Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  Terkel was about to say something, but Camilla cut him off.

  “I’m still not saying that we accept it. Not that we accept what happened fifty years ago in that West Jutland fishing family either. It’s just good common sense to look at the similarities.”

  She was totally winded, but could tell by looking at him that he had heard her. It would be complete lunacy not to slap this in as an aside before Holbæk descended into a character assassination of all Muslims.

  “Did you also know that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Danish headquarters are in Holbæk?” she asked. “The Watchtower’s office is out by Stenhus, the old boarding school. Not that they have any connection with this case, but since the folks who live out there now are all working themselves into a frenzy about Samra’s family and the other immigrants in town, it’s a great local hook for this story.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had suddenly become so engaged in this specific topic,” her boss said.

  “I don’t even know if I have,” Camilla replied after having contemplated it for a moment. “But I’m curious to find out what’s going on since it occurred to someone to kill a person they love to maintain the family’s honor outwardly.”

  “Well, get to it,” Terkel said, wanting to know when he could expect her article.

  “You can have it this afternoon. There’s just one part I need to read up on,” she said, thinking she wanted to contact the National Council for Unmarried Mothers to see what they had to say about these types of stories.

  Camilla had her hand on the phone, about to dial. She was lost in her thoughts about girls who had either knowingly or inadvertently offended their families and what had happened to them as a result. She and Louise had gone to high school with a girl who came from a well-respected Roskilde family. She was seventeen when she got pregnant. The family had shut down anything having to do with her. The baby was given up for adoption and the girl sent to France to be an au pair for one of her father’s business associates. At the time, Camilla had found the whole thing exotic and exciting, but she was sure the girl probably hadn’t seen it that way. Rumor had it that she had married a rich car dealer in Provence, and that she had shocked people by not attending her own mother’s funeral a couple of years ago.

  Camilla was torn from her recollections when the phone rang.

  “He’s dead.”

  At first she didn’t recognize the voice, but then she felt her stomach tense up and her heart begin to pound faster.

  “What happened?” she whispered, clenching the phone.

  “He managed to hang himself in his cell,” her ex-boyfriend Henning said, obviously referring to his brother.

  It felt like a tower of blocks had collapsed in her chest. A loud, piercing voice inside her said she ought to hang up, that this didn’t concern her. She had struggled very hard to deal with the breakup and had only now finally started to accept that he no longer wanted to be with her. So he couldn’t just simply call her up with a quick comment and drag her back into his life again.

  “I’d really like you to come to the funeral,” Henning said.

  “Why?” she blurted out, even though her piercing internal voice was screaming for her to say no.

  “He left a farewell note. He asks that you participate in his final journey.”

  How pathetic, Camilla managed to think before the voice on the other end of the phone line continued: “And I think you owe it to him to come.”

  Camilla felt the tears and then her throat tightening. “Do you want me there too?” she asked quietly.

  “It’s not about me, and it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Henning responded tersely. “He’s going to be buried in Sorø on Saturday at two o’clock.”

  Then he hung up.

  34

  AHMAD AL-ABD WAS THIN AND IMMACULATELY GROOMED, with his dark hair combed neatly back. He was sitting in the living room with his wife and their three young children when Louise and Mik arrived at the apartment in Benløse, and he agreed right away to accompany them back to Holbæk. Apparently he didn’t have anything against talking to the police, nor did he seem to be upset about the arrests anymore. Although once they were seated in the cruiser, he did say, “It’s a great tragedy for us all that they’re in jail.”

  Louise didn’t ask him what he meant by that, preferring to wait until they were sitting across from each other and could see each other properly, so she just nodded and looked out the windshield as they drove through the countryside back to Holbæk.

  “How well did you know your brother’s daughter?” Mik asked once they were seated in the office with black coffee in the station’s standard-issue white plastic cups.

  Louise had asked Mik to take charge of the questioning while she wrote up the witness statement on the computer. There had been something in Ahmad’s manner, even when they were standing in his doorway in Benløse, that told her he respected Mik more than he did her, and they couldn’t afford not to use that to their advantage.

  “I knew her very well,” he replied. “Our family is quite close.”

  “Tell me about Samra as you knew her,” Mik said.

  Already in the car, Mik had made it clear to Ibrahim’s brother that the police expected him to cooperate even though arrests had already been made in the case.

  “Of course,” the man had said and added that it was his duty to help the police and that he was very sad about what had happened.

  “Samra was a delightful child, a happy, easy little girl,” he began.

  “How did things go as she got older, entered puberty, and became a teenager?” Mik wanted to know.

  Ahmad drew out his response a little, looking down at his hands, as if he were considering how to weight his words.

  “That, of course, is a difficult age,” he finally said. He rubbed his hands together.

  Ahmad was thirty-six, seven years younger than Ibrahim, Louise figured out, doing the calculation as she sat watching him.

  “In what way was it difficult?” Mik asked, to get Ahmad to continue.

  “Yes, well, she did as she pleased. There were friends and boys, who suddenly became more important than her family.”

