7

DICTA AND SAMRA’S HOMEROOM TEACHER LIVED IN A YELLOW house on the outskirts of Holbæk. Forty-five years old, Louise guessed, plus or minus. She was an attractive woman with her short, dark hair tucked behind her ears, her glasses pushed up on top of her head, and her lipstick a subdued hue. Her voice made it clear that she was not quite as composed as she seemed, and she was clenching her hands tightly together in her lap.

They didn’t say much in the car. Mik assumed the role of chauffeur and hadn’t uttered a word since they left the police station. He drove with a local’s familiarity through the residential neighborhoods named after various flowers, and he nodded subtly when Louise volunteered to walk up to the teacher’s door by herself.

Now Louise sat leaning her head against the window on their way to Copenhagen for the second time that day. Jette Petersen obviously had her mind on her student, who might be the victim in this case.

Before they left Holbæk police headquarters, Louise phoned the on-call Pathology Lab technician in Copenhagen, asking to have the body brought out so it would be ready for viewing when they arrived.

“Is it normal for Samra to miss a day of school?” Louise said, breaking the silence as she turned around in her seat to look at Jette.

She quickly repeated that they still weren’t at all sure that the victim was her student, but this was the only relevant tip they had gotten on the missing-person report. And obviously the fact that they weren’t able to get in touch with the girl or her family was a contributing factor in their suspicion.

“Yes, she misses a day every now and then. Most of the students in this class do. But she hasn’t had any major absences. In fact, it’s fairly uncommon for her not to show up,” the teacher said after thinking a bit.

“What’s her family like?”

“I don’t know much about them,” Jette replied, saying that Samra had an elder brother, Hamid, but she knew him only by sight. He was a few years older than she was and had attended the school for only a year before moving on to the business school. “She’s a very pretty girl, and I’ve gotten the impression several times that the parents had the son keep an eye on her. He was often standing around waiting for her when school got out, and then would accompany her home. Occasionally she would run into trouble if she stayed late after school or if we had a special-topic week and were working on class projects into the early evening. The last time we did that, Samra asked me to call her parents at home to confirm it was true she would be staying at school that late. So I guess you could say they keep a pretty close eye on her, but she never complains about it. I probably couldn’t put up with it myself, though,” Jette said quietly.

“What’s your impression of her parents?”

“I’ve met them only a few times. Her father showed up just once for a parent-teacher conference, but otherwise I haven’t seen him. But last winter we did ‘Food Week.’ We have several immigrant kids in class, so we spent a week focusing on different food cultures, and we invited all the students’ parents for an evening in the home ec classroom and had the parents prepare a special dish together with their children. It was really great—homey and pleasant and fun—and we ended up with a huge buffet of Danish and international dishes from all over the world. Samra’s mother, Sada, is a lovely, sweet woman. That night we laughed a lot and ate a lot, and I don’t think I might otherwise have had the opportunity to talk as openly and freely with the mothers had it not been in a format where they were serving their food to us. Everyone’s dishes came with lots of funny stories. Sada had her two littlest ones with her as well, Aida and Jamal, and Samra’s sister was a big hit strolling around the room in her little white apron, holding her mother’s fancy serving dish in those little hands of hers and asking, ‘Would you like any more, ma’am? Sir?’” Jette smiled at the memory.

“Does Samra have relatives in the area?” Louise asked. “Or farther away, for that matter, that her family might be off visiting?”

“They do have some family here in town. I’m not sure whether they’re on her mother’s or father’s side, but Samra does have a cousin. She’s in the other ninth-grade homeroom, and I have her for math,” Jette said. “Also, I think there’s an uncle who lives somewhere around Ringsted, or somewhere between Holbæk and Copenhagen, I’m not exactly sure. But during vacation last summer I ran into Samra at a flea market in Ringsted, and I think she said she was visiting family. My sister lives just outside Ringsted,” Jette said by way of explanation.

“Do you know what her uncle’s name is?”

The teacher shook her head.

Louise knew that Bengtsen and Søren were already starting to look into locating other people with Samra’s last name, and she thought there was a decent chance the families had the same last name. Louise wondered if she should ask any more about the girl but decided to wait until she knew whether it was actually Samra al-Abd whose body was lying out waiting to be ID’d.

