Only One Life: A Novel Part 23

"They were friends," came the answer.

"You mean that your daughter might have confided in her friend?" Camilla fished. That was also her guess at the police's connection.

Again there was a nod.

It was hard to tell if Sada was telling the truth or if she didn't dare divulge what her daughter had been hiding. But now at least she admitted that there had been something.

"Let's try to think about it from the police's perspective. Are they a.s.suming it was an honor killing?" Camilla started, asking Sada to think through what might have triggered Ibrahim's rage. She had a strong hunch that deep down inside, Sada was afraid her husband's temper had gotten away from him and that in a fit of rage he had killed their daughter, but Sada categorically rejected that.

"That kind of thing never happens as long as no one outside the family knows about what took place," Sada slowly explained, as if she were trying to select each correct word individually. "My daughter didn't do anything that our family is aware of."

Camilla asked her to explain that a bit more clearly.

"When girls are killed, it's because you can't defend the family's honor to the rest of the family-I mean, the extended family."

Sada reached out for Camilla's white paper napkin and asked to borrow a pen.

She drew a little circle.

"This is my immediate family, at home on Dysseparken." Then she made a larger circle around that. "This is the rest of our extended family who live in Denmark," she explained.

Yet another ring around those.

"This is the entire extended family back home in Rabba."

She looked earnestly at Camilla and set the tip of the pen down on the outer circle.

"When the extended family knows there are problems with a daughter, they will want you to get her under control. If you can't do that, things can turn out badly."

She moved the pen in to the innermost circle.

"We loved our daughter. If there are problems, then you help your child. Things don't turn out badly here."

Camilla tried to follow. "What you're saying is that the rumor that something is wrong has to make it further than this small nuclear family before it would result in an honor killing?"

Sada nodded.

"And the problems that involved Samra weren't something that anyone outside your immediate family knew about?"

Sada shook her head, apparently not realizing that by doing so she was confirming that there had been problems. She stood up quickly and packed up her daughter's playthings as she thanked Camilla for the tea.

"I can't make them understand," Sada said on her way out the door.

Camilla sat there lost in her thoughts for a long time. She didn't doubt that Sada felt trapped in the prejudices about the culture she came from, and somewhere deep down inside she also seemed to feel unsure of what she herself should think about Samra's fate.

As Camilla left the restaurant a little while after that, a crowd of teenagers on the other side of the street caught her eye. They had surrounded Sada and her children, who hadn't made it to the bus stop yet but were trapped in front of the large train station building.

Camilla ran out the door and marched over to the group. Once she had pushed her way through, she positioned herself between the crowd and Sada, and made it loud and clear that if they did not leave this family alone, she would call the police faster than they could repeat the T in towelhead, which was just one of the words she'd overheard them using.

Instead of dissipating as Camilla had hoped, the teens started aggressively closing in. They were somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old, she guessed, and their anger at Samra's mother hung like a thick cloud around them.

"Girl killer!" one of the boys hissed at Sada as she and her kids started backing away from the group. Word of the arrests had spread quickly and, in a small town like Holbaek, the response was quite evident.

Camilla heard Aida crying and, outraged, she stepped up to the group's apparent ringleader.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing, you little p.r.i.c.k?" she snarled, sensing more than seeing how a couple of the boys jumped. She whipped her press pa.s.s out of her purse.

"If one of you has a beef you want to get off your chest, then I would love to hear it. Bring it to me, not to a woman walking down the street with her children. That's just pathetic."

Camilla overheard some of them mumbling that she ought to "shut her a.s.s" and quit b.u.t.ting in where she didn't belong, and she ignored a shove to her left shoulder. She maintained eye contact with the boy she had spoken to.

"Until someone is found guilty of murder, you need to shut up and quit bullying people. But, actually, I'd really like to write about your anger, and maybe I can even get your pictures in the paper," she said, her sarcasm lurking just below the surface.

Then she turned and followed Sada, who was headed over to the buses. She stayed until Sada and the kids were safely seated. By the time the bus pulled away, the boys were gone.

32.

THE PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION STARTED AT THREE, and it was fair. The whole investigative team attended and listened along as the judge found that there was sufficient reason to hold the father and son and that they could remain in custody for fourteen days.

"He wasn't sure enough to hold them for four weeks," Storm said, once they had returned to the command room and were seated around the table drinking sodas, which Ruth had retrieved from the fridge. Still, the relief was obvious in his face. "Well, now we'll have a little s.p.a.ce to work."

Skipper and Dean had just finished searching the al-Abd family's home on Dysseparken right before the preliminary examination began, so no one had heard yet if they'd turned up anything new.

"Nothing," Skipper said, shaking his head. "No murder weapon, no diary pages or anything else that in any way revealed new details about Samra's private life, and now I think I can say that there won't be anything either. There's no place that hasn't been searched, so we need to change tacks."

"Louise and I are on our way to have a chat with the photographer Michael Mogensen," Mik said, draining his Fanta. "And early tomorrow we'll bring Ibrahim's brother in. He was with the parents around the time of Samra's death. We need to ascertain where he was when Dicta was killed."

Louise caught his eye. She left her cola on the table and stood up to signal that she was ready to go. She was having a hard time coming down from the adrenaline rush she'd felt during the preliminary examination, so heading out right away suited her just fine.

Michael Mogensen answered the door quickly when they rang the bell on the front of the large yellow-brick home in which he rented the first floor from his grandmother and also had a large room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, which he used for his studio and computer equipment.

"We would really like to speak to you about the two murders that occurred here in town," Mik began.

A shadow instantly fell over the photographer's eyes and he lowered his head and nodded.

"May we come in?" Louise asked.

