Only One Life (38 page)

Mik gave Michael his instructions. There were still flowers there, both recent additions and the bouquets that had been left there since Dicta’s savaged body had been found. The photographer was clearly moved to find himself at the scene of the crime and pointed out a large bouquet of white roses that he himself had brought. Still, he remained meticulous and focused as he got started photographing the site, so the readers could see that Dicta had been lying in the rear corner of the parking lot, down by Lindevej.

Louise reached out to take the tripod when Michael started packing up, but gladly left it to Mik when he offered to carry it back to the cars.

40

T
HEY BOTH SAID YES TO
M
lCHAEL
M
OGENSEN
’
S OFFER OF COFFEE
, and he hooked his digital camera up to his computer to download the photos before disappearing up into his apartment to put the coffee on. Louise noticed that the gash on her shin was still bleeding and walked over to pull a paper towel off the roll that stood on a small table under the window.

She sat down on the sofa and rolled up her pants leg. The blood had spread into a smudged stain. She carefully dabbed it clean and held a fresh paper towel up against her leg to stop the trickle of blood. Michael came back down with the coffee, mugs, and a carton of milk under his arm.

“Well, are you ready to look at them?” he asked as he sat down in front of his monitor.

Louise walked over to the trash with the paper towel. As she was about to toss it in, she was struck by the familiar and distinctive rounded marks the blood from her wound had made. This time she didn’t need a ruler to know there were exactly three centimeters between them.

For a moment she forgot to breathe. Then she turned around slowly and studied Michael Mogensen, as every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Mik had not noticed Louise’s silence as he poured their coffee.

Louise stood and gathered her thoughts for a moment, then calmly walked over and sat down next to the photographer. For a few minutes she watched as he brought photos up on the screen. Then she asked her question.

Her partner only reacted the second time she asked. Michael Mogensen had his eyes firmly on the screen, but his fingers had stopped moving on the keyboard. He looked at her for a moment, and the look in his eyes convinced her that she was right in her suspicion.

“Why did you kill them?” she repeated, waiting for his response.

Mik came over and stood next to her, but Louise didn’t take her eyes off Michael Mogensen, leaving her partner to follow along as best he could. She could see him putting the pieces together as she passed him the paper towel with the two red marks that the screws on the plate the camera housing attached to had left on her leg. His face was serious and his voice calm as he closed in on the photographer.

“Did you take Aida as well?” he asked.

Finally Michael Mogensen turned his body toward them, allowing his eyes to remain locked on the screen and the picture of the suburban street where Liv’s home was.

He hesitantly shook his head, speaking in such a low voice that they had to lean close to hear him.

“That wasn’t me,” he said.

Louise reached out and grabbed him. She forced him to look at her.

“I don’t know where she is,” he continued in the same quiet tone. “I could never do anything to her.”

He looked down, avoiding her angry face.

“Why should I believe that when you’ve been so hypocritical—leaving flowers for both Samra and Dicta even though you were the one who killed them?”

He mumbled something she didn’t understand, and she glanced up at Mik, who shrugged.

“I’m going to ask you again. Were you behind her disappearance?” Mik said in a voice that Louise had trouble recognizing.

“I haven’t touched her,” the photographer repeated, this time with more strength in his voice.

The answer came so quickly and clearly that they were forced to believe him. Louise got up and went out into the hallway to call Storm and tell him they’d found their murderer but that he denied having anything to do with Aida’s disappearance. She told him that they needed no assistance. They would handle the arrest themselves and he would hear from her again soon.

When she returned to the studio, she felt rage throbbing within her, but she was determined to keep it under wraps and exerted a great deal of effort to make her voice sound relaxed. There was no reason to fight him now when gaining his trust was key so they could get him to talk.

“Tell us what happened between you and the two girls,” she encouraged.

The photographer sat, his back hunched, nearly collapsed in on himself; but before he had a chance to consider whether or not he was going to say anything, she continued.

“When it comes to Dicta, I’m guessing it was anger that made you kill her. Anger that she’d turned her back on you in favor of a Copenhagen fashion photographer. She hurt your feelings.”

Louise avoided pointing out how small-minded this reaction was, because it wasn’t her place to define these things. A forensic psychologist would have the opportunity to do that later.

“She humiliated me,” Mogensen corrected her immediately.

Louise could tell that it wouldn’t be hard to get him to talk, so it didn’t surprise her when the words suddenly started flooding out of his mouth like loose gravel being tipped out of a truck bed.

“She mocked me and became cruel. She said that I was a second-class, provincial photographer who would never make a name for myself any farther away than the village of Vipperød.”

Louise nodded. That was what she’d figured. She would get the details of his explanation later during the official interrogation at the police station. But the answer to the next question wasn’t so obvious.

“Why Samra? You hardly knew her, right?”

She tried to establish eye contact with him.

Finally something changed in his face. He turned to look her in the eye and what Louise saw in front of her was a big boy who was slowly falling apart.

“I loved her,” he said, his eyes becoming moist.

There was no trace of guilt in his eyes. Just a deep despair that confused Louise.

“You were her Danish boyfriend?” Mik asked.

Now Louise was the one left out in the cold.

“If that was the case,” she said hesitantly, “then why did you kill her?”

Again there was a long pause during which Louise tried to put the last pieces of the puzzle together herself.

“She didn’t want me,” he finally whispered. “She said she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry someone from there. Someone Muslim like herself.”

He spoke softly, but there was nothing tentative about his words. He really wanted to make them understand.

“Why did she want that?” Louise asked, bewildered.

His response took her completely by surprise and didn’t fit with the image she had formed of Samra.

