The Scarred Woman Read online

  ALSO BY JUSSI ADLER-OLSEN

  Stand-alone Novel

  The Alphabet House

  The Department Q Series

  The Keeper of Lost Causes

  The Absent One

  A Conspiracy of Faith

  The Purity of Vengeance

  The Marco Effect

  The Hanging Girl

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Translation copyright © 2017 by William Frost

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Adler-Olsen, Jussi, author. | Frost, William, 1978– translator.

  Title: The scarred woman / Jussi Adler-Olsen ; translated by William Frost.

  Other titles: Selfies. English

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, 2017. | Series: A Department Q novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017013668| ISBN 9780525954958 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101984239 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780698409781 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Denmark—Copenhagen—Fiction. | Detectives—Denmark—Copenhagen—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Detective and mystery stories.

  Classification: LCC PT8176.1.D54 S4513 2017 | DDC 839.813/74—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013668

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Dedicated to our wonderful “family” in Barcelona, Olaf Slott-Petersen, Annette Merrild, Arne Merrild Bertelsen, and Michael Kirkegaard

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday, November 18th, 1995

  She didn’t know how long she had been kicking the sticky, withered leaves, only that her bare arms were now cold and that the shouting up at the house had become shrill, sounding so harsh and angry that it hurt her chest. Only just now she had been about to cry, but that was something she really didn’t want to do.

  You’ll get lines on your cheeks and that’s ugly, Dorrit, her mother would say. She was good at reminding her of that sort of thing.

  Dorrit looked at the wide, dark tracks she had left in the foliage on the lawn, then once more counted the windows and doors of the house. She knew perfectly well how many there were; it was just a way to pass the time. Two doors for the wings, fourteen large windows and four rectangular ones in the basement, and if she counted every pane, there were one hundred and forty-two.

  I can count really high, she thought proudly. She was the only one in her class who could.

  Then she heard the hinges of the basement door on the side wing squeak, which was rarely a good sign.

  “I’m not going in,” she whispered to herself when she saw the housemaid coming up from the basement stairwell, heading straight toward her.

  At the far end of the garden where it was dark among the bushes, she often crouched down and hid, sometimes for hours if necessary, but this time the housemaid was too quick, the grip on her wrist tight and hard.

  “You’re crazy trudging about out here with those fine shoes on, Dorrit. Mrs. Zimmermann will be fuming when she sees how mucky they are. You know that.”

  —

  She stood in front of the sofas in her stocking feet, feeling uncomfortable because the two women just stared at her as if they had no idea what she was doing in the drawing room.

  Her grandmother’s face was stern and full of foreboding, while her mother’s was red-eyed and unattractive. Just as wrinkled as she had said Dorrit’s would become.

  “Not now, Dorrit, darling. We’re speaking,” her mother said.

  She looked around. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked.

  The two women looked at each other. In a flash, her mother was like a scared little animal, cowering in a corner, and not for the first time.

  “Go to the dining room, Dorrit. There are some magazines you can flick through,” her grandmother dictated.

  “Where’s Daddy?” she asked again.

  “We’ll talk about that later. He’s gone,” answered her grandmother.

  Dorrit took a careful step backward, watching her grandmother’s gesticulations: Go now! they seemed to say.

  She could just as well have stayed out in the garden.

  In the dining room, plates with stale cauliflower stew and half-eaten pork patties still lay on the heavy side table. The forks and knives lay on the tablecloth, which was stained with wine from two overturned crystal glasses. The room didn’t seem at all like it normally did, and it was certainly not somewhere Dorrit wanted to be.

  She turned around toward the hallway and its many gloomy and tall doors with worn handles. The large house was divided into several areas, and Dorrit thought she knew every corner. Up on the second floor, it smelled so strongly of her grandmother’s powders and perfumes that the scent clung to one’s clothes even after returning home. Up there, in the flickering light f
rom the windows, there was nothing for Dorrit to do.

  On the other hand, she felt right at home in the wing at the back of the first floor.

  It had both a sour and sweet smell of tobacco from the drawn curtains, and heavy furniture of the sort one couldn’t see anywhere else in Dorrit’s world. Large, cushioned armchairs you could cuddle up in with your feet tucked under you, and sofas with decorated brown corduroy and carved black sides. That domain in the house was her grandfather’s.

