The Scarred Woman

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “You look sad, Assad. What’s up?” he asked.

  “Up where, Carl? Why do you ask?” He shook his head. “I called the hospital to ask how Rose is doing and I heard her screaming and shouting in the background that I should go to hell and that we should leave her alone.”

  “Heard?”

  “Yes, she obviously knew that it was me on the other end. I just wanted to ask when we could visit her. She must have walked past as I called.”

  Carl patted his mate on the shoulder. He hadn’t deserved to hear that.

  “Well, I guess we’re going to have to respect that, Assad. If it makes Rose feel worse that we contact her, we’re not doing her any favors by trying.”

  Assad hung his head. He was feeling terrible. There was no doubt that he was very fond of Rose. Now Carl would have to try to lift his spirits. This wasn’t helping anyone.

  “Has Assad told you what she shouted at him?”

  Gordon’s face said it all. So he had.

  “It’s my fault that she’s reacting like this,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t have pried in her notebooks.”

  “She’ll come around, Gordon. We’ve been through similar with Rose before.”

  “I doubt it.”

  So did Carl, but he said, “Come on, Gordon, you did what you needed to do. Unlike me. I should’ve asked her before we went looking around her apartment and handed your notes over to the psychiatrists. That was unprofessional.”

  “If you’d asked her first, she would’ve just said no!”

  Carl pointed his finger at him. “Exactly! You’re not as dumb as you look, and that’s saying something.”

  Gordon smoothed out his notes with his spindly fingers, which were long enough to easily hold a basketball in one hand. The little weight he had managed to put on over the past few years had disappeared almost overnight since Rose had been admitted. The formerly pink bags under his eyes had turned dark, and his freckled skin was as white as whipped cream. No one could claim that it was a particularly aesthetic look.

  “As we already know,” Gordon continued in an attempt to sound like he had things under control, “Rigmor Zimmermann’s husband had a shoe shop in Rødovre with the monopoly on a fancy brand in Denmark. When he died in 2004 he left a large sum of money. Rigmor Zimmermann sold the business, the house, cars, and everything else, and moved into an apartment. After that she moved around a bit, and strangely enough is registered at her daughter’s address. I think it’s just a case of her never having updated her details.”

  Carl looked at Gordon. “Why are you investigating Rigmor Zimmermann? Weren’t you supposed to find Rose’s friend Karoline? Wasn’t this Assad’s assignment?”

  “We’re mixing things up a bit, Carl. We have to now that Rose isn’t on the team. Assad is looking into Fritzl Zimmermann’s background, and we’ve asked the national register to check up on the Karoline woman. We should get an answer later today.”

  “Why is Assad checking up on the husband? He hasn’t got anything to do with the bloody case.”

  “That’s exactly what Assad is checking. He thinks it seems a bit strange that he died exactly one day after Stephanie Gundersen was found murdered in Østre Anlæg.”

  “He what?”

  “Exactly, Carl. That was Assad’s reaction when he found out. Look here.” There came those spindly fingers again. “Stephanie Gundersen was found murdered on June 7th, 2004, and Fritzl Zimmermann drowned on June 8th, 2004.”

  “Drowned?”

  “Yes, in Damhus Lake. Fell on his face sitting in his wheelchair, eighty-six years old. He’d been using it since he suffered a blood clot six months earlier. As far as we know, he was fine upstairs but didn’t have the energy to maneuver the chair himself.”

  “So how did he get there?”

  “His wife went out with him every night, but that evening she’d nipped home to fetch him a sweater. When she came back she found the wheelchair in shallow water and her husband a few meters farther out.”

  “How the hell do you drown in shallow water in Damhus Lake? The place must be swarming with people at that time of year.”

  “The police report doesn’t mention anything about that. But given that she went home for a sweater, it must have been cold that night. So maybe it was too cold for people to be out walking.”

  “Find out.”

  “Er, okay. But I have already. Summer 2004 was really cold and rainy. In fact, it wasn’t until the beginning of August that we had the first real day of summer. A depressing record!”

