by Sara Blaedel
“Did you sleep with him?”
Dicta melodramatically widened her eyes and gave Louise a shocked, offended look with her groggy eyes.
“You have no right to ask me that. He thinks I have a lot of potential.” Again Dicta had trouble speaking clearly. “He says I could make it as far as Lykke May or Louise P.”
“Did he do anything to you against your will?” Louise asked when Dicta didn’t respond to her question.
“What do you mean?” Dicta asked, seeming sincerely not to understand.
“Did he force you to do anything you didn’t feel comfortable with?” Louise really couldn’t put it anymore clearly than that.
Dicta closed her eyes and hid her face in her hands as she shook her head. After a while, she moved her hands again and gave Louise a dark look. “You’re like my mother. Why don’t you believe that amazing things can really happen?”
Louise was about to defend herself, but saw how tired and wretched Dicta looked. “Of course they can really happen. I just want to make sure that he didn’t take advantage of you. You’re a little off balance these days after what happened to your friend. That can make it harder to make good decisions.”
“He didn’t. He just thought I was pretty, and he really wanted to help me. We kissed a little. Okay?”
She added the last part out of spite and Louise couldn’t tell if that covered everything that had happened. But she wasn’t actually all that concerned as long as the girl hadn’t been molested on top of being marinated in a large portion of champagne.
Louise stood up and supported Dicta under her arm and helped her up.
“I’ll drive you home.”
Dicta stood there unstably on her feet and looked as if she wanted to protest, but Louise started pulling her along right away.
It was dark in the big house when Louise parked outside, but by the time she reached the front door Charlie had already started barking loudly and several lights along the driveway switched on. She rang the bell and supported Dicta while they waited for the door to open.
“No one’s home,” Dicta said after they’d waited a while.
Louise looked at her in surprise.
“Then why are we standing here waiting for someone to open the door?” Louise asked, helping Dicta as the girl tried to extract her keys from the little chest pocket of her jeans jacket.
At first the girl didn’t answer, then she shrugged and laughed a little foolishly. “I forgot it was the weekend,” she said, getting the door open without letting the dog out. “My mom spends most of her weekends at dog shows or agility courses, and my dad goes along. Otherwise they’d never see each other.”
She spat that last sentence out and had obviously heard the explanation repeated so many times that it had become a kind of mantra. Louise had the sense that it was more that Dicta didn’t care about her parents’ priorities, not that they upset her. Louise stood there in the front door watching the girl slip off her jacket and toss it on the floor. Once she had ascertained that Dicta was heading for her bedroom she yelled good night and shut the door to drive back to the hotel.
19
“WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THOSE TIRES?” STORM ASKED, irritated, looking at Skipper and Dean.
It had been more than two weeks since Samra had been found, and the whole group was sitting around the table in the command room. So far they hadn’t gotten anything out of the crime-scene investigations or the dinghies that were out there, the search of the al-Abds’ home, or the string of witness statements that Louise and Mik had spent the intervening weeks on along with Bengtsen and Velin. They’d trawled through everything—acquaintances, work relationships, family, neighbors. Storm had even considered whether he ought to have Interpol send one of them to Jordan to speak to family members there, but it would have a big impact on the investigation if that kind of questioning was to be permitted and he still hadn’t found a way to justify it.
Skipper reached for a little stack of papers he had on the table in front of him.
“Well, there is a report here from the crime-scene investigators that we’ve been working with for the last several days. They compared the tire tracks secured out at Hønsehalsen with the tires of Ibrahim’s red Peugeot. In one of the treads in the crime scene track they found a milled groove, which was measured at 1.3 millimeters deep. In comparing that to the corresponding tread on the Peugeot’s four tires the corresponding depths were measured at 1.4 on the left front tire, 1.7 on the left rear tire, 1.6 on the right front tire, and 1.8 on the right rear tire,” he read from the pages and then set them down again. “Therefore there are no specific parameters that can serve as a basis for identification between the plaster of Paris cast from the scene and Ibrahim’s car,” Skipper concluded. “But we also can’t rule out that the impressions at the site were made by his car. The tire impressions are of the same dimension with an equivalent pattern and wear. We’ll just never be able to prove it.”
“All right, then let’s drop that,” Storm said gruffly. “There’s no reason to throw more resources in that direction.”
He went on to explain that there hadn’t been anything in the dinghies that were close to where the body was found, nothing besides remnants of fish blood, which had aroused interest at first until Dean reminded everyone that Samra hadn’t bled.
Louise sighed and looked around at the rest of the team. She sensed that they had all been banking on the tire tracks being unique and matching the car Samra’s father usually drove. There was no doubt that Samra’s body had been dumped into the water from a boat, but the family could easily have driven her out to the site and then just rowed her out from there instead of crossing the entire sound with her in the boat.
Since they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the tire track had been made by any random driver, Skipper and Dean had issued a press release asking people who owned cars with the same type of tires to contact them if they’d been out at Hønsehalsen in the days before the killing. There had also been a great deal of talk about tires and tire tracks in the media and on the police’s home page. But no one had come forward.
