by Sara Blaedel
Louise could picture the scene in the bathroom. Samra had been a slight, delicate girl. It would have been almost effortless for him to have his way with her. She hadn’t stood a chance of resisting, although she hadn’t tried either.
“Then my husband got angry,” Sada continued. “He hugged our daughter and held her tight and promised that it would never happen again. He also promised that she would be at peace.”
“What did he have to say about her seeing a Danish boy?” Louise asked when Sada once again fell silent, with her head bent and her hands folded.
“He said that she was free to live her life and that she was more important to him than his extended family or anyone else.”
A tremble of discomfort suddenly made the room feel cold and full of sorrow. Louise crossed her legs tightly and folded her arms, huddling up a little.
“Then what happened?”
“He asked Ahmad to come over Tuesday evening, the night she disappeared,” Sada began and then looked up with an expression so distant, it was as if no one was there. “They argued. My husband said we refused to be threatened. He had made plans to send our daughter home to Jordan for Christmas. No one in Rabba would turn their back on him. And if she were ever touched again, he would report it to the police.”
Louise looked at her in surprise.
“Ahmad got angry too and said that my husband wouldn’t dare because he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Jordan once the rumors got there about how his daughter had behaved here in Denmark. My husband didn’t care, he was going to protect Samra, and finally he kicked his brother out.”
“The next day, you went to Benløse. What did you talk about on that visit?” Louise wanted to know.
“Samra was missing. We wanted to ask if he’d taken her or seen her,” came the response.
“Had he?” Louise asked.
Sada shook her head and started crying again.
“But you think he was the one who killed your daughter?”
It took a moment before Samra’s mother gathered her wits and raised her head. “I don’t know what to think now, but I didn’t think she was dead then. I thought maybe she’d run away to get away from him, or so she wouldn’t have to be home when her father talked to him.”
Louise had a hard time understanding how the mother could have been walking around with suspicions like this about her brother-in-law—and it was almost worse if Ibrahim had the same suspicions—without anyone saying anything.
She could tell that Mik was already preparing to go bring Ibrahim’s brother in for another round of questioning, but she remained seated when he stood up and let him leave on his own. Samra’s story had been more gruesome than she’d imagined, and both she and Sada needed a moment to sit and let everything settle.
37
THE SCENT OF FLOWERS WAS PUNGENT. CAMILLA CHOSE A discreet bouquet of bright yellow blossoms and contemplated whether or not to include a little card. Maybe she should just leave it anonymous, because she didn’t know what to write. Should she apologize because maybe she bore some of the blame for his arrest, and because his life was over now? She didn’t hear it when the saleslady repeated her question about a card. Just held out her debit card and finally shook her head. The arrest wasn’t her fault, she decided, and she wasn’t going to carry that as a burden.
“Just send it,” she said, handing the woman the address of the church in Sorø.
She walked out of the shop and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, thinking about the funeral. She didn’t feel like she could share in grief that didn’t concern her, and suddenly it was like something inside her gave in and relaxed. As if the love she’d felt for her ex-boyfriend had finally seeped out of her, allowing her to see clearly again. She didn’t have room for him anymore and didn’t want anything else to do with him. That chapter was over now.
Camilla strolled down the main street. She’d spoken with Louise and knew that Ahmad had been brought in for another round of questioning, and that he had opted not to have a defense attorney present because he stubbornly insisted that he hadn’t done anything he could be charged for. That was all she’d found out, but that was enough to make her think she might have misjudged the situation and jumped the gun a little with her defense of the family. On the other hand, she was pretty much the only one who hadn’t railed against the family and hung them out to dry long before they were ever convicted of anything. If that turned out to have been the wrong call, she was going to have to eat crow.
If it really was someone in the al-Abd family who had killed those two girls, of course the act was completely indefensible, she thought, crossing the wide thoroughfare, whose sidewalks were lined with planters full of flowers. She had never intended her articles to imply that it was acceptable for recent immigrants to kill their daughters just because ethnic Danes had done the same thing at some point in the past. Of course it had ticked her off that people were so quick to judge the immigrants even though the same phenomenon could be found in other subsets of Danish society, but really she mostly just felt that she owed it to Sada for people to hear her side of the story.
Camilla had visited Sada after she’d been questioned at the police station. Sada had called and invited her over. Still deeply shaken by the experience, Sada had obviously felt that Camilla was the only person she could talk to if she were to have any chance of making someone understand what it was like to be trapped between two cultures. Sada had served her sweet tea, and Camilla had quietly listened with Aida on her lap. While the little girl twisted Camilla’s long blonde hair into loose ringlet curls, it slowly dawned on Camilla that the familial schism Sada was talking about was so deep that it wasn’t just about being good or evil. This woman’s life had been ripped apart, both when Samra died and when her conduct had been called into question, without her having any chance to set the record straight.
