The Scarred Woman (Afdeling Q #7)
Jussi Adler-Olsen
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 from 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.”