Part 12 (1/2)
Suddenly things made sense, and she had to smile.
”The Rowing Club is behind Hotel Strandparken,” Mik said on his way out the door.
She waved after him, but her cell phone rang just then; and when she saw that it was Camilla, she pushed the office door shut a little with her foot before answering.
”I don't think we'll be working that late tonight,” Louise answered after her friend asked if she had an estimate for when she'd be done.
”There's a restaurant down by the harbor that looks promising. Let's meet there at eight. I'll have my articles turned in by then,” Camilla said. ”Maybe some of the others would like to join us. You guys can't keep hanging out at the Station Hotel, and it's usually pretty easy to tempt Soren Velin into tagging along.”
Louise had no doubt he could be tempted. When they'd worked together in Unit A, Soren had been known as a joiner. She headed down the hall to find him and hadn't even finished talking before he'd suggested they start with a beer at the brewpub before heading to dinner. Skipper stopped as he walked by and asked what time they were meeting.
”Who's going to convince Bengtsen?” Louise asked, heading down the hall to see if Dean had left yet.
”I will,” said Ruth, who had appeared in the hallway without Louise's noticing her.
Suddenly Louise had the impression that the prospect of a little socializing had improved everyone's mood. They'd all been buried in work since the group had been formed. Now people's voices sounded more upbeat.
They all had more than one beer at the little brewpub, which was in walking distance from the hotel, and when they made it down to the nice restaurant by the harbor they agreed it probably wasn't the best fit for them. They were well past the point where appetizers and quiet conversation were what they wanted. So they decided on a nearby Indian restaurant instead. The group was a little too big for the one table that was available, so they all had to squeeze to fit, but that didn't seem to bother anyone. Not even Bengtsen, who had ordered an orange soda at the brewpub to begin with, although that had only lasted until Camilla stuck a foamy draft beer into his hand.
Louise sat crushed between Skipper and Soren, and she was well entertained because Skipper pulled his iPod out of his pocket and started showing off his knowledge of fusion jazz. She listened with concentration, trying to hear the tranquillity in the notes, but kept getting thrown off because the music kept switching tempo and style. She noticed that he smiled whenever she grimaced periodically.
”Do you like it?” he asked.
She felt like she'd been caught and shrugged her shoulders a little.
He said a lot of people felt that way about this kind of music; they either loved it or hated it. The people who loved it took pleasure in the unpredictable notes, and the ones who weren't captivated described it as irritating noise. He explained that he'd been in a band when he was younger.
”Now we just mess around for fun, whenever I get together with a couple of the other old guys back home in Svendborg.”
Louise turned to look straight at him and really had a hard time picturing him with a saxophone in his mouth. Skipper was in his mid-thirties and in great shape, muscular in an outdoorsy way. It was much easier to picture him with a golf club or a fis.h.i.+ng pole, now that she thought about it.
Soren ordered another bottle of red wine while Ruth and Camilla made Dean retell a story that had made them erupt in raucous laughter, so that everyone else could hear it too.
”Shortly after I arrived in Denmark, I was living in a refugee center in Lyngby,” Dean began, getting everyone's attention. ”And if I have anything funny to say about that period it was that we discovered that on the door to the boss's office it said Peder Pedersen. Because where I come from, Peder means gay. So you can appreciate why all the kids laughed every time they saw him and the rest of us had a little trouble taking the head of the refugee center seriously. The guy resigned after just two weeks.”
The laughter spread around the table and Soren generously refilled people's winegla.s.ses.
When they were having coffee after dinner, Ruth got a call from Storm, who had just returned to the Station Hotel. For a second it sounded like he was considering joining the party, but that was only until Ruth made it clear to him in succinct, unambiguous terms how irritated she was that he hadn't been there doing his job when they'd needed him.
Louise followed the conversation from the other side of the table and smiled, thinking that it must have taken years of working together closely for Ruth to achieve such a sharp tone without his taking it the wrong way. Louise was yanked out of her musings when Skipper spoke to her.
”So, are you happy with Unit A and Suhr?”
As she nodded, she reminded him that he too had worked in Unit A once upon a time. ”But that was many years ago,” he said. ”A long time before Hans Suhr became chief of the homicide division. He and I worked together back near the dawn of time at Station 3, or Bellahoj, as they call it now.”
Well, she supposed it shouldn't surprise her that Skipper and Captain Suhr knew each other. They were sort of the same caliber of men even though it was hard to spot a gruff side to Skipper. But maybe that was because she didn't really know him yet.
”I've been there three and a half years and so far, so good,” she replied, explaining that she was in Henny Heilmann's group.
Skipper knew her too, of course, and told Louise a couple of anecdotes, ending with a story about Thomas Toft, who had seniority on the investigation team Louise was currently part of. She laughed out loud when Skipper called him a stubborn terrier who wouldn't let go once he'd bitten into something, because that was the perfect image.