Sada might actually have suffered more than Samra had, Camilla thought sadly as she strolled down the narrow walkway that led to the harbor to get a little fresh air.
“Ahmad still denies that he killed Samra, and so do both Ibrahim and Hamid,” Storm said once the team had gathered in the command room after having spent the whole day questioning the three family members. “But we have to stick with it until one of them loosens up a little.”
“That’s going to take a while with this family. They’re not going to say shit,” Skipper said, adding that he had the impression Ahmad didn’t believe he had anything to hide. “He actually acknowledged that he’d had sex with his niece, but he doesn’t think it was rape because girls who go out with Danish boys are sex-crazed hussies.” He stopped and glanced around at the others as he pulled his hand though his wavy gray hair. “I was really working on him, but he didn’t give up a thing. Suddenly he can’t even remember what the boyfriend looks like. Nothing besides the fact that he’s blonde and way too old for her. Ahmad stubbornly insists that he didn’t see his niece after he left his brother’s house Tuesday night. His wife confirmed that he came right home after the visit and that he didn’t leave the house again until the next morning when he went to open his shop.”
“She’s not a credible alibi,” Velin interjected critically.
“Of course not,” Skipper said. “And at this point he doesn’t really have anything else to say, although it doesn’t seem like he understands how serious his crime is. He’s said several times that Samra represents only one life.”
Dean had pulled his chair back a little and was stretching out his legs. “This all suggests your basic honor/shame scenario,” he said and looked at Skipper. “One life doesn’t matter that much when you look at their entire extended family—the ones living here in Denmark and the ones back home in Jordan—in which this kind of thing generally has ripple effects that people would prefer not to deal with.”
Louise could tell that Mik was going to contradict him, but he stopped himself.
“What about Hamid?” she asked.
Louise hadn’t talked to Hamid
herself. She had concentrated on Ibrahim and felt that eventually the two of them had built up a decent rapport. Mik had continued with Hamid, even though they still hadn’t clicked.
“He’s sick of it,” Mik said. “And I also get the sense that he’s afraid of what’s going to happen. Whether they end up in jail or get kicked out of the country. He talks a lot about school and his friends, but he says he didn’t know anything about his sister having a boyfriend. I had hoped, and still hope, that he could tell us who the boyfriend is. But apparently there isn’t anyone who can.”
“What did the techs find? There must be something that can tie them to the two killings,” Louise said, and was immediately followed by Dean, who asked, “What about the wiretap?”
“Nothing noteworthy,” Storm admitted, “which is to say, no increased activity; but all three family members consented to let Bengtsen and Velin do a cheek swab on them, so we can check their DNA profiles. No DNA material was found on Samra and we have to assume that any that might have been there was washed away in the water, but we did secure several samples from Dicta. We just haven’t heard back yet from the Forensic Genetics Lab if there was enough to construct a profile.”
Storm moved on to the witness statements. “Several people saw Dicta down on the big lawn behind Hotel Strandparken on Saturday afternoon when she was doing the photo shoot Michael Mogensen told us about. She went home to eat a little past six and left her house again at seven-thirty to bike over to Liv’s place, where she was going to spend the night. She arrived there fifteen minutes later and stayed with Liv until a bit after eleven, when she left. Dicta said she was going to meet the photographer and promised to come back before the next morning, so Liv wouldn’t have to explain to her parents where Dicta had gone.”
“And she was exchanging text messages with Tue Sunds all evening,” Louise interjected.
Storm nodded and continued. “After that, the father of one of her classmates saw her on Ahlgade entering a shop, and a couple of witnesses also saw her downtown at that late hour, but no one can tell us with a hundred percent certainty exactly where they saw her. But the route fits nicely if she went from Liv’s place toward Nygade and then on up to the train station. After that, there’s no trace of her. Where was she going?”
“To Copenhagen,” the detectives said, all speaking at once, and Storm nodded again.
“Yes, we’re assuming that she went to the station to take the last train into the city at 11:45 P.M.”
“But she never boarded,” Bengtsen concluded, lost in contemplation for a moment. “Should we try to recreate the route she took from Liv’s place to the scene of the crime?” he asked, looking slowly around the table.
“We have a good working relationship with Venstrebladet,” Dean added, and said the paper had been known to include photos before if the police requested it to jog people’s memories.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Bengtsen agreed, looking at his younger colleague. “Let’s get one of their photographers to walk the route with us and take pictures of the locations where we know Dicta was seen and of the actual crime scene.”
