Authors: Erik Valeur
The Seventh Child
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2011 Erik Valeur and JP/Politikens Forlagshus A/S
Translation copyright © 2014 K. E. Semmel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
The Seventh Child
was first published in 2011 by JP/Politikens Forlaghus A/S as
Det syvende barn
. Translated from Danish by K. E. Semmel. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2014.
ISBN-13: 9781477849804
ISBN-10: 1477849807
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013915843
Prologue
It must remain a secret how I uncovered the new and hitherto unknown information in the case that became known as the Kongslund Affair.
I made that promise as solemnly as possible, considering that it’s rather silly to make oaths; the truth can never be suppressed when Fate has other plans. And it always does.
In any case I will try to report, as simply and objectively as possible, the strange events that for a brief time held an entire nation in thrall. I hesitate to side with either camp regarding these events, which only a merciful God of the most forgiving kind will be able to regard with mild eyes. And I can almost hear the famous matron at Kongslund sneer at these thoughts, because what does God have to do with any of this?
In her world, which for sixty years was inhabited by tens of thousands of orphaned children, there was no merciful God—certainly
not
one resembling an absentminded, silver-haired, elderly gentleman inclined to forgive human beings by day’s end.
In that world, there was only the stubborn will of the formidable governesses to mitigate the sins and the arrogance of previous generations, and from the very beginning, that doomed project had been subject to a dark and unmanageable Fate that operated outside the reach of both religion and reason. Creating obstacles was Fate’s favorite pastime; shocks and sudden blows its areas of expertise.
“Fate is the only power of any significance, and it knocks over the children of humankind as it pleases,” she would say with that contagious enthusiasm that was her trademark; then she would laugh so hard the walls trembled and she would add, “Here at Kongslund, we’ve needed the help of neither God nor the Devil!”
I can still recall the rumble that rose from her bosom after she uttered such statements. They caused us children to hold our breaths in equal parts delight and terror. Even today, all these years later, I am inclined to agree with her.
Like the main characters of this book, I spent the first years of my life at the Infant Orphanage Kongslund, and I have returned there several times since, driven by forces I have never fully understood. It must have been what enabled Marie to finally locate me.
I base my retelling of the Kongslund Affair on her detailed notes—especially those concerning the lives of the six children with whom she spent the first months of her existence at Kongslund and who became such an obsession for her—combined with my own investigation of those events for which she was unable to provide an accounting.
The mystery of the seventh child is, as I see it, also a story of Marie’s longing. I think the psychologists at Kongslund would agree with this interpretation, as they study the world’s damaged beings through gleaming glasses, while smoking their pipes.
We can only hope that Marie and Fate, in spite of everything, can reach an accord here at curtain call.
If that wish is granted, her journey has not been in vain. She will be sitting somewhere in the shade of the beech trees—the very same ones that once sheltered Denmark’s last absolute monarch—singing the song she sang as a child, night after night, the one about the blue elephants.
And this time, I don’t think she’ll stop until she has reached the final verse.
April 30, 2011
If you find a friend, you’ve got a chance. If you find none, you will succumb.
—Magdalene, 1969
THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH
September 11, 2001
The woman was found approximately halfway between the Skodsborg Beach Hotel and Bellevue Beach in the early morning of September 11, 2001.
Just a few hours later the world would be altered forever. This strange coincidence determined the course of events in this peculiar case, and one can only conclude that Fate thought it amusing to put two such unusual occurrences on the same day.
The less significant event was soon forgotten, though for the first few hours the police considered it with utmost gravity, describing it in much detail in their initial reports. The alarm sounded at 6:32 a.m. The dead woman was lying close to the edge of the water with her face pressed into a gray sludge of sand, as though
she’d
tried to devour Copenhageners’ favorite beach in a single, greedy mouthful. Her arms were bent backward, her hands open, and there were small patterns of sand in her palms. This discovery prompted investigators to momentarily speculate that a ritual murder had been committed by some depraved individual. But of course, as one detective noted, before the sun rose over Øresund, the eastern wind might have simply whirled the sand across the body, and it had come to rest in the dead woman’s palms.
It was a dog walker from one of the tony suburban mansions on nearby Tårbæk Strandvej who, terrified, called the police. Investigators had no doubt the woman in the sand was dead the moment she hit the ground. There was a cone-shaped crater in her forehead. Blood had seeped into her hair and soaked the sand beside her temples.
Technicians found light-gray hair on the sharp rock that had pierced her skull, but most of the blood had been washed to sea by the tide long before the body was discovered. The dead woman carried no identification, though her clothes and wristwatch led the police to believe she was from Australia (or possibly New Zealand). But by the time investigators arrived at that conclusion, it was too late; no one was paying attention to a dead woman on a beach in Denmark.
