Only One Life: A Novel Part 14

"Did you take drugs? Pills? Or smoke something?"

Dicta vehemently shook her head.

"I just drank champagne."

Louise forced her to drink some more water and relaxed a little to hear it had just been champagne. Although that could be bad enough when you were fifteen and almost certainly hadn't had it before. It struck Louise that she probably ought to call the girl's parents instead of sitting here herself with the sad dregs of their daughter.

"What about your parents?" she asked. "I have to call them."

Dicta shook her head again.

"Were you with your photographer?" Louise asked, already prepared for the scolding the Venstrebladet photographer could look forward to after dropping his young model off outside the train station in this condition.

Dicta suddenly looked childishly proud in the midst of all her misery as she told Louise that she'd been photographed by one of the big-name photographers.

"He photographed Lykke May too," she said, clearly a.s.suming that Louise would be familiar with the name of one of Denmark's most successful models.

"Can you give me a few more details? I'm not quite following. How did you end up with him?"

Dicta had perked up a bit.

"I'd seen his name in a few magazines, and then yesterday I called him and he invited me in for a photo session."

There were a few too many Ss in "session," and she struggled to get control of her p.r.o.nunciation as she continued.

"I took the train in this morning and we met at Cafe Ketchup and had brunch. His studio is right next door."

Louise was a little surprised at how uncomplicated and familiar she made it all sound.

"Do you usually go to Copenhagen like that?" she asked. "It sounds like you're familiar with the cafes."

Dicta shook her head and said that she'd never been there before-she'd just read about it. She and Liv had been to Copenhagen over summer vacation, but otherwise she usually went there with her parents.

That reminded Louise that she had to contact them. "Do your parents know that you're back?"

"They think I'm at Liv's house," Dicta said, brus.h.i.+ng aside Louise's objections.

"But they know you went to Copenhagen?"

This was starting to sound like an interrogation and Louise noticed Dicta receding into her own world again, so Louise restrained herself and let the girl go on with her story.

"His studio was really impressive compared to the one Michael has here at home," Dicta said, describing the walls with the different photographic backdrops and a bunch of lights and filters to tone down the light.

"What does Michael Mogensen have to say about your finding yourself another photographer?"

"He doesn't know I went there. Michael's totally not in the same league. Tue says that too," she said, explaining that the Copenhagen photographer's name was Tue Sunds and that he had already explained to her over the phone that if she was really dreaming about making it big on an international level, she was going to have to stop wasting her time in a Podunk town like Holbaek.

"Michael is really just small potatoes, a provincial photographer," Dicta said with a level of disdain that was the result of her visit to the big city.

"Why did Tue Sunds want to meet you on a Sat.u.r.day?" Louise interrupted when the question occurred to her. "I hope you didn't take your clothes off for him."

Dicta turned to face her angrily, and there was something comical about the gesture because she still hadn't regained full control over her speech or coordination. She flung out her hands, whacking the back of one of them against the edge of the table.

"Are you crazy? I wouldn't do that!"

"Did you two go anywhere else?" Louise asked.

The girl sat for a bit before responding that they'd only been to the cafe and then he took a couple of pictures of her.

"Just a couple?"

That didn't seem like very many considering the man had spent his Sat.u.r.day on this. In that case, it was probably a desire to maximize his income, Louise supposed.

"I mean, he is a professional," Dicta retorted quickly. "He's totally not like Michael, who spends several hours on a single pose. Tue works for the big magazines."

"But you didn't get home until now? Or had you already been back in Holbaek for a while when I met you?"

Dicta obviously had to think about that one for a minute. Maybe she just couldn't remember how or when she'd come back.

"I took the train home and had just gotten back. And then standing there outside the station I suddenly had to throw up."

Louise shook her head at the girl.

"What did you guys do for the rest of the day?"

"We went out and drank champagne to celebrate our new collaboration." Dicta sounded proud. "He said one of the heads of the big modeling agencies often came to the same place and that he would introduce us."

Louise sat there with her arms crossed.

"Did you go back to his place after that?" she asked, and Dicta nodded so that her long, blonde hair fell down over her face in wisps.

"We drank more wine and ate the sus.h.i.+ and caviar he ordered before I had to go home."

"Did you sleep with him?"

Dicta melodramatically widened her eyes and gave Louise a shocked, offended look with her groggy eyes.

"You have no right to ask me that. He thinks I have a lot of potential." Again Dicta had trouble speaking clearly. "He says I could make it as far as Lykke May or Louise P."

"Did he do anything to you against your will?" Louise asked when Dicta didn't respond to her question.

"What do you mean?" Dicta asked, seeming sincerely not to understand.

"Did he force you to do anything you didn't feel comfortable with?" Louise really couldn't put it anymore clearly than that.

Dicta closed her eyes and hid her face in her hands as she shook her head. After a while, she moved her hands again and gave Louise a dark look. "You're like my mother. Why don't you believe that amazing things can really happen?"

Louise was about to defend herself, but saw how tired and wretched Dicta looked. "Of course they can really happen. I just want to make sure that he didn't take advantage of you. You're a little off balance these days after what happened to your friend. That can make it harder to make good decisions."

