Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  “It was probably, like Sunds said, because she was impatient to be discovered,” Louise said after a long pause.

  Mik had picked up a little athletic bag from the bottom of the closet. He started spreading out the contents on the floor. Skimpy tops, short skirts of both denim and softer material. He picked up a narrow yellow belt and a small white bikini the size of the one Dicta had been photographed in.

  “Could this be the one she took to Copenhagen?” he asked, checking the bag’s exterior pockets. A small picture of a young, very blonde-haired boy fell onto the floor as he pulled out a flowered, worn, standard-size notebook with the word PRIVATE written neatly in a white field on the front.

  Mik sat down with his back against the open closet door and opened the book. Louise watched him, curious.

  “Read it out loud,” she urged, annoyed at his silence.

  He looked up at her after having skimmed a few more pages. “It isn’t Dicta’s.”

  Louise gave him a quizzical look.

  “‘My big brother got a job at Kvickly today,’” Mik read. “Dicta was an only child.”

  Louise nodded, and he turned the page in the book.

  “‘Saving up for a bigger cage for Snubby.’ This was written last summer,” Mik said, after glancing at the date in the top corner, but Louise was already up off the sofa. She snatched the flowered notebook out of his hands before he had a chance to react.

  “It’s Samra’s,” she said, sitting down with the book in her hands. Flipping through it, she could see that the young girl had started the diary in May of the previous year.

  “There are big jumps in the dates every once in a while, and somewhere near the end, several pages are missing,” Louise said after having quickly skimmed it.

  Mik had gotten up from the floor and had come over to sit next to her. They sat in silence and read until they came across a poem Samra had written about her white rabbit.

  “You and me. Me and you. We’ll never get out. You in a cage. Me behind a wall. We are the same. We’ll never be free. But happiness can touch us now. Your soft fur and tiny nose undo the big knot within me and make me happy inside. Thank you. I love you, my little furry animal.”

  “That’s the one they killed and served to her to punish her for coming home late,” Louise said dryly.

  After some searching through the pages, she found the episode in which her parents had made their daughter believe that they were eating chicken and only after the fact did they tell her it had actually been Snubby.

  “I will never, never speak to Father again, and I will not eat Mother’s food. I told them I was going to live with Dicta. Father went ballistic and started hitting.”

  “How can parents treat their children like that?” Mik asked, and Louise shrugged. Even though neither she nor Mik had children, it seemed totally incomprehensible.

  Louise flipped through to the last entries in the diary. Something in her resisted pushing her nose in somewhere that had been another person’s most confidential and private space, but, given the situation, the diary could obviously be an important key to the investigation.

  “I got permission to go home to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Christmas. I’m flying to Amman on my own and then they’ll pick me up there. Maybe everything will work out. Father is sweet.”

  The short sentences in the naïve handwriting had been written the day before Samra died. She must have hidden the diary in the bag when she was at Dicta’s place that Thursday, Louise thought.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mik said, looking blankly at Louise, who left the book sitting in her lap while she tried to make sense of it. They started reading their way backward through the diary and sat there in silence after reading each page.

  There was a soft knock on the door and Henrik Møller stuck his head in to ask how it was going and if they’d like a cup of coffee.

  They declined, and Louise showed him the book and pointed to the bag.

  “Did you know that Samra had a few things hidden in your daughter’s closet?” she asked.

  He stared at her with a puzzled face and then looked down at the contents of the bag, which were spread out on the floor in front of the closet.

  Then he shook his head and said that it was possible his wife knew something about it. He stepped out, and a moment later Anne came in.

  She nodded when she saw it and said that she actually had known that but hadn’t given it a thought. She apologized, saying she was sorry many times.

  “It was some of the clothes her parents wouldn’t allow her to wear. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned a blind eye to it.”

  Louise showed her the diary and asked if she was aware of that as well. But Anne shook her head. She had never pried into the bag’s contents.

  “Did Dicta keep a diary as well?” Mik wanted to know before Anne left.

  The mother shook her head again. Not as far as she knew.

  “Did she have a calendar or day planner?” Louise asked.

  “Yes, she had a nice one from Louis Vuitton that she got as a Christmas present. Maybe it’s in the living room. I can go look for it,” she offered and walked out.

  A moment later, she was standing in the doorway with the large brown monogrammed planner, holding it out to them.

  Mik took it and said they would really like permission to take Samra’s bag and its contents and Dicta’s planner back to the station so they could go through them there instead of taking up the Møllers’ time, but Louise wasn’t paying attention. She felt the blood surging through her body. Her intuition told her that the diary was important and at the moment she couldn’t think of anything other than getting back to the station and being able to study it in peace and quiet.

  “Dicta was in Copenhagen four times after she had those first pictures taken,” Mik said once they were back at the police station. “He obviously photographed her several times, or at least the planner has them listed as ‘photo sessions,’ but she went into the city twice in the evening, and for those it says ‘Restaurant.’”