  An hour ago, before her father had started arguing with her grandmother, all five of them had been happily sitting around the dining table, and Dorrit had thought that this day would softly wrap around her like a blanket.

  And then her father had said something or other really wrong that caused her grandmother to immediately raise her eyebrows and her grandfather to stand up from the table.

  “You’ll have to sort this out yourselves,” he had said, straightening his pants and sneaking away. That’s when they sent her out into the garden.

  Dorrit carefully pushed open the door to his study. Along one wall there was a pair of brown dressers with shoe samples in open boxes, while on the opposite wall was her grandfather’s carved desk, totally piled with papers covered with blue and red lines.

  It smelled even stronger of tobacco here, though her grandfather wasn’t in the gloomy room. It almost seemed as if the tobacco smoke came from over in the corner, from where a small shaft of light shone through a pair of bookshelves and rested across the writing chair.

  Dorrit moved closer to see where the light came from. It was exciting because the narrow crack between the bookshelves revealed unknown territory.

  “So are they gone, then?” she heard her grandfather grunt from somewhere behind the shelves.

  Dorrit pushed through the crack, entering a room she had never seen before, and there by a long table on an old leather chair with armrests sat her grandfather attentively leaning over something she couldn’t see.

  “Is that you, Rigmor?” he said in his distinctive voice. It was his German, which wouldn’t disappear, her mother often said with irritation, but Dorrit was very fond of it.

  The decor of the room was very different from that in the rest of the house. The walls in here were not bare but plastered with large and small photographs, and if one looked closely it became apparent that they were all of the same man in uniform in various situations.

  In spite of the thick tobacco smoke, the room seemed lighter than the study. Her grandfather was sitting contentedly with his sleeves rolled up; she noticed the long, thick veins that coiled up his bare forearms. His movements were calm and relaxed. Gentle hands leafing through photographs, his eyes fixed on them with a scrutinizing stare. He looked so content sitting there that it made Dorrit smile. But in the next moment, as he suddenly swung the office chair around to face her, she realized that the usually friendly smile was distorted and frozen as if he had swallowed something bitter.

  “Dorrit!” he said, standing halfway up with his arms outstretched, almost as if trying to hide what he had been perusing.

  “Sorry, Opa. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go.” She looked around at the photographs on the walls. “I think the man in these photos looks like you.”

  He looked at her for a long time, as if considering what to say, before suddenly taking her hand and pulling her over to him and up onto his lap.

  “Actually, you aren’t allowed to be in here because this is Opa’s secret room. But now that you’re here, you might as well stay.” He nodded toward the wall. “Och, ja, Dorrit, you’re right. It is me in the photographs. They are from when I was a young man and a soldier in the German army during the war.”

  Dorrit nodded. He looked handsome in his uniform. Black cap, black jacket, and black pants. Everything was black: belt, boots, holster, and gloves. Only the skull and crossbones and the smile with the pearly white teeth shone among all the black.

  “Then you were a soldier, Opa?”

  “Jawohl. You can see my pistol for yourself up there on the shelf. Parabellum 08, also known as a Luger. My best friend for many years.”

  Dorrit looked up at the shelf with fascination. The gun was grey-black with a brown holster beside it. There was also a small knife in a sheath beside something she didn’t recognize but that resembled a softball bat, only with a black can at one end.

  “Does the gun really shoot?” she asked.

  “Ja, it has done so many times, Dorrit.”

  “So you were a real soldier, Opa?”

  He smiled. “Ja, your Opa was a very brave and talented soldier who did many things in World War II, so you can be proud of him.”

  “World war?”

  He nodded. As far as Dorrit knew, war could never be good. Not something that could make you smile.

  She sat up a little and looked over her grandfather’s shoulder so she could see what it was he had been looking at.

  “Nein, you mustn’t look at those pictures, Dorritchen,” he said, putting his hand on the back of her neck to pull her away. “Maybe another time when you are grown up; those pictures aren’t for children’s eyes.” She nodded but stretched forward a few centimeters more and this time wasn’t pulled back.

