Part 7 (1/2)
The Mollers' house had a white plaster exterior with a large balcony that went all the way around the top floor. Louise guessed that the view was impressive: the sound, the marina, open fields, forest, and the city. Parked in the driveway was a large new SUV. Louise was a little puzzled. As far as she had managed to figure out, both parents worked in Holbaek; the father had a chiropractic clinic on the main street, and the mother worked part-time as a medical secretary. Yet they had opted to equip themselves with a Jeep Grand Cherokee with yellow license plates, normally reserved for business cars that were eligible for lower fees. It irked Louise when people who didn't have a really good reason chose to drive big, heavy cars like that.
As she approached the front door, she heard fierce barking. There was a wall to the right of the house with a white gate in the middle. She had the feeling there might be a nice pack of medium-size dogs just on the other side, and she got a glimpse of the shadow of a German shepherd and an Old English sheepdog before she quickly took the three steps up to front door and rang the bell.
Ding-dong. The sound echoed and only agitated the dogs more. Now there was barking from inside the house too. Louise began to regret not asking Dicta to come down to the police station after all. Not that Louise had anything against dogs, but all the noise and frenzy was annoying as she tried to gather her thoughts and prepare her questions.
Dicta was wearing a gray tracksuit, she had no makeup on, and her long blonde hair was gathered into a loose ponytail. Her ditziness and flightiness of the other day were now entirely gone. Louise was standing opposite a young girl who was either trying to be a grown-up or striving to give an impression of maturity. Pale and deeply upset, Dicta invited Louise inside, into something Louise would have described as a laundry room-or scullery, as people still called them where she was from. A woman was busy grooming a large, black poodle there.
The woman wiped the dog hair on her hands onto an ap.r.o.n that was mostly covered by a picture of a dog jumping through a car tire. Underneath were the words STOCKHOLM 2006.
”Hi, I'm Anne Moller,” she said, offering her hand to Louise. ”Dicta's mother.”
The latter comment was superfluous. Not only did the two of them resemble each other uncannily, but the woman also looked at Dicta with the concern on her face that only a mother could have for her child. ”I came home as soon as Dicta got the call from school,” she explained. ”She called me at the medical practice where I work.” She let the dog go and pulled her shoulder-length blonde hair behind her ears as she explained that she did compet.i.tion-level agility trial training and trained other people's dogs for them. Those were the dogs running around out in the yard right now.
That explained all the barking, and probably the SUV, Louise thought.
The poodle was interested in her and began to sniff.
”Charlie, down,” Dicta's mother commanded. The dog hesitated only for a moment before going under the dining table and lying down.
Anne Moller asked Louise to follow her into the kitchen, where she pointed at the large oval Piet Hein table that filled the room.
”Do you drink coffee? I just put a pot on. My husband is on his way home. He just has to pa.s.s off his patients to the two chiropractors who work for him at the clinic.”
Anne's speech seemed a bit frantic and her cheeks were flushed. During pauses, her eyes would dart over to see how her daughter was doing.
Louise had taken a seat opposite Dicta and had the sense that the girl was tuning out her mother's stream of words. Dicta sat with her eyes trained on the table and was obviously somewhere else entirely.
”Do you take milk? I'll just warm some up!”
Louise looked up at Anne and said cold milk was fine, but Dicta's mother ignored her and placed a carafe of milk in the microwave.
After clicking the door shut and punching in the heating time, she appeared to calm down. She came over and stood behind Dicta, laying her hands on her shoulders. She had taken off her ap.r.o.n and was dressed cla.s.sically in a lightweight cardigan over a white blouse and beige linen trousers. Her face looked fresh and youthful with nice, smooth skin.
”It doesn't make any sense at all. Samra was just here a couple of days ago,” Anne said.
She started stroking her daughter's arms and then walked over and took out a bowl and filled it with chocolate cookies. She did the whole thing reflexively, because there was something safe and rea.s.suring about setting out cups and cookies on the table.
Louise looked intently at Dicta, saying she wanted to chat with her a little about Samra's friends and her relations.h.i.+p with her family.
