30

BY THE TIME LOUISE HAD READ MOST OF SAMRA’S DIARY, she had a knot in her gut.

The pages drew a picture of a young girl who was torn. On the one hand, she was trying to meet her parents’ expectations and demands, while at the same time she tried to adapt to her new country and new friends. It was clear that she was having a hard time finding the balance between these two in her own identity. Was she Danish or was she still a Muslim girl from Jordan? Louise read between the lines that what Samra was really trying to achieve, with so much effort, was to be a Muslim Danish girl, which on the surface sounded easy enough; but when you read the diary, you realized it was obviously far from it.

Louise had been taking notes on the things that would be of particular interest when they started questioning Samra’s family again in a bit. It was clear in a couple of places that Samra had started having thoughts of love—at least, emotions had begun to occupy a more visible significance in the words she wrote. Louise guessed that she might have fallen in love, but it was not clear that she had begun a relationship. She had written short poems about what she thought it would be like for two people to share a life. “The person I love and me,” she wrote in her script. She also wrote a story about what it would be like when they went up to the old Crusaders’ castle in Jordan together and sat looking out over the valley and then after that walked home to her grandmother’s house and drank tea and ate sweet cakes.

Louise was a little surprised that Samra dreamed of walking home with her boyfriend in Rabba instead of along the sound in Holbæk.

“Did you know that your daughter kept a diary?” Louise asked, once she’d brought Ibrahim in.

He did not appear to understand what she meant.

Louise held up the diary so he could see it. “Do you recognize this?” she asked instead.

He hesitated and shrugged. “Maybe.”

“It’s your daughter’s diary. Where she wrote down her secrets.”

His face remained expressionless, so she continued.

“This book gives me reason to believe there’s something you’re not telling us. Something that made Samra very afraid. In several places she expressed outright fear that she might have to die.”

Ibrahim looked away from her, but didn’t say anything.

“Did you kill your daughter?” Louise asked bluntly after several minutes of silence.

He shook his head.

“I could never hurt my little girl,” he finally said just as Louise was giving up on hearing him say anything.

“I know that you hurt her. It says that clearly here in the book, but that happened long before she died. Something occurred during the last few months of her life. What was it that made her so unhappy and afraid?”

He thought about it for a long time before he said anything. “Maybe something at school?” he suggested.

Louise shook her head. “I think your daughter had a secret she was trying to keep hidden from her family. But she didn’t succeed and then she became really, really scared.”

Ibrahim went pale, but remained silent.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” Louise asked, even though Dicta had already told her that Samra had never said anything that would suggest that.

Ibrahim didn’t make eye contact, but he shook his head.

“It’s strange,” Louise said, “that I thought it was you she was afraid of, but this here confuses me.”

She read the last page of the diary out loud and stared intensely at him to take in his reaction.

She read, “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.”

Now Ibrahim hid his face in his hands and sat silently rocking back and forth.

Louise cleared her throat.

“I think you should tell me about this. The fact is, we know that something happened. And it won’t just go away because you sit there hiding,” she said, trying to sound kind.

While she waited patiently, she wrote on a piece of paper that she didn’t think he knew about the diary. She got up and walked into the office next door, where Mik was questioning Hamid. Without saying anything, she set the piece of paper on the desk and waited while he wrote back to her: “Hamid does. And the bag.”

She returned to Ibrahim, who lifted his head as she entered.

“I didn’t hurt my daughter,” he repeated after Louise was seated.

“You mean other than killing her pet rabbit and forcing her to eat it.” It slipped out before she could stop herself. She instantly regretted it, because now she was going to have to do some coaxing if she was to have any hope of getting him to talk. Idiot, she thought to herself, rubbing her face with both hands. She watched him as he sat there like a statue, then she sighed and said: “Maybe it wasn’t you who physically killed her. But I think you know what happened to her and what she was afraid of. She writes that she had lost her faith in the people who loved her. And the people she was referring to were her family. In other words, you. My colleague is sitting next door talking to your son. He’s not as reluctant to tell us what he knows. For example, he was well aware that his sister hid a bag of clothes at her friend’s house. Clothes she didn’t dare keep at home because you wouldn’t allow her to wear the same things her classmates wore. Hamid also knew about the diary, and I think he was aware that his sister confided in Dicta Møller.”

At that moment, something struck her, and she got up and left the office with a quick apology. Storm and Ruth were sitting in the command room, studying the big whiteboard where details about Samra’s life and actions during the period leading to her death were written in blue ink. Next to that was a similar summary of Dicta’s final days. Bengtsen and Velin had reconstructed the days up to the time when Dicta had been found in the parking lot.

Louise stood there in the doorway and talked a little too fast. “Could Samra’s family be behind both killings?”

She explained that Hamid had just admitted that he knew about the bag and the hidden clothes and the diary at Dicta’s house.

