Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  “There. Time for a coffee,” she heard Flemming say, pulling her out of her reverie.

  His office wasn’t particularly big, and there were stacks of papers and folders everywhere. He cleared off a chair for her and stepped out for a moment, returning shortly thereafter with two cups and plates bearing a chocolate croissant and a Danish with rum frosting, which he squeezed onto the last available spot on the desk.

  “How’s it going in Holbæk?” he asked once he’d poured the coffee.

  She shrugged, not up to explaining that they really hadn’t gotten anywhere. Instead she told him that she’d tried sea kayaking.

  “Sea kayaking?!” His outburst was just as surprised as her own had been when Mik invited her to try it.

  She smiled and nodded, breaking off a piece of pastry. “It’s amazingly fun,” she admitted, one eyebrow shooting up when Flemming set down his cup of coffee and said it was something he’d been wanting to try for ages.

  “I’ve just never gotten around to it, but now I have a good excuse. It would be fun if we went kayaking together next spring.”

  Louise brushed some crumbs off her blouse.

  “Well, I can’t promise that I’ll be so hooked that I’m still doing it then, but if I am, that sounds nice,” she laughed.

  When they finished the coffee, she stuck the death certificate into her purse and said good-bye with the agreement that they’d go out for a couple of beers once she was back in town.

  “I can’t understand how this happened. How could this happen?”

  Ibrahim’s voice was husky and unclear, but the interpreter translated without adding any emotion to the words.

  “You stopped taking care of her.”

  “Sada is accusing him,” the interpreter explained.

  Louise had let her bag and jacket drop to the floor as she joined the others back at the police station.

  “Of the murder?” Storm asked, interested, leaning over the oval table, where they were all sitting tensely, listening to the previous day’s recordings. They hadn’t gotten much out of the tapes the last couple of weeks, but now that the girl’s body had just been released, her parents were suddenly discussing something that might be related to what had happened.

  “I never stopped.”

  The Mobile Task Force’s own interpreter sat listening with concentration before he repeated the words in Danish.

  “Why do you even talk to him? Why don’t you shut the door on him?”

  “He humiliates me. I won’t find any peace until he’s dead. He’s ruined us.”

  “Who is Ibrahim talking about?” Louise asked.

  The interpreter stopped the recording and thought for a moment before shaking his head and saying, “It could be a friend, an acquaintance, someone from the family. I don’t know. But it could also be himself. If he killed his daughter and is convicted, I would interpret that as self-reproach.”

  When he turned the playback on again, they heard deep sobbing and a sentence so drowned out by the sobs they had to play it several times before Fahid was able to tell them what had been said.

  “It would have been better if she weren’t dead, but alive.”

  Again Fahid turned it off and looked at them.

  “That is a very strong expression he used there,” he explained. “He means they might have been able to find a different solution than taking her life.”

  “Well, then, he’s admitting it, isn’t he?” Skipper exclaimed.

  “No, I wouldn’t interpret it that way. I would sooner say he’s acknowledging that someone is responsible for her death and that he might know who it is. I don’t consider it a direct admission.”

  “You still don’t think they should be questioned about what they’re saying here?” Mik asked, looking at Storm, who shook his head.

  “They shouldn’t find out we’ve been listening in on them until we arrest him, if we’re going to. We can use this in court to get the court order extended if that’s necessary. If we need to, we can confront them with the most important sections of the recordings and ask them to explain themselves. We can also easily compare things they haven’t disclosed and false statements up until that point if they don’t know we’re listening.”

  It was obvious that Louise’s partner did not agree with that plan, but he gave in and continued paying attention as Storm signaled to the interpreter to continue.

  Sada’s clear voice filled the room.

  “I told you you shouldn’t kill her. She could have gotten married.” He was still crying when he again said something. “I didn’t do it. She was my daughter.”

  “Who did it, then? It was your fault.”

  “There’s a very unpleasant atmosphere between the two of them. It is completely obvious that his wife is accusing him, but he is denying it. I think he sounds extremely unhappy,” Fahid said once the sequence had finished playing.

  “Does he say anything we could charge him with?” Storm asked, not allowing himself to be moved by the sympathy the interpreter seemed to be feeling for Ibrahim.

  “No, quite the contrary. He seems agitated and unhappy.”

  “He’s alluding to a third person, isn’t he?” Louise asked, her eyes on the interpreter.

  She couldn’t tell if Fahid was feeling trapped, as if his loyalties were divided, or if he had really changed his opinion on the father partway through this session. At first he had seemed like he believed Ibrahim was incriminating himself, but now he was leaning toward believing Ibrahim was profoundly unhappy.

  “There’s something about this family that isn’t right,” Skipper said in his calm, deliberate manner. “That story Camilla Lind wrote about the rabbit made that quite obvious.”

  Louise had been disgusted when her friend had called her one evening after talking to Samra’s friend Fatima, who had related an episode that had taken place a month before Samra was killed. One night Samra’s parents served their daughter’s pet rabbit for dinner, but told her it was chicken. It was only after she’d eaten it that her father asked her to go out to the yard and look in the empty rabbit cage. Camilla’s story had taken up the whole front page that time.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they killed her,” Fahid objected, eyeing them steadily. “Ibrahim explained that he’d done that to punish Samra, because she’d come home so late one night after visiting her aunt and uncle in Benløse. They had had a clear agreement that she would be back at a specific time. And yet she didn’t get home until several hours after that.”

