ve put up with it for many years now, but I have to ask you to stop correcting me constantly, Carl!”

  Carl raised his eyebrows. Did he really correct him that much? He wanted to protest but said nothing, noticing Gordon patting Assad’s shoulder. Two against one on a Monday. Who could be bothered with that fight?

  Assad took a deep breath and looked down at his notes. “Lis found out that Rigmor Zimmermann was very aff . . .” He thought for a moment. “. . . afflu . . . ent.” He glared at Carl, who wanted to nod but didn’t dare.

  “As well as the six million we already knew she had in the bank, she had stocks to the value of four million and also owned three apartments. One in Borgergade, which is where Birgit Zimmermann lives, one in Rødovre above the old shoe shop her husband owned back in the day, and then one in Stenløse.”

  Carl whistled. “A rich lady and no mistake. And you say that she owned an apartment in Stenløse. That’s odd. That’s where Rose lives.”

  Assad nodded. “Yes, Carl.” He turned toward Gordon. “This will be news to you, too, Gordon, because I’ve only just found out.”

  Gordon shrugged. Was he supposed to be impressed?

  “You won’t believe this. Rose’s neighbor is called Zimmermann. Rigmor Zimmermann—to be precise!”

  40

  Monday, May 30th, 2016

  “Everyone at the plant hates you, Rose. Everyone. They smile at you, but when you turn your back they’re bent over double laughing about how bad you are at your job. Ha-ha-haaaa, they laugh, but you also make them feel uncomfortable because they know how dangerous it is to have someone like you at the plant. So it’s about time you pull yourself together before something goes wrong.”

  Her father looked at his sheet, marked a couple of slabs with white, and then pointed a yellow finger at her. When he pointed that accusing finger, there was no knowing what it might lead to, because Rose’s father had a habit of ensuring that he kept hurting her in new ways. He lived and breathed for the pleasure it gave him to bring her down, and nothing was beneath him.

  She knew that most of what he said wasn’t true, but she just couldn’t take it anymore. The distress of not knowing when he would attack next drained her of energy, and a couple of days ago she had decided that it had to stop.

  “You should be grateful that I bother to tell you before you hear it from someone else. But you need to know that I’m the only one who defends you, Rose. Don’t forget it. And you do need to earn some money, also for your mom’s sake.” He seemed genuinely touched by his own lies but changed in a second as always, and his expression hardened. “It’s never been cheap to have you hanging around in the house, but that’s more than your small brain can grasp, isn’t it?”

  He took a couple of steps back as the magnet lifted up the next slab, noting that she was about to protest. His eyes began to glare with pleasure and contempt, and his mouth widened to unimaginable proportions. His teeth were like stone pillars, and the spray of spit forming a cloud around him washed her away.

  “And on top of everything else, I have to do all your work. If only management knew. It’s not like they’re doing well as it is, so maybe I’d be doing them a favor by telling them how I think you’re doing. So what do you think I should do, hmm? And I’ll tell you something else . . .”

  Rose was clutching the vibrating pager in her pocket, using all her strength to block out his words and fill her lungs to their breaking point so that the words that were always on the tip of her tongue could explode in his face.

  “If you don’t stop now, you bastard, I’ll . . . !”

  And as expected, he stopped. The world around him disappeared as a blissful smile spread across his nasty face. Moments like this were the best of his life. Rose knew that nothing could compare with it.

  “What will you do?”

  When Rose’s hallucinations reached the point between unconsciousness and reality, she tried to wriggle free. Since the girls had tied her up more than three days ago, she had relived the same dream over and over again. In this state the words tended to merge together to pure black, while her memories of the sounds from the other side of the furnace at the steel plant took center stage. The same thing over and over for three days. Every time she tried to return to reality, her nightmare continued with the sound of the rolled slab being cooled down quickly with water. It was a high-pitched whistling sound that she had been unable to bear ever since.

  “You won’t do anything,” sneered her father through the steam. “And you never will,” he said, pointing at her.

  And then Rose touched the pager while for the last time taking in the scorn he threw at her.

  That moment would become her ultimate triumph. The happiness of her father’s accusing finger freezing as the shadow was released from above.

  Afterward, she couldn’t remember the sound of the magnet releasing the slab—only the sound of his body when the steel colossus hit him, crushing every bone in his lower body.

  —

  She woke up gradually with the feeling of sweat gathering on her eyelashes. She half opened one eye, realizing once again where she was and that her already weakened state was worsening.

  Rose’s legs hurt terribly. The slightest shiver of her calves shot up through her nervous system like needles. In contrast, she hadn’t been able to feel her feet for more than two days, and the same went for her forearms and hands. Of course she’d tried to wriggle herself free. If only she was able to jerk one hand free from the belt that tied her to the railing on the wall, she knew she would stand a chance. But the more she struggled, the more the belt cut into her skin.

