Only One Life (15 page)

Mik sat there studying the folder Ruth had given him, and then shook his head. “Just that it was because they were worried about Samra.”

Before they wrapped up the meeting, to get ready for the next round of questioning with Samra’s parents and her older brother, Louise reported on her conversation with Dicta Møller the previous evening.

“It turns out that Samra tinkered with her school schedule to give herself a couple of free periods each week when she could escape her parents’ control for a little while, so she did occasionally do something they didn’t know about,” Louise concluded just as the phone rang to let them know the al-Abd family had arrived.

She and Mik walked to their office together.

“I’ll be back from the school as soon as I’ve spoken to Samra’s four friends,” Louise said. “And we’ll see if I can twist anything out of them.”

They had agreed to split up, so Mik went to participate in questioning the family while Louise went to talk to Samra’s school friends, and they had both turned down the offer of help from a couple of local assistant detectives. Louise realized she had misjudged her new partner when she had assumed he was lazy. He actually took more work on himself than he assigned her.

“Good luck,” he called after her as she walked away.

“Same to you. You’ll need it more.”

Mik smiled at her and tipped his chair back a little, running his hand through his hair and making a face. “I suppose I’ll have to try to go a little easier on Hamid if I want to keep him from shutting down right away,” Mik said, and for the first time Louise got the sense that her new partner didn’t feel so uptight with her anymore.

“I’ll see you,” she said, stuffing her car keys into her pocket on her way out the door.

14

L
OUISE LOOKED AROUND THE EMPTY FACULTY LOUNGE
. There was a long table and several small clusters of sofas, stacks of books and newspapers, and a couple of empty coffee cups that had been left behind. It was bright and airy with a couple of colored reproductions hanging on the walls, and though it was an old school, it had obviously been renovated within the last few years. She had an appointment when classes got out to meet the four girls who’d been closest to Samra. School was canceled for the rest of the day, but Jette Petersen had asked permission for their class to meet for a memorial service in the gym before Louise took over.

“I’ll just get them all out the door,” Jette had said when they had spoken that morning.

Maybe she should have waited until Monday, Louise thought, walking over to the window, but then the whole weekend would have passed before she got a sense of the girl’s circle of friends. She saw a rented bus parking along the sidewalk, emptying its load of small children with wet hair and swimming gear in their hands. She followed them with her eyes as the herd disappeared across the playground.

The door opened and Louise turned around and said hello to a man, who gave her a funny look, wondering who she was.

She introduced herself and explained that she was waiting for Samra’s teacher. Jette Petersen’s co-worker just nodded at her and walked over to the table that served as a kitchenette and poured water into the coffee maker.

“It’s a sad story,” he grunted when he was done. The machine started gurgling a second later.

Louise quietly agreed with him.

“But who says the family’s behind it?” he asked, nodding at the morning papers that were sitting on the long table. Both front pages prominently featured the words
HONOR KILLING.
“She may just as easily have been the victim of a crime the family wasn’t behind. Isn’t that kind of jumping to conclusions?” he asked in a tone that made Louise feel as if he was holding her accountable for the coverage.

She hurried to say that of course someone else could easily have been behind it. “But there’s not really any motive to suggest that,” Louise continued, trying not to sound defensive.

Silence hung in the air between them and she took a seat. The coffee maker finished gurgling and the man pulled a couple of clean mugs out of the dishwasher. He asked her if she wanted anything in hers. She said “Milk, please” and asked if he might know anything the police hadn’t heard yet, since he had brought all this up.

He shook his head and said that it just seemed to him as if they were taking the path of least resistance. “You’re going after the easiest target,” he said, taking a seat. “If it had been a Danish family, you’d be searching for the perpetrator everywhere
but
inside the family.”

Really? You think so?
Louise thought. “The second we have any other leads to follow, I promise you we will.”

“Even though Holbæk isn’t that big, there are crazy people here too. We’ve had a number of rapes,” the man began.

“Well, Samra wasn’t raped,” Louise interrupted sharply. “She was murdered, callously and coldheartedly. She was asphyxiated and had a concrete slab tied to her abdomen.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t know it was the family,” he said once more.

Louise sighed and conceded that he was right. No, they didn’t know. “But I can tell you that two of my colleagues have been looking for witnesses since she was found and no one saw her leave her parents’ home,” she said, thinking about all the interviews Bengtsen and Velin had done in Dysseparken and the neighborhood around the large residential area where the family’s apartment was located.

“But that also means no one saw her father drive off with her,” he pointed out, and again Louise had to concede. Samra could easily have left home without having been noticed.

“You’re just starting out with the assumption that the family is guilty—”

The door opened and he stopped talking.

Louise got up and walked over to put her mug in the sink. “We’re not assuming anyone is guilty,” she said, standing right across from him. “We’re following the leads we have as we continue to investigate the case.”

She was starting to get irritated and turned around to greet the girls Jette Petersen was just leading into the teachers’ lounge.

“We can go down to the classroom, which is at the end of the hall,” Jette said after they’d greeted each other. There were three girls in addition to Dicta Møller.