“If Samra was really hiding a secret that would be so damaging to the family’s honor that they felt they had to kill her, wouldn’t it be possible that they went one step further if they realized that she had confided in her friend from school?”

A thoughtful silence settled over the room as they each tried to picture that scenario.

Ruth got up and walked over to the window, where she gazed out over the square in front of the old police station. Grass and big trees filled the space between the building and the sidewalk on Jernbanegade.

A couple of uniforms were called in to keep an eye on Samra’s family members and make sure none of them left the police station while the team was quickly gathered.

“You’re on to something,” Storm said, nodding at Louise. “That would also explain why the one murder was so carefully thought out and the other seemed very impulsive. If they felt threatened by what Dicta knew, they would have acted fast.”

“Let’s arrest the father and son for killing Samra,” Velin said. “Then we can add charges later to cover Dicta’s murder.”

“Yeah, or we could charge them with both killings from the get-go,” Skipper suggested.

Louise was sitting on the edge of the table.

“We don’t know what secret she was hiding,” Mik reminded them. “Let’s be cautious now not to read too much into this.”

“No, but we know there was one and we know she feared for her life. That’s enough for me right now,” Skipper interjected. “What we don’t know is which of them killed her. That’s why we charge them both.”

“Often the person chosen to do the killing is the person the family can most easily do without,” Dean explained and said that could either be someone who didn’t have anyone else to look after or someone who wasn’t able to contribute by sending money back to the remaining family members in the old country. “Of course it also happens that that person is sometimes a minor,” he concluded.

“You’re saying you think it was Hamid who killed his sister?” Bengtsen said.

“I don’t know what I think. I’d really like a little more to go on before I sign on to anything. I’m just telling you what kinds of considerations I would expect people to contemplate in families living according to strict cultural traditions,” Dean hurried to add.

Storm had remained silent, but now cleared his throat to interrupt their conversation. “I’m not sure we have enough right now to hold them on,” he said, “but we’ll do it and then gamble on more coming out during questioning. We may also get lucky and have something turn up if we do a new search, and then we have to hope it’ll be enough.”

“What about Sada?” Louise asked.

“She can go home to the two little ones, and then we’ll follow the audio surveillance closely and have it interpreted as we go. We can easily guess that there will be increased activity if we’re holding her husband and oldest son,” Storm replied. He asked Ruth to get hold of the interpreter they’d had listening to, transcribing, and translating the tapes from the last several weeks in installments of several days’ worth at a time.

“It’s Monday, October 9. The time is 4:55 P.M. You are under arrest for the murders of your daughter Samra al-Abd and her friend Dicta Møller,” Louise said when she returned to the office.

Ibrahim jumped as if he’d received an electrical shock. He stared at her with his eyes agape, after which he collapsed in his chair with his head bowed and his chin resting on his chest.

Louise thought for a minute that he’d fainted and moved over to him. For a brief instant she saw Mik standing out in the hallway with Hamid, ready to walk him down to the uniforms downstairs so the arrest could be processed.

“I have to ask you to follow me,” she said quietly, watching him as he slowly collected himself and stood up.

Neither the father nor the son said anything as their names were entered in the arrest log and they were searched, their possessions placed in clear plastic bags.

“We’ll walk you over to the jail,” Louise said, holding the door for them. Ibrahim had kept his eyes on the ground, but when he was even with Louise, he raised his head and gazed right into her eyes with a profoundly unhappy, silent look, as he almost imperceptibly shook his head.

Two officers were waiting in the jail to accept the men. They said hello to Mik and nodded at her. Before they took Ibrahim and Hamid away, Louise stopped them and walked over to the two arrestees.

“If there’s anything you want to say, just ask to come talk to Mik Rasmussen or me,” she said and then watched them as they started walking down the hallway toward the jail cells.

Louise and Mik returned to their office and started reading through all the previous transcripts of questioning sessions with the family members before they started with the father and son again.

It was only just seven when the deputy chief of police walked into the office and said he wanted to order a preliminary examination that same day so they could get it over with.

Louise was up out of her desk chair so fast that it shot backward and slammed into the wall.

“Out of the question,” she said, giving him a stern look. “We need the full time, and we have twenty-four hours for the questioning we need to get through.”

Mik was also standing, but he said nothing.

The deputy chief paced back and forth a little bit before he leaned against the wall and looked from Mik to Louise.

“I read the whole thing and I’m not sure I have enough to keep them in custody,” he finally said.

Louise pulled her chair back to her desk and sat down.

“But this isn’t a presentation of the evidence. You just need to convince the judge that there is reason to suspect that if we let them out, they could sync up their explanations and sway other people,” Louise said and referenced section 762 (1), paragraph 3. “Now just give us a little peace to do our work.”

The deputy chief hesitated. “Fine. We’ll hold off on the preliminary examination until tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “But by then, I will also expect you to have something more for me.”