“We have to keep looking,” Storm said, nodding at Bengtsen. “Should we expand our search for witnesses?”
Bengtsen stopped him by thrusting a hand up in the air. “We’ve talked to a lot of people the last couple weeks. It would be total coincidence if we suddenly found one who’d seen the girl. It isn’t likely.”
“Well, then we’ll focus on the audio surveillance of the family, and we may have to consider starting to put some pressure on them to see if there’s any reaction.”
Søren seemed to support that decision. “We’ll keep going with the digital room bug, and there’s a wiretap on their landline too,” he said.
Storm nodded and appeared satisfied. Louise was hardly as satisfied. They’d been working hard the last two weeks, mostly routine work, in the hopes that they’d overlooked something, but nothing new had turned up. She thought about Dicta. Louise hadn’t talked to her since that night at the hotel, but maybe it was most considerate to let that episode be, she thought, getting up as the meeting ended.
“There are women strong enough to fight their way out of the iron grip their damned families keep them locked in. They break free to escape forced marriages and violence and mentally ill husbands who feel so overly confident that they own these women that they rape them around the clock and dominate them and damn well believe that they have the absolute right to use them any way they will.” Camilla was working herself up to maximum volume. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “But that’s a tiny fraction compared to all the women who stick around and put up with the whole thing because they don’t have the same strength.”
She was sitting across from Terkel Høyer in his office and had just turned in two articles for the next day’s paper, but after she saw the look on his face, she realized that she couldn’t even count on a mention on the front page.
“It’s been over two week
s since the girl’s body was discovered, but instead of going to the police and pressuring them to reveal whatever the hell they’re doing, you turn in two articles about honor and shame and about women who never get a real chance to integrate into Danish society, because, according to you, they’re bound by cultural traditions.”
Camilla kept a straight face.
“What the hell are you thinking?” thundered her editor. “Our readers couldn’t care less about cultural traditions if they cause a couple of parents to kill their daughter. No one is ever going to accept that kind of thing in Denmark, no matter what the girl did to get on her family’s bad side. If they choose to live in Denmark, then it’s up to them to fucking follow our cultural norms! You’re not going to get anywhere with that angle, and you can’t be cramming crap like that down my readers’ throats. This paper does not condone that kind of thing in any way.”
Ah, so now they were his readers, Camilla thought. Her voice was icy as she got up to stand in front of his desk. “I don’t agree with you,” she said simply. “What I wrote has nothing to do with getting Danes to accept this. But it can’t hurt to try to understand where it’s coming from, to get to the bottom of why people are doing these things, which we very obviously don’t understand and which of course we will not tolerate. Your readers may well be stupid, but I don’t fucking think they’re that stupid.”
She spun around and a couple of steps later, once she was out of the office, she slammed the door shut behind her so the wall shook. She did it again when she got to her own office just to get some of the rage out of her system in an efficient way.
Camilla sat down at her desk and looked at her screen: Loneliness was worse than fear. She had promised Sada some sort of redress in the paper and she was ready to go to some lengths to make good on her promise. But right now that felt rather impossible. Terkel was going to have to back down a little first, or she was going to have to come up with some news from Holbæk. There just wasn’t any news, though. Obviously she’d been keeping tabs on developments the whole time. What was he thinking?
The whole time since Sada had come to see her at the hotel, Camilla had been working on those two articles on the side, along with everything else she’d written. She had spent a lot of time getting all her research in place, talked to women who had managed to break free, and even with a Pakistani woman whose husband had kept her locked in their small apartment and brutally raped her whenever he wanted to have sex, which was at least once a day. If she begged him to leave her alone, he beat her.
Camilla had striven to distinguish between religion and culture in the articles, to explain that the two things didn’t have anything to do with each other when it came to concepts like honor and shame.
“When you lose your honor, you lose your worth as a person and a social being,” Camilla had written, linking that to the Arabic saying “Honor is what distinguishes people from animals.”
It had shaken her that honor killings in the Middle East were increasing instead of decreasing. And there was obviously a big difference between the shamefulness of an act and the consequences for it. Women’s sexuality was worst of all, for example, being unfaithful and having sex outside marriage. Only after that came hardened criminality. She shook her head and felt deeply indignant on behalf of her sex.
Camilla had determined that the consequences of such an act depended a lot on where you lived. In traditional families in rural areas, honor and shame meant much more than in modern families in urban environments, so obviously it was impossible to generalize. She had also made a big deal of elaborating on that.
When she was almost done, she had stumbled across something that had made her consider whether she ought to write the story at all, because there was something about it that she had obviously misunderstood and she thought she might never really truly comprehend the whole thing.