After coffee, they split the bill and got up to go check out Holbaek's night life. Dean and Soren led the way, heading back to the brewpub, where they had live music, and Louise gladly accepted the pints Skipper pa.s.sed across the table to her each time he returned from a trip to the bar. As she let herself into her hotel room a couple of hours later, she noticed she had gotten a bit tipsier than she had realized, and it didn't take many minutes from the time she lay down in bed until sleep overcame her.
16.
CAMILLA WAS LYING IN HER HOTEL ROOM READING THROUGH HER own article in Morgenavisen. They'd been out late the night before, and they had had plenty of beer and wine with their food. That had been nice. Bengtsen had stubbornly denied that he'd let Else down on a Friday night because of Ruth's special persuasive abilities. He had insisted to Camilla that he was very social as long as the company was right, so she'd taken it as a compliment that he'd chosen her as a tablemate, and she made sure he was aware that in the future she would include him on her list of police sources.
The paper was featuring her story prominently, with a set of statistics on recent honor killings. She'd hoped all the way up until her deadline that Samra's mother would show up so she could interview her, but as much as she had hoped for that, she was also very sure that it wouldn't happen. And it certainly wouldn't happen now that her boss had thoughtlessly rewritten the headline for the article Camilla had written about the mother's visit to the women's shelter. SAMRA'S MOTHER FAILED HER, it now said, and with those words her last chance of an interview disintegrated, Camilla thought angrily.
Camilla felt rotten about the headline. Something in the pit of her stomach contracted when the words jumped out at her. Plus there was no way she could retract it, since the t.i.tle promised quite a bit more than the article actually contained. She had carefully described the police report about the father and how Sada had sought help. That was all information she'd gotten from the police. It wasn't like she'd been poking around to find that out on her own, and nowhere in the article did she suggest that the mother had failed her daughter and that this had cost the girl her life.
Camilla had spent most of her Friday afternoon trying to find someone who would talk to her about their impressions of Sada al-Abd, both as a mother and a wife. It was hard to get anyone to talk, but she had finally managed to find two other immigrant women who dared to speak to her, and they had been very positive and had told her in their limited Danish how she devoted all her time to her children, especially the two little ones. On the other hand, when Camilla brought up the spousal abuse Samra's mother had been subjected to, the two women shut down. Either they didn't know anything about it or, more likely, they dared not get involved in that kind of thing. That was something you kept in the family.
Camilla quickly skimmed through the rest of the paper, and was lazily lounging around in her hotel bed when the phone in the room rang. She tripped over her suitcase as she darted to answer it. She had packed her things before breakfast and was planning to head back into Copenhagen later that morning.
”There's a guest in the lobby who'd really like to speak with you,” the person at the front desk said.
”Is it Louise Rick?” Camilla asked.
”It's a foreign woman who says she needs to speak to you.”
Camilla felt herself trembling and sensed instinctively that something unpleasant was coming.
”I'll be right down,” she said and put on her shoes.
The woman was sitting in the large dark-brown armchair to the left of the front desk. Her face was hidden behind the same veil Camilla recognized from the day before. Camilla took a deep breath and straightened herself up before walking over and saying h.e.l.lo.
There was a girl manning the front desk, one she hadn't seen before, and Camilla noticed that she was watching them with curiosity.
”Come,” Camilla told Samra's mother, nodding toward the restaurant. ”Let's find somewhere where we can talk in peace.”
She said it so loudly that the girl behind the desk quickly looked away.
Sada al-Abd still hadn't said a word, but she rose and followed Louise. The restaurant was empty. All the same, Camilla asked the waiter cleaning up after breakfast if there was a place where she and Sada could speak undisturbed. He showed them into something that might have been the hotel's conference room, although it did not look as if it was used very often. There was a heavy, stuffy odor in the room and a layer of dust over the rectangular rosewood table that filled the room lengthwise.
When the waiter left, shutting the door behind him, Camilla turned to Sada, ready to take whatever the woman was going to dish out.
”You mustn't write things like that,” Sada exclaimed in despair.
Camilla was completely unprepared for how loud Sada was and pulled back reflexively.
”How could you do that?” Sada stepped toward her and started crying loudly and shrilly, as if she were pus.h.i.+ng out the pain from all the way down in her diaphragm.
Camilla stepped back farther, now standing silently and watching Sada, until she sensed that the rebukes were over. When she saw Sada collapse into quiet, miserable sobs, Camilla put her arm around her shoulders and led her over to a seating area by the far wall.
Once Sada was seated, Camilla stepped out into the restaurant and asked the waiter to bring them some tea. Then she sat down across from Samra's mother and let her cry. When the tea finally arrived after a long wait, the woman was still crying.