Only One Life (11 page)

Louise looked at Dicta and thought she had a curiously grownup way of relating to this modeling career that she hadn’t even really embarked on yet. They must be the photographer’s words she was using.

“Who took the pictures?” Louise asked, contemplating one where Dicta was sitting on the deck of a sailboat with her long blonde hair fluttering in the breeze and her feet hanging over the edge. She turned the photo over to see if there was a copyright notice on the back, but there was nothing.

“His name’s Michael Mogensen, and he’s the best in town,” Dicta said, sitting up straight. “We’ve spent a lot of time taking the pictures that are going into my portfolio. Now I’m just waiting for him to finish them. There’s something about the background he needs to correct in Photoshop; but once that’s all set, the portfolio will be ready to be submitted to the major modeling agencies.”

Louise smiled at her. Dicta had a youthful joy and exuberance when she talked about her dreams, and at the moment it was just sweet—but it didn’t take a professional’s eyes to see that there was something naïve and rigid in Dicta’s poses, which a more talented photographer would probably have done something about.

“It sounds exciting,” Louise said.

She fished out a picture in which Dicta was standing between Samra and a man who was in his mid-twenties.

“That’s Michael,” explained Dicta. “He is a staff photographer at
Venstrebladet.”
She sounded a little impressed that he had taken on the responsibility for shepherding her to the top.

Louise looked at the picture for a long time. Samra had a big smile on her face and her hair hung loose. It had been taken on a summer day down by the water. Louise recognized the bridge out to Holbæk’s public beach, and she thought she could just make out the red-painted main building and little changing cabins in the background.

“He looks nice,” Louise said, examining the very average-looking guy with blonde hair and thick eyebrows.

“Did Samra have her photos taken too?” Louise continued, asking out of curiosity.

Dicta shook her head. “She just came with me a couple of times. Her father would totally flip out if he knew.”

Dicta stacked up the pictures and put them back into the box before carefully hiding it away again and making sure it was hidden by other boxes and a bag in the bottom of her closet.

“Was she seeing any boys?” Louise asked once Dicta emerged again.

It took a while before she answered.

“What do you mean by
seeing?”

Louise was angling again to find out whether Samra had a boyfriend, or whether there was a boy she had had an especially big crush on.

“She wasn’t allowed to do that stuff,” Dicta continued.

“Not being allowed to do something is not necessarily the same as not doing it,” Louise tried to say in a way that would not force Dicta to snitch on her friend for breaking her family’s rules. Dicta herself obviously felt other people didn’t necessarily need to know everything about Samra’s life.

Louise asked how Dicta perceived Samra’s relationship with her family.

Dicta shrugged, and when no answer was forthcoming, Louise stepped over and opened the door to leave.

“Over time, she preferred spending time here more than being at home,” Dicta said finally as Louise stood in the hallway, “but that may also have been because there was always so much noise and so many people at her place,” she continued, following Louise.

Louise went back out to the kitchen and said good-bye to Dicta’s parents, who were still sitting at the table talking softly, but they got up and came outside with her.

“Did Samra mention anything about her family recently? Did she give the impression that anything wasn’t as it should be?”

Louise glanced at the parents to see if they understood where she was headed with this line of thought.

Dicta’s shoulders sank a little, and, without warning, all the tears she had been holding back suddenly flooded out. Her slender body began to shake as though convulsing from some intense cramp, and then the sobs emerged. Charlie got up uneasily from his place under the table and watched Dicta. The tremors increased, and Dicta’s father took his daughter in his arms and rocked her gently back and forth.

“Had you noticed anything about Samra that might indicate she was afraid of something the last few times you saw her?” Louise repeated, persisting with her question despite the sobbing because the question might well have been what triggered it.

Dicta didn’t answer, and her father closed his arms tighter around her. Louise nodded at him and said good-bye to Dicta as she let the mother accompany her the rest of the way out.

They stood on the front steps as Anne said she thought she had noticed a change in Samra recently. She said Samra had seemed sullen and sad.

“She used to enjoy helping me out a little with the dogs, also when I was training them in our dog run out in the back yard. But lately she’s been staying up in the bedroom with Dicta. Maybe they just had a lot of homework to do, or a lot of things to talk about.”

Louise nodded. It was impossible to know, if Dicta didn’t want to say what was going on. Louise thanked Anne for the coffee and asked her to tell her daughter that she could call or stop by the police station at any time if anything else came up.

She was just stepping off the end of the driveway onto the sidewalk when a blue station wagon drove up and parked at the curb, and she immediately recognized the photographer as he got out of the car and started walking up toward the front door.

“Hello,” she said, offering a hand. “Detective Louise Rick. I’m with the Holbæk Police Department.”

The man shook her hand and introduced himself.

“Michael Mogensen,” he said, seeming a bit hesitant.

“I know,” Louise said, smiling. “I was just looking at the pictures you’ve been taking of Dicta. Those are some big plans the two of you have been cooking up there.”

He nodded a little self-consciously.

“I’d really like to help her. It would be fun for me as well if she got discovered and became famous.”

“I noticed that you also knew Samra.”

“Yes, a little,” he said. “I promised Dicta I’d drive her out to Hønsehalsen cemetery so she can lay a bouquet of flowers and light a candle.”

The door behind Louise opened.

“I’ll be right there,” Dicta yelled, disappearing back into the house. A moment later she returned, wearing a jacket and ready to go.

Louise went to her car and smiled at them as the photographer gallantly opened the station wagon’s door for the young woman.

