Only One Life (31 page)

Louise nodded and got up. She glanced at him over her desk as she gathered up her papers and acknowledged that now was not the time for them to lose their nerve.

Camilla was still worked up when she left the police station. She went back to the hotel and had breakfast in the restaurant. She was seated at a table by the window, looking over at the train station, when she spotted Sada, who was trudging toward the hotel with her eyes down, holding hands with Aida and Jamal. Camilla got up and went out to greet her, and with her arm around the slender woman’s shoulder and Aida’s little hand in hers, she brought them into the restaurant.

“Have you had anything to eat?” Camilla asked, looking at the kids, pointing into the next room where the continental breakfast buffet was still set up. Camilla had ordered à la carte because she hadn’t felt up to sitting with all the other hotel guests, mostly consisting of German and Danish tradesmen, who populated the hotel on weeknights. Camilla had only seen Samra’s little sister once before. That had been the time she had almost been thrown out of the family’s apartment by an enraged Ibrahim, but apparently that hadn’t had any negative impact, because now the little girl smiled and handed Camilla her doll.

“Oh, for me?” Camilla said, smiling back.

Aida nodded and followed Camilla’s suggestion to go in to the buffet, even though her mother and little brother were seated at the window table and appeared satisfied with cups of tea.

Camilla wasn’t used to little girls, but she just couldn’t resist this one. Her heart went all soft when Aida looked at her with those delightful, kind dark eyes.

Sada gasped when she saw two large pastries on her daughter’s plate, but she didn’t say anything. Not even when Aida climbed up onto a chair next to Camilla instead of sitting by her mother and Jamal. Sada just sat there looking down and stirring her tea.

“They’re going to end up in jail,” she said finally, setting down her spoon.

Camilla really wanted to comfort her and said that nothing was certain until they’d seen a judge, but at the same time she said that she’d been by the police station to find out what had made them decide to make the two arrests.

“They found your daughter’s diary at Dicta Møller’s house,” Camilla said.

Storm hadn’t told her much beyond the fact that the diary seemed to connect the two cases.

“Haven’t they told you anything?” Camilla asked when Sada didn’t react to the information.

“The police say that they’re not coming home right now,” Sada said, arms desperately wrapped around herself, as if she were trying to warm up her fingers. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Camilla wished she could reassure the woman, but that might be raising false hopes.

“Couldn’t you tell me what you think the police might have read in Samra’s diary? They wouldn’t arrest two men if they didn’t have a reason to,” she said.

Sada didn’t say anything, but Camilla had the sense that she was struggling internally and that it was a battle in which doubt and trust were playing major roles.

“I don’t know anything,” she finally said and took a little sip of her tea.

Aida had finished both pastries and her mother pulled a sketch pad and a box of puzzle pieces from her purse and spread out a small blanket on the floor and asked Aida and Jamal to sit down and play.

Without objections, the girl went over to her mother and took the things her mother handed her, and a second later the two kids were both busy down on the blanket.
That would never have worked with Markus
, Camilla thought.

“Do you know what this might have to do with Dicta Møller?” Camilla persisted, even though she was afraid of putting too much pressure on Sada.

“They were friends,” came the answer.

“You mean that your daughter might have confided in her friend?” Camilla fished. That was also her guess at the police’s connection.

Again there was a nod.

It was hard to tell if Sada was telling the truth or if she didn’t dare divulge what her daughter had been hiding. But now at least she admitted that there had been something.

“Let’s try to think about it from the police’s perspective. Are they assuming it was an honor killing?” Camilla started, asking Sada to think through what might have triggered Ibrahim’s rage. She had a strong hunch that deep down inside, Sada was afraid her husband’s temper had gotten away from him and that in a fit of rage he had killed their daughter, but Sada categorically rejected that.

“That kind of thing never happens as long as no one outside the family knows about what took place,” Sada slowly explained, as if she were trying to select each correct word individually. “My daughter didn’t do anything that our family is aware of.”

Camilla asked her to explain that a bit more clearly.

“When girls are killed, it’s because you can’t defend the family’s honor to the rest of the family—I mean, the extended family.”

Sada reached out for Camilla’s white paper napkin and asked to borrow a pen.

She drew a little circle.

“This is my immediate family, at home on Dysseparken.” Then she made a larger circle around that. “This is the rest of our extended family who live in Denmark,” she explained.

Yet another ring around those.

“This is the entire extended family back home in Rabba.”

She looked earnestly at Camilla and set the tip of the pen down on the outer circle.

“When the extended family knows there are problems with a daughter, they will want you to get her under control. If you can’t do that, things can turn out badly.”

She moved the pen in to the innermost circle.

“We loved our daughter. If there are problems, then you help your child. Things don’t turn out badly here.”

Camilla tried to follow. “What you’re saying is that the rumor that something is wrong has to make it further than this small nuclear family before it would result in an honor killing?”

Sada nodded.

“And the problems that involved Samra weren’t something that anyone outside your immediate family knew about?”

Sada shook her head, apparently not realizing that by doing so she was confirming that there had been problems. She stood up quickly and packed up her daughter’s playthings as she thanked Camilla for the tea.

“I can’t make them understand,” Sada said on her way out the door.

Camilla sat there lost in her thoughts for a long time. She didn’t doubt that Sada felt trapped in the prejudices about the culture she came from, and somewhere deep down inside she also seemed to feel unsure of what she herself should think about Samra’s fate.

