Free Only One Life by Sara Blædel Page A

shoulders slumped, and a moment later tears burst from his eyes, and a long screeching sound was pulled up and out of him from somewhere deep within. As the sound made its way out into the room, the girl’s father rose with a jerk and started to pace back and forth in tears as he cried in shock that it couldn’t be true. The words were ripped into pieces by a stream of Arabic they didn’t understand, but there was no mistaking the despair in them.
    Louise approached cautiously, pulled him back toward the chair, and tried to get him to calm down.
    “My little girl,” he repeated between deep sobs, sitting with his face hidden in his hands.
    The air in the office was heavy with misery and grief. Finally Ibrahim calmed down a little.
    Mik turned the MP3 recorder back on and made an attempt to get the interview going again.
    “We need to talk more with you about your daughter’s disappearance.”
    The father looked at them with a distant gaze and tear-laden eyes.
    “How did it happen?” he asked, his face still preoccupied.
    “We don’t know quite yet,” Mik said, making no mention of the rope and concrete.
    “Could you please repeat for us when you and your wife last saw Samra?” Louise asked, turning the conversation in another direction.
    “Tuesday night, when my wife said good night to her at eight-thirty.”
    “Yesterday one of your daughter’s friends from school came forward when she heard we had found a dead teenage girl. Didn’t you see or hear the news yesterday?”
    Ibrahim al-Abd was frozen, sitting as if encased in ice for a moment before he shook his head and his face cracked.
    “Was it on TV? So then everyone knows what happened …?”
    Mik interrupted him. “We put out a description. No picture was shown.”
    Louise couldn’t tell from Ibrahim’s face whether he thought it was good or bad that the missing-person report had gone out.
    “Last night we went out to talk with you and your wife after the tip from Samra’s friend, but no one answered. Where were you?” she asked.
    It took a moment before Samra’s father replied.
    “At my brother’s house in Benløse, outside of Ringsted,” he explained, and Louise just nodded.
    “How did you travel down there?” she asked.
    “By car.”
    Tears were making his eyes shiny again.
    “We drove,” he continued, diverting attention from his fresh bout of weeping.
    “When did you come home?”
    “Midnight, maybe 1:00 A.M. , I think.”
    “But you didn’t answer this morning either, when we stopped by again,” Mik interjected.
    The man looked over at him and explained that he and his son had gone to work.
    “My wife is very worried and didn’t sleep at all. After my son and I left, she took the little ones to her sister’s house.”
    “When we went out to talk with you last night, your car was parked in the parking lot, and it was at just past ten. Does your wife have a car?” Louise asked.
    He shook his head, but she had known the answer already. No other cars were registered to their address.
    “If you didn’t drive your car, then what car did you drive?” He didn’t seem to understand what she meant.
    “You drove down to your brother’s house, you say. But your car was parked in the parking lot last night,” Mik clarified.
    “No, no,” he said, jumping up from his chair and pacing back and forth again. “We didn’t drive. My son drove.”
    “There is no vehicle registered in his name,” Louise interrupted.
    “He’s buying one. It’s not all worked out yet, but he’ll get it settled,” the father assured them.
    Louise asked for the car’s make and registration number, but the father could only say it was an older-model BMW.
    “Could I just get your brother’s name and phone number?” she asked, to be on the safe side, so they could compare that with the information Søren had dug up.
    He sat down and gave her both.
    “What happened? What happened to her?” he mumbled again, rubbing his forehead hard with his