  Carl tried to recall that summer. It was the year before Vigga left him. They were supposed to have gone on a camping holiday to Umbria, but a case popped up, meaning that Carl had to stay in the country, so he had booked a summerhouse down by Køge instead, much to Vigga’s annoyance. He remembered that summer well, and there was nothing romantic about it. If there had been, he might have been able to make her stay.

  “Carl, are you listening?” said Gordon.

  He looked up at Gordon’s pale face.

  “The wife said she left him down by the lakeshore, like she had done so often before. She couldn’t rule out that her husband might have somehow managed to release the brake, and so the police couldn’t rule out suicide. After all, he was eighty-six and could no longer run his business. In that situation, it isn’t hard to imagine that someone could grow tired of life.”

  Carl nodded, but what the hell did this have to do with anything? They seemed to have gone off on something of a tangent.

  The telephone saved him from continuing with this conversation.

  “Mørck,” he said authoritatively, waving Gordon out of the room.

  “Are you the police guy?”

  “I should think so. Who am I speaking to?”

  “You might not want to speak with me if I tell you who I am.”

  Carl leaned forward. The voice was gruff and dark, almost as if he had put something over the receiver.

  “That depends on what you have to tell me.” Carl grabbed a notepad. “Try me.”

  “I hear you’ve spoken to Leo Andresen about Arne Knudsen’s accident at the plant, and I just want to say that there is nothing suspicious about it. Even though we all hated the bastard Arne Knudsen and all laughed under our breath when he was squashed, it doesn’t change the fact that it was an accident.”

  “Have I led you to believe that we think otherwise?” answered Carl. But now his suspicion was aroused. “You see, we’re just investigating the case to help one of our colleagues, who was very affected by it.”

  “You’re talking about Rose Knudsen, right?”

  “I can’t tell you as long as I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling.”

  “Rose was a lovely and sweet girl. She really was. She was everyone’s Rose, except for her dad’s, that is, the nasty bastard.”

  “Now, just a minute—”

  “Of course it was a shock for her. She saw it happen. No number of investigations can change that, as I’m sure you’ll agree. That was all I wanted to let you know.”

  Then he hung up.

  Damn it. Why was the man trying to convince him that it was an accident? Carl’s experience told him that people did that when the opposite was true. Had he just spoken to a man who had something to hide? Was he afraid that Rose would be implicated? Or was he more involved in the case than he was willing to admit?

  Damn it. He could do with Rose here just now. No one knew the many mysteries of the HQ internal telephone system like she did.

  He had to make do with calling Lis in admin. “I know it’s normally Rose’s job, but can you find out who just called me, Lis?”

  She seemed stressed, but it took her only three minutes to get back to him.

  “The telephone is registered in the name of one of my idols, Carl.”

  “Ah, so
his name is Carl Mørck. What a coincidence.”

  Her laugh gave Carl butterflies. There was nothing as sexy as a woman laughing.

  “Nooo. His name is Benny Andersson, like that guy from ABBA. He’s a bit tubby today, but back then when he was still playing, my God, he was charming. All he had to do was drop me a line back then when he and Anni-Frid split up, and I’d have been there in a flash.”

  She gave Carl the man’s number and address while Carl tried to shake off the image Lis had given him.

  “We’re going for a drive, Assad!” he shouted down the corridor.

  —

  “Do you remember the Nuremberg trials, Carl?”

  He nodded. It wasn’t hard to recall the black-and-white images of those bastards from the Second World War sitting in rows wearing Bakelite headphones while listening to accusations about their atrocious war crimes. Göring, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Frank, Streicher, and all the others waiting for the gallows. There had never been a Christmas at his aunt Abelone’s house in Brovst when he had not looked at photos of the hauntingly displayed bodies in a history book, shuddering in horror. Strangely enough, despite the theme of the book, he had nothing but happy memories of a bygone childhood when he thought of those Christmases.

  “There were also many smaller war tribunals like that around the world after the war, but I’m sure you know that?”

