29

THE PASTOR WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN WITH DlCTA’S PARENTS when Mik and Louise came to the front door. Both Anne and Henrik Møller came to greet them when they rang the bell. A bunch of bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in cellophane, along with small white cards that hadn’t been opened or read yet were sitting on the counter. The pastor stood up and shook hands with Mik and Louise.

“It appears that sorrow has settled over our town for the time being,” he said.

There was something very forthright and confidence-inspiring about him, and there was a peace in the kitchen even though the grief was also palpable and visible in both parents. The mother’s eyes were red and puffy, her nose bright and shiny and rubbed almost raw from wiping and countless handkerchief dabs. The father’s face was ashen and withdrawn, his eyes glassy, but there was no sign of tears. So he hadn’t gotten that far yet, Louise thought, but it would come. In some people, the crying and flood of tears happened right away, while in others the grief had to take root in all of their cells before the reaction came.

“We would really like permission to look around Dicta’s room. Do you have anything against that?” Louise asked, after they’d both said no-thank-you to coffee or joining the parents at the table.

“Of course we don’t have anything against that,” Henrik said immediately. He stood up and led the way and opened the door, but remained frozen in the hallway as if he didn’t have the strength to go into the bedroom that still contained so much of his daughter’s spirit in all the things that were in there.

They could hear that Anne had started crying again and the pastor was comforting her. Louise turned her attention to the girl’s room. She’d been there before, but with Dicta, and hadn’t been so interested in the things in the room but instead had been focusing more on what the girl had told her.

There was a big round disco ball hanging in one corner of the room above a small circular table that was so covered in thick, pink pillar candles that there was only space for an old-fashioned alarm clock with a bell on top. The bed was a futon, which was currently made up as a sofa adorned with two cream-colored pillows.

At the end of the bed, hidden behind the open door, hung a large vanity mirror with bare bulbs screwed into a wood frame all the way around it, like you might see in a theater dressing room or like a professional makeup artist might have. Under the mirror hung an open shelf with more hair and body-care products, makeup and perfumes—along with a curling iron and a flat iron—than Louise had seen gathered anywhere else, even at Camilla’s place. Overwhelming and completely unnecessary for a young woman with the appearance nature had imbued Dicta with, Louise thought. Along the opposite wall there was a narrow desk and a tall bookshelf. To the left of the desk a little stereo system was mounted on the wall and in the corner there was a tall, narrow CD holder.

A Fatboy beanbag chair filled up the space just to the left of the door. The trendy, oversized version of the classic 1970s beanbag chair was pink and matched the candles on the table. On the floor next to that, there was a big pile of fashion magazines. A quick glance showed that they were Costume, Eurowoman, Sirene, and Bazaar. There was also a TV and a small black iPod on the table under the disco ball. The only thing missing was the computer Bengtsen and Velin had already picked up. On the wall over the desk, there was a photo collage that Dicta had made herself with pictures of several of the biggest international models on catwalks from around the world.

“She was a beautiful girl,” Mik said, as Dicta’s father stood in the doorway.

Henrik nodded and asked if they needed him to stay while they looked through her things.

“No, we can manage on our own,” Louise hurried to say. It would be better if she and Mik could talk undisturbed without worrying about offending the girl’s parents.

“We’ll see if she wrote anything about her meetings with Tue Sunds,” Louise said once she’d taken a seat on the sofa to get an overview. Mik had gently put his arms around her waist as he slipped around her to enter the room and she could still feel his hands on her body. It irritated her that she was receptive and, besides, it wasn’t okay that he touched her that way. He would never have done that before their night together.

She followed him with her eyes as he opened Dicta’s closet and started slowly flipping through her hangers. Not surprisingly, the closet was crammed full. The floor of it was littered with shoes and boots. The room overall was neat and tidy on the surface, but as soon as you opened something, an awful mess was revealed. This young woman obviously had not yet developed any sense of order yet, or she just hadn’t been interested in that.

Louise got up and started with the bottom shelf in the bookcase. It was mostly textbooks and three-ring binders; the two shelves above that were books, children’s and young adult; and then there were computer games, The Sims and The Sims 2. Louise was guessing they hadn’t been used in a while, because there weren’t many kidlike things left in the room anymore.

Then there was the shelf with the photo album and a thin scrapbook. Louise took both of them over to the sofa to look through.

A lot of pictures had been taken of Dicta. Louise could see that this must have been done over a long period of time, possibly over a year, because she had changed over time. Louise left the album sitting on her lap and flipped open the scrapbook. Several stores in town had used Dicta in their ads, and Michael Mogensen had also used her often as a model in the photos accompanying stories in the local paper. There were also clippings showing her as a movie extra. He had apparently done what he could to make her dream of a modeling career come true, Louise ascertained, lingering for a bit over the clippings Dicta had pasted on the front page of the scrapbook and drawn a thick border around with a felt-tip marker. They were quotes from a couple of the biggest names in Danish modeling.

“Remember your goals. A single picture can ruin your career.”

That was surely true, Louise thought, letting her eyes move down to the next frame.

“The first time you see your picture on the cover of Vogue, the sky falls and the world opens up. That’s the best.”

Dicta had double-underlined “the best.”

Louise read the first quote to Mik.

“Then why the hell did she send a picture to Ekstra Bladet?” he asked.

Louise shrugged. She started looking through the rest of the shelf to see if maybe there was a calendar or day planner that Dicta might have written something in. Something like that might also reveal how many times she’d been to Copenhagen, and Louise would take great satisfaction in slapping it down on the table in front of Tue Sunds and asking him to provide some more details on his first statement.

“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 up 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.