  The first time Rose felt the full effect of the cold room, she knew how her stomach would react. All her experience told her that if her bare abdomen was subjected to this cold temperature for a sustained period, she would develop diarrhea. It had been the same year after year whenever they had gone to Jægersborg Deer Park when the hawthorn was in bloom and her sisters had begged to go on a picnic. It was usually freezing cold to sit on blankets on the ground at that time of year, and it always made Rose ill, much to her father’s delight. He used to use it against her, forcing her to stay seated until she couldn’t hold it in anymore. It resulted in days of diarrhea and vomiting, so Rose couldn’t go to school, and then that was a problem. And here in Zimmermann’s bathroom she had been ice-cold from the waist down for days. Even though it had been a long time since she had eaten, so there couldn’t be much left in her intestines, something suddenly streamed violently out of her.

  As expected, she had developed a burning sensation, so if she had been able to make them remove the duct tape from her mouth for a moment, she would have begged them to wipe her behind. But it was clear to her that both these hopes were wishful thinking. The only thing they did for her was give her something to drink when they remembered. The strongest of the girls, the one called Denise, had only allowed the other girl to put the straw in her mouth into a glass of water. Rose had overheard them shouting something about a third girl, but she wasn’t sure what because she had been hallucinating most of the time and was never entirely sure what was going on around her.

  The previous evening when Denise had been peeing in the sink as she normally did before heading to bed, she had spoken directly to Rose for the first time about giving her something other than water.

  “Maybe you’re wondering what we’re doing here?” she said and told Rose that Rigmor was her grandmother, and that the woman had been a witch and a devil, and that she was glad she was dead.

  “So you can understand that it’s only fair that we’re using her apartment, right?”

  Perhaps she had expected Rose to nod, but when it didn’t happen her expression changed.

  “
Maybe you think she was a good woman? Do you?” she said coldly when Rose turned her eyes away from her. “She was a plague, and she ruined my life. Don’t you believe me? Look at me.”

  Her lipstick was bright red and her teeth pearly white, but her mouth looked as repulsive and distorted as Rose’s father’s. Her hatred seemed just as extreme. Maybe she had killed her grandmother, thought Rose. That sort of crime often took place within families. Parents killed their children and children killed their parents and grandparents. No one knew this better than she did.

  “Are you listening, pig?” she said from the sink as she dried herself.

  But Rose wasn’t.

  She busied herself inspecting the room while there was still light. There was a ventilator in the air vent, which activated only when the light was on. But up here on the second floor of the building, it was as if the world had ended. If there had been an upstairs neighbor, she might have been able to whimper and be heard through the vent, though the chance would have been very slim. But apart from this hypothetical chance, there were no other means of communicating with the outside world.

  She twisted her head up toward her right hand, where the belt was least tight around her wrist, but she couldn’t twist far enough to make any attempt at loosening it farther. In short, she was incapable of helping herself, and there was probably no chance the woman sitting across from her would show any mercy.

  “Have I told you about the time when my grandfather took me to an auction and I accidentally smashed a Chinese vase by dropping it on the floor? Do you think my grandmother was happy when we came home and told her that it had cost thirty thousand kroner? And do you think my mother defended me?”

  Rose drifted off. She had been overly sensitive to stories like that her whole life. She couldn’t watch films in which children were misunderstood. She couldn’t listen to adults trying to explain away evil deeds. She couldn’t stand men with nicotine-stained fingers, men who parted their hair on the right, and men who started their sentences with “I’ve already told you . . .”—that damn supercilious “already” that served only to widen the distance between them and you. And most of all, she had always hated women who didn’t defend their children like lionesses.

  And now this bimbo was raking it all up again. That was the last thing she needed.

  Then the other girl shouted from the sitting room that Denise should come because there was more news, and Denise jumped down from the sink and threw the used toilet paper on the floor. Apparently it was something they had been waiting for, because this time Denise was in too much of a rush to shut the door to the hallway.

  They don’t care about me. They can’t even be bothered to watch what they say. Rose opened her eyes and looked blankly around the room.

  She knew that they would just leave her to die. And for the first time in weeks, it wasn’t what she wanted anymore.

  —

  For some time there was no other sound from the sitting room than the faint humming of the TV.

  But when they turned it off and moved over to the dining table, she was able, with a lot of concentration, to catch the odd word, and even sentences when Jazmine raised her voice.

  She couldn’t understand much of what they were talking about, but one thing was clear: the girls, and Jazmine in particular, had started to feel uneasy—maybe even scared.

  It was someone called Patrick who had them worried. They were discussing that the police might now be able to link Birna, Michelle, Bertha, and Senta together because of him. And that Birna’s gang members had been questioned and had mentioned someone called Jazmine and the girl Michelle who had been killed.

  Rose tried her best to follow. Jazmine’s voice began to quiver. Meanwhile, Rose’s breathing became heavier, causing small bubbles of spit to be pushed back and forth through the straw she was breathing through. They were talking about a shooting, the dead Michelle, the police, and a robbery at a nightclub. And then she suddenly heard very clearly what Denise said.

