Part 21 (1/2)
”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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.'”