  Louise was absorbed in a drawing that covered two pages of the flowered diary. At the top of the corner of one page, someone had drawn a picture of a girl’s face, a girl with long, smooth hair like Samra’s own. Tears were flowing from her eyes and the tears filled both pages. The ruled pages were filled with itty-bitty, round tears densely packed in next to each other.

  She flipped to the next page, where she read, “He did the worst to me and says it’s my own fault.”

  There were very short, incoherent sentences filling the pages around the crying girl’s face.

  “If I say anything, he’ll give away my secret.”

  Mik was still talking on the other side of the desk, but Louise had blocked out his words and felt something contracting inside herself.

  She flipped farther ahead in the book.

  “They were laughing together as we ate. The whole family was there, and my mother was in the kitchen.”

  Louise interpreted the small scenes as a form of short prose, taken out of context, but the fragments of a teenage girl’s pain were far more alarming and powerful the way they appeared here in short excerpts.

  “I will never, never trust anyone again. How could he do that to me when he says he loves me?”

  Louise stood up and walked out the door with the diary in her hand. She didn’t notice Mik’s questioning look and didn’t hear him get up and follow her.

  Storm was sitting in the command room talking on the phone when she walked in. Louise stood in front of him and waited impatiently for him to finish.

  “We need to bring Samra’s parents in now,” she said as soon as he hung up.

  She showed Storm the section where the pain was depicted graphically in dense teardrops and explained where they’d found the diary and summarized briefly the rest she’d managed to read.

  “A few pages were ripped out, but what’s here says plenty,” she said.

  He read a little himself before standing u
p and handing back the diary. Then he went to find Skipper and Dean and ask them to drive out and bring in Samra’s parents.

  “They should bring the brother,” Louise called after him. She was starting to see the outlines of what Samra might have been subjected to.

  Then she returned to her office and her close reading of Samra’s tormented pages.

  30

  BY THE TIME LOUISE HAD READ MOST OF SAMRA’S DIARY, she had a knot in her gut.

  The pages drew a picture of a young girl who was torn. On the one hand, she was trying to meet her parents’ expectations and demands, while at the same time she tried to adapt to her new country and new friends. It was clear that she was having a hard time finding the balance between these two in her own identity. Was she Danish or was she still a Muslim girl from Jordan? Louise read between the lines that what Samra was really trying to achieve, with so much effort, was to be a Muslim Danish girl, which on the surface sounded easy enough; but when you read the diary, you realized it was obviously far from it.

  Louise had been taking notes on the things that would be of particular interest when they started questioning Samra’s family again in a bit. It was clear in a couple of places that Samra had started having thoughts of love—at least, emotions had begun to occupy a more visible significance in the words she wrote. Louise guessed that she might have fallen in love, but it was not clear that she had begun a relationship. She had written short poems about what she thought it would be like for two people to share a life. “The person I love and me,” she wrote in her script. She also wrote a story about what it would be like when they went up to the old Crusaders’ castle in Jordan together and sat looking out over the valley and then after that walked home to her grandmother’s house and drank tea and ate sweet cakes.

  Louise was a little surprised that Samra dreamed of walking home with her boyfriend in Rabba instead of along the sound in Holbæk.

  “Did you know that your daughter kept a diary?” Louise asked, once she’d brought Ibrahim in.

  He did not appear to understand what she meant.

  Louise held up the diary so he could see it. “Do you recognize this?” she asked instead.

  He hesitated and shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “It’s your daughter’s diary. Where she wrote down her secrets.”

  His face remained expressionless, so she continued.

  “This book gives me reason to believe there’s something you’re not telling us. Something that made Samra very afraid. In several places she expressed outright fear that she might have to die.”

  Ibrahim looked away from her, but didn’t say anything.

  “Did you kill your daughter?” Louise asked bluntly after several minutes of silence.

  He shook his head.

  “I could never hurt my little girl,” he finally said just as Louise was giving up on hearing him say anything.

  “I know that you hurt her. It says that clearly here in the book, but that happened long before she died. Something occurred during the last few months of her life. What was it that made her so unhappy and afraid?”

  He thought about it for a long time before he said anything. “Maybe something at school?” he suggested.

  Louise shook her head. “I think your daughter had a secret she was trying to keep hidden from her family. But she didn’t succeed and then she became really, really scared.”

  Ibrahim went pale, but remained silent.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” Louise asked, even though Dicta had already told her that Samra had never said anything that would suggest that.

  Ibrahim didn’t make eye contact, but he shook his head.

  “It’s strange,” Louise said, “that I thought it was you she was afraid of, but this here confuses me.”

  She read the last page of the diary out loud and stared intensely at him to take in his reaction.

  She read, “I got permission to go home to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Christmas. I’m flying to Amman on my own and then they’ll pick me up there. Maybe everything will work out. Father is sweet.”