  “That’s quite a severe punishment for a young girl,” Mik said, staring at the wall.

  According to Fatima, Samra had run straight into the bathroom and thrown up until there wasn’t anything left in her stomach, and after that she refused to eat, no matter what her mother served her.

  “Why don’t we just charge the family?” Velin asked, looking at Storm in irritation, as if he was losing faith in his boss’s ability to make decisions.

  “Because we’ll get more out of waiting until we’re sure that we have enough to hold them on,” Storm replied sharply.

  The interpreter finished his work, and Louise walked back to her office with Mik with an uncomfortable sense that the atmosphere at work was becoming rather tense. Good thing the weekend was almost here, so they wouldn’t all have to spend every minute in such tight quarters for a couple of days.

  21

  SATURDAY MORNING, LOUISE WAS ON AHLGADE TRYING TO PICK out a face cream when someone grabbed her arm and spun her around. Anne Møller said hello with a big smile, and Louise immediately got the distinct sense that Dicta’s mother had not heard about her daughter’s overindulgences. She also decided that the mother didn’t need to hear about it from her.

  “Hi,” Louise said, smiling back.

  “You’ve practically moved out here to the boondocks for good,” Anne joked. Then she asked Louise if she wasn’t getting tired of eating at the Station Hotel every night.

  “It is starting to get a little old,” Loui
se admitted.

  “If you want, you’re very welcome to come over and eat with us. Dicta comes home for dinner, even if she goes back over to Liv’s afterward. She’s starting to do a little better, but of course the whole thing is still a terrible shock to her. As it was to all of us, of course,” she hurried to add and said that she’d seen Storm on TV the evening before and understood that some family matter was behind the killing, not that that made the crime any more understandable, but at least there was no reason to walk around feeling afraid there was some maniac on the loose.

  Louise hadn’t seen the report, but thought maybe her boss ought to have kept his statement to himself, since he didn’t want to detain the suspects yet. She politely declined the dinner invitation with an off-the-cuff excuse.

  “I’m afraid I’m getting together with one of my colleagues tonight,” she said. “Perhaps we could do it another time?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Louise said, seizing the opportunity to break into the conversation as an employee walked over to them. She quickly said good-bye to Dicta’s mother.

  Indian summer. Wish I knew how long this weather was going to hold out, Louise thought that afternoon as she biked out to the Rowing Club. It was a week into October and the sun still felt warm. She’d borrowed an old men’s bike from Mik and was pedaling hard, so her pulse was up and her body covered in sweat. She was slightly out of breath as she rode down the gravel path to the Rowing Club and the Turkish baths.

  After the beginners’ class the previous weekend, Mik had persuaded her to keep going with Beginners’ level 1 and 2, which were each four hours long. At the same time he had emphasized that she didn’t need to try to be the best. She should just be satisfied to learn enough techniques so she felt safe going out paddling on her own.

  But it just wasn’t that easy. From the very beginning, all some of the men could talk about was when they would finally learn to do an Eskimo roll. When the first beginners’ course ended, they’d practiced turning around and doing a half roll, and Mik had gotten them all worked up by promising that in the next class he would teach them how to go all the way around. Louise had felt sort of left out, but she had still said “Of course” when he’d asked her earlier in the week if she was ready for Beginners 2. No matter what, it was better than sitting around looking at the inside of her hotel room.

  She zipped up her life jacket, tossed her bag containing a change of clothes next to the shed, put on a hat with a visor so the sun wouldn’t blind her, and she was ready. There were six of them, two women and four men, and she was intent on ignoring their boyish outbursts and putting the daunting task of learning to roll the kayak all the way around out of her mind.

  “I’d rather get soused than learn how to roll a kayak,” she’d said when Mik leaned in over her desk the day before and asked if she was going to give it a try too, when all the men rolled their boats.

  Now she took a couple of deep strokes with the paddle and moved quickly away from the landing platform. The sun glimmered on the water, shrouding Cape Tuse on the other side of the sound in a lovely golden mist, and it filled her with calm as her kayak shot out and her mind lost all sense of time. By the time Mik got his kayak into the water a couple of minutes later and the lesson was under way, she had put all thoughts of work and murderers behind her and just wanted to follow the others farther out.

  She left her bike there afterward, climbing into the passenger’s seat of Mik’s car and driving out to the farm with him. She was still laughing and he was still complimenting her.

  Before the lesson was over—and while the four lumbering men in the class had fooled around with their paddles sticking up in the air and the water sloshing around them because they couldn’t succeed in finding the right angle that would get their kayaks to flip all the way around, without having to bail out partway—Louise slid up alongside Mik. She had spent the day’s training session learning to fall into the water and then right the kayak again on her own using her paddle and a bilge pump to empty the water out. She had tipped her kayak many times before she started feeling secure that she would be able to do it some day when she was out on her own. Now, without making a face, she tapped him on the shoulder with her paddle. Then she put her weight out to the side and put her paddle into the water and, with all her might and the technique he’d just shown the guys, she disappeared underwater and came up again, becoming the first of the students to have successfully completed the eagerly discussed full roll.