10

W
HEN
L
OUISE GOT BACK TO THE POLICE STATION
,
SHE MET
Samra’s father and a woman in the hallway. She guessed it must be the mother, Sada, because she was wearing a headscarf and keeping her eyes stiffly trained on the floor. They were following Søren Velin to the corner office where Bengtsen and both interpreters were ready for them. Louise nodded to them and hurried to her own office. Once there, she cautiously knocked before entering and found her partner in the middle of questioning Samra’s older brother. Without interrupting, she took a seat and listened in.

“Where’d you get the car from?” Mik asked.

“From a friend, like I said!”

There was no trace of anger in the young man’s tone, just a stubbornness that told them they shouldn’t count on finding out any more than he’d already told them.

“But it isn’t your car?” Mik continued.

Samra’s brother shook his head.

“Does that mean other people might have used it in the last week?”

There was no response.

Mik Rasmussen leaned forward and asked, “Did you use the car Tuesday night?”

Hamid nodded. “I wasn’t anywhere near Hønsehalsen.”

His Danish was very good considering he’d only been living in the country for four years, Louise noted, although he did have a tough time pronouncing
H
ø
nsehalsen
.

“I’m not saying you were,” Mik interrupted. “I really just want to know if anyone else might have driven that car out there.”

Samra’s brother shook his head.

“Did your sister have a boyfriend?”

Mik had changed topics so quickly that it seemed as if Hamid needed a moment to reboot before he answered the new question. He shook his head.

“Who do you hang out with?”

“People from school.”

They had determined that he went to trade school, and in addition to a morning job where his father worked, he also had an after-school job at the local Kvickly supermarket. Ruth was already working on getting a list of his classmates in case they needed to talk to them.

Louise leaned back to listen in on the questioning session. She was surprised that her partner was being so aggressive with his questioning. Louise was more a fan of the cognitive interview method, in which you guided the subject through an explanation in his own words at his own pace. She had always found that more productive. But every now and then it just failed to get anything out of a subject, and then of course you had to be more aggressive.

“Does it bother you when girls have male friends?” Mik asked, changing topics again.

“Why the hell would I care about that? Girls can have male friends. What kind of silly preconceptions do you have?”

“So you feel that way even when your sister is involved?” The tone the question was asked in was filled with a confrontational sarcasm.

There was a bang as Hamid angrily slapped his hand against the desk instead of responding, and in a way Louise couldn’t blame him for losing his temper if the interview had been going like this from the beginning.

“Was your sister dating anyone?” Mik asked again, in a more subdued tone.

The brother shook his head and hid his face in his hands as he shrugged his shoulders.

Mik set down the pen he had been holding in his hand. “That’s enough for now,” he said and asked Hamid to wait until the interview had been typed out so he could read through it and sign it. Once that was done, Mik said, “It may be that we need to talk to you again.” He followed Samra’s brother to the hallway and held out his hand, but the young man ignored it and just scurried off.

“I guarantee you that got to him,” Louise exclaimed as Mik stepped back in and closed the door.

“He spent the first half hour evading everything I asked about, so I did that to get a reaction,” Mik responded, and Louise got the sense that he had taken her comment as criticism. Instead of getting into it, she started focusing on her computer to avoid spoiling the mood just because they approached things differently.

“All right. I admit that he got to me too,” Mik said after they had each sat staring at their screens for a few minutes. “But I’m having a hard time accepting his attitude toward immigrant girls and their male acquaintances. There must be a fundamental acceptance of what’s permitted for girls. And yet here it seems like everything is divided into two categories. There’s plenty of tolerance toward immigrant girls in general, but that tolerance is severely curtailed when it has to do with the female members of your own family.”

Louise thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “She was kind of viewed as the family’s property and then suddenly that turns into something else,” she said, remembering what a sociologist from the University of Southern Denmark had explained to her when she was on the Nørrebro case.

“That’s really the crux of it when you’re talking about honor and shame,” Louise continued after a moment. “In families where those concepts are significant, people don’t care that much about honor or shame when it doesn’t have to do with their immediate family members. And in those cases when something does happen to offend the family’s honor, it doesn’t become dangerous until someone from the neighborhood starts talking about it. As long as the problem is only known within the family’s four walls, no one has to react to it. It’s so strange that there’s such a huge difference between the world in general and the inner circle.”

Mik watched her while she talked, and she could tell that he wasn’t putting much stock in her explanation. But that was one of the important things she had learned during the case she had just wrapped up. It wasn’t until it became publicly known that the family couldn’t control their own daughter that the girl had to die. In the case in Nørrebro, the death sentence had been pronounced by an uncle and his three sons. They wanted the girl killed before any of the other girls in the family became infected by her loose behavior.

“The world is a strange place. I don’t understand that way of thinking,” Mik admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

Louise smiled at him and said that there weren’t many Danes who did.

“Jette Petersen is here,” Ruth announced from the doorway. She asked if they were ready for her and when they wanted the classmates to come in.

“Maybe we ought to see about borrowing a room at the school so we can do it while school’s in session tomorrow?” Mik suggested and received a nod of confirmation from the administrative assistant.

“That’ll save us a ton of coordination. Good idea,” Louise said, standing up to go receive Samra’s homeroom teacher.

“I’ll write up the parents’ and brother’s interviews and update what we have in the case file on the family from before,” Ruth said before heading back to the command room.

Storm came in to ask them if they could also talk to the women’s shelter the mother had stayed at to find out what information they had on the family. Louise took a seat on the edge of her desk as he spoke.

“We just need to find out if the parents were having problems with the girl, before we latch on to our suspicions,” Storm said.

“I’ll call the shelter right away,” Mik offered, pulling out his papers and flipping through them. He left the office to find somewhere quiet to call from so Louise could start her conversation with Samra’s teacher. Louise followed Mik into the hallway and asked Jette Petersen to come in.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

The teacher looked tired, as if she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and there were streaks of mascara under her bottom lashes.