  Now Ibrahim hid his face in his hands and sat silently rocking back and forth.

  Louise cleared her throat.

  “I think you should tell me about this. The fact is, we know that something happened. And it won’t just go away because you sit there hiding,” she said, trying to sound kind.

  While she waited patiently, she wrote on a piece of paper that she didn’t think he knew about the diary. She got up and walked into the office next door, where Mik was questioning Hamid. Without saying anything, she set the piece of paper on the desk and waited while he wrote back to her: “Hamid does. And the bag.”

  She returned to Ibrahim, who lifted his head as she entered.

  “I didn’t hurt my daughter,” he repeated after Louise was seated.

  “You mean other than killing her pet rabbit and forcing her to eat it.” It slipped out before she could stop herself. She instantly regretted it, because now she was going to have to do some coaxing if she was to have any hope of getting him to talk. Idiot, she thought to herself, rubbing her face with both hands. She watched him as he sat there like a statue, then she sighed and said: “Maybe it wasn’t you who physically killed her. But I think you know what happened to her and what she was afraid of. She writes that she had lost her faith in the people who loved her. And the people she was referring to were her family. In other words, you. My colleague is sitting next door talking to your son. He’s not as reluctant to tell us what he knows. For example, he was well aware that his sister hid a bag of clothes at her friend’s house. Clothes she didn’t dare keep at home because you wouldn’t allow her to wear the same things her classmates wore. Hamid also knew about the diary, and I think he was aware that his sister confided in Dicta Møller.”

  At that moment, something struck her, and she got up and left the office with a quick apology. Storm and Ruth were sitting in the command room, studying the big whiteboard where details about Samra’s life and actions during the period leading to her death were written in blue ink. Next to that was a similar summary of Dicta’s final days. Bengtsen and Velin had reconstructed the days up to the time when Dicta had been found in the parking lot.

  Louise stood there in the doorway and talked a little too fast. “Could Samra’s family be behind both killings?”

  She explained that Hamid had just admitted that he knew about the bag and the hidden clothes and the diary at Dicta’s house.

  “If Samra was really hiding a secret that would be so damaging to the family’s honor that they felt they had to kill her, wouldn’t it be possible that they went one step further if they realized that she had confided in her friend from school?”

  A thoughtful silence settled over the room as they each tried to picture that scenario.

  Ruth got up and walked over to the window, where she gazed out over the square in front of the old police station. Grass and big trees filled the space between the building and the sidewalk on Jernbanegade.

  A couple of uniforms were called in to keep an eye on Samra’s family members and make sure none of them left the police station while the team was quickly gathered.

  “You’re on to something,” Storm said, nodding at Louise. “That would also explain why the one murder was so carefully thought out and the other seemed very impulsive. If they felt threatened by what Dicta knew, they would have acted fast.”

  “Let’s arrest the father and son for killing Samra,” Velin said. “Then we can add charges later to cover Dicta’s murder.”

  “Yeah, or we could charge them with both killings from the get-go,” Skipper suggested.

  Louise was sitting on the edge of the table.

  “We don’t know what secret she was hiding,” Mik reminded them. “Let’s be cautious now not to read too much into this.”

  “No, but we know there was one and we know she feared for her life. That’s enough for me right now,” Skipper interjected. “What we don’t know is w
hich of them killed her. That’s why we charge them both.”

  “Often the person chosen to do the killing is the person the family can most easily do without,” Dean explained and said that could either be someone who didn’t have anyone else to look after or someone who wasn’t able to contribute by sending money back to the remaining family members in the old country. “Of course it also happens that that person is sometimes a minor,” he concluded.

  “You’re saying you think it was Hamid who killed his sister?” Bengtsen said.

  “I don’t know what I think. I’d really like a little more to go on before I sign on to anything. I’m just telling you what kinds of considerations I would expect people to contemplate in families living according to strict cultural traditions,” Dean hurried to add.

  Storm had remained silent, but now cleared his throat to interrupt their conversation. “I’m not sure we have enough right now to hold them on,” he said, “but we’ll do it and then gamble on more coming out during questioning. We may also get lucky and have something turn up if we do a new search, and then we have to hope it’ll be enough.”

  “What about Sada?” Louise asked.

  “She can go home to the two little ones, and then we’ll follow the audio surveillance closely and have it interpreted as we go. We can easily guess that there will be increased activity if we’re holding her husband and oldest son,” Storm replied. He asked Ruth to get hold of the interpreter they’d had listening to, transcribing, and translating the tapes from the last several weeks in installments of several days’ worth at a time.

  “It’s Monday, October 9. The time is 4:55 P.M. You are under arrest for the murders of your daughter Samra al-Abd and her friend Dicta Møller,” Louise said when she returned to the office.

  Ibrahim jumped as if he’d received an electrical shock. He stared at her with his eyes agape, after which he collapsed in his chair with his head bowed and his chin resting on his chest.