A man was waiting to let them into the Teilum Building, which was otherwise dark at this late hour, and he led them through the waiting room to the left of the main entrance and then around a corner where he opened the door to a smaller waiting room. He asked them to take a seat on the blue sofas and wait for a moment. There was a box of Kleenex on the table, and the blinds were rolled down over the window into the viewing room, where Louise knew that the girl was already lying.

The technician opened the door to the room, and he asked Jette to come in. Louise stood up and walked over to the door. He had pulled the white cloth down to reveal the girl’s face, and her hair was neatly arranged over her narrow shoulders. She had no wounds or bruises. She looked the way you often hear: like she was asleep.

It was over after the first glance. Jette nodded and confirmed that the dead girl was fifteen-year-old Samra al-Abd, who was a student in her ninth-grade class. Louise nodded at Mik, who stepped out to make the phone call so they could start focusing the investigation.

The teacher placed her hand on her student’s cheek and let it rest there for a moment as she looked at Samra’s face with her eyes shut. Jette’s eyes were tearing up as she turned, and Louise left her in peace as the tears started flowing freely.

When Mik came back in, to Louise’s great surprise, he stepped over to put his arm around Jette’s shoulders and stood there for a moment comforting her. Louise couldn’t hear what he said, but she noted that the teacher stopped crying, and shortly after she heard him ask if Jette was ready to go back to Holbæk. She saw the small nod, and they slowly began to walk toward the exit. Louise stayed back a bit as Mik helped the teacher into the car.

They drove back in silence. There were suddenly a number of important questions to ask, but Louise didn’t feel it was the right time to ask them. It was late, and Jette was sitting with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths as though she were struggling to regain control over the emotions that had suddenly sprung a leak within her. Her willingness to come had been an enormous help to them. Louise received a text message from Søren, who wrote that the family in Ringsted had been located, but they were going to postpone getting in touch with them until morning, hoping that would allow them to inform the parents first.

Before dropping Jette off, Louise asked her not to mention anything at school. They wanted to make sure that the family had been told before they heard the rumors in town. They agreed to meet the next morning when the teacher had a free period in her schedule so they could talk about Samra.

“Good night, and thank you so much for being willing to do this so late in the evening and on such short notice,” Louise said.

Mik got out of the car and shook the teacher’s hand good-bye.

“Do you know her?” Louise asked as he pulled away from the curb.

“I know who she is, and she knows who I am, but I don’t know her any more closely than that. But it’s never nice to take a blow like that while other people are looking on, let alone people who know you.”

Louise just sat and watched him, surprised by the thoughtfulness that had shone through Mik’s reserve and awkwardness.

“I’m heading home if that’s okay with you,” he said when they arrived back at the police station. After they dropped Jette off, they had stopped at Dysseparken 16B to inform the girl’s parents, but there was still no answer at the door.

Louise nodded at her new partner and said good night before heading up to see whether the others were still at their desks. The lights were off in most of the offices, but Ruth Lange was sitting at her desk working. Ruth told her that everyone had just taken off and they would regroup again at eight.

Louise sat down in her office and found to her satisfaction that the IT guy had managed to set up her two laptops, so she would be ready for the next morning. She took out her personal cell phone and saw the long list of messages from Camilla, who asked her to call. But now it was too late.

She turned it off and flipped it shut, and then started walking over to the hotel with an extra key that had been dropped off for her that opened the main door to the hotel when the front desk was closed. She suspected there wouldn’t be anyone at the front desk this late, but she still went over to see if she could get anything to drink and take up to her room.

Søren Velin was sitting in one of the roomy armchairs in the lobby waiting for her. With two beers.

“Hey,” he said, asking if she wanted one.

She nodded and sat down. There was a pack of cigarettes on the table, but she quickly looked away. She had relapsed and started smoking again over the summer but had decided to quit again.

“How’s it going?” he asked, holding out a beer to her.

“All right,” she replied. “We got the girl ID’d.”

He nodded and said he actually meant how Louise herself was doing.

Louise smiled and said that she was all right too.

