Only One Life: A Novel Part 21

"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 alb.u.m and a thin sc.r.a.pbook. 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 alb.u.m sitting on her lap and flipped open the sc.r.a.pbook. 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 sc.r.a.pbook 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 naive 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 Moller 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 Mollers' 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.

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 ident.i.ty. 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 Holbaek.

"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.