Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  The sun was shining, enveloping the parking lot between the buildings in a soft, golden sheen, and there was some warmth in its rays despite the season. Camilla buttoned her cardigan and climbed into the driver’s seat of her car. Well, that didn’t go well, she thought. It would be hard to recover from that beginning. She supposed the ball was in Samra’s mother’s court now, since Camilla hadn’t had a chance to say she would come back. The father would skin his wife alive if he found Camilla interviewing her in the apartment. Plus there were the two little kids. It would end in chaos.

  “I’m going to kill that whore.”

  “You mustn’t say kill. Or die. What are you doing to us? Can’t you understand that they’re going to come and take my children away from me if you say things like that? Stop it!”

  The heated voices could be heard in the background, but the interpreter’s monotone translation remained calm and unaffected by the things that were being said.

  “You’re ruining it for us, and we’ll all end up in there.…”

  “In jail,” the interpreter explained, glancing up at Louise, who was standing with the rest of the team, listening in on the audio surveillance feed.

  “For God’s sake, don’t ruin anything else,” the interpreter continued, concentrating again on the unintelligible words whirling around the Danish police officers’ heads.

  Again a man’s voice on the tape: “I didn’t say kill. I said I’ll hit you!”

  “Why are you saying these things?”

  “I’m going crazy. I’m going to kill myself too.”

  “You mustn’t say that word at all. They’re going to take my babies away from me.”

  The woman started crying loudly.

  “Get out, get out! I don’t want to hear any more.…”

  A door slammed and Storm impatiently asked for the tape to be stopped so they could discuss what they’d heard.

  During the morning briefing, Storm had informed them that they were going to have to do without him for the rest of the day. With a little embarrassment he had explained that he certainly knew it was impractical and that it was coming at an unfortunate time, but the appointment had been made a long time ago. He was going to teach a continuing education course at the Police Academy Center in Avnø and he had to be there until ten o’clock that night because they were having a big farewell dinner.

  Louise got the sense that he was anxious to get out of there, but he obviously also felt like he had to be present while they prepared, before bringing Samra’s family back in for another round of questioning an hour later.

  They were brought into the interrogation room at ten o’clock. The National Police’s staff interpreter, Fahid, had arrived early that morning so he could listen in as the family woke up. Normally they would have had the audio material transcribed and would have waited until they had the translated transcript in their hands, but Storm had decided that there was enough time pressure in this case that they had to skip that step. So instead they had the interpreter doing a simultaneous interpretation directly from the tape, which would allow them to pick up the last few important details before the couple arrived.

  “He calls his daughter a whore,” Søren Velin said, offended.

  Fahid shook his head and explained that it wasn’t Samra but the female interpreter who was being called a whore.

  “He’s accusing her of stabbing him in the back during the questioning. He’s very upset during this conversation,” Fahid said. “They were apparently just visited by a journalist, who was standing in the doorway talking to his wife when he came home, and he feels like everyone is against him.”

  “What was that stuff about the kids?” Louise asked.

  “That has to do with the problems stemming from Sada’s stay in the shelter. A note was placed in the file that the state was considering removing the two youngest children from the home if the internal family problems continued.”

  “She’s accusing him indirectly of having killed their daughter,” Skipper concluded, referring to the statement that the father mustn’t ruin anything else.

  “I don’t get it,” Louise said heatedly. “He was completely crushed when he found out the murder victim was his daughter. What the hell kind of charade is this?”

  Mik nodded in agreement. He was apparently also having trouble reconciling how this could be the same man who’d been so upset to learn of his daughter’s death.

  They stood around quietly, digesting what they’d heard, before moving into the command room and taking their seats around the table. Storm pulled on his jacket, grabbed his computer bag and the large, square black briefcase containing all his teaching materials, and then he was out the door with a brief nod.

  Ruth had a stack of plastic folders ready, which she handed out. “Here are all the facts on the al-Abd family,” she said. “About their stay at the shelter too.”

  “The father can be a real prick,” Bengtsen began, explaining that he had some peripheral awareness of Ibrahim al-Abd, both from the local street scene and from Stark, the company where Bengtsen’s brother-in-law was in charge of the department where Samra’s father and brother worked. “But he’s also very well liked by his co-workers. As long as things run smoothly, he’s cheerful and amenable, but he’s got a short fuse.”

  “I can believe that,” Mik said, rubbing his nose and seeming lost in thought for a moment.

  “Well, in spite of everything, Samra’s mother must have some backbone,” Louise said, thinking it would take guts to report your husband for domestic abuse and then end up going back home again. “She’s not a coward.”

  Skipper got up and took a handful of sodas out of the fridge and put them on the table, sending the bottle opener around.

  “Nah, but if it was the father who was responsible for Samra’s murder, then it didn’t really pay off for the mother to have reported him for his violence, did it?” Velin contributed.

  “The father’s brother in Benløse says that he visited Ibrahim and the family on Tuesday evening the way he does every week,” Mik said, glancing down at his notepad. “He describes Samra as a sweet girl, but at the same time said that there had been a few problems lately, trouble getting her to stay away from the boys. The Danish boys.”

  “That sounds a little exaggerated,” Louise exclaimed in surprise.

  “Did he want to go into any more detail on that?” Dean asked.

  Before Mik had a chance to respond, Louise interrupted, telling everyone about the picture Samra’s mother had found in her daughter’s wallet.

  When Louise finished, Mik shook his head and said the father’s brother wouldn’t say anything concrete. “He does not generally consider Ibrahim to be particularly violent, but he did say that if that kind of thing happens, of course you have to take action and get the girl in line before things get totally out of hand.”

  “But we’re not talking about a dog that needs a little behavioral correction,” Skipper commented.

  “It doesn’t make any sense that a fifteen-year-old girl would do anything that went so much against her parents’ wishes that they’d rather kill her,” Ruth Lange said, plopping down onto the edge of the table.

  “This kind of thing isn’t logical,” Skipper countered. “We’ll never accept that things like this happen. And I don’t give a damn if this is part of their religion,” he continued.

  “Cultural tradition,” Louise interjected, but she really didn’t want to get into that with a group of co-workers she’d just met. It was easier to have this conversation with people who knew each other, because every time someone made it clear where they stood on this issue, you found yourself in deep water.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with religion or Islam. Honor and shame are part of their cultural heritage. Men fight for their honor and fear that women are bringing shame to them. Therefore all women must be controlled so they don’t mess things up for everyone,” Dean explained.

  “There’s also that thing about some families r
egarding women as property, thus making it totally okay to beat them and treat them as chattels,” Velin said, both indignant and baffled that people could think like that.

  Dean nodded at him, agreeing that unfortunately that was not uncommon.

  “Did the father’s brother say anything else?” Bengtsen asked, putting an end to their contemplations of global cultural differences. “Did he say why Samra’s parents went out to see him in Benløse again so soon, when they’d just seen each other?”

  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

  LOUISE 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.