The Scarred Woman

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “I’m going now, Denise,” she said. “And I won’t be back, okay?”

  “Y’okay,” mumbled Denise. She didn’t even bother to open her eyes.

  Down on the street, Michelle tried to think about things that were at least slightly positive in the middle of this damn mess.

  The first and best thing was that Patrick could testify that she had not taken part in the robbery and that no one knew that she and the two other girls had moved in together. It was also a plus that Denise had made sure the taxi couldn’t be traced back to here. They had taken a taxi from Sydhavnen to City Hall Square, and from there they had walked to Ørsteds Park, where they had ditched the scarves and their jackets in front of a homeless woman sleeping on a bench. From there they had taken a bus to Østerport Station, and then on to Stenløse with a different taxi company.

  On the way to Stenløse, Jazmine and Denise had acted as if nothing was wrong, chatting away about the great food they had eaten at a local restaurant. They were finally dropped off at the other side of Stenløse Station and walked home from there.

  Anyway, Michelle doubted that anyone would suspect a girl who had just been the victim of a hit-and-run driver to be behind a robbery.

  And then there was Jazmine and Denise. If Birna woke up, or if the police made a connection to them, would they be able to keep quiet, or would they squeal? And if they did, would they take her down with them even though they had promised not to?

  Michelle felt nervous. She had almost reached the station. Should she turn around and go back to them to agree what the plan was? She stopped, considering her options. They had said themselves that she should go back to Patrick and settle things. So wasn’t that what she should do?

  But what if the police really had taken him in for questioning? Then he wouldn’t be at home. She had to find out before she did anything else.

  She took her cell from her bag. If he answered his phone, that was a good thing. Then she could tell him she was coming with the money so he wouldn’t be surprised when she turned up. Michelle smiled. Perhaps he would even be happy. He might even be waiting for her and try to convince her to stay. Hadn’t there been a glimmer of hope between them yesterday? She was sure there had been.

  Then she heard a thud that made her turn around to face a black car hurtling directly toward her.

  The last thing she saw was the same familiar face behind the wheel.

  28

  Thursday, May 26th, 2016

  Rose stared at the wall.

  When she fixed her gaze on the pale yellow surface and sat completely still, a vacuum appeared around her that drained all consciousness from her. In this state, she was neither awake nor sleeping. Her breathing was imperceptible and her senses in hibernation. She was just one of the living dead.

  But then when she was awoken by sounds in the hallway, a domino effect of thoughts tumbled through her mind, and as insignificant as they might be, they left her defenseless. The sound of a door opening or closing, the whimpering from another patient, or footsteps was all it took before Rose had to gasp for breath and started crying.

  She had been prescribed medication to sedate her and medication that sent her into a deep, dreamless sleep. And yet these reactions returned at the slightest disturbance.

  Before Rose had been admitted, she had been through weeks of sleepless nights. An almost inhuman accumulation of dark hours that she could suppress only by tormenting herself in multiple ways.

  Rose knew full well why it had to be like that. Because if she let her guard down for even one second, she was thrown into a torrent of images of her father’s screaming mouth and his blinking, almost astonished eyes in the moment he was killed. And in those moments she had inevitably yelled at the ceiling that he should leave her alone and scratched her skin to numb the pain of these eternally grinding thoughts for a few seconds.

  “You do not belong here,” she had begun mumbling after some time. And when her voice had given out after many hours, she had thought instead while writing.

  After four days of having hardly slept or eaten, she had begged to be admitted.

  Like usual, Rose knew where she was but had trouble keeping track of time. She had been told that she had been there for nine days, but it might as well have been five weeks. And the doctors, whom she knew so well from the last time she had been committed, stubbornly kept assuring her that her perception of time was of no importance. As long as she made progress in her treatment, however insignificant it might seem, there was nothing to worry about.

  But Rose knew that they were lying. That this time they would do everything to ignore her integrity, forcing and intensifying the treatment so they would eventually have full control over her.

  Rose sensed their distance from her in their expressions when she sought refuge in her tears, but the nurses seemed to find it especially difficult to maintain their poker faces. They didn’t exude pity or sympathy like last time, but rather the kind of irritation experienced by a professional when things don’t go as planned.

  During her therapy sessions, they had emphasized that Rose was there voluntarily and that she should say only as much as she felt comfortable with about her sense of loneliness, being bullied, having been betrayed by her mother, and the loss of her childhood.

  Obviously she didn’t allow them access to her darkest place, because that was hers and hers alone. In that place the truth about her father’s death lay buried, and the shame and shock caused by her part in the tragedy was not something that should be stirred.

  No, Rose kept her distance. That was her specialty. If only they could find a medication that would make her hatred, guilty conscience, and sorrow disappear, she would be satisfied.

  They collected her in the common room where she was crying, and she thought they would take her to her room to prevent her from upsetting the other patients, but instead they took her to see the chief physician in his office.

