SCHÄFER ENTERED THE interrogation room and closed the door behind him. He looked at the man who was seated on the other side of the desk. He was tall and athletic, with long, sinewy muscles, clearly in good shape. His head was shaved smooth and shone glossily, his sunken cheeks covered in dark stubble.
Salah Ahmed looked directly at Schäfer.
There was something about the look in his eyes that Schäfer had difficulty interpreting. Every guilty person who had ever sat in that chair had looked either defiant or eager to please, but what he saw now was different from anything he had ever seen before.
Was that pride? Honor?
Schäfer stepped over to the table and pulled out a chair, informing the man once again of his rights. Then he pulled a photo out of the case file and pushed it across the table. It was the picture of Thomas Strand at Camp Bastion, the same one that he had shown the Bjerre family.
“I assume that introductions aren’t necessary,” he said.
Salah Ahmed looked down at the photo. He mumbled something or other in Arabic. Then he looked up again.
“You don’t speak Danish?” Schäfer asked.
“I speak Danish just fine,” he replied with a heavy Copenhagen dialect. There was only the vaguest hint of foreignness in his intonation.
“Good, that will make it a little easier for us to have a conversation.”
Schäfer took out the next picture and set it in front of the man. It had been taken by the police photographer in the Pathology Department and showed the entrance hole in Strand’s lower face. The hole was magnified ten times and looked like the impact crater from a meteor.
“What can you tell me about this guy?”
“He looks dead,” Salah Ahmed said, meeting Schäfer’s eyes.
“Good observation.” Schäfer nodded, looking at the man for a moment. Then he leaned forward in his seat. “We know you’re behind this, Salah.” His tone was pleasant, almost brotherly. “So do yourself a favor and cooperate. You’ll be in a better situation then when the evidence is turned over to the prosecution and they decide to file charges against you. Because believe me, they will!”
Salah Ahmed said nothing.
Schäfer leaned back in his seat and clasped his hands in front of his stomach. Waiting. Patient.
He still didn’t have anything on Ahmed other than his fingerprint on the radiator in a dead man’s apartment. If Schäfer didn’t come up with anything else, he would go free after the twenty-four hours Schäfer was allowed to detain him before he either had to be questioned before a judge or released.
Schäfer needed to get a confession out of the man. He needed to get him to talk.
“You’re Iraqi?” he asked.
“I’m a Danish citizen, like you.”
“But you were born in Iraq?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of Denmark?”
Salah Ahmed snorted. “Denmark or Danes?”
“Is there a difference?”
He half smiled and nodded. “There’s a difference.”
“All right,” Schäfer said. “Then what do you think about Danes? Or to be more specific: What do you think about this Dane?” He nodded at the picture of Thomas Strand.
“I’d like to talk to a lawyer.” Salah Ahmed leaned back in his chair with a look that revealed that he had said all he intended to say about the matter. “I know my rights. I want a lawyer.”
“That’s all very well.” Schäfer’s gaze cooled. “But unlike what you’ve seen on CSI or DNA or whatever other Hollywood shows, that’s not how the cookie crumbles here in Denmark. You’re welcome to a lawyer once I’m done with you, not a second before. And if you don’t—”
The door behind them opened and Schäfer looked over at it in irritation. Bertelsen stood in the doorway and signaled that he should come out into the hall.
Schäfer got up and left the room. He turned to Bertelsen as soon as the door was closed, a bit peeved at having been interrupted so early in his questioning.
“What is it?”
“We ran the Ahmed family through the system.”
“And?”
“He has a cousin.”
“Most people do,” Schäfer said.
“The cousin’s name is Kareem Hussein Al-Fadl Ahmed. He works for the military.”
A buzz spread through Schäfer’s chest. He nodded to get Bertelsen to continue.
“He’s a trauma psychologist at Svanemøllen Barracks. He works with the soldiers.”
“And Thomas Strand?”
Bertelsen nodded. “Strand was his client.”
Schäfer nodded, pleased. “Good job, Nils Petter.”
He turned to return to his questioning session.
“There’s more,” Bertelsen said.
Schäfer looked back at him.
“Ahmed’s immediate family came to Denmark in 1993. His parents and grandparents, his older sister, and his younger sister. But in the paperwork it says there was also a younger brother, but he didn’t come to Denmark.”
“Did he stay in Iraq?”
“It doesn’t say anything about that. It just says that there were eight people in the family, but only seven of them came to Denmark in 1993.”
“Okay,” Schäfer said.
He opened the door again and his eyes met Salah Ahmed’s across the room.
“All right, here’s the situation,” he said and walked over to the table. “Kareem is sitting in the next room and he’s ready to talk.” He sat down heavily in his chair and then waved his hand apologetically. “So I don’t need your help after all, but I will of course make sure that you get a lawyer as you requested, and I wish you good luck going forward.”
Schäfer pulled his phone out of his pocket and started scrolling down his list of contacts.
“I assume you don’t already have a lawyer and you’re not in a financial position to pay for one of the good ones, so it’ll be an appointed one. They’re almost as good, or …” He shook his head. “Well, they’re better than nothing anyway.”