  Louise quickly glanced over at Mik and their eyes met. The uncle should not be interrupted now. This was an account of Samra’s life they hadn’t heard before.

  It was as though Ahmad had picked up on their sudden uptick in interest. He paused for a moment and then started to explain that of course it was fine for young women to live their own lives, but his niece was only fifteen, so it was expected that she would respect the rules her father set for her.

  “Could you expand on that?” Mik asked.

  Ahmad hesitated a little before he continued. “There are some guidelines for how young girls should behave,” he began. “They mustn’t run around with boys and they must obey their fathers.”

  Mik interrupted, even though it would have been best to let the uncle go on. “What do you mean when you say that she ran around with boys?”

  “Just that young girls should behave in such a way that the family can continue to be familiar with them,” Ahmad explained.

  “And Samra didn’t do that?” Louise asked.

  Samra’s uncle looked irritated that Louise was getting involved in the conversation, then he shrugged and fell silent.

  Mik took over again.

  “It sounds to me like you’re saying that Samra was a little more interested in boys than was acceptable. Whom did she see?”

  Ahmad al-Abd didn’t even look up when Mik asked the question, so Louise didn’t expect him to answer.

  But Mik kept staring at him expectantly, so a long, awkward silence filled the office.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” Mik finally asked directly.

  Ahmad raised his shoulders a bit and kept his eyes focused on the desk. After another pause, he nodded a couple of times.

  “Was this a relationship other people knew about?”

  Again it took a whil
e before Ahmad answered, and it was an answer that was hard to interpret, because he shrugged his shoulders while at the same time shaking his head and mumbling a weak “Perhaps.”

  “Did her parents know about it?” Mik asked, also wanting to know if it was something that had been discussed in the rest of the family.

  Louise was on the edge of her seat.

  “Someone did,” Ahmad finally responded.

  It was obvious that he was not inclined to provide any more details.

  “What boyfriend are we talking about?” Mik asked. “Was he Danish?”

  Louise had leaned back and was watching Ahmad while she contemplated why he was telling them this, something that frankly would not help Ibrahim or Hamid’s case, and she wondered why Ahmad was the one who was providing them with this information, considering how many people they’d talked to who had all denied that Samra had a boyfriend. Maybe the girl had confided in her uncle. Even though he was obviously male and a chauvinist to boot, he was younger than her parents and she had spent a fair amount of time at his house.

  Samra’s uncle nodded.

  “Can you tell us who he is?”

  Now Ahmad shook his head and apologized.

  Louise caught Mik’s eye and held it a second before standing up and excusing herself from the room.

  Out in the hallway, she quickly headed for Skipper and Dean’s office and found them each sitting with a big piece of chocolate cake in front of them. She stopped abruptly in the door, pissed off for a second that they were just sitting there chilling out and having fun while she and Mik were slaving away on the investigation.

  “It’s Else,” Skipper said, pointing at the cake, as if that explained how it had ended up on his plate.

  “There’s more,” Dean said, smiling at her, although he seemed to sober up when he saw the serious expression on her face.

  She quickly filled them in, telling them she and Mik had brought Samra’s uncle in and that he had just told them his niece had had a Danish boyfriend.

  “Or, at any rate, a friend,” she corrected herself, looking at Dean. “Why do you think he’s telling us that? He could just as easily have left that out. All he’s accomplishing is he’s reinforcing our suspicions of Ibrahim and Hamid, because now we suddenly have a concrete reason for them to have killed her.

  “Why is he telling us this?” she repeated when Dean took another bite of his cake as he apparently considered the question.

  “So there will be no doubt that the act occurred to restore the family’s honor,” he finally responded after he’d finished chewing. “He’s not saying it to help us. It’s a signal to the rest of the family and their social circle that the matter has been dealt with.”

  Louise pulled a heavy sweater over her head and strolled down toward Nygade to eat lunch at the small local brewery, where the beer was every bit as good as the Czech draft beer at Svejk back home in Frederiksberg. Mik was driving Ahmad back to Benløse, and after lunch she would pay the Møller family a visit.

  She ordered a large beer and the herring plate, on which the head brewer had left his mark by including a beer-marinated pickled herring. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to have a meal like this in the middle of the day, but honestly she didn’t care. She needed it.

  It irked her that Samra’s uncle was only now starting to share what he knew. He hadn’t said a word that would point in this direction the first time Mik had talked to him. Although, true, she didn’t know if he’d been asked, but it certainly would have been nice if they’d known this before they started questioning people, because now they had to ascertain that Samra’s friends either hadn’t known about any relationship or were holding back and didn’t want to get mixed up in anything.

  She drank half of her large beer in one go. Then glanced quickly around the restaurant to see if anyone had noticed, but no one seemed interested in the beer-guzzling woman sitting by herself in the corner. Her herring had just arrived when her cell phone started ringing.

  “Hello,” she said when she saw it was Camilla. It took a little while before she could understand what her friend was saying. The sobbing made her voice unclear, and her words came out in hiccups.