“What about your partner? Is he okay?” he asked, and Louise took care not to say too much because she knew she couldn’t afford to complain.

“I haven’t really figured him out yet,” she said. “It’s like we’re not communicating on the same frequency.”

“Well, everything is still pretty new. Are you still happy about being in Unit A back in Copenhagen?” he asked, shifting the subject away from the local situation.

She nodded and asked if he had plans to come back.

“Yes, but I don’t know when,” he replied. “Right now things are going well here.”

“What about at home? Are you guys able to stay connected with you gone so much?”

“Actually, it’s working pretty well,” he said. “As long as Lisbeth is enjoying working from home, I think we can make it work.”

Søren and Louise had been partners back when Søren’s wife was deciding to quit her job and start up her own Web-design business, so Louise had been privy to all the considerations that had entailed.

“With her working from home, it’s possible for her to take care of Sofie alone, and things have been working really well for them when I’m away.”

Louise estimated that his daughter must be about two and a half now. She still thought that the girl’s name was little pretentious, and she knew Søren had preferred the spelling “Sophie,” but he hadn’t won that battle.

“Are things going well with her job?”

Louise knew only that his wife designed Web sites, but she had no idea whether it was a proper business or more like a hobby.

He nodded. “At least right now, and if things change we’ll obviously have to sell Strand Boulevard,” he said, referring to their place in an affluent neighborhood north of downtown Copenhagen.

Yes, and either buy somewhere out in Hvidovre or smack-dab on City Hall Square, depending on which direction things go, Louise thought, picturing one of the beautiful old brick buildings with ornate, wrought-iron balconies near the fancy hotels across from City Hall. But he was right. You had to adapt.

“How about you?” he asked, lighting a cigarette. “Did you keep the apartment after Peter moved out?” She nodded.

“That was my place when I was single too, before he moved in,” she reminded him.

He smiled.

“Ah, right. And do you think there will be two names on the door again at some point?”

She shook her head and loosened up a bit. There weren’t many colleagues she felt like inviting into her private life, but back when Louise and Søren used to be partners, he had managed to break down her barriers, and she felt a little of their old familiarity starting to rekindle.

“At first Peter wanted to move back in. Or, I don’t fucking know exactly what he wanted, but in any case he had second thoughts about the breakup at one point.”

When Peter had dumped her for someone else after eight years together, Louise had told her partner, Søren, everything. It was some other girl Peter worked with. Then shortly after he had moved in with that girl, Louise found him standing in the stairwell outside her place again, asking if they couldn’t work things out after all.

“I just couldn’t,” Louise said. “And when I thought the whole thing through carefully, I came to see that the right thing had happened—it probably should’ve even happened a little sooner!”

Søren nodded, but at the same time asked if she wasn’t saying that with the benefit of hindsight.

She shrugged.

“I spent a whole month with Camilla and her son in the South of France. We rented a little house and sat gazing out over the water drinking Kir and discussing everything that had happened to us at the start of that summer. I don’t think I’m seeing it this way only because he’s gone. We were too different and we wanted different things from our lives.”

She got lost in her thoughts for a bit while he nodded.

“Yes, but it can be hard to get perspective on stuff like this while you’re in the middle of it, especially if two people’s everyday routines seem to work without major conflicts.”

She conceded his point, but reminded him that there had been a few clear signs along the way.

“For example, I never thought about joining him when he would fly to Aberdeen for work.”

“Well, you’re not exactly the archetype of the follow-him-loyally-at-his-heels housewife,” Søren replied dryly.

“No, but I probably would have gone with him if he’d been the most important thing in my world,” she said, taking a sip of her beer.

“Do you miss him?”

She nodded.

“I miss him as a person, but I don’t miss our life together.”

“Incidentally, what happened with Camilla after that arrest down in Roskilde? Is she still together with that guy’s brother?”

Louise shook her head and suddenly felt overwhelmed with fatigue.

“No, they broke up before we took that trip to France. The whole thing knocked all the wind out of her, and I don’t really know what I should do to help her. The only sensible thing for her to do is forget him and move on.”

Søren stood up and grabbed another beer, and she nodded when he asked if she wanted to share it.

