Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  “Was your sister dating anyone?” Mik asked again, in a more subdued tone.

  The brother shook his head and hid his face in his hands as he shrugged his shoulders.

  Mik set down the pen he had been holding in his hand. “That’s enough for now,” he said and asked Hamid to wait until the interview had been typed out so he could read through it and sign it. Once that was done, Mik said, “It may be that we need to talk to you again.” He followed Samra’s brother to the hallway and held out his hand, but the young man ignored it and just scurried off.

  “I guarantee you that got to him,” Louise exclaimed as Mik stepped back in and closed the door.

  “He spent the first half hour evading everything I asked about, so I did that to get a reaction,” Mik responded, and Louise got the sense that he had taken her comment as criticism. Instead of getting into it, she started focusing on her computer to avoid spoiling the mood just because they approached things differently.

  “All right. I admit that he got to me too,” Mik said after they had each sat staring at their screens for a few minutes. “But I’m having a hard time accepting his attitude toward immigrant girls and their male acquaintances. There must be a fundamental acceptance of what’s permitted for girls. And yet here it seems like everything is divided into two categories. There’s plenty of tolerance toward immigrant girls in general, but that tolerance is severely curtailed when it has to do with the female members of your own family.”

  Louise thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “She was kind of viewed as the family’s property and then suddenly that turns into something else,” she said, remembering what a sociologist from the University of Southern Denmark had explained to her when she was on the Nørrebro case.

  “That’s really the crux of it when you’re talking about honor and shame,” Louise continued after a moment. “In families where those concepts are significant, people don’t care that much about honor or shame when it doesn’t have to do with their immediate family members. And in those cases when something does happen to offend the family’s honor, it doesn’t become dangerous until someone from the neighborhood starts talking about it. As long as the problem is only known within the family’s four walls, no one has to react to it. It’s so strange that there’s such a huge difference between the world in general and the inner circle.”

  Mik watched her while she talked, and she could tell that he wasn’t putting much stock in her explanation. But that was one of the important things she had learned during the case she had just wrapped up. It wasn’t until it became publicly known that the family couldn’t control their own daughter that the girl had to die. In the case in Nørrebro, the death sentence had been pronounced by an uncle and his three sons. They wanted the girl killed before any of the other girls in the family became infected by her loose behavior.

  “The world is a strange place. I don’t understand that way of thinking,” Mik admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

  Louise smiled at him and said that there weren’t many Danes who did.

  “Jette Petersen is here,” Ruth announced from the doorway. She asked if they were ready for her and when they wanted the classmates to come in.

  “Maybe we ought to see about borrowing a room at the school so we can do it while school’s in session tomorrow?” Mik suggested and received a nod of confirmation from the administrative assistant.

  “That’ll save us a ton of coordination. Good idea,” Louise said, standing up to go receive Samra’s homeroom teacher.

  “I’ll write up the parents’ and brother’s interviews and update what we have in the case file on the family from before,” Ruth said before heading back to the command room.

  Storm came in to ask them if they could also talk to the women’s shelter the mother had stayed at to find out what information they had on the family. Louise took a seat on the edge of her desk as he spoke.

  “We just need to find out if the parents were having problems with the girl, before we latch on to our suspicions,” Storm said.

  “I’ll call the shelter right away,” Mik offered, pulling out his papers and flipping through them. He left the office to find somewhere quiet to call from so Louise could start her conversation with Samra’s teacher. Louise followed Mik into the hallway and asked Jette Petersen to come in.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

  The teacher looked tired, as if she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and there were streaks of mascara under her bottom lashes.

  “We told the students right after their lunch break,” she said, “and then we gathered Samra’s classmates in the gym afterward and told them what had happened. It was the single worst experience of my twenty years of teaching.”

  Louise let her sit for a moment.

  “I’d actually thought the girls would take it the hardest. But several of the boys reacted quite strongly. Also in a somewhat unfortunate way.”

  “In what way?” Louise asked.

  “Obviously they were all really shocked, but I don’t think they’d ever thought much about the fact that Samra and two of the other students in the class who aren’t ethnically Danish came from different cultures. But now suddenly they’re all aware of this and cursing all immigrants and wanting them to go home. Of course they’re mostly reacting to the feelings of helplessness and grief,” she said after pausing to think for a moment.

  Louise nodded.

  “There’ve already been journalists outside the school asking the students about Samra’s family. About whether they’d tried to force the girl into an arranged marriage, whether maybe that was what triggered the killing. And that kind of thing is enough to stir up trouble among the kids.”

  “But there wasn’t anything like that, as far as we know,” Louise said.

  Jette Petersen shook her head.

  “Now we just need to help them stick together and talk about what happened so we don’t end up with a worse schism in the class—or the school, for that matter. No one has been sentenced yet and we don’t know what happened, but they’ve already made up their minds,” Jette said and then in the same breath added that it was both good and bad that the newspapers had been featuring stories about honor killings so prominently because of course that affected the kids’ opinions about what must have happened when a girl like Samra was suddenly murdered.