  Carl looked at the GPS. Straight ahead for a few kilometers.

  “Yes, they had them wherever there had been war crimes. The Balkans, Japan, Poland, France, and Denmark too. But why do you bring it up, Assad?”

  “Because Fritzl Zimmermann was one of the people the Polish wanted executed.”

  Carl raised his eyebrows and briefly looked at Assad. “Rigmor Zimmermann’s husband?”

  “Exactly!”

  “What had he done?”

  “They couldn’t prove anything because apparently he was one of the people who managed to erase the traces of their atrocities. No survivors. Full stop.”

  “They couldn’t prove what, Assad?”

  “That Fritzl Zimmermann was actually Sturmbannführer Bernhard Krause, who was directly involved in executing captured Allied soldiers in France and later on civilians in Poland and Romania. I’ve read that they had convincing evidence against him in the form of photos and witness statements.” He took his feet down from the dashboard and rummaged around in the briefcase on the floor.

  “I don’t understand. Witness statements? Didn’t you just say he’d erased all traces and that there were no survivors to document his involvement?”

  “Yeah, the main witnesses were two Totenkopf officers, but Fritzl Zimmermann’s defense lawyer managed to convince the judges that their statements were unreliable because they wanted to pin their own war crimes on someone else, and therefore the case was dismissed. The other two were hanged for their crimes in 1946.”

  “And what about the photographs that pointed to Fritzl Zimmermann?”

  “I’ve seen a couple of them, but I’ll spare you for now, Carl. The executions were extremely brutal, but the defense lawyer managed to prove that some of them had been doctored and that the man they showed wasn’t Zimmermann. So he was acquitted.”

  “Acquitted just like that?”

  “Yes. And later a death certificate was found stating that Sturmbannführer Bernhard Krause had died from diphtheria on February 27th, 1953, in a POW camp in Sverdlovsk in the Urals.”

  “And meanwhile Fritzl had reinvented himself as a shoe retailer?”

  “Yes, he started off small in Kiel and then worked his way up with a few shops in Southern Jutland before setting up business in Rødovre, west of Copenhagen.”

  “And where is all this information coming from, Assad? You’ve not had much time to research.”

  “I know someone with good contacts at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Austria.”

  “But don’t they only hold information about crimes committed against Jews?”

  “Yes, many of Bernhard Krause’s victims were Jews. They kept a record of the whole case, and at the center they’re convinced about Fritzl Zimmermann’s guilt and identity.”

  “Was he still wanted when he was living and working in Denmark?”

  “It doesn’t say anything specific in the paperwork, but my friend was under the impression that ‘someone’”—he made quotation marks with his fingers in the air—“had broken into his villa twice to look for evidence of his involvement. When they didn’t find anything, the case was shelved.”

  “A break-in in Rødovre?”

  “Don’t underestimate the Israelis. Maybe you remember that they kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him back for trial in Israel?”

  Carl nodded. Red light in front of him and then a right turn.

  “And what can we use all this information for, Assad?” he said, putting the car in neutral.

  “Among the photos that were mailed to me was this one, Carl. You’ll understand when you see it.”

  He handed Carl a print so he could see it up close.

  It was an unusually clear photo showing a black-clad officer seen from behind. Both his hands were clenching a short, blunt club, and his arms were raised above his shoulders, ready to smash the club into the back of the head of a poor tied-up victim standing in front of him.

  On the ground to the right of the man lay three bodies with their heads smashed in. To the left of the victim stood another two bound men awaiting their fate.

  “Fuck,” whispered Carl. He swallowed a couple of times and pushed the photo away. There had been a time when people had thought that this kind of evil could never happen again, but all it did was remind him of the reality in large parts of the world today. How could this be allowed to happen over and over again?

  “What are you thinking, Assad?”

  “That Stephanie Gundersen and Rigmor Zimmermann were murdered in exactly this way. What more is there to say? Is it a coincidence? I don’t think so.” He pointed at the traffic light. “It’s green, Carl.”