  At first Mik didn’t realize what she’d done, even though she was sitting there in front of him, soaking wet, with a huge grin on her face. It wasn’t until the men in the group started catcalling that he exclaimed, “What the hell are you doing? You can’t just do a roll like that!” But then he started clapping too and smiling at her, impressed, while tactfully not mentioning the fact that this was probably due more to astoundingly good luck than to her technique.

  Louise’s heart was still pounding and she was a tad shaken that it had even occurred to her to do that. She couldn’t comprehend how humiliating it would have been if she hadn’t made it all the way around. At any rate, she couldn’t help but be glad that she could still get it into her head to do things without overthinking them to death.

  “So, I guess that means you picked the Eskimo roll instead of getting drunk?” Mik said when they were standing around the clubhouse afterward having a soda.

  Louise nodded, but still agreed when he suggested they celebrate her Eskimo roll with a beer back at his farm.

  They drove out past Strandmølleengen and Holbæk Marina, which was full of pleasure boats. The road narrowed as they continued out toward the golf course and Dragerup, where Mik’s red U-shaped farmhouse stood. The roof was thatched, the house freshly whitewashed, and the timber framing had been tarred over that summer. Everything looked like you would expect for a Copenhagen dweller who moves to the countryside and puts his all into realizing the dream of a pastoral idyll. But Mik wasn’t from the city; he’d taken over the farm from his parents and fixed it up himself with the help of a couple of friends and the local roof thatcher.

  “Do you want to see the puppies?” he asked once they’d gotten out of the car.

  Louise followed him to the house, but then quickly took a step back when an exuberant wirehaired pointer came running out and started dancing around them until it lost interest and continued around behind the house into the yard. Mik waved for her to follow and then went into the kitchen, where the puppies were sleeping in a big basket.

  “They’re not always this calm,” he said, leaning down and petting the mother, a black Lab, who stood up when they came in.

  Louise kneeled next to the basket and stuck her hand down to touch the soft puppies, who were beginning to move. A second later they were wriggling. They came tumbling over to curiously sniff her hand and then started nudging it. Mik came over and picked up a puppy for her. She put her cheek down next to it and felt its muzzle against her skin. When it started getting fidgety, she carefully put it back in with the others and stood up.

  “Every time I get close to a puppy, I forget I don’t want a dog,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. Then Mik said that one of the puppies was still for sale.

  She followed him as he grabbed two beers from the fridge and they strolled back out into the yard again.

  “Shall we sit here?” He gestured to a wood bench bearing the inscription DAD’S BEER-DRINKING BENCH.

  Louise winced to think Mik didn’t have enough taste to acquire a nicer bench, but at the same time had to concede that at least the view couldn’t be better. She stood for a second, enjoying the sight of the fields and woods on the other side of the road.

  “Don’t you ever miss the countryside?” he asked once he’d sat down.

  She shook her head and said she probably never would miss it enough to picture herself moving back.

  “But every now and then I do need to get out of the city,” she adm
itted, looking at the horses in the corral in the field opposite them.

  “Do your folks still live out here?” he asked, watching her as she took a swig of beer.

  She nodded and smiled at him. Not because he was asking about her, but because she’d misjudged him. She didn’t have to pull every word out of him. He was the one who was grilling her, which surprised her a little.

  She told him about her parents’ place, which was between Roskilde and Holbæk, and said that her brother still lived out there, not in an old farmhouse, but in a house in a new development that didn’t have even a smidge of the charm her folks’ country home or his farm had.

  “Actually, what is the difference between a country home and a farm?” she asked, then volunteered an answer to her own question: “Isn’t it mostly that you tend a farm, while a country home is mostly just for fun?”

  Mik nodded. That pretty much summed up the definition.

  “How much land do you have here?” she asked him. “Are you growing anything?”

  “Almost seventy acres, but I lease it to the farm over there.” He nodded toward the large farm on the other side of the narrow road, the one with the horse corral. “They have the machinery and a barn.”

  Mik brought them another two beers and a blanket Louise could wrap around herself.

  “My parents are dead, but I’m sure I told you that,” he said after he sat down again.

  Louise nodded.

  “My mom died this spring, but it’s been almost six years since my father died. His heart just stopped one morning while he was out checking on the cows. But if he had to go, I couldn’t imagine a more fitting way for him to do it.”

  Louise watched him as he spoke. He sagged a little and was picking at the label on his beer bottle, but he didn’t seem as if he felt any pressure to tell her about himself.

  “It didn’t take more than a few months after my father died for my mom and me to move. She couldn’t manage this whole place on her own and I had a small house on Fasanvej in town.” He nodded in the direction of Holbæk. “And then I have a sister in Dubai. She moved down there with her husband almost ten years ago and I really doubt they’re coming back. The kids go to a European school and she stays home and does her thing, so she wasn’t interested in taking over this place.”