  Louise agreed with her, but had a hard time seeing how it could be any other way. At the moment, she couldn’t think of a single murder case where a young immigrant girl had been killed and it wasn’t the family that was behind it. But of course you had to be careful about leaping to conclusions, even though that was also where the police had been focusing their investigative resources.

  After a moment during which they each sat lost in their own thoughts, Louise asked Jette to describe Samra, both how she fit into the class socially and as a student, anything that might help the police put together a more nuanced picture of the girl that could lead them to a motive.

  11

  “IT’S CLEAR SHE WAS VERY WELL LIKED AND GOT ALONG FINE IN class,” Louise said, addressing the others in the command room later. “Her parents didn’t forbid her from attending class events and other activities at school, but even so, there were problems at times. Sometimes her father wanted proof that she was really at school if there were late classes or something.”

  “And Jette Petersen didn’t have the impression that Samra had much to do with her classmates outside of school hours,” added Mik, who had been present during the last part of the conversation.

  “As we already know, Samra occasionally saw a couple of the girls,” Louise continued. “For the first few years after she started school here in fifth grade, she played handball with a bunch of kids from school, but that only lasted a couple of years. Then she quit.”

  “Something happens around the time girls start puberty,” Dean explained. “When they transition from childhood into puberty, they no longer have the same freedom. Up until t
hat point their fathers are in charge of their upbringing and they are welcome to play and spend time with other kids their age. But once the girls menstruate for the first time, all that’s over. Then the upbringing becomes the mother’s responsibility and their freedom is noticeably curtailed. And if things go wrong for a girl, it’s the mother’s fault. So they’re kept at home and not allowed to hang out with boys the way they could before.”

  “Are you Muslim?” Louise blurted out. She knew he was from the former Yugoslavia and was now married to a Dane, but she wasn’t sure it was polite to ask.

  He shook his head. “Catholic,” he replied. “But where I come from, there were a lot of Muslims.”

  “Well, then your familiarity with the cultural concepts will give us a head start,” Skipper said.

  Louise noted that, when viewed from the outside, their little group was quite diverse: a woman, a couple of older men with years of experience and strange habits, and a couple of young bucks who really wanted to make their mark. She smiled at Dean when he responded, “Now I’m afraid of disappointing you.”

  For a second he looked self-conscious.

  “So we’ll assume that Samra al-Abd didn’t have that big a circle of friends. She occasionally spent time with some of her girlfriends after school and on the weekend, but she was kept under relatively tight rein at home,” Storm concluded, looking at Louise and the others to see if there were any objections.

  “I agree that she was under very tight control from her parents,” Søren Velin said, and gave a recap of his and Bengtsen’s questioning session with the parents. They had both denied knowing anything about their daughter’s disappearance.

  “They say that their daughter didn’t have many friends and preferred to spend time with her family,” Bengtsen began before pouring some coffee into a plastic mug. “Yet her father maintains that he didn’t really get worried about her being gone until she still wasn’t home when they got back from visiting his brother in Benløse. And that sense of worry was only reinforced when he heard the news on the radio the next morning at nine.”

  Now it was Mik’s turn to report. “I spoke to the women’s shelter,” he began. “She was there six months ago, and the woman I talked to remembered the family quite well. She said that Samra was rather beaten up when they arrived. Apparently from being hit, but she wouldn’t talk about what had happened. So they got the story from her mother. The family voluntarily returned home after about five days, and there haven’t been any more reports of violence since then.”

  Everyone in the room sat digesting that for a moment before Storm spoke again.

  “The preliminary results are back from the technical inspection of the father’s boat,” he said. “They didn’t find any traces to suggest that he’d been carrying a concrete slab in the boat. There’s no doubt it would have left scratch marks. There was also nothing to suggest that the boat was the scene of the crime. They’re still studying the pictures.”

  Storm looked over at Skipper. “You head out to the house and examine her bedroom.”

  Skipper nodded so his hair billowed gently.

  “How’s it going with the cell phone printout?” Storm asked. This was aimed at Bengtsen and Velin.

  Bengtsen pointed to the table in front of him where there were two sheets of paper.

  “It’s here,” he replied. “She mostly sent text messages and we’ve located the numbers. Her family and some of the girls from school. No unknown numbers, no surprises,” he said, sounding disappointed that he didn’t have anything more helpful to report.

  Skipper and Dean stood up to go help the crime-scene technicians examine the girl’s room.

  “Remember to check if she had access to a computer,” Storm called after them, and Dean turned in the doorway. “And if she did, obviously bring it back,” he continued, and then directed his attention to Bengtsen and Velin.

  “We need to set up audio surveillance in the home,” he said and suggested that that be done the next time the family came in for questioning.