Storm nodded and thought for a moment. “Let’s do it. But we can’t do the same thing for Samra, because she wasn’t killed out at Hønsehalsen. She was brought out there after she was killed.”
“The duty officer just received a call from the harbor master that someone vandalized Ibrahim’s boat yesterday or last night,” Ruth interrupted, having just walked in the door. She said that someone had painted extremely crass messages all over it.
“Maybe that means we should start paying attention to the threats against the family. At least as long as the mother is still living in the apartment with those two little ones,” Ruth said, taking a seat.
The group went silent. The newspapers had already described the mood in town as a lynch mob out to get the al-Abd family and other Muslim families as well. People were lumping all the Muslims together in terms of assigning blame for the two girls’ deaths. But until now the anger that had arisen had not been manifested in any kind of physical assault.
They discussed assigning officers to protect Sada and her children or maybe moving them out of town.
“Let’s contact Venstrebladet,” Storm said, concluding the meeting. “We need to get those photos taken tomorrow.”
They all stood up and trickled out into the hall, heading off to shut their office doors before going to eat, when the cell phone in Louise’s pocket started vibrating. She could see that it was Camilla and answered it with a perky “What’s up?”
Mik stepped on the back of her heel, giving her a flat tire, when she abruptly stopped, listening to her friend’s torrent of words. When she hung up, she called her colleagues together before they had a chance to disappear into their offices.
“Aida is missing,” she said loud enough for everyone to hear her.
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?” Skipper asked, stopping in the doorway to his and Dean’s office.
Louise explained that Camilla had just received a call from Sada, who had explained, with some confusion, that the two children had had permission to go down and play in the sandbox before dinner. Dysseparken’s minimal playground facility was off the end of the parking lot in front of the al-Abds’ building.
Storm called them back into the command room and asked Louise to finish explaining.
“When Sada went down to get them, Jamal was sitting there alone, playing, and when she asked him where his sister was, he just said she’d left. Sada spent the last hour running around looking for her daughter until she called Camilla a second ago and asked her what she should do.”
“The little girl could have gone to visit someone,” Velin suggested. “But we have to react, given the threats people have been making against them the last several days. We have to go find that girl.”
Louise agreed. They needed to act immediately. It really didn’t matter what kind of mischief Aida might have gotten into. It was embarrassing that the police hadn’t responded to the threats. They had talked about providing some kind of protection for Sada and the little ones so many times, but it just hadn’t been done.
“Why the hell didn’t she call us?” the MTF captain asked, irritated.
“Because—” Louise began, and Storm finished her sentence: “So far, we haven’t done anything besides split up her family.
So we’re not her first choice to turn to when she needs help. We’re going out there.”
38
ASMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE “OF ETHNIC BACKGROUND”—as Skipper put it—were gathered in the parking lot. Storm pulled Louise aside with a tug on her arm.
“Go find out what the mother says,” he told her and then returned to the others to start a search.
Louise spotted Sada right away. She was sitting on a bench with Jamal on her lap surrounded by a crowd of people. Louise made it to the middle of the crowd and was standing right in front of Sada before the woman noticed her and pointed over to the sandbox through her sobs. Just then Camilla came running up to them and Sada made room for her on the bench.
Everyone standing around moved back a little, uneasy about the level of intimacy they perceived between the blonde journalist and the Jordanian woman. Louise understood their reaction. This was an unfamiliar situation: an outsider was unreservedly offering the same degree of concern and caring they had been providing.
“Maybe she went over to someone’s house?” Camilla asked when Sada looked up at her. And at that second, Louise had no doubt that Camilla was there as a private person and not as a journalist.
Aida’s mother shook her head. In the background, Louise noticed that Mik and Skipper had started organizing the people who had turned out to help into a search party.
“Maybe somebody was bothering her, so she hid?” Camilla suggested, stroking Sada’s arm as she spoke.
Louise looked at her. That wasn’t unlikely, based on what Camilla had described the crowd of teenagers doing to Sada and the kids outs
ide the train station.
Sada shook her head again. “Then Jamal would have been scared too,” she said, “but he was sitting here quite calmly, playing, when I came to get them.”
“When did you last see her?” Louise asked, leaning over to hear Sada’s quiet voice.
“Four o’clock. They came down to play when I started making dinner.”
That was over two hours ago. That was a long time for a four-year-old girl to be away, but it wasn’t normally long enough to report a person missing. But this wasn’t a normal situation.
Louise walked over to inform the rest of the police officers what had happened, and over the next half hour the local police got a search going that would focus on the area around Dysseparken to begin with. There was still a small hope that she had gotten wrapped up playing with a friend and lost track of the time or wandered off. It was well past dinnertime, and if she’d forgotten the hour, her hunger would soon remind her that it was time to go home.
