20

“WE’RE GOING TO RELEASE THE BODY,” STORM SAID FROM their office doorway, and then asked if Louise didn’t need to take a spin back to Copenhagen to water her plants. If so, could she swing by the Pathology Lab and bring the certificate back? The family had requested permission to fly Samra back to Jordan so she could be buried in Rabba, where she’d grown up and where her grandparents still lived.

“I’m sure my plants would love that. I suppose I might as well go do it now?” she said, looking from Storm to Mik, who both nodded.

“Of course, you could also stay for a cup of coffee before you go,” her partner coaxed once Storm had left. “Bengtsen brought in some of Else’s macaroons.”

Louise smiled and held up both hands to fend off the offer.

In the car she called Flemming Larsen’s direct number and said she was on her way in to the Pathology Lab to pick up Samra’s death certificate. Did he have time for breakfast or a cup of coffee?

“I’m going to have trouble getting out of here,” he said and explained that he was about to start an autopsy. “But if you want, we could have a cup of coffee here when you arrive. I’d really like to see you before you leave town.”

Louise laughed into her headset. The tall pathologist was a master at making her feel like she was special, which made her cherish their friendship.

“I’m in the basement,” Flemming said. “Just come on down and we’ll get the death certificate all sorted out too.”

When she arrived at the Teilum Building, she said hello to one of the pathology techs whose name she couldn’t remember and found out that Flemming was in the first room on the right at the bottom of the stairs.

Her heels echoed. She’d been down to the cold-storage rooms several times, but had never attended a postmortem there. She wasn’t usually there until they did the formal autopsy. She knocked and waited a bit before pushing the door open.

“Hi,” Flemming said, walking over to her in his white lab coat.

Louise stayed out in the hallway, but saw that the deceased on the table was an older man. She received a quick peck on the cheek from Flemming.

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready. I picked up some pastries across the street from the cafeteria at the National Hospital,” he said, indicating a chair a little farther down the hallway.

“I’ll wait,” she said, smiling at the fact that he’d gone out of his way to pick up pastries for her.

Down the hallway a heavy steel door opened and a man in a gas mask came out. She raised her eyebrows at Flemming, wondering what that was about.

“They just started embalming your Jordanian girl,” he said. “That has to be done before she can be sent abroad. Have you ever seen how they do that?”

Louise shook her head and followed him as he started walking toward a glass window in the wall. It was a small room that was dominated by a steel table, which was screened by a thick plastic curtain on all four sides. Above that, there was an enormous exhaust fan, and Samra’s naked body lay on the table.

“They slowly fill her up with formalin,” Flemming explained, pointing to a pump next to the body. Several tubes were attached with needles to the girl. “About four or five liters will be pumped in via the major arteries, also filling the lungs and the chest cavity. The formalin will cause her organs to shrink a little, and then they’ll keep for quite a long time after that.”

The pathology tech in the gas mask came back, rolling a zinc coffin in front of him.

Louise stood there for a bit, looking at the girl. You couldn’t tell that her earthly remains were being preserved. She still looked like she had when her teacher identified her in the presentation room.

“Once she’s been through a few Muslim burial rituals, the coffin will be sealed, and then she’ll be sent home to Jordan, where the actual burial will take place,” Flemming said.

He went back to finish his postmortem exam, and Louise took a seat to wait for him. The sentimental side of her, which she still struggled with from time to time, really wanted to see them apprehend the culprit before Samra left Denmark. Not because her departure brought up any technical problems; all the evidence had been secured. Louise knew she would just feel more confident that justice had been done if she could say good-bye to the girl secure in the knowledge that someone was going to be punished for having robbed her of her young life. Instead, Samra was being sent away without their knowing anything at all.

“There. Time for a coffee,” she heard Flemming say, pulling her out of her reverie.

His office wasn’t particularly big, and there were stacks of papers and folders everywhere. He cleared off a chair for her and stepped out for a moment, returning shortly thereafter with two cups and plates bearing a chocolate croissant and a Danish with rum frosting, which he squeezed onto the last available spot on the desk.

“How’s it going in Holbæk?” he asked once he’d poured the coffee.

She shrugged, not up to explaining that they really hadn’t gotten anywhere. Instead she told him that she’d tried sea kayaking.

“Sea kayaking?!” His outburst was just as surprised as her own had been when Mik invited her to try it.

She smiled and nodded, breaking off a piece of pastry. “It’s amazingly fun,” she admitted, one eyebrow shooting up when Flemming set down his cup of coffee and said it was something he’d been wanting to try for ages.

“I’ve just never gotten around to it, but now I have a good excuse. It would be fun if we went kayaking together next spring.”

Louise brushed some crumbs off her blouse.

“Well, I can’t promise that I’ll be so hooked that I’m still doing it then, but if I am, that sounds nice,” she laughed.