  In the office, she was also met by an assistant physician whom she didn’t like at all, the charge nurse, and one of the younger physicians who was in charge of prescribing medication. They all looked serious, and Rose knew that the day had come when she would once more be confronted with the offer of electroconvulsive therapy.

  But she wasn’t about to let anyone mess with her brain. The things she had experienced in her life should not just be shocked out of her system. Whatever spark or creativity remained in her shouldn’t be dulled. If they couldn’t find medication that could make her feel calm inside, she didn’t want to be there at all. She had committed an offense and done things she wasn’t proud of, and that was a fact they couldn’t erase.

  She would just have to learn to live with it. That was all there was to it.

  The chief physician looked at her with the sort of steady expression you could learn. Manipulation came in many forms, but even if they tried their hardest, they couldn’t fool an investigator who spent most of her time dealing with lies and evil.

  “Rose,” he said in a soft voice. “I’ve asked you here today because we’ve obtained some information that affects our understanding of your situation and what we can do to better it.” He held out a pack of tissues, but she didn’t take them.

  Rose frowned, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned toward the wall, staring intensely while trying to calm herself down. She hadn’t seen this coming. Information, he had said? But there wasn’t going to be any talk about information unless it came from her. That was for sure.

  She began to stand up, thinking that now was as good a time as any to go back to her room and stare at the wall. She could think about what to do next later.

  “Sit down and listen to what I have to say, Rose. I know it can feel extremely intimidating, but everyone just wants what’s best for you. You do know that, don’t you? Your sisters have come forward with some information about what you have written, and your colleagu
es at police HQ have analyzed it. They’ve created a timeline, so to speak, of your life since you were ten based on your changing mantras.”

  Rose sat back down. She had lost her focus and felt trapped. Her eyes welled up and her jaw tensed.

  She slowly turned toward him, and despite his welcoming and friendly attitude, she could easily see through him. He had seriously let her down, the shit. He had failed to inform her about the development and neglected to tell her that he was in possession of new information that he ought to have asked her permission to use. She had felt tortured for days and now he dragged her into the actual torture chamber.

  “I’m going to place a sheet of paper in front of you with a list of the phrases you’ve written in your notebooks every year since you were a girl, Rose. Take a look at it and tell me what you feel.”

  Rose wasn’t listening. She was just thinking that she should have burned the notebooks when she had the chance and committed suicide before the insanity took hold. Because now it was as big a threat as ever. The situation itself indicated as much.

  There was a cabinet with glass doors next to where she was sitting. God only knew what the doctor kept in there, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. Two days ago she had turned her head toward it and seen her reflection in the glass, and it had seemed so unreal that it terrified her. Was it really her own image she saw in the glass door, reflecting not only her face but also the thoughts that had been going through her head? Had the reflection of those eyes been the same eyes she knew were on her face, transmitting the impression to her brain? These impossible questions were driving her crazy. The incomprehensible fact of even existing made her feel dizzy, as if she was on something.

  “Are you with us, Rose?” The chief physician gestured toward her, causing Rose to turn her head in his direction. It almost seemed as if his forehead was touching hers and that the room was smaller than ever.

  It’s because there are so many of us in here, she thought. The room is the same as always. It really is.

  “Listen to me, Rose. These phrases you’ve written make it clear that you’ve attempted to protect yourself against your dad’s psychological abuse through an internal dialogue with him. We roughly know when and why you switched between the different phrases, but we can’t know exactly what was going on inside you. I think you’ve been searching for answers that could help you escape the darkness that surrounded you. And this is what we need to deal with now, once and for all, so you can free yourself from your compulsive thoughts. Are you willing to work with us, Rose?”

  Work with him, he said, as if they were colleagues.

  Rose’s arms felt limp, so she simply glanced across at the sheet on up toward the ceiling. She could clearly sense the way the four other people present were staring at her in anticipation. Perhaps they were waiting for this damn shit to cause her to have a breakdown. Perhaps they thought that these phrases and systems would suck the thoughts out of her and leave the answers to their questions rotating in the air around them. As if their maneuver would make her burst out with the information her medicine and their saccharine talk, admonitions, warnings, and pleas had failed to elicit. As if this were a truth serum—pure scopolamine in paper form.

  She locked eyes with the chief physician.

  “Do you love me?” she asked him with exaggerated clarity.

  It wasn’t only the chief physician who looked confused.

  “Do you love me, Sven Thisted? Can you say that you do?”

  He searched for the words. Stammered that of course he did, just like he loved everyone who entrusted him with their innermost thoughts. Like those who needed help and those—

  “Please spare me your bloody doctor talk.” She turned toward the others. “What do you say? Have you got a better answer?”

  It was the nurse who took the role of the oracle.

  “No, Rose, and you shouldn’t expect that from us. The word ‘love’ is too big, too intimate, don’t you understand?”

