Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  “Until someone is found guilty of murder, you need to shut up and quit bullying people. But, actually, I’d really like to write about your anger, and maybe I can even get your pictures in the paper,” she said, her sarcasm lurking just below the surface.

  Then she turned and followed Sada, who was headed over to the buses. She stayed until Sada and the kids were safely seated. By the time the bus pulled away, the boys were gone.

  32

  THE PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION STARTED AT THREE, and it was fair. The whole investigative team attended and listened along as the judge found that there was sufficient reason to hold the father and son and that they could remain in custody for fourteen days.

  “He wasn’t sure enough to hold them for four weeks,” Storm said, once they had returned to the command room and were seated around the table drinking sodas, which Ruth had retrieved from the fridge. Still, the relief was obvious in his face. “Well, now we’ll have a little space to work.”

  Skipper and Dean had just finished searching the al-Abd family’s home on Dysseparken right before the preliminary examination began, so no one had heard yet if they’d turned up anything new.

  “Nothing,” Skipper said, shaking his head. “No murder weapon, no diary pages or anything else that in any way revealed new details about Samra’s private life, and now I think I can say that there won’t be anything either. There’s no place that hasn’t been searched, so we need to change tacks.”

  “Louise and I are on our way to have a chat with the photographer Michael Mogensen,” Mik said, draining his Fanta. “And early tomorrow we’ll bring Ibrahim’s brother in. He was with the parents around the time of Samra’s death. We need to ascertain where he was when Dicta was killed.”

  Louise caught his eye. She left her cola on the table and stood up to signal that she was ready to go. She was having a hard time coming down from the adrenaline rush she’d felt during the preliminary examination, so heading out right away suited her just fine.

  Michael Mogensen answered the door quickly when they rang the bell on the front of the large yellow-brick home in which he rented the first floor from his grandmother and also had a large room in the basement, which he used for his studio and computer equipment.

  “We would really like to speak to you about the two murders that occurred here in town,” Mik began.

  A shadow instantly fell over the photographer’s eyes and he lowered his head and nodded.

  “May we come in?” Louise asked.

  He quickly stepped aside to make room. “Of course. Should we go down to my workspace, or up to where I live?” He sounded uncertain and uneasy with the situation.

  “Your call,” Mik said, but when it didn’t seem as if anything was happening, Mik suggested that they go down to the basement. “You knew Dicta as a result of your work, so that seems fitting.”

  Portraits of babies, couples, brides, grooms, and businesspeople from town lined the walls, and there were advertising photos and an enlarged reporting series from the School of Arts and Crafts on the outskirts of Holbæk.

  The photographer offered them coffee once they were seated by a small coffee table and rolled his own desk chair over so he was sitting across from them, looking at them expectantly.

  “I just can’t understand it,” he began. He seemed more exhausted than Louise had first noticed.

  “Tell us how you and Dicta became acquainted,” Louise requested, to get him talking.

  He seemed to be letting his memory rewind until it found the right instant.

  “There’d been a game down at the stadium, and I was on my way home to submit my pictures to my editor. On the way home, I stopped to get a bite to eat, and that’s where I saw her. I was standing at the corner by the Kebab House and she came walking toward me.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “That was last fall. She wasn’t that old, but we did a few catalog photos for one of the sporting-supply companies in town and then the rest came later.”

  “The rest?”

  “The jewelry and clothes.” He pointed over at some pictures showing a hand with various rings and a neck with an elegant gold chain.

  “Did you use other models besides her?” Mik wanted to know.

  Mogensen nodded and looked over at a filing cabinet. “But little by little it was actually mostly her that I used. She was good, and my customers were happy with her. But there were some things she was too young for, of course. Women’s clothes, for example. I do some work for an optician’s shop, and they really wanted their models to be a little older.”

  “How was she as a model?” Louise asked.

  “She was great—natural talent and a pleasure to work with,” he said without hesitation.

  “Had she ever tried it before you originally stopped her on the street?”

  He shook his head. “No, never. But like I said, I could see that she could become something. Which is why I devoted the time to helping her feel comfortable in front of the camera. Those pictures would just remain in the cabinet. It was an investment for both of us, which ultimately brought in more gigs.”

  “What do you know about the photographer she went to see in Copenhagen? Did she tell you about her plans?”

  Michael Mogensen shook his head and said a little defensively that she wasn’t obligated to stick with him, that they’d never drawn up a contract saying that she would work exclusively for him. There was no way he could have afforded to honor that.

  “But if you were volunteering your time and energy to mentoring her, wasn’t it a little frustrating that she disappeared just as she was getting so good that maybe there was more money in the gigs you were getting?” Louise asked, eyeing him with curiosity.

  He sat for a moment before he shrugged and said, “That’s life, isn’t it?”

  “Didn’t you ever dream about working for some of the big magazines?” Mik asked.

  The photographer looked at him and smiled for the first time. “It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond,” he said, becoming solemn again.