  “We need new passports, Jazmine. You deal with that. And I’ll head over to Anne-Line’s place and break in. If she has any money, I’ll take it. If she doesn’t, I’ll wait for her to come home.”

  Then it went quiet. What they had been discussing was apparently an unexpected development in the case, and now they were going to escape.

  And here she was. Doomed.

  There was a long pause before Jazmine finally reacted. “Anne-Line will kill you, Denise.”

  She laughed at that. “Not when I have this with me.” Apparently she was showing something to Jazmine.

  “You’re not taking that hand grenade with you, Denise! Do you even know how it works? Do you even know if it works?”

  “Yes, it’s easy enough. You screw the metal cap off the bottom, releasing a small ceramic ball on a string, which you need to let drop and then yank. Then you have four seconds before it goes boom!”

  “But you’re not going to use it, are you?”

  She laughed again. “You’re easily fooled, Jazmine. It would make too much noise, and besides, I know what it can do to a human being. My grandfather showed me loads of pictures, and it’s a complete mess. No, I’ll take the pistol and I’ve already loaded the cartridge. Now we know it works! So just grab the hand grenade if you feel scared being alone.”

  “Don’t mess with me. I’ll come with you, Denise. I don’t want to be alone with her out there.”

  What is she scared of? thought Rose. That I’ll lose thirty kilos in ten minutes and free myself? That I’ll suddenly jump out and knock her down with a couple of spinning backfists? That she will be taken down forever with seventeen varieties of kickboxing?

  Rose couldn’t help squinting her eyes and laughing behind the duct tape, and she stopped only when she could sense one of the girls standing in the doorway looking at her.

  Then she grunted a few times as if she were dreaming.

  “Stay here and keep an eye on her until I get back,” said Denise dryly. “Then I will make sure that we won’t be hearing any more from her.”

  41

  Monday, May 30th, 2016

  Anneli let herself in the house and in her rush simply threw her bag in the hallway of the ground-floor apartment. She had seen at least thirty types of oil filter on the Internet that could be used as makeshift silencers, and the one she was looking for needed to be fairly large. She turned on the fluorescent lights in the mechanical engineer’s sitting room, and having scanned the room for half a second she understood why he only rarely ventured home. The room was stuffed from floor to ceiling with shelves of things that, in her opinion, belonged in a junkyard—components and spare parts that even in her wildest imagination she couldn’t believe had any meaningful use.

  She found a suitable oil filter on the bottom of a box that contained at least twenty others. It was red and round with a hole at one end that fit fairly well around the barrel of the gun.

  She waved the gun around the room and could hardly stop herself from firing it to see how well her homemade silencer worked. Actually, she was just about to pull the trigger while pointing at a sack of packthread or kapok, or whatever it was, when the doorbell rang.

  Anneli was puzzled. Was it a door-to-door collection? Doctors Without Borders had just been here. Could it be the Red Cross or some other charity? She shook her head. They were a day late in that case, because who in their right mind would knock door-to-door on a Monday? No one!

  Anneli frowned because she didn’t have any neighbors or friends who called unexpectedly. But perhaps it was someone here to visit the mechanical engineer. In that case, she would advise them to go online and buy the first available ticket to Venezuela, Laos, or wherever the hell he was these days.

  She went over to the curtain and lifted it a little to see who was waiting on the doorstep.

  It was a woman with raven-black hair and makeup that gave her bo
th a cheap and tough appearance. Anneli had never seen her before, and she wouldn’t have opened the door if it hadn’t been for the woman’s pleated skirt. The absurd combination aroused her curiosity. She put the gun down on a shelf just inside the door to the sitting room and opened the front door with a smile that quickly disappeared.

  The woman on the doorstep looked at her coldly, pointing a pistol directly at her chest. Despite the makeover, there was no doubt about who she was now that Anneli saw her close-up.

  “Denise,” she said, surprised. That was all she could muster.

  Anneli staggered backward into the hallway when the girl pushed her with the barrel of the pistol. She came across immensely resolute and determined, far from the lazy and obstinate Denise Anneli had despised for years.

  “We know it was you who killed Michelle,” said Denise. “And if you don’t want to end up behind bars for the rest of your life, you need to listen very carefully. Understood, Anne-Line Svendsen?”

  She nodded in silence. “Behind bars,” she’d said. So Denise hadn’t come to kill her with that very efficient-looking pistol. This meant she could start off by simply playing along.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about, Denise. And why do you look like that? I didn’t recognize you at all. Is there something I ought to know? Can I help you with something?”

  She knew immediately that she had overdone her act as she felt the pistol handle hit her jaw. She suppressed a cry of pain and tried to look like she didn’t understand what was happening, but it was clear that Denise wasn’t buying it.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” said Anneli meekly.

  “You’re going to hand over your money, okay? We know you’ve won a lot of money in the lottery. Where do you keep it? If it’s in the bank, you’ll transfer it to my account online. Are you listening?”