"He didn't. He just thought I was pretty, and he really wanted to help me. We kissed a little. Okay?"

She added the last part out of spite and Louise couldn't tell if that covered everything that had happened. But she wasn't actually all that concerned as long as the girl hadn't been molested on top of being marinated in a large portion of champagne.

Louise stood up and supported Dicta under her arm and helped her up.

"I'll drive you home."

Dicta stood there unstably on her feet and looked as if she wanted to protest, but Louise started pulling her along right away.

It was dark in the big house when Louise parked outside, but by the time she reached the front door Charlie had already started barking loudly and several lights along the driveway switched on. She rang the bell and supported Dicta while they waited for the door to open.

"No one's home," Dicta said after they'd waited a while.

Louise looked at her in surprise.

"Then why are we standing here waiting for someone to open the door?" Louise asked, helping Dicta as the girl tried to extract her keys from the little chest pocket of her jeans jacket.

At first the girl didn't answer, then she shrugged and laughed a little foolishly. "I forgot it was the weekend," she said, getting the door open without letting the dog out. "My mom spends most of her weekends at dog shows or agility courses, and my dad goes along. Otherwise they'd never see each other."

She spat that last sentence out and had obviously heard the explanation repeated so many times that it had become a kind of mantra. Louise had the sense that it was more that Dicta didn't care about her parents' priorities, not that they upset her. Louise stood there in the front door watching the girl slip off her jacket and toss it on the floor. Once she had ascertained that Dicta was heading for her bedroom she yelled good night and shut the door to drive back to the hotel.

19.

"WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THOSE TIRES?" STORM ASKED, irritated, looking at Skipper and Dean.

It had been more than two weeks since Samra had been found, and the whole group was sitting around the table in the command room. So far they hadn't gotten anything out of the crime-scene investigations or the dinghies that were out there, the search of the al-Abds' home, or the string of witness statements that Louise and Mik had spent the intervening weeks on along with Bengtsen and Velin. They'd trawled through everything-acquaintances, work relations.h.i.+ps, family, neighbors. Storm had even considered whether he ought to have Interpol send one of them to Jordan to speak to family members there, but it would have a big impact on the investigation if that kind of questioning was to be permitted and he still hadn't found a way to justify it.

Skipper reached for a little stack of papers he had on the table in front of him.

"Well, there is a report here from the crime-scene investigators that we've been working with for the last several days. They compared the tire tracks secured out at Honsehalsen with the tires of Ibrahim's red Peugeot. In one of the treads in the crime scene track they found a milled groove, which was measured at 1.3 millimeters deep. In comparing that to the corresponding tread on the Peugeot's four tires the corresponding depths were measured at 1.4 on the left front tire, 1.7 on the left rear tire, 1.6 on the right front tire, and 1.8 on the right rear tire," he read from the pages and then set them down again. "Therefore there are no specific parameters that can serve as a basis for identification between the plaster of Paris cast from the scene and Ibrahim's car," Skipper concluded. "But we also can't rule out that the impressions at the site were made by his car. The tire impressions are of the same dimension with an equivalent pattern and wear. We'll just never be able to prove it."

"All right, then let's drop that," Storm said gruffly. "There's no reason to throw more resources in that direction."

He went on to explain that there hadn't been anything in the dinghies that were close to where the body was found, nothing besides remnants of fish blood, which had aroused interest at first until Dean reminded everyone that Samra hadn't bled.

Louise sighed and looked around at the rest of the team. She sensed that they had all been banking on the tire tracks being unique and matching the car Samra's father usually drove. There was no doubt that Samra's body had been dumped into the water from a boat, but the family could easily have driven her out to the site and then just rowed her out from there instead of crossing the entire sound with her in the boat.

Since they couldn't rule out the possibility that the tire track had been made by any random driver, Skipper and Dean had issued a press release asking people who owned cars with the same type of tires to contact them if they'd been out at Honsehalsen in the days before the killing. There had also been a great deal of talk about tires and tire tracks in the media and on the police's home page. But no one had come forward.

"We have to keep looking," Storm said, nodding at Bengtsen. "Should we expand our search for witnesses?"

Bengtsen stopped him by thrusting a hand up in the air. "We've talked to a lot of people the last couple weeks. It would be total coincidence if we suddenly found one who'd seen the girl. It isn't likely."

"Well, then we'll focus on the audio surveillance of the family, and we may have to consider starting to put some pressure on them to see if there's any reaction."

Soren seemed to support that decision. "We'll keep going with the digital room bug, and there's a wiretap on their landline too," he said.

Storm nodded and appeared satisfied. Louise was hardly as satisfied. They'd been working hard the last two weeks, mostly routine work, in the hopes that they'd overlooked something, but nothing new had turned up. She thought about Dicta. Louise hadn't talked to her since that night at the hotel, but maybe it was most considerate to let that episode be, she thought, getting up as the meeting ended.