  That was Søren Velin’s specialty and he nodded right away, so Louise guessed that he’d already done the prep work for that.

  “Maybe you should head out there while the others are working on the bedroom just so you can get an overview of the apartment. We have a warrant, so there’s no problem with your having permission to be there,” Storm said.

  Velin nodded again and Louise could tell that he must have already been by the place and presumably had a very good idea of what he would need to be able to set up the audio surveillance there.

  “The phone is easy, and you’ll know best how to capture the conversations that take place in the various rooms.” Storm avoided going into detail. The custom was that only the officers who set up the equipment would know where the devices were located. “Check the place out and get everything ready so we can start the surveillance tomorrow.”

  “We should have it up and running today,” Bengtsen cut in. “It would be crazy to wait until tomorrow.”

  There was a second of silence. He was right.

  “Well, then we need to get the family out of the house again,” Storm said, without showing any sign of irritation at having been rebuked by the local officer.

  “We’re not ready for our next questioning session yet. We need a little more time to prepare,” said Ruth, who was responsible for gathering all the details about the family’s background and past.

  “Then we’ll do something else,” Bengtsen suggested. “We’ll invite them to come in for an update on where things stand in the case. Then we can also set up a time for them to go see the girl’s body. It’ll be totally informational, no questioning, just an update of what our plans are, what the school has told the other students, and the fact that they’re having a moment of silence for Samra tomorrow at noon. We also owe it to them to prepare them a little for what’s going to come now that the press is starting to get interested in the case and in them in particular.”

  The others nodded. They hadn’t had a chance to discuss that yet. Of course the family should be provided the same courtesies others would be in that situation, even if suspicions were starting to point in their direction.

  “We mustn’t treat them as if they’ve been charged,” Mik Rasmussen added. “They’re just suspects.”

  Louise could tell by looking at Søren that he was starting to get irritated. No one had been treating Samra’s family as if they’d been charged; but even though he and Bengtsen were looking as hard as they could for witnesses who might have seen Samra and they were receiving assistance in those endless interview sessions from local officers from the Holbæk Police, it hadn’t led to anything, and that meant that for the time being the suspicion was still focused on the family. So he seemed to think treating them with kid gloves was a little bit of overkill.

  Louise looked out the window as she listened. Suddenly she remembered how it had occasionally driven her crazy that Søren’s patience was as fragile as crystal. He wanted action and progress the whole time. It would do him good to get out and mess around with his eavesdropping equipment, she thought.

  “Right. We’ll just invite them in for some coffee and pastries and I’ll have a chat with them,” Storm said as he sent everyone out the door.

  It was after five and there was no guarantee the family would even be home, but everyone agreed that this was the right approach.

  Storm waved for Mik and Louise to remain behind as they were starting to follow Søren down the hall.

  “We also need to pay the uncle a visit and find out what happened when he saw the family Tuesday night,” he said. “And at the same time, find out why Samra’s parents visited him in Benløse the following day, when they’d just seen him.”

  “I’ll get hold of him, then Louise and I can drive down there this evening,” Mik said, pulling his car keys out of his jacket pocket. “The uncle has a shop, so he won’t be home until after he closes at seven.”

  They took the back stair
s down to Mik’s car to drive out and invite the al-Abd family in for a chat. In the yard, Bengtsen and Velin were checking to see if they had all the necessary equipment for the audio surveillance and they agreed that Louise would send them a text message once they knew the family was safely lured out of the house.

  Half an hour later, Louise and Mik came back with Samra’s parents, and Storm ushered them into a meeting room next to the police chief’s office. Back in their own office, Mik familiarized himself with what Ruth had printed out about the uncle and his family. There wasn’t much, just a little about the business he owned, his wife and kid’s social security numbers, information about their immigration and residency permits. Louise offered to bring her partner a soda if he needed a pick-me-up.

  “Good thinking,” he said, tearing himself away from the papers for a second while he explained that she would find whatever she needed in the cafeteria.

  Her tour of the Holbæk Police Station had not included the cafeteria, so she stood in the doorway, a little lost.

  “Fourth floor,” Mik said.

  She walked out to the secretary’s office and took the stairs up. The passport and DMV offices were on the first floor, and administration, the police’s legal department, and the cafeteria were on the fourth.

  There was a small group of officers around one of the tables when she walked in. She said hello and felt their eyes following her as she walked over to the vending machine. Something told her it wasn’t because she was a woman but because she was an outsider. Even from a distance she could tell there were only Pepsi and Faxe Kondi. Irritated, she wondered why she couldn’t just get a Coca-Cola, but with the men’s eyes on her back she couldn’t get herself to spin around in disgust and walk back out empty-handed. She decided to just get something for Mik and give up on the one for herself.

  On the way back, she met Ruth, who was headed for the hotel with her bag over her shoulder to take a nap before dinner. She smiled at the Pepsi in Louise’s hand and said there was a bunch of soda and bottled water down in the command room.