“I feel like giving her a firm shaking. The relationship between those two was completely lopsided, but instead of getting angry and flicking him off, which is much more her style, she’s doing just the opposite.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Camilla Lind I know,” Søren conceded, lighting another a cigarette.

“Uh-uh, not the one I know either.”

“The best thing would be if she met someone else who completely swept her off her feet,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“You’re right. But that kind of thing just doesn’t happen that often, and certainly not when you need it to.”

Louise glanced at her watch and downed the rest of her beer.

“I think I’m going to call it a night,” she said, standing. “It’s been great seeing you again—thanks for the beer. Next time they’re on me.”

“Same here,” Søren said. “I’m looking forward to working with you again.”

They went up together and parted ways at the top of the stairwell.

It was nearly half past nine the next morning when Ibrahim al-Abd arrived at Holbæk police headquarters. Louise had just returned to the office and grabbed a cup of coffee, and her hand was on her phone. Earlier that morning, Mik Rasmussen and she had stopped by the family’s apartment again. Since there was still no answer, Ruth Lange helped them look up where the father worked, which was a lumberyard by the harbor. When they arrived there, the manager said the father had just left.

He was a small man with thick, black hair and a solid, well-groomed mustache. Louise had been about to leave for the Højmark School and her appointment with Jette Petersen, but she canceled when Storm asked her to come with him to notify Samra’s father.

“Let’s go in here,” Louise said, leading Ibrahim into the office. She asked him to take a seat on the chair next to her desk and nodded at Mik, who had already grabbed an MP3 recorder that he was setting up from where he was sitting. She offered the father coffee and water while she prepared for the conversation. Right as she was about to shut the door, Storm waved her out into the corridor.

“Try to get him to tell you a little bit about his daughter before you tell him that she’s the person we ID’d.”

Louise raised an eyebrow and stood there for a moment but then nodded and turned to walk back into her office.

“You wanted to talk to us about your daughter?” she began.

He nodded and said he had left work when he heard the news at nine that morning that had included a report about the dead girl the police had found.

“What is your daughter’s name?” Louise asked.

“Samra al-Abd,” the girl’s father said, pronouncing her name clearly. He added that his daughter was fifteen years old and was in the ninth grade.

“How long has she been gone?”

He shrugged his shoulders all the way up to his ears and, holding out his palms in despair, said it was hard to know. “We haven’t seen her since she said good night and went to bed Tuesday night.”

The night before she was found out by Hønsehalsen, Louise thought, feeling sorry for the man, who in a moment was going to find out his daughter was dead. Still, she wanted to try to get as many facts as possible about Samra al-Abd as long as the father was talking.

“What about the next morning when she was supposed to go to school?” Mik asked. “Didn’t you notice if she left for school?”

He was obviously also determined to get the father to explain himself, and he watched the man intently as he answered.

“No, my wife doesn’t get up when our older kids leave for school.”

He briefly said that he had to be at the lumberyard down by the harbor at six-thirty himself, and his eldest son had a job at the same location three mornings a week before his business-school classes started.

“He and I are already gone when Samra gets up.”

“Has your daughter disappeared from home and stayed away for a whole night before?” Mik asked.

At first Ibrahim shook his head, but after thinking for a while he said, “Sometimes the other young people she hangs out with infect her, like a rotten apple in a basket,” he said, looking accusingly at Louise for a moment as if she bore part of the blame. “So it can be hard to figure out exactly what she’s up to.”

“What other kinds of things does your daughter do?” Louise asked, seizing the opening.

She could see how torn he felt as he contemplated what to say.

“She doesn’t always listen to what we tell her,” he said finally. “Then she comes home when it suits her.”

“Does she often come home late?” Mik wanted to know.

“A few times it’s been several hours past what we agreed on,” said Ibrahim.

“But right now we’re talking about almost thirty-six hours—has she ever been gone so long before?” Louise asked.

“No, which is why I think something must have happened. She wouldn’t dare,” the girl’s father replied, and Louise noted that Samra apparently had reason to fear her father’s reaction.

“Does your daughter have a boyfriend she might be staying with?” Louise asked, following every movement in his face.

His expression suddenly seemed less open and he shook his head.