  “He killed himself?” Louise asked once she’d finally pieced together a bit of sense from the stream of words in her ear. “Of course I’d go with you, but are you sure it’s a good idea?” Louise asked.

  She sat there holding her phone to her ear with one hand and drinking her beer with the other while the weeping Camilla explained that she couldn’t decide what to do. Finally Louise repeated that she would go if Camilla decided to attend the funeral. That calmed her friend down and then, to distract her, Louise said they’d just brought Samra’s uncle in and that he’d told them his niece had had a Danish boyfriend before she died.

  “I think you’re wasting your time by focusing so much on the family,” Camilla said. “We’re so full of prejudices about the way they behave and in reality we Danes aren’t a damn bit better ourselves.”

  It surprised Louise that she hadn’t piqued Camilla’s curiosity more. It just wasn’t like her not to ask for more information about a detail like the one Louise had just given her.

  “What do you mean?” Louise asked, signaling to the waiter that she’d like a small draft beer.

  “You can read all about it in Morgenavisen,” Camilla continued.

  The beer arrived on her table and Louise asked for the check.

  “Maybe you’re the one who should hold back a little until you find out what our investigation turns up, so you don’t waste your time on some dead end,” Louise retorted, smiling at her phone. They had eventually found balance in their relationship, the police detective and the journalist, but that didn’t stop them from giving each other a hard time when it was justified.

  “Yes, well, let’s just see which of us is on the right track,” Camilla said, finally sounding a little less overwhelmed. “Are you going out to sit on that farmer’s beer bench tonight?” she asked before they wrapped up the conversation.

  Louise felt a little flutter in her stomach at the thought. “It’s not out of the question,” she said, happy that her friend couldn’t see the red glow her cheeks had suddenly taken on.

  35

  ONLY AFTER LOUISE HAD RUNG THE DOORBELL FOR THE SECOND time did she notice the silence. There was no barking from the yard or from inside the house, but the big four-wheel-drive was parked in the driveway, which confused her.

  She rang again, then walked over and peered in the kitchen window. The house seemed empty. She walked around it once. The curtains were drawn in several of the windows. She stopped for a moment, leaning against the wall, to think. She could call them when she got back to the station. It wasn’t because this couldn’t wait. She wanted to see how they were doing, given the two arrests, and talk to them about the funeral, which was scheduled for Monday.

  An unpleasant mood had taken hold of the town as the rumors had spread that Samra’s father and brother had been taken into custody in the case, and in particular, the news that they were also being charged for Dicta’s murder had ratcheted things up to a fever pitch. The police were prepared for a big turnout at Dicta’s funeral and, along with the local detective inspector, Storm had agreed to send a handful of officers to keep the peace among the many teenagers who needed an outlet for their sorrow and anger. Anne and Henrik were informed of the situation, but had announced that everyone was welcome and said that afterward, there would be beer and soft drinks down at the youth hostel for anyone who wished to come.

  Louise called them one last time. When they still didn’t pick up, she climbed back into her car and drove back downtown; but instead of heading for the police station, she turned down Ahlgade and parked outside Henrik’s chiropractic clinic.

  She trotted quickly up the stairs and after she introduced herself, asked the receptionist if she knew where Henrik Møller was.

  “Yeah, of course. He’s here,” she said with a smile.

&n
bsp; Louise looked at her in confusion. “I had understood that he wasn’t coming in until after the funeral,” she said, speaking quietly because of the patients in the waiting room.

  “That was the plan, but he came in this morning and has been taking patients all day. I didn’t really have the heart to talk him out of it.”

  The receptionist’s hair hung around her head in loose curls. She had warm, cheerful eyes, and when she spoke about her boss her voice contained equal parts concern and care.

  “There is actually a break in his schedule when he’s done with this current patient. Because I’m assuming you would like to speak to him,” she said, eyeing Louise inquisitively.

  “Yes, please. I’ll make it quick.”

  Louise sat down and grabbed a magazine, but had only just flipped to the first page when the receptionist called her name.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I hadn’t realized you were back at work,” Louise began once she was in Møller’s office. She explained that she had actually just come to ask if his receptionist had any idea where he was.

  “I hadn’t planned on coming back so soon,” he said, tipping his desk chair back. He rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms up in the air and folded them behind his head.

  He looked tired.

  “I just stopped by your place, but there wasn’t anyone home,” Louise continued.

  He looked at her in surprise. “Anne wasn’t there?”

  Louise shook her head. “She didn’t answer the door, anyway.” Louise felt bad for a second. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten involved.

  Henrik closed his eyes.

  “I didn’t go home last night,” he admitted. He brought his arms down from behind his head and leaned forward, supporting himself on his elbows on his desk. “I actually haven’t been home since we found out you arrested the father and brother. She talks and talks and talks and blames me. I didn’t tell her I suspected that Dicta might have been up to something she hadn’t told us about.”

  He rubbed his temples and let his eyes rest on the top of his desk.