  Rose nodded, stood up, walked over to the woman, and embraced her. Of course she misunderstood and patted Rose comfortingly on the shoulder, but this was not Rose’s intention. She embraced her so that the contrast was all the greater when she turned toward the three doctors and hissed directly in their faces, sending a cloud of spit around them.

  “Traitors, that’s what you are! And nothing in the world is going to bring me back to a place where well-paid, healthy, condescending quacks who don’t love me have secret thoughts that are more dangerous for me than the ones I have myself.”

  The chief practitioner attempted to appear indulgent, but this stopped immediately when she stepped toward him and slapped him in the face, causing the other two doctors to move back in their chairs.

  When she walked past the medical secretary’s desk in the corridor, the woman just managed to tell her that there was an Assad on the line asking to speak with her.

  Rose swung around. “Oh, is he, now!” she screamed. “Well, you can tell him to go to hell and make sure he tells the rest of them to leave me in peace.”

  It hurt, but those who had betrayed her and pried into her life were no longer part of her world.

  Fifty minutes later, Rose was on her way to where the taxis waited in front of Glostrup Hospital. She could sense that she was too drowsy for this because the medicine she still had in her body made everything seem like it was happening in slow motion and affected her sense of distance.

  She felt that if she threw up she would fall over and not be able to get up again, so she squeezed her throat with her free hand, which strangely enough seemed to help.

  But the situation was bad. From a rational point of view, she would probably never function normally again, so everything was fucked up, to say the least. Why not just get it over with? She had saved enough pills over the past few years to commit suicide. Just one glass of water and a few gulps and all these horrible thoughts would follow her to her grave.

  She gave the driver a five-hundred-kroner tip, which made her feel momentarily happy. And walking up the stairs to her apartment, she thought about a poor crippled beggar with really deformed legs whom she had seen at the Cathedral Square in Barcelona. As she was leaving this world anyway, wouldn’t it be a good idea if all her worldly possessions were distributed among unfortunate people like him? Not that she had much to give, but what if instead of ruining her organs with sleeping pills, she slit her wrists instead? She could leave a note stating that she wished to donate all her organs, and then call an ambulance while bleeding to death. How long should she wait to call the ambulance before losing consciousness if she didn’t want to run the risk of them arriving in time to save her? That was the question.

  She unlocked her apartment door, feeling confused about all these possibilities and obligations, and was immediately hit by the walls covered in her own writing: “YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.” You do not belong here.

  The words hit her like a sledgehammer. Who was talking to whom? Was it her cursing her father, or was it him cursing her?

  Rose let her travel bag fall on the floor and held a hand to her chest. A pressure from inside was pushing her tongue up against her palate, blocking her throat. The choking feeling was so strong that her heart was beating like a pneumatic drill to oxygenate her body. With eyes wide-open, she looked around the apartment, realizing how she had been stabbed in the back. Candle drippers had been put on her chandeliers. Clean tablecloths on the tables. Scrapbooks containing her Department Q cases had been stacked in a completely regular pile on the chest of drawers under the mirror. Chairs were suddenly upright. Sticky and sugary marks had been wiped off her stereo, floors, and carpets.

  She clenched her fists, gasping for breath. No one should enter another person’s home and decide what was normal and how the person living there ought to behave within her own four walls. Her dirty laundry, unwashed dishes, rubbish and papers on the floor, a
nd complete powerlessness were all hers and hers alone. And no one should mess with it.

  How the hell was she supposed to function in this clinically purged and violated home?

  Rose stepped backward away from this poison, all the way out onto the walkway, where she leaned up against the railing and let her tears pour forth.

  When her legs began to feel numb, she went over to her neighbor’s door. In the years Rose had lived here, a sort of connection had been established between them. Not a friendship as such, but more like a mother-daughter relationship, which unlike anything Rose had experienced entailed a certain feeling of security and confidentiality. Even though it had been a while, the way she was feeling made her sure it was the right thing to do to ring the doorbell.

  Unaware of how long she had been waiting outside her neighbor’s door without anyone answering, she was suddenly aware of one of her other neighbors walking directly toward her.

  “Are you looking for Zimmermann, Rose?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know where you’ve been lately, but I’m sorry to say that Rigmor is dead.” She hesitated for a moment. “She was murdered, Rose. It was three weeks ago today. Didn’t you know? You’re with the police, after all.”

  Rose stared up at the sky. Toward the eternally unknowable. She momentarily disappeared from the world, and when she returned it was as if the world disappeared from her.

  “Yes, it’s terrible,” said the woman. “Really terrible. And then that young girl who was killed in a hit-and-run just around the corner earlier today. But maybe you didn’t know that either?”

  29

  Thursday, May 26th, 2016

  Assad was looking down in the dumps when Carl found him rolling up his prayer rug on the basement floor of the claustrophobic office.