“She’s too young for that sort of thing. She’s fifteen,” he said, looking Louise straight in the eye when he replied. Louise felt as though she were gazing directly into the abyss of a father’s deep worry.

If he thought a fifteen-year-old girl was too young to have a boyfriend, then he also probably thought the girl was too young to marry off, thought Louise, making it fairly unlikely that it was an “honor” killing triggered by a conflict in that area.

Louise excused herself for a moment and went to ask one of her colleagues to check on whether there were any past reports of violence in the family. But when she entered the command center, Ruth Lange had already foreseen Louise’s request and had a printout of the information ready for her.

“We’ve got one report against the father for domestic violence. His wife filed it a year and a half ago. Apparently he beat both her and her daughter, and subsequently the wife stayed at a women’s shelter in Nykøbing Sjælland. Other than that, we don’t have anything on him or the elder brother. The father came to Denmark in 1998, while the rest of the family did not arrive until 2002. At that point, the youngest hadn’t been born yet, and the little sister was still an infant. They come from a town fifty miles south of Amman, Jordan, called Rabba. Since early 2001 he has been working at Stark, a lumberyard down by the harbor,” said Ruth.

Louise hurried back to her office and sat down quietly so she wouldn’t interrupt the interview.

“Do you have a picture of her?” Mik asked.

Samra’s father gently pulled a photo out of his jacket pocket. He set it on the table. It must have been taken on Midsummer’s Eve; Samra was wearing a light-colored summer dress and you could see the bonfire in the background. Her long, dark hair fell onto her shoulders, and she was holding her little sister’s hand. Both of them were smiling widely for the photographer. It struck Louise that she actually hadn’t known whether Samra wore a headscarf, but apparently she hadn’t.

“Is she the one you found?”

Louise glanced quickly at Mik, who nodded to her, and she turned to the father and said she was deeply sorry to have to tell him that it was his daughter whom a fisherman had found in the water out by Hønsehalsen in Udby Cove.

All the color drained out of his face. His shoulders slumped, and a moment later tears burst from his eyes, and a long screeching sound was pulled up and out of him from somewhere deep within. As the sound made its way out into the room, the girl’s father rose with a jerk and started to pace back and forth in tears as he cried in shock that it couldn’t be true. The words were ripped into pieces by a stream of Arabic they didn’t understand, but there was no mistaking the despair in them.

Louise approached cautiously, pulled him back toward the chair, and tried to get him to calm down.

“My little girl,” he repeated between deep sobs, sitting with his face hidden in his hands.

The air in the office was heavy with misery and grief. Finally Ibrahim calmed down a little.

Mik turned the MP3 recorder back on and made an attempt to get the interview going again.

“We need to talk more with you about your daughter’s disappearance.”

The father looked at them with a distant gaze and tear-laden eyes.

“How did it happen?” he asked, his face still preoccupied.

“We don’t know quite yet,” Mik said, making no mention of the rope and concrete.

“Could you please repeat for us when you and your wife last saw Samra?” Louise asked, turning the conversation in another direction.

“Tuesday night, when my wife said good night to her at eight-thirty.”

“Yesterday one of your daughter’s friends from school came forward when she heard we had found a dead teenage girl. Didn’t you see or hear the news yesterday?”

Ibrahim al-Abd was frozen, sitting as if encased in ice for a moment before he shook his head and his face cracked.

“Was it on TV? So then everyone knows what happened …?”

Mik interrupted him. “We put out a description. No picture was shown.”

Louise couldn’t tell from Ibrahim’s face whether he thought it was good or bad that the missing-person report had gone out.

“Last night we went out to talk with you and your wife after the tip from Samra’s friend, but no one answered. Where were you?” she asked.

It took a moment before Samra’s father replied.

“At my brother’s house in Benløse, outside of Ringsted,” he explained, and Louise just nodded.

“How did you travel down there?” she asked.

“By car.”

Tears were making his eyes shiny again.

“We drove,” he continued, diverting attention from his fresh bout of weeping.

“When did you come home?”

“Midnight, maybe 1:00 A.M., I think.”

“But you didn’t answer this morning either, when we stopped by again,” Mik interjected.