As Camilla left the restaurant a little while after that, a crowd of teenagers on the other side of the street caught her eye. They had surrounded Sada and her children, who hadn’t made it to the bus stop yet but were trapped in front of the large train station building.

Camilla ran out the door and marched over to the group. Once she had pushed her way through, she positioned herself between the crowd and Sada, and made it loud and clear that if they did not leave this family alone, she would call the police faster than they could repeat the
T
in towelhead, which was just one of the words she’d overheard them using.

Instead of dissipating as Camilla had hoped, the teens started aggressively closing in. They were somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old, she guessed, and their anger at Samra’s mother hung like a thick cloud around them.

“Girl killer!” one of the boys hissed at Sada as she and her kids started backing away from the group. Word of the arrests had spread quickly and, in a small town like Holbæk, the response was quite evident.

Camilla heard Aida crying and, outraged, she stepped up to the group’s apparent ringleader.

“What the hell are you doing, you little prick?” she snarled, sensing more than seeing how a couple of the boys jumped. She whipped her press pass out of her purse.

“If one of you has a beef you want to get off your chest, then I would love to hear it. Bring it to me, not to a woman walking down the street with her children. That’s just pathetic.”

Camilla overheard some of them mumbling that she ought to “shut her ass” and quit butting in where she didn’t belong, and she ignored a shove to her left shoulder. She maintained eye contact with the boy she had spoken to.

“Until someone is found guilty of murder, you need to shut up and quit bullying people. But, actually, I’d really like to write about your anger, and maybe I can even get your pictures in the paper,” she said, her sarcasm lurking just below the surface.

Then she turned and followed Sada, who was headed over to the buses. She stayed until Sada and the kids were safely seated. By the time the bus pulled away, the boys were gone.

32

T
HE PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION STARTED AT THREE
, and it was fair. The whole investigative team attended and listened along as the judge found that there was sufficient reason to hold the father and son and that they could remain in custody for fourteen days.

“He wasn’t sure enough to hold them for four weeks,” Storm said, once they had returned to the command room and were seated around the table drinking sodas, which Ruth had retrieved from the fridge. Still, the relief was obvious in his face. “Well, now we’ll have a little space to work.”

Skipper and Dean had just finished searching the al-Abd family’s home on Dysseparken right before the preliminary examination began, so no one had heard yet if they’d turned up anything new.

“Nothing,” Skipper said, shaking his head. “No murder weapon, no diary pages or anything else that in any way revealed new details about Samra’s private life, and now I think I can say that there won’t be anything either. There’s no place that hasn’t been searched, so we need to change tacks.”

“Louise and I are on our way to have a chat with the photographer Michael Mogensen,” Mik said, draining his Fanta. “And early tomorrow we’ll bring Ibrahim’s brother in. He was with the parents around the time of Samra’s death. We need to ascertain where he was when Dicta was killed.”

Louise caught his eye. She left her cola on the table and stood up to signal that she was ready to go. She was having a hard time coming down from the adrenaline rush she’d felt during the preliminary examination, so heading out right away suited her just fine.

Michael Mogensen answered the door quickly when they rang the bell on the front of the large yellow-brick home in which he rented the first floor from his grandmother and also had a large room in the basement, which he used for his studio and computer equipment.

“We would really like to speak to you about the two murders that occurred here in town,” Mik began.

A shadow instantly fell over the photographer’s eyes and he lowered his head and nodded.

“May we come in?” Louise asked.

He quickly stepped aside to make room. “Of course. Should we go down to my workspace, or up to where I live?” He sounded uncertain and uneasy with the situation.

“Your call,” Mik said, but when it didn’t seem as if anything was happening, Mik suggested that they go down to the basement. “You knew Dicta as a result of your work, so that seems fitting.”

Portraits of babies, couples, brides, grooms, and businesspeople from town lined the walls, and there were advertising photos and an enlarged reporting series from the School of Arts and Crafts on the outskirts of Holbæk.

The photographer offered them coffee once they were seated by a small coffee table and rolled his own desk chair over so he was sitting across from them, looking at them expectantly.

“I just can’t understand it,” he began. He seemed more exhausted than Louise had first noticed.

“Tell us how you and Dicta became acquainted,” Louise requested, to get him talking.

He seemed to be letting his memory rewind until it found the right instant.

“There’d been a game down at the stadium, and I was on my way home to submit my pictures to my editor. On the way home, I stopped to get a bite to eat, and that’s where I saw her. I was standing at the corner by the Kebab House and she came walking toward me.”

“How long ago was that?”

“That was last fall. She wasn’t that old, but we did a few catalog photos for one of the sporting-supply companies in town and then the rest came later.”

“The rest?”

“The jewelry and clothes.” He pointed over at some pictures showing a hand with various rings and a neck with an elegant gold chain.

“Did you use other models besides her?” Mik wanted to know.

Mogensen nodded and looked over at a filing cabinet. “But little by little it was actually mostly her that I used. She was good, and my customers were happy with her. But there were some things she was too young for, of course. Women’s clothes, for example. I do some work for an optician’s shop, and they really wanted their models to be a little older.”

“How was she as a model?” Louise asked.

“She was great—natural talent and a pleasure to work with,” he said without hesitation.

“Had she ever tried it before you originally stopped her on the street?”

He shook his head. “No, never. But like I said, I could see that she could become something. Which is why I devoted the time to helping her feel comfortable in front of the camera. Those pictures would just remain in the cabinet. It was an investment for both of us, which ultimately brought in more gigs.”