When they finished the coffee, she stuck the death certificate into her purse and said good-bye with the agreement that they’d go out for a couple of beers once she was back in town.

“I can’t understand how this happened. How could this happen?”

Ibrahim’s voice was husky and unclear, but the interpreter translated without adding any emotion to the words.

“You stopped taking care of her.”

“Sada is accusing him,” the interpreter explained.

Louise had let her bag and jacket drop to the floor as she joined the others back at the police station.

“Of the murder?” Storm asked, interested, leaning over the oval table, where they were all sitting tensely, listening to the previous day’s recordings. They hadn’t gotten much out of the tapes the last couple of weeks, but now that the girl’s body had just been released, her parents were suddenly discussing something that might be related to what had happened.

“I never stopped.”

The Mobile Task Force’s own interpreter sat listening with concentration before he repeated the words in Danish.

“Why do you even talk to him? Why don’t you shut the door on him?”

“He humiliates me. I won’t find any peace until he’s dead. He’s ruined us.”

“Who is Ibrahim talking about?” Louise asked.

The interpreter stopped the recording and thought for a moment before shaking his head and saying, “It could be a friend, an acquaintance, someone from the family. I don’t know. But it could also be himself. If he killed his daughter and is convicted, I would interpret that as self-reproach.”

When he turned the playback on again, they heard deep sobbing and a sentence so drowned out by the sobs they had to play it several times before Fahid was able to tell them what had been said.

“It would have been better if she weren’t dead, but alive.”

Again Fahid turned it off and looked at them.

“That is a very strong expression he used there,” he explained. “He means they might have been able to find a different solution than taking her life.”

“Well, then, he’s admitting it, isn’t he?” Skipper exclaimed.

“No, I wouldn’t interpret it that way. I would sooner say he’s acknowledging that someone is responsible for her death and that he might know who it is. I don’t consider it a direct admission.”

“You still don’t think they should be questioned about what they’re saying here?” Mik asked, looking at Storm, who shook his head.

“They shouldn’t find out we’ve been listening in on them until we arrest him, if we’re going to. We can use this in court to get the court order extended if that’s necessary. If we need to, we can confront them with the most important sections of the recordings and ask them to explain themselves. We can also easily compare things they haven’t disclosed and false statements up until that point if they don’t know we’re listening.”

It was obvious that Louise’s partner did not agree with that plan, but he gave in and continued paying attention as Storm signaled to the interpreter to continue.

Sada’s clear voice filled the room.

“I told you you shouldn’t kill her. She could have gotten married.” He was still crying when he again said something. “I didn’t do it. She was my daughter.”

“Who did it, then? It was your fault.”

“There’s a very unpleasant atmosphere between the two of them. It is completely obvious that his wife is accusing him, but he is denying it. I think he sounds extremely unhappy,” Fahid said once the sequence had finished playing.

“Does he say anything we could charge him with?” Storm asked, not allowing himself to be moved by the sympathy the interpreter seemed to be feeling for Ibrahim.

“No, quite the contrary. He seems agitated and unhappy.”

“He’s alluding to a third person, isn’t he?” Louise asked, her eyes on the interpreter.

She couldn’t tell if Fahid was feeling trapped, as if his loyalties were divided, or if he had really changed his opinion on the father partway through this session. At first he had seemed like he believed Ibrahim was incriminating himself, but now he was leaning toward believing Ibrahim was profoundly unhappy.

“There’s something about this family that isn’t right,” Skipper said in his calm, deliberate manner. “That story Camilla Lind wrote about the rabbit made that quite obvious.”

Louise had been disgusted when her friend had called her one evening after talking to Samra’s friend Fatima, who had related an episode that had taken place a month before Samra was killed. One night Samra’s parents served their daughter’s pet rabbit for dinner, but told her it was chicken. It was only after she’d eaten it that her father asked her to go out to the yard and look in the empty rabbit cage. Camilla’s story had taken up the whole front page that time.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they killed her,” Fahid objected, eyeing them steadily. “Ibrahim explained that he’d done that to punish Samra, because she’d come home so late one night after visiting her aunt and uncle in Benløse. They had had a clear agreement that she would be back at a specific time. And yet she didn’t get home until several hours after that.”

“That’s quite a severe punishment for a young girl,” Mik said, staring at the wall.

According to Fatima, Samra had run straight into the bathroom and thrown up until there wasn’t anything left in her stomach, and after that she refused to eat, no matter what her mother served her.

“Why don’t we just charge the family?” Velin asked, looking at Storm in irritation, as if he was losing faith in his boss’s ability to make decisions.

“Because we’ll get more out of waiting until we’re sure that we have enough to hold them on,” Storm replied sharply.

The interpreter finished his work, and Louise walked back to her office with Mik with an uncomfortable sense that the atmosphere at work was becoming rather tense. Good thing the weekend was almost here, so they wouldn’t all have to spend every minute in such tight quarters for a couple of days.