Dicta slowly raised her eyes toward Louise, as though it were a long trip back to reality, and Louise gave her plenty of time once she finally began to speak. Mechanically, the girl took a cookie from the bowl and broke it into small pieces so the crumbs fell on the table as she rattled off the names of three other girls from school she knew Samra spent a fair amount of time with.
”I only know one of them really well,” Dicta said. ”She's my friend too; the other two I don't know that well.”
Louise wrote down the names and signaled that the mother was welcome to come over and sit with them. She'd been hovering in the background since they started talking. Now she brought her cup over and sat down.
”I think they mostly hung out together at school,” Dicta continued after regaining her composure, explaining that it was rare for Samra to get permission to take part in anything that happened after school hours.
”Her parents were really strict. She was supposed to come straight home and do her homework,” Dicta said. ”And she often had to help watch her little sister and brother too.”
Louise detected a sweet sort of pride when Dicta explained that her friend Samra had been one of the smartest students in their cla.s.s-but then you'd darn well expect that, Louise thought, if you were forced to pore over your schoolbooks for so many hours every day.
”You're some good kids,” her mother interjected, stroking her daughter's cheek.
Dicta looked at her as though she didn't understand where that comment had come from, finding it out of place.
”She was a good kid,” Dicta stressed, turning her eyes back to Louise.
”You work hard too,” the mother insisted.
Dicta ignored her, and Louise hurriedly stepped in.
”But her parents did give her permission to come over here?” Louise asked.
”Yes, but definitely not quite as often as Samra would have liked, as far as I understood.”
Anne was the one who latched on to that question, and Louise listened in interest as Anne explained that she had met Samra's mother several times.
”At the medical practice where I work,” she said. ”She stops by there relatively often, either by herself or with the two children, and then we always chat about the girls and their school. She knows that Dicta is a stable, sensible girl, and that probably contributes to their feeling comfortable having their daughter at our house. But I never got the impression Samra was allowed to spend much time with anyone else after school either.”
”She also got permission to sleep over here,” Dicta said, adding that she hadn't gotten permission to sleep over at Liv's, another of the girls in their clique.
They heard a car engine stop and a door slam shut. Anne got up to go out and prepare her husband for the fact that there was a police officer visiting, Louise guessed.
He was a tall, handsome man, blonde with bright-blue eyes. It wasn't hard to see where Dicta had gotten her looks from with these parents, Louise thought, standing to shake his hand.
”I'm Henrik,” he said once Louise had introduced herself and explained why she was there.
He gave his daughter a kiss on the cheek before going to get a cup from the cabinet and joining them.
”It's so terrible, you can hardly bear to think of it,” he said.
”I can't think of anything else,” Dicta said.
He looked with worry at his daughter.
”Of course you're thinking of her,” he said, turning to look at Louise. ”It's just so incomprehensible when it's a girl you know. It's been all the talk at the clinic the whole morning. People are afraid this will lead to something more.”
”It might, too, if there's a killer on the loose in town,” said Anne.
Henrik looked at his wife, and Louise could tell that he was about to say something rea.s.suring when Dicta suddenly stood up and left the kitchen.
They sat watching her go.
”The police still don't know much?” Henrik asked, looking at Louise. She shook her head.
”We've started interviewing the family and are looking for witnesses who might have seen Samra during the period of time we think she went missing. But it's a gap that extends over twelve hours. From when she said good night to her mother in her room at eight-thirty until she was found the next morning.”
Neither of the parents asked Louise whether the police thought the family was behind it. And she was happy about that. She looked over toward Dicta's room to a.s.sess whether enough time had pa.s.sed for her to go in to talk to her more.
”She was a good kid,” Dicta's father said, using the same wording that his wife had used earlier. ”Even if her family had a different set of rules for her than the ones her friends lived under, it seemed like she accepted them. There was no anger in her voice and she talked openly about the things that were off-limits to her. I actually had quite a lot of respect for that. We also hear about girls at school who are very disruptive to cla.s.s unity because they let all their pent-up frustrations spill over onto their cla.s.smates.”