  Carl looked up. All of a sudden a Danish provincial town like this seemed so immensely distant from everything.

  “But Stephanie Gundersen was murdered in 2004, and by that time Fritzl Zimmermann was eighty-six, very weak, and wheelchair bound, so he can’t possibly have been the perpetrator,” he thought out loud. “Not to mention the possibility of him killing his wife given that she died more than ten years after him.”

  “I’m just saying that I think there’s a connection. Maybe Marcus is right.”

  Carl nodded. It was an impressive amount of information to have found in such a short time. And thinking about it, Assad had delivered the whole torrent without so much as making one of his usual linguistic blunders. It was remarkable how well-spoken he suddenly was.

  He looked at Assad, who was staring pensively at the houses they drove past. Full of wisdom.

  Who the hell are you, Assad? he thought, turning right.

  —

  The number from which the anonymous call to Department Q had been made was registered to an address in one of the more humble neighborhoods in the vicinity of the steel plant. A quick glance over the state of the house and the mess around it was enough to invoke Carl’s prejudice.

  “Do you think he collects scrap metal?” asked Assad. Carl nodded. What was it about all these defunct lawn mowers, bicycles, car wrecks, and other rusty vehicles that brought out the hoarder and protective instincts in certain types of men?

  The guy who opened the door blended in naturally in this hopeless jumble of bad taste. Never had a tracksuit been more in need of a wash. Never had an unkempt mane of hair looked greasier. There was no doubt that keeping a distance would be better for their health.

  “Who are you?” said the man with breath that could kill. Carl took a step back, giving the man the opportunity
to slam the door in their faces if he wanted to.

  “I’m the man you called”—Carl looked at his watch—“exactly fifty-two minutes ago.”

  “Called? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Your name is Benny Andersson, and Assad here is recording your voice for the voice-recognition program as we speak. Show him the recorder, Assad.”

  He nudged Assad with his elbow, and Curly was resolute enough to conceal his confusion and produce his smartphone from his pocket.

  “Just a second; it’s just processing,” he said while the skunk looked at the cell with obvious skepticism.

  “Yes, it’s a match. He is the guy we recorded at HQ,” said Assad with his eyes fixed on the empty phone display. “You’ve been caught out, Benny,” he said without looking up from the phone. He pressed a few buttons, pretending to exit the program, and put the cell phone back in his pocket.

  “Well, Benny,” said Carl with a rare authority in his voice. “We’ve established that it was you who made an anonymous call to an investigator at police HQ an hour ago. We have come to determine whether there was any criminal intent behind your call. May we come in so we can have a chat, or would you rather come with us now to police HQ in Copenhagen?”

  He didn’t have a chance to answer, as Assad was already pushing at the door with all his weight.

  —

  Carl had gasped for breath a couple of times when he walked into the extremely stuffy house, but as soon as he had grown accustomed to the stench, he came down hard on Benny Andersson. Within the space of two minutes he had made the situation crystal clear. The accusations of malicious intent, a hidden agenda, and insinuations and secrets that could all come back to bite him. Only then did Carl change tack.

  “You say that you liked Rose? But what’s that got to do with her dad’s death? Can you explain?”

  The man stretched out his grubby fingers, fumbling for a cigar butt in a full ashtray, and lit it.

  “Can I ask if an inspector like you has ever worked in a steel plant?”

  “Of course I haven’t.”

  “No, I thought not. So you can’t possibly understand what it’s like. The stark contrasts the work exposed us to every day: the huge buildings where small, vulnerable people were trying to master the powerful machines; the struggle against the heat, which was sometimes so strong that it felt suffocating and you had to go outside to cool down in the wind from the fjord; the knowledge that the work was dangerous and could destroy you in a matter of seconds, contrasted with the feeling of your sleeping child’s soft cheek against your hardened fingertips. It’s impossible to understand how savage it can be when you haven’t tried it yourself. And of course some of us turned hard like the steel we were working with while others turned soft like butter.”