“He deserved it,” Salah Ahmed mumbled.
Schäfer looked up from his phone. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”
“That bastard.” He nodded at the pictures of Strand lying on the autopsy table. “He deserved it.”
“Oh, so now you want to cooperate? Is that what I’m hearing?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“It’s now or never,” Schäfer said. “If you confess, the punishment will no doubt be less severe than if you—”
“I couldn’t care less about the punishment.”
He had to care at least a little bit, Schäfer thought, since he had started talking. He gave a subtle nod to the one-way window in the door to the room, the sign that he wanted to request the papers for Ahmed to sign.
“I couldn’t care less about the punishment,” Salah Ahmed repeated. “Just like you couldn’t care less about someone like me.”
Schäfer looked him in the eyes. “Excuse me?”
“You asked what I think about you Danes,” he said. “I think you don’t care. If it doesn’t involve you—your families, your kids—then you don’t care. You send an asshole like this guy …” He put his index finger on top of the picture of the bullet hole. “You send him to Iraq, to Afghanistan. But you’re not interested in what he does when he’s down there. You couldn’t care less who he kills.”
“Of course we care,” Schäfer said, his brow furrowed. “If we didn’t care, we’d let you go it on your own.”
The man scoffed. “After the Manchester Arena bombing a few years ago, you told each other: ‘Children! Now they’ve started going after children!’ Do you remember that?”
Schäfer didn’t respond.
“All the TV stations showed pictures of the attack,” Salah said. “Picture after picture after picture, right? There was one of a young girl in jeans missing half of one of her pants legs. She left the concert location on crutches, covered in blood stains. Do you remember that? The media showed that picture nonstop. For days. For weeks!”
Schäfer nodded once. He remembered that very well.
“And then you held a memorial concert and lit candles and whatever the hell. I …” Salah Ahmed stared into space as if he were picturing the whole thing. He looked back at Schäfer again. “The week after the attack, I was reading the newspaper. And squeezed in between all the other news, in the middle of the paper, there was a tiny little note that said that forty children had been killed in a bombing in Syria. Only four lines. Planes from the American-led coalition had bombed civilians, families of ISIS fighters.”
“That’s war for you,” Schäfer said gloomily.
“Is it?” Salah raised his eyebrows and smiled joylessly. “You couldn’t care less about the dead children as long as they’re not your dead children. My brother was killed by a bomb like that, an American bomb. In the middle of the night. We were asleep at home in Baghdad. Yazid was in the bed next to mine. And then …” He snapped his fingers. “Then he was gone, but there were no pictures of that in your newspapers, no memorial services, no public outcry. You couldn’t have cared less. He was six years old. Oh well!” He shrugged as his eyes teared up. “He wasn’t one of yours.”
Schäfer didn’t say anything. What could he say?
“I have a kid now,” Salah said. “A little boy. And to know that he can grow up in a world where there is one less Thomas Strand …” He nodded to himself. “I’m fine with that. So to answer your question: Yes! I avenged Yazid and all the others like him, and I’m fine with that. Your soldier murdered innocent children—ask Kareem! He murdered innocent people for fun, and there wasn’t a single person here in this country who even raised an eyebrow.”
Schäfer regarded him with a neutral expression. “What children did Strand allegedly kill?”
“I had a fare over Christmas one time, picked the customer up in my cab out on Amagerbrogade somewhere. A chatty guy who tells me that he was a soldier at the barracks out in Østerbro, Svanemøllen, you know?”
Schäfer nodded.
“I tell him that my cousin works there and it turns out this guy knows Kareem. He says that I should tell him hello from a Thomas Strand. Nice guy, I think, and drop him off on Sølvgade. I spend New Year’s Eve with Kareem and tell him about the conversation, talking pleasantly about this Strand guy, and then Kareem’s face suddenly turns red. I can tell that something is wrong, but he says that he can’t tell me what it is, that he needs to maintain patient confidentiality. But I keep digging into it until by the end of the night he finally gives in …” He leaned forward in his chair indignantly. “Then he tells me that that bastard shot women and children in Afghanistan, that he killed innocent people—children!—for fun.”
Salah Ahmed’s body was tense with indignation, like one big middle finger gesturing. He leaned back in his chair and shook his head.
“I couldn’t forget that story, and I knew where the man lived … So he got what he deserved.”
The door opened and Bertelsen handed the papers and a ballpoint pen to Schäfer.
Schäfer set them both in front of Salah Ahmed and watched as he signed the confession. Then Schäfer nodded a couple of times; bit his cheek a little.
“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “What you described about your little brother is tragic, of course, and you’d have to be a callous jerk with a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for your story. But there’s just one problem we haven’t talked about yet …”
Salah looked Schäfer in the eye.
“Lukas Bjerre,” Schäfer said.
Salah suddenly froze in his chair.
Schäfer saw his eyes wander, and then the martyr-like expression was back. It only lasted for a split second.
But it was enough.