“Because she wanted someone who was like her and fit in with everything she knew,” he said, as if he didn’t quite understand it himself. “And then she said that Danish families didn’t have the same kind of solidarity that families had where she came from. She didn’t want to be part of a family where people never really spent any time together even though they lived in the same house. She thought it seemed empty and wrong that I didn’t have more to do with my grandmother, since we lived so close together, and that I’m not really in touch with my other family members. In Jordan the whole family sticks together, they all take care of each other there. If one person is sick, the others bring food. It’s never lonely, and she missed and longed for the kind of togetherness she was familiar with. That’s why she wanted to go home to Jordan and marry a man from there.”

“But she was happy enough to risk a lot to see you in secret, even though she didn’t want people to know about your relationship,” Mik prompted.

“Was it because she knew that her parents would object to her picking you instead of a man from her own background?” Louise asked and noticed the adrenaline rushing through her body again.

Michael started crying and hid his face in his hands as his shoulders shook.

They let him be until he dried his face with both hands and looked up.

“It wasn’t like that. She knew that they wouldn’t object. She was the one who didn’t want it, even though she was free to follow her heart. That’s what I couldn’t understand. I’ve never loved another person the way I loved her. She also claimed she loved me. But she still wouldn’t consent to being a couple.”

“She was much younger than you. Far too young to know whom she wanted to share her life with,” Louise interjected.

Michael shook his head.

“Her father had given her permission to go home and visit her grandparents for Christmas. She said maybe she could find someone to marry.”

When he saw Louise’s dumbfounded face, he continued: “She said that on Tuesday night when she came over after her parents were asleep and I gave her a necklace and asked her if she would marry me.”

“You killed her because she said no?” Mik asked.

“Samra tried to convince me that I would always be in her heart even though we weren’t together. I couldn’t understand that, and for me it wasn’t enough either. She was the one I wanted,” he said.

The photographer let his chin fall down against his chest and closed his eyes.

“And when she went home, she said she wasn’t following her heart but that it would be easier for her. But it was all just lies. Because if she really wanted to, she could have just moved in here with me.”

Louise cleared her throat. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it was that easy for her,” she began, picturing the pages from Samra’s diary.

The room was silent. Only the sounds of their breathing made the air vibrate.

Louise thought of Ibrahim and Hamid. It surprised her that neither one of them had distanced himself more vociferously from the crime. That alone had cast suspicion over them. They had denied it and hadn’t wavered on their statements, but they hadn’t seriously defended their innocence. Now that it was clear they weren’t behind the killings, she realized that each of them must have suspected the other after the crime Ahmad had subjected his niece to.

Ibrahim had suspected his brother of the killing, but didn’t want to turn him in until he was sure of what had happened. That was what he’d been trying to figure out when he went to see Ahmad the day after Samra disappeared.

Maybe he was also afraid that Hamid had acted on his own initiative to make his father and uncle happy, if he knew about his sister’s secret.

Ahmad probably suspected Ibrahim of killing his own daughter so she wouldn’t cast shame over the family once the relationship with the Danish man was revealed. That would make sense to Ahmad. Louise also knew from Camilla that for a while, Sada had suspected her husband was behind the murder, although later her suspicion had passed to Ahmad. No one in the al-Abd family had ever really suspected anyone from outside the family of doing it.

“I must now officially inform you that the time is 6:21
P.M.
and you are under arrest, charged with the murders of Samra al-Abd and Dicta Møller,” Mik said to Michael Mogensen.

The he asked the photographer to stand up and he started frisking him, before putting a hand on his elbow and leading him out to the patrol car.

41

“L
ET
’
S ISSUE A PRESS RELEASE RIGHT AWAY
,” S
TORM SAID
when Louise and Mik returned to the police station with Michael Mogensen. The photographer was received by two officers who were ready to process him so Louise and Mik could join the others in the command room.

“It’s important that we let the media know that this case did not involve an honor killing. Maybe that will make whoever’s behind Aida’s disappearance come to their senses,” Dean said.

“We’ll release Ibrahim and his son immediately and tell them what’s happened,” Storm said, looking over at Ruth. “I wonder if we’ll be fined for their arrests. We’re sure to receive a claim for compensation for wrongful imprisonment that’s going to fucking hurt more than just our public image.”

The administrative assistant raised an eyebrow and nodded thoughtfully before agreeing that he was right.

“But there was no other choice, what with the situation the way it was,” Skipper interrupted.

“All the family members seemed to suspect each other and no one was telling us what they knew, so it’s really not that surprising that we suspected them as well,” Louise said, reaching for a bottle of soda before she started telling everyone about Michael’s arrest.

“Late Tuesday evening, after Ahmad had gone home and once her parents were asleep, Samra sneaked out to see her boyfriend. Out of fear that her parents and brother would discover their relationship, Samra hadn’t allowed any phone calls between them. Instead they arranged their future meetings in person when they were together. Michael Mogensen thinks it was about eleven when she came over. He had lit candles and bought her flowers, because he had been planning to ask her to marry him that night, so it took him completely by surprise when she said she had come to tell him that she had arranged with her parents to send her back home to Jordan.”

“Ouch,” mumbled Bengtsen, passing the cookies around again as Louise continued.

“He gave her the thin gold chain she was wearing around her neck when she was found. But he didn’t understand why she didn’t want him, or why she would rather find a husband in Jordan when the time came.”

“Who says that’s what she wanted?” Skipper asked.

“That’s what Michael Mogensen said,” Mik responded and then let Louise continue.

“Michael thinks it’s because Samra wanted the kind of close extended family life she would have had with someone from her own traditional background. After having read her diary, I don’t think the family relationship was the main reason. I mean, just think about what her uncle did to her. It might have been part of the reason, but I think mostly she was looking for an excuse to call it off.”