“Great,” Louise said, leading the way out the door without saying good-bye to Jette’s colleague.

Two of the girls, Fatima and Asma, were from immigrant backgrounds. Liv was Danish. Louise pulled a couple of tables together so they could sit across from each other. Jette Petersen sat down a little ways in the background as an observer.

“I’d really like to get a better sense of who Samra was,” Louise began, looking at the girls. “As far as I’ve understood, you were the ones who were closest to her.”

She was prepared for the crying and gave them plenty of time as it rapidly set in. The memorial service in the gym must have been tough on them.

“She’s my cousin,” said Asma, the thinnest of the girls, whose pretty, slender face was framed by a headscarf that was so tight-fitting that Louise couldn’t see a single strand of hair.

Louise sat for a moment, watching her, because it would have been hard to find someone sending more mixed signals than this girl. Of the four, Asma was the most provocatively dressed, so the demure head covering seemed completely out of place in combination with her plunging neckline and tight skirt. Louise’s eyes moved on to Fatima, who was a little stockier and seemed more relaxed about her appearance. She was wearing a pair of baggy pants and a stylish pink T-shirt and had a lot of curly black hair surrounding her face in a rather unruly hairdo.

Louise got back down to business and explained that she had already spoken with Dicta and that what she hoped to get out of today’s conversation was an impression of who Samra had hung out with. Who had known her, and what kind of person had she been?

She looked first at Fatima, who had been in Samra’s class.

“Our families know each other. We moved to Holbæk because my father grew up with Samra’s father back home in Rabba. So I played with her a lot during the years we’ve lived here.”

Louise was particularly struck by the girl’s use of the word “played.” That wasn’t a word Dicta would have used about the time she spent with Samra.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Louise asked. She had thought about whether or not she ought to meet with the girls individually, but had decided that having them all here together might help them loosen up.

“We saw each other last weekend,” Fatima said and nodded at Asma, adding that Asma had been there with her family too.

Asma explained that her mother was Sada’s sister. Asma was in the same grade, but had a different homeroom.

“How do you guys think Samra was doing?”

“She was doing well,” Fatima answered without hesitation, but then she gave Asma a questioning look. Asma, however, was lost in her own thoughts and didn’t respond to Fatima.

“Do you also think Samra seemed to be doing well when you were together last weekend?” Louise asked the girl’s cousin, when she didn’t respond.

The cousin hurriedly nodded, and Louise felt herself starting to get a little exasperated. “You know, I’d heard that she seemed like she was under a little pressure lately, but you guys hadn’t noticed that?” Louise prompted.

Fatima shook her head, but Asma looked Louise in the eye and said that there were times when Samra wasn’t that happy.

“Had she been like that lately?” Louise asked.

Asma shrugged. There was something vulnerable about her, evoked by her provocative sense of style and her covered hair. She didn’t look at all cheap in her tight-fitting clothes, it was more like she radiated a strong sense of feminine elegance, one that she was just way too young to carry off and that wasn’t fully realized because she was hiding one of the most feminine of bodily adornments: her hair.

“Did Samra say anything to you? She must have needed someone to talk to?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Louise asked the girls whom they talked to when they were sad. “Each other,” all four of them replied.

Dicta added that she also talked to her parents, and there was nodding all around the table. The others obviously did too, when all was said and done.

The silence in the classroom was oppressive until Louise asked if anyone thought the family might have been planning a wedding for Samra and that maybe that was what had been making her feel pressured.

Suddenly everyone was talking over each other.

“They wouldn’t do that,” Fatima exclaimed loudly and was interrupted by Liv, who exclaimed, “Well, they could just forget about that!”

“My aunt and uncle aren’t like that,” Asma said, once everyone had calmed down. “They’re not into that kind of thing.”

“But that’s what you Danes always think about us, isn’t it?” Fatima mumbled angrily.

“Samra would never have put up with that. She was way too independent to accept a decision like that,” Liv interjected, and the other girls agreed.

Louise studied Liv for a moment. Liv was hardly the first person Louise would have picked as one of Samra’s closest friends. Her leather jacket was worn, and the red T-shirt with the black dots she wore underneath it was faded. Louise couldn’t figure out whether the girl’s hair was standing up in stiff tufts because it was beyond greasy or if she’d painstakingly achieved this look with multiple hair products. It was hard to tell what color the girl’s eyes were behind all that thick black eyeliner.

“Well, good, we’ll forget about that then,” Louise said. “Do you think Samra would have sneaked out of the house at night without telling her parents?” she asked instead.

Both Dicta and Liv nodded, while Asma and Fatima took a little longer to contemplate the idea before they also acknowledged that she might well have done that. “Samra’s parents usually went to bed around ten, because her father had to get up early,” one of the girls added.

“Who would she have gone to visit if it wasn’t one of you guys?”

This time there was no rapid outburst of answers.

“She was very cautious,” Liv said, pulling her leather jacket tighter around her, as if she were a little uncomfortable talking and having the others’ full attention. “If they found out, her father would have been furious and then she would have been grounded for several months.”