  “Were you close, you and Dicta?” Louise wanted to know.

  He nodded and said that he thought they had grown close over the time they’d known each other.

  “You have to trust each other, otherwise it shows in the pictures.”

  Louise smiled to herself. There was something touching about his self-importance, but she had no doubt that he took his work seriously even if he was unlikely to ever achieve the sort of recognition a photographer like Tue Sunds had.

  Mik had gotten up and was walking around a little. He stopped in front of the filing cabinet and asked if he could look in it.

  Michael Mogensen said of course and explained that the pictures were divided into categories, but the top two drawers were portraits.

  He and Louise talked a bit more about the friendship that had arisen between him and Dicta over the year they had known each other.

  “I got so I could tell if she was in a good mood or a bad mood, if there were problems at school, or if she was tired. It’s hard to hide that kind of thing when you’re standing in front of a camera lens.”

  Louise nodded and listened the same way you skim a book: she picked up on what sounded interesting and let the rest slip right by.

  Mik cleared his throat and pulled a picture out of the filing-cabinet drawer.

  A dark-haired girl with long, straight hair and large, dark eyes was smiling warmly from the picture. “You knew her?” he asked, walking over to Michael with the portrait of Samra.

  The photographer nodded and reached for the picture. He sat with it for a bit, as if lost in thought, before he explained that Dicta had sometimes brought her friend along when she came straight from school.

  “She was also a pretty girl,” Michael said, setting aside the picture.

  “Did she ever pose for you?” Louise asked.

  “I asked her to, but she didn’t dare because of her parents.”


  “But you still photographed her?”

  He nodded, but said it was just a personal photo.

  Louise smiled and tried to picture Samra. Although she’d never known the young Jordanian girl, Louise knew she would have liked her. She had given herself permission to be photographed and feel the freedom of following the dream, knowing the whole time that the pictures must never be shown. She wanted the full experience. She’d had it, but certainly knew that her parents mustn’t find out.

  “Did you get the impression that the two girls confided in each other?” Louise asked.

  The photographer thought for a moment and then said, “I’m not sure what you mean by that, but they were best friends.”

  “If one of them had a secret, do you think the other would have known about it?”

  He mulled that over for another moment and said, “I’m not sure.”

  “When did you last see Dicta?” asked Mik, who had once again taken a seat next to Louise.

  “I was actually with her last Saturday, the day before she was found dead. We had an appointment to take a few pictures down behind the Strandparken Hotel that afternoon.”

  “Did she seem threatened or scared of anything?”

  Michael Mogensen thought about that before he responded. “I hadn’t considered that, but I also hadn’t seen much of her lately.”

  Once Louise and Mik were back in the car, she said that it seemed Dicta had withdrawn from Michael a little while she tried her luck with Tue Sunds.

  “Yeah, you almost wish she hadn’t been so ambitious, but had stuck with Michael. She probably would have gained more good experience that way,” Mik said as he pulled up in front of the hotel and gave Louise a quick kiss on the cheek before she got out.

  31

  “DICTA MØLLER WAS ONE OF THE MOST TALENTED AND promising models I’ve worked with. She had a natural luminosity that glowed through the camera’s lens and stuck. I don’t doubt for a second that she had a big international career ahead of her, on par with other great Danish fashion models like Louise P or Lykke May. It’s a great loss for the Danish modeling world that something so dreadful could happen to her.”

  Oh, just shut up, Louise thought, shaking her head once she was done reading. She folded up the newspaper and dropped it on Mik’s desk. She’d spotted it when she was eating breakfast and had brought the paper back with her. Tue Sunds occupied the whole front page and two pages inside the paper.

  “He damn well isn’t upset about it,” she said, nodding at the front page.

  “No, it looks like he knows how to promote himself,” her partner agreed, pulling the paper over to skim through the article.

  “When are we going out to Benløse?” Louise asked and added that they really ought to pick up Ibrahim’s brother before he drove in to open his shop at ten o’clock.

  “We’re leaving as soon as you’re ready,” Mik said, tearing himself away from the paper.

  There was a relaxed intimacy between them. She had spent a second night out at his farm, and the situation had transformed from being a painful mistake to a controlled attraction, which filled her with warmth. They agreed that what they had together was nice, but that it shouldn’t interfere with their work. She watched him as he put on his jacket. He had a calming effect on her, and although his slightly edgy manner and lanky frame weren’t things she immediately associated with security, he held her in a way that made her feel like she’d come home.

  “I’m eager to hear what he has to say about their being arrested,” Louise said as she led the way to the car.

  “I’m never going home to my parents again. Their wrath is so great and they’re so ashamed of me that it has clouded their minds and warped their hearts. How can people who are tied together by blood be so cold to each other? How can anyone who used to love me suddenly want me dead? I ran into my aunt on the street, and when she saw me she crossed to walk on the other side. I don’t know how much longer I can take this.”