  When she saw a series of black-and-white photos in which a man with drooping shoulders was dragged over toward her grandfather, who in the following photos raised a gun and then shot the man in the back of the neck, she asked tentatively, “You were just playing, weren’t you, Opa?”

  He turned her face tenderly toward his and met her eyes.

  “War isn’t a game, Dorrit. You kill your enemies, or you’d be killed yourself. You understand, don’t you? If your Opa hadn’t done everything he could back then to defend himself, why then, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here today, would we?”

  She shook her head slowly and moved closer to the table.

  “And all these people wanted to kill you?”

  She glanced over the photos; she didn’t know what they were supposed to represent. They were horrifying. There were people falling down. Men and women hanging from ropes. There was a man being beaten on the back of the neck with a club. And in all of the pictures, there was her grandfather.

  “Yes, they were. They were evil and loathsome. But that’s nothing for you to worry about, Schatz. The war is over, and there won’t be another one. Trust your Opa. It all ended back then. Alles ist vorbei.” He turned toward the photographs on the table and smiled, almost as if he took pleasure in seeing them. It was probably because he no longer had to be scared or defend himself against his enemies, she thought.

  “That’s good, Opa,” she replied.

  They heard the footsteps from the adjoining room almost simultaneously, managing to push themselves up from the chair before Dorrit’s grandmother stood in the doorway between the shelves, staring at him.

  “What’s going on here?” she said harshly, grabbing Dorrit while giving them a piece of her mind. “There is nothing for Dorrit in here, Fritzl, didn’t we agree on that?”

  “Alles in Ordnung, Liebling. Dorrit has only just come in and is on her way out again. Isn’t that right, little Dorrit?” he said calmly but with cold eyes. You’ll keep quiet if you don’t want a scene, she understood, so she nodded and followed obediently as her grandmother dragged her toward the study. Just as they were leaving the room she caught a glimpse of the wall around the doorway. It was also decorated. On one side of the door hung a large red flag with a large white circle in which a strange cross took up most of the space, and on the other side of the door there was a color photo of her grandfather, head held high and with his right arm raised toward the sky.

  I will never forget this, she thought for the first time in her life.

  —

  “Take no notice of what your grandmother says, and forget what you saw in there with your grandfather. Promise me t
hat, Dorrit; it is all just nonsense.”

  Dorrit’s mother pushed Dorrit’s arms into her jacket sleeves, bending down in front of her.

  “We’re going home now, and we’ll forget all about this, won’t we, my sweet?”

  “But, Mommy, why were you shouting like that in the sitting room? Is that why Daddy left? And where is he? Is he at home?”

  She shook her head with a serious expression on her face. “No, Daddy and I aren’t getting along at the moment, so he is somewhere else.”

  “But when is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know if he will, Dorrit. But you mustn’t be upset about it. We don’t need Daddy, because your grandfather and grandmother will look after us. You know that, don’t you?” She smiled and caressed her cheeks. Her breath smelled of something strong. Similar to the clear liquid her grandfather poured in small glasses from time to time.

  “Listen to me, Dorrit. You are so beautiful and wonderful. You’re better and more intelligent than any other little girl in the whole world, so we’ll manage just fine without Daddy, don’t you think?”

  She attempted a nod, but her head just wouldn’t budge.

  “I think we should head home right now so we can turn on the television and see all the exquisite dresses the ladies are wearing to the prince’s wedding with the beautiful Chinese girl, okay, Dorrit?”

  “Then Alexandra will be a princess, right?”

  “Yes, she will, just as soon as they are married. But until then she’s just a normal girl who has found a real prince, and you’ll also find your prince one day, sweetie. When you grow up, you’ll be rich and famous because you’re even better and prettier than Alexandra, and you can have whatever you want in the world. Just look at your blond hair and beautiful features. Does Alexandra have these things?”

  Dorrit smiled. “And you’ll always be there, won’t you, Mommy?” She simply loved it when she could make her mother look as touched as she did now.

  “Oh yes, my darling. And I would do anything for you.”

  1

  Tuesday, April 26th, 2016

  As always, her face bore traces of the night before. Her skin was dry, and the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced than they’d been when she went to bed.