No doubt, someone would have dug deeper into the case had the world not been turned upside down during these very hours—and this was a coincidence that no one at the alleged crime scene could have anticipated. As technicians combed the sand around and under the woman for critical leads, two hijacked airplanes flew into New York City air space, and all activity on God’s green earth lost significance. In the days that followed, only one image burned through the airwaves and into the Danish consciousness: the smoking towers and the charred bodies that fell and fell and fell, down and down and down, toward the concrete.
If the case of the dead woman ever had a chance of making it to the front pages of the Danish newspapers, that chance was now lost. Most media never mentioned her. Two smaller dailies printed a few lines, and a few weeks later, one reported the police decision to close the case, labeling it an “accident.”
After that, the dead woman literally sank into oblivion.
The police had been unable to identify her. At their Copenhagen headquarters, homicide detectives concluded that, since there hadn’t been a single call about her or any missing person who matched her description, no one was looking for the woman. Repeated INTERPOL searches yielded nothing, and no one came forward to identify the dead woman from the macabre photo of her that had been widely circulated. The police had no leads and no good ideas. And not a single registry or database provided any information that could break the deadlock.
In this way Fate outplayed the efforts of mortals—simply to amuse itself, one might think. But, to tell the truth, the police had no serious qualms about dropping the case; after all, there were more important things to worry about.
And yet.
A few years later, the chief inspector
who’d
led the investigation was interviewed for a series of newspaper articles on the subject of unresolved murder cases.
In the middle of the interview, he suddenly mentioned the woman on the beach between Skodsborg and Bellevue, a case that by that point had been completely forgotten. Several things that morning had always puzzled him—small but peculiar details—and now the retired chief inspector spontaneously found words for his unease.
“If it really
was
murder, I fear it was the act of a very sick individual,” he said. “In fact, during those first few days, we suspected we might be dealing with the first Danish serial killer.” The aging inspector delivered this statement in a rather gloomy tone that he otherwise abhorred, because he considered it unprofessional to show any emotion regarding his cases.
The reporter pricked up his ears. He couldn’t recall having heard of a murder near Bellevue.
On the other side of the table, the chief inspector closed his eyes, as though imagining that popular stretch of beach, recalling items the technicians had marked and photographed in the sand. Then he said, in that same grave tone of voice, “At first we thought it a little strange that she would fall onto the only big rock on that beach. The
only
big rock. It was quite a coincidence. But it was a possibility
…
and we couldn’t prove otherwise.”
The reporter nodded and found his digital recorder, laying it gently on the table.
“Of course we were surprised that her one eye was so badly
damaged
while the other eye was entirely unharmed, as if simply closed in peaceful sleep. The damaged eye hung halfway out of the socket, and we couldn’t see how the rock could have inflicted that kind of injury—at least not at once—or even if
she’d
fallen twice. But then again
…
it
could
have happened. Or she could have been injured elsewhere some time earlier.” The chief inspector opened his eyes. “Maybe she had fallen before
…
earlier that night.” He formulated his hypothesis in such a doubtful tone that the reporter dared only a subtle nod, not wanting to impede the eerie suspicion that seemed to be emerging.
Then the chief inspector came to the mysterious discoveries, and his voice sank even lower. “Maybe they had nothing to do with the crime,” he said. “But close to the body we found four objects that we honestly thought were
…
were without any logical connection to what people do on any ordinary Danish beach—sunbathe, relax. Yet the objects lay almost in a circle around the woman’s body, close enough that they
could
be connected, and that made us really nervous.”
To capture every single word that followed, the reporter turned on his small digital recorder.
“To her right—to the south, that is—was a small book, just five or six feet away. Maybe it had nothing to do with her. But it wasn’t your typical book, certainly not the kind
you’d
expect beachgoers to be reading. It was written by a twentieth-century astronomer
…
Fred Hoyle
…
The Black Cloud
, published in 1957. An old science-fiction novel.
You’d
have to be an astrophysicist to find it interesting. I read it myself.”
He shook his head, almost apologetically.
The reporter hadn’t heard of the book, or the author.
“But there was another thing,” the old inspector said. “Due west of the body, a little ways up the beach, we found the branch of a linden tree. The peculiar thing is that no linden trees grow anywhere near that spot. So why was it there?” He shook his head once more, as if to deny a miracle of natural history, and then repeated the reservations any officer worth his salt would have. “Of course, some kid could have brought it there and tossed it
…
it just seemed so
…
implausible.”
Again he sat motionless, trapped in the past.
“But what
really
puzzled us was that it had been sawed off with a chainsaw—the branch, I mean. And then
…
” He fell silent, closing his eyes again, as if to revisit that beach again, where the body lay face down in the sand and the technicians crept about on their hands and knees.
The reporter nudged the recorder discreetly toward the inspector, but remained silent, aware of the man’s unease. Sawed-off branches that thick aren’t carried about in the beaks of doves.
“It was very old,” the chief inspector finally said, the despair in his voice even more pronounced now. “When we had it examined, it turned