  Camilla was far away, lost in her own thoughts, when the door to her office opened and Terkel Høyer came in.

  “What did you want?” he asked, standing in the doorway.

  Camilla picked up the clipping and read aloud.

  “Will it never end?” he sighed when she was done. Then he continued. “That was good spotting. We’ll bring it up again to show that strict rulings and long sentences aren’t enough to stop this kind of thing. Find the girl and write her story. If she doesn’t want her picture in the paper, she can be anonymous, but get hold of her.”

  Since the arrests of Samra’s father and older brother, letters to the editor had been pouring in. People were sick to death of hearing about cultural differences and “honor,” and anger was building such that the vast majority felt the sentencing guidelines ought to be made even stricter, a policy the minister of justice had just come out in favor of. A large percentage of the letters basically said that in cases involving crimes based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, or issues involving honor, the judge should order deportation once the sentence was completed.

  In Holbæk, anger and frustration at the two killings was so palpable that one night the living-room window and a large, frosted pane in the front door were smashed at Dysseparken 16B, where Sada al-Abd was now living alone with her two youngest children.

  “Find her,” the editor repeated. “Or find someone else with the same story. There are enough of them out there that it shouldn’t be that hard.”

  “Nah, I guess it won’t be that hard,” Camilla agreed, her eyes trained on him. She sensed the rage starting to build within her, but wisely held it in check and instead continued calmly: “The girl who wrote it is ethnically Danish. Her name is Pernille and she’s from Præstø.” Camilla took a deep breath. “But I won’t be talking to her, because she took her own life ten days ago. She was born into a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses and had just turned sixteen when she broke with the church.”

  Terkel Høyer was on his way out the door but stopped and took a step closer to her.

  “And now you just listen here,” Camilla continued, and before he had a chance to say anything, she started reading another account from fifty years ago: “‘If I have to bear this child, I would rather end it all.’

  “That was written by a very young woman who came from a fishing family in Western Jutland, where she grew up in an evangelical family. She got pregnant at a very young age by one of the local farmers and turned to Mødrehjælpen, the National Council for Unmarried Mothers, in the hope of getting permission for an abortion. She was denied. That same day, she took her own life by walking out into the waves to avoid having to go home to her family, who wanted her dead anyway.”

  “What are you getting at?” Terkel asked, walking all the way over to her desk.

  Camilla was geared up for yet another confrontation and was prepared for Terkel to reject the angle she’d found for the current case.

  “As a small parenthetical comment on the debate,” Camilla said, “I want to draw people’s attention to the fact that Danish families also expel relatives if they cast shame over the family. Of course, we don’t kill them. They handle that on their own. But we shouldn’t go around pretending that this could never happen in a Danish family,” she said, noticing her voice getting a little louder.

  Terkel sat down on the edge of her desk.

  “Those aren’t ordinary Danish families,” he objected.

  “I definitely think you could meet Jehovah’s Witnesses who would be downright insulted to hear you say that,” Camilla said. “Sure, they’re part of a religious community, but otherwise they’re completely ordinary, even if the rest of us might think they have bats in their belfries.”

  He smiled at her.

  “They don’t kill their daughters!” Terkel exclaimed.

  “No, but that’s the only difference. If Samra’s family members were expelled by the rest of their Jordanian relatives, they would be treated the same way as Jehovah’s Witnesses who were
expelled by their community. The difference is that Samra’s father had the option of restoring his honor by taking his daughter’s life.”

  “We can’t make that comparison. You’re talking about just a tiny group of religious fanatics.”

  “Well, it’s not that small,” Camilla retorted. “The current population of Denmark is 5.4 million. That’s about the same as the number of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the world, so they’re not exactly an insignificant group.”

  Her boss seemed to consider this.

  “Motorcycle gangs,” she said. “That’s not news. If you get on bad terms with them, they’ll fucking kill you. Their concept of honor is perhaps more developed than everyone else’s, and that has certainly happened in Denmark. During the years when the Great Nordic Biker War was going on, we hardly read about anything else.”

  Høyer gave up on saying anything and just looked at her.

  “This is about the fact that there are also Danes who feel that their honor has been violated and would expel someone as a result. I think that would be extremely interesting right now, with the debate at its peak, and everyone being so busy distancing themselves from what’s going on with Samra’s family,” Camilla blurted out. It was very irritating that they even had to discuss this, even though it didn’t surprise her.

  “A very small percentage,” he repeated.

  Camilla tucked her hair behind her ears, looked at him seriously, and said, “It is also a very small percentage of Muslims who would commit an honor killing. Quit making it sound like you believe it’s the whole lot of them who would do that kind of thing. The families who react that way usually come from rural areas and they act the way we did fifty to a hundred years ago, and I can damn well remember hearing my grandmother, who came from tiny Hvide Sande, telling some terrible stories about the girls—and boys, for that matter—who had sex out of wedlock. It just irritates me that now we’ve totally forgotten how it actually used to be here too.”