"There are women strong enough to fight their way out of the iron grip their d.a.m.ned families keep them locked in. They break free to escape forced marriages and violence and mentally ill husbands who feel so overly confident that they own these women that they rape them around the clock and dominate them and d.a.m.n well believe that they have the absolute right to use them any way they will." Camilla was working herself up to maximum volume. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. "But that's a tiny fraction compared to all the women who stick around and put up with the whole thing because they don't have the same strength."

She was sitting across from Terkel Hoyer in his office and had just turned in two articles for the next day's paper, but after she saw the look on his face, she realized that she couldn't even count on a mention on the front page.

"It's been over two weeks since the girl's body was discovered, but instead of going to the police and pressuring them to reveal whatever the h.e.l.l they're doing, you turn in two articles about honor and shame and about women who never get a real chance to integrate into Danish society, because, according to you, they're bound by cultural traditions."

Camilla kept a straight face.

"What the h.e.l.l are you thinking?" thundered her editor. "Our readers couldn't care less about cultural traditions if they cause a couple of parents to kill their daughter. No one is ever going to accept that kind of thing in Denmark, no matter what the girl did to get on her family's bad side. If they choose to live in Denmark, then it's up to them to f.u.c.king follow our cultural norms! You're not going to get anywhere with that angle, and you can't be cramming c.r.a.p like that down my readers' throats. This paper does not condone that kind of thing in any way."

Ah, so now they were his readers, Camilla thought. Her voice was icy as she got up to stand in front of his desk. "I don't agree with you," she said simply. "What I wrote has nothing to do with getting Danes to accept this. But it can't hurt to try to understand where it's coming from, to get to the bottom of why people are doing these things, which we very obviously don't understand and which of course we will not tolerate. Your readers may well be stupid, but I don't f.u.c.king think they're that stupid."

She spun around and a couple of steps later, once she was out of the office, she slammed the door shut behind her so the wall shook. She did it again when she got to her own office just to get some of the rage out of her system in an efficient way.

Camilla sat down at her desk and looked at her screen: Loneliness was worse than fear. She had promised Sada some sort of redress in the paper and she was ready to go to some lengths to make good on her promise. But right now that felt rather impossible. Terkel was going to have to back down a little first, or she was going to have to come up with some news from Holbaek. There just wasn't any news, though. Obviously she'd been keeping tabs on developments the whole time. What was he thinking?

The whole time since Sada had come to see her at the hotel, Camilla had been working on those two articles on the side, along with everything else she'd written. She had spent a lot of time getting all her research in place, talked to women who had managed to break free, and even with a Pakistani woman whose husband had kept her locked in their small apartment and brutally raped her whenever he wanted to have s.e.x, which was at least once a day. If she begged him to leave her alone, he beat her.

Camilla had striven to distinguish between religion and culture in the articles, to explain that the two things didn't have anything to do with each other when it came to concepts like honor and shame.

"When you lose your honor, you lose your worth as a person and a social being," Camilla had written, linking that to the Arabic saying "Honor is what distinguishes people from animals."

It had shaken her that honor killings in the Middle East were increasing instead of decreasing. And there was obviously a big difference between the shamefulness of an act and the consequences for it. Women's s.e.xuality was worst of all, for example, being unfaithful and having s.e.x outside marriage. Only after that came hardened criminality. She shook her head and felt deeply indignant on behalf of her s.e.x.

Camilla had determined that the consequences of such an act depended a lot on where you lived. In traditional families in rural areas, honor and shame meant much more than in modern families in urban environments, so obviously it was impossible to generalize. She had also made a big deal of elaborating on that.

When she was almost done, she had stumbled across something that had made her consider whether she ought to write the story at all, because there was something about it that she had obviously misunderstood and she thought she might never really truly comprehend the whole thing.

In the Koran it said that you mustn't force someone to marry against their will. So how the f.u.c.k could parents still be forcing their wishes on their children? But there was obviously also something cultural going on, Camilla realized. She just didn't see how people could so blatantly be going against the Koran, since it made it so clear. She had decided not to include that in the article, but the book was sitting there as a note on her desk and she had to admit that it all was quite complicated. So she had gone to see Terkel with her two articles, which she considered important to the debate that had been raging steadily in the press since Samra's murder.

Now in a fit she had crumpled them both up and tossed them into the corner of her office. She swung her legs onto her desk and sat there lost in thought, her eyes focused on the many drawings Markus had made for her, which she had dutifully hung up on the wall as a border all the way around her desk.

She had actually been planning to drive to Holbaek that evening to find out if there'd been any progress that hadn't percolated out of the police command room yet. Markus was with his dad, so that would have worked great. But after her run-in with Terkel she suddenly didn't care. It was one thing for him to have his opinions, but it surprised her that he had voiced them aloud. It was inappropriate for an editor to so openly take sides.

It made her jump when he flung open the door without knocking and fired off his torrent of words in one breath: "If you can find some kind of Danish angle in your articles, we'll run them. Otherwise, forget it. We're not publis.h.i.+ng a manifesto here."

He was gone before she'd processed what he'd said, and the door had already clicked shut by the time she yelled that it was too a manifesto if he was going to be so freaking one-sided that he wouldn't even listen to the other side.