He quickly stepped aside to make room. "Of course. Should we go down to my works.p.a.ce, or up to where I live?" He sounded uncertain and uneasy with the situation.

"Your call," Mik said, but when it didn't seem as if anything was happening, Mik suggested that they go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. "You knew Dicta as a result of your work, so that seems fitting."

Portraits of babies, couples, brides, grooms, and businesspeople from town lined the walls, and there were advertising photos and an enlarged reporting series from the School of Arts and Crafts on the outskirts of Holbaek.

The photographer offered them coffee once they were seated by a small coffee table and rolled his own desk chair over so he was sitting across from them, looking at them expectantly.

"I just can't understand it," he began. He seemed more exhausted than Louise had first noticed.

"Tell us how you and Dicta became acquainted," Louise requested, to get him talking.

He seemed to be letting his memory rewind until it found the right instant.

"There'd been a game down at the stadium, and I was on my way home to submit my pictures to my editor. On the way home, I stopped to get a bite to eat, and that's where I saw her. I was standing at the corner by the Kebab House and she came walking toward me."

"How long ago was that?"

"That was last fall. She wasn't that old, but we did a few catalog photos for one of the sporting-supply companies in town and then the rest came later."

"The rest?"

"The jewelry and clothes." He pointed over at some pictures showing a hand with various rings and a neck with an elegant gold chain.

"Did you use other models besides her?" Mik wanted to know.

Mogensen nodded and looked over at a filing cabinet. "But little by little it was actually mostly her that I used. She was good, and my customers were happy with her. But there were some things she was too young for, of course. Women's clothes, for example. I do some work for an optician's shop, and they really wanted their models to be a little older."

"How was she as a model?" Louise asked.

"She was great-natural talent and a pleasure to work with," he said without hesitation.

"Had she ever tried it before you originally stopped her on the street?"

He shook his head. "No, never. But like I said, I could see that she could become something. Which is why I devoted the time to helping her feel comfortable in front of the camera. Those pictures would just remain in the cabinet. It was an investment for both of us, which ultimately brought in more gigs."

"What do you know about the photographer she went to see in Copenhagen? Did she tell you about her plans?"

Michael Mogensen shook his head and said a little defensively that she wasn't obligated to stick with him, that they'd never drawn up a contract saying that she would work exclusively for him. There was no way he could have afforded to honor that.

"But if you were volunteering your time and energy to mentoring her, wasn't it a little frustrating that she disappeared just as she was getting so good that maybe there was more money in the gigs you were getting?" Louise asked, eyeing him with curiosity.

He sat for a moment before he shrugged and said, "That's life, isn't it?"

"Didn't you ever dream about working for some of the big magazines?" Mik asked.

The photographer looked at him and smiled for the first time. "It's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond," he said, becoming solemn again.

"Were you close, you and Dicta?" Louise wanted to know.

He nodded and said that he thought they had grown close over the time they'd known each other.

"You have to trust each other, otherwise it shows in the pictures."

Louise smiled to herself. There was something touching about his self-importance, but she had no doubt that he took his work seriously even if he was unlikely to ever achieve the sort of recognition a photographer like Tue Sunds had.

Mik had gotten up and was walking around a little. He stopped in front of the filing cabinet and asked if he could look in it.

Michael Mogensen said of course and explained that the pictures were divided into categories, but the top two drawers were portraits.

He and Louise talked a bit more about the friends.h.i.+p that had arisen between him and Dicta over the year they had known each other.

"I got so I could tell if she was in a good mood or a bad mood, if there were problems at school, or if she was tired. It's hard to hide that kind of thing when you're standing in front of a camera lens."

Louise nodded and listened the same way you skim a book: she picked up on what sounded interesting and let the rest slip right by.

Mik cleared his throat and pulled a picture out of the filing-cabinet drawer.

A dark-haired girl with long, straight hair and large, dark eyes was smiling warmly from the picture. "You knew her?" he asked, walking over to Michael with the portrait of Samra.

The photographer nodded and reached for the picture. He sat with it for a bit, as if lost in thought, before he explained that Dicta had sometimes brought her friend along when she came straight from school.

"She was also a pretty girl," Michael said, setting aside the picture.

"Did she ever pose for you?" Louise asked.

"I asked her to, but she didn't dare because of her parents."

"But you still photographed her?"

He nodded, but said it was just a personal photo.

Louise smiled and tried to picture Samra. Although she'd never known the young Jordanian girl, Louise knew she would have liked her. She had given herself permission to be photographed and feel the freedom of following the dream, knowing the whole time that the pictures must never be shown. She wanted the full experience. She'd had it, but certainly knew that her parents mustn't find out.

"Did you get the impression that the two girls confided in each other?" Louise asked.

The photographer thought for a moment and then said, "I'm not sure what you mean by that, but they were best friends."

"If one of them had a secret, do you think the other would have known about it?"

He mulled that over for another moment and said, "I'm not sure."

"When did you last see Dicta?" asked Mik, who had once again taken a seat next to Louise.

"I was actually with her last Sat.u.r.day, the day before she was found dead. We had an appointment to take a few pictures down behind the Strandparken Hotel that afternoon."

"Did she seem threatened or scared of anything?"

Michael Mogensen thought about that before he responded. "I hadn't considered that, but I also hadn't seen much of her lately."

Once Louise and Mik were back in the car, she said that it seemed Dicta had withdrawn from Michael a little while she tried her luck with Tue Sunds.

"Yeah, you almost wish she hadn't been so ambitious, but had stuck with Michael. She probably would have gained more good experience that way," Mik said as he pulled up in front of the hotel and gave Louise a quick kiss on the cheek before she got out.