In the Koran it said that you mustn’t force someone to marry against their will. So how the fuck could parents still be forcing their wishes on their children? But there was obviously also something cultural going on, Camilla realized. She just didn’t see how people could so blatantly be going against the Koran, since it made it so clear. She had decided not to include that in the article, but the book was sitting there as a note on her desk and she had to admit that it all was quite complicated. So she had gone to see Terkel with her two articles, which she considered important to the debate that had been raging steadily in the press since Samra’s murder.
Now in a fit she had crumpled them both up and tossed them into the corner of her office. She swung her legs onto her desk and sat there lost in thought, her eyes focused on the many drawings Markus had made for her, which she had dutifully hung up on the wall as a border all the way around her desk.
She had actually been planning to drive to Holbæk that evening to find out if there’d been any progress that hadn’t percolated out of the police command room yet. Markus was with his dad, so that would have worked great. But after her run-in with Terkel she suddenly didn’t care. It was one thing for him to have his opinions, but it surprised her that he had voiced them aloud. It was inappropriate for an editor to so openly take sides.
It made her jump when he flung open the door without knocking and fired off his torrent of words in one breath: “If you can find some kind of Danish angle in your articles, we’ll run them. Otherwise, forget it. We’re not publishing a manifesto here.”
He was gone before she’d processed what he’d said, and the door had already clicked shut by the time she yelled that it was too a manifesto if he was going to be so freaking one-sided that he wouldn’t even listen to the other side.
20
“WE’RE GOING TO RELEASE THE BODY,” STORM SAID FROM their office doorway, and then asked if Louise didn’t need to take a spin back to Copenhagen to water her plants. If so, could she swing by the Pathology Lab and bring the certificate back? The family had requested permission to fly Samra back to Jordan so she could be buried in Rabba, where she’d grown up and where her grandparents still lived.
“I’m sure my plants would love that. I suppose I might as well go do it now?” she said, looking from Storm to Mik, who both nodded.
“Of course, you could also stay for a cup of coffee before you go,” her partner coaxed once Storm had left. “Bengtsen brought in some of Else’s macaroons.”
Louise smiled and held up both hands to fend off the offer.
In the car she called Flemming Larsen’s direct number and said she was on her way in to the Pathology Lab to pick up Samra’s death certificate. Did he have time for breakfast or a cup of coffee?
“I’m going to have trouble getting out of here,” he said and explained that he was about to start an autopsy. “But if you want, we could have a cup of coffee here when you arrive. I’d really like to see you before you leave town.”
Louise laughed into her headset. The tall pathologist was a master at making her feel like she was special, which made her cherish their friendship.
“I’m in the basement,” Flemming said. “Just come on down and we’ll get the death certificate all sorted out too.”
When she arrived at the Teilum Building, she said hello to one of the pathology techs whose name she couldn’t remember and found out that Flemming was in the first room on the right at the bottom of the stairs.
Her heels echoed. She’d been down to the cold-storage rooms several times, but had never attended a postmortem there. She wasn’t usually there until they did the formal autopsy. She knocked and waited a bit before pushing the door open.
“Hi,” Flemming said, walking over to her in his white lab coat.
Louise stayed out in the hallway, but saw that the deceased on the table was an older man. She received a quick peck on the cheek from Flemming.
“Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready. I picked up some pastries across the street from the cafeteria at the National Hospital,” he said, indicating a chair a little farther down the hallway.
; “I’ll wait,” she said, smiling at the fact that he’d gone out of his way to pick up pastries for her.
Down the hallway a heavy steel door opened and a man in a gas mask came out. She raised her eyebrows at Flemming, wondering what that was about.
“They just started embalming your Jordanian girl,” he said. “That has to be done before she can be sent abroad. Have you ever seen how they do that?”
Louise shook her head and followed him as he started walking toward a glass window in the wall. It was a small room that was dominated by a steel table, which was screened by a thick plastic curtain on all four sides. Above that, there was an enormous exhaust fan, and Samra’s naked body lay on the table.
“They slowly fill her up with formalin,” Flemming explained, pointing to a pump next to the body. Several tubes were attached with needles to the girl. “About four or five liters will be pumped in via the major arteries, also filling the lungs and the chest cavity. The formalin will cause her organs to shrink a little, and then they’ll keep for quite a long time after that.”
The pathology tech in the gas mask came back, rolling a zinc coffin in front of him.
Louise stood there for a bit, looking at the girl. You couldn’t tell that her earthly remains were being preserved. She still looked like she had when her teacher identified her in the presentation room.
“Once she’s been through a few Muslim burial rituals, the coffin will be sealed, and then she’ll be sent home to Jordan, where the actual burial will take place,” Flemming said.
He went back to finish his postmortem exam, and Louise took a seat to wait for him. The sentimental side of her, which she still struggled with from time to time, really wanted to see them apprehend the culprit before Samra left Denmark. Not because her departure brought up any technical problems; all the evidence had been secured. Louise knew she would just feel more confident that justice had been done if she could say good-bye to the girl secure in the knowledge that someone was going to be punished for having robbed her of her young life. Instead, Samra was being sent away without their knowing anything at all.