The man looked over at him and explained that he and his son had gone to work.

“My wife is very worried and didn’t sleep at all. After my son and I left, she took the little ones to her sister’s house.”

“When we went out to talk with you last night, your car was parked in the parking lot, and it was at just past ten. Does your wife have a car?” Louise asked.

He shook his head, but she had known the answer already. No other cars were registered to their address.

“If you didn’t drive your car, then what car did you drive?” He didn’t seem to understand what she meant.

“You drove down to your brother’s house, you say. But your car was parked in the parking lot last night,” Mik clarified.

“No, no,” he said, jumping up from his chair and pacing back and forth again. “We didn’t drive. My son drove.”

“There is no vehicle registered in his name,” Louise interrupted.

“He’s buying one. It’s not all worked out yet, but he’ll get it settled,” the father assured them.

Louise asked for the car’s make and registration number, but the father could only say it was an older-model BMW.

“Could I just get your brother’s name and phone number?” she asked, to be on the safe side, so they could compare that with the information Søren had dug up.

He sat down and gave her both.

“What happened? What happened to her?” he mumbled again, rubbing his forehead hard with his thumb and forefinger as his face once more took on an absent look.

Mik took over and pointedly asked Samra’s father to describe in detail the period of time when he was last with his daughter.

Ibrahim calmed down a little, and Louise could almost see him pulling himself together and preparing to go through the last time he had been with his daughter. They waited as his breathing became regular again.

“Tuesday,” he said, savoring the memory of the weekday. “I was down at the boat,” he continued, explaining that he had a small sailboat moored in Holbæk’s marina.

Louise asked him to clarify where it was and wrote a note that she should have someone look into how long it took to sail from Holbæk over to Udby Cove, where the Hønsehalsen peninsula jutted out.

“When did you get home?” Mik asked after they had noted all the details about the boat so they could find it later.

“Around seven o’clock.”

“Was Samra home when you came back?”

He thought carefully before nodding.

“Did anything particular happen that night?” Louise asked.

He shrugged slightly and said they had had a visit from family.

“Who from?”

Louise was starting to get annoyed that they were having to drag everything out of him. She had hoped that they would be able to get him talking without having to squeeze each word out so they would have his own description and sequence of events to go by.

“My brother,” he replied.

“The one from Benløse?”

He nodded.

“You see each other a lot,” she noted.

“That’s normal in my family.”

“Was Samra with you?” Mik asked.

The father shook his head and said that she had spent the whole evening in her room.

“She was doing her homework,” he added.

“But you said good night to her?”

Again there was a pause before he explained that usually his wife was the one who took care of that sort of thing.

“I was in the living room.”

“We know that you were reported for domestic violence previously against your wife and daughter. Will you tell us what happened?” Louise asked.

The father winced and looked down at the table.

“Have there been problems between you and your daughter since then?” she continued.

He still didn’t respond and they let him sit in silence. “It was a misunderstanding,” he finally said. “Nothing bad. I lost my temper.”

“What set off your anger?” Louise asked quietly.

“It was my son, and Samra stuck her nose into it.”

“How?”

“It’s not her place to make a fuss about the way I raise my son,” he said simply.

“What did your son do?” Mik wanted to know.

“He lied to me. But I had misunderstood and made a mistake. I apologized, and my wife came home again. You can see that everything got sorted out.”

Mik coughed briefly before meeting the father’s eyes and asking: “Did you kill your daughter?”

Ibrahim al-Abd’s face shut down completely and he started crying as he vigorously shook his head and looked back into Mik’s eyes without shame.

Louise and Mik quickly looked at each other and agreed that that would have to be enough for now. They asked him to give them his son’s cell phone number so they could get in touch with him.

“Can we get permission to see her?” the father asked, turning around in the doorway on his way out, tears still running down his cheeks.

They both nodded and said they would call him about a time when he and his wife could drive over to the Pathology Lab in Copenhagen and see their daughter one last time.

He nodded his thanks and zipped his jacket all the way up to his throat before turning around and heading down the corridor past the offices where everyone was hard at work on the investigation into his daughter’s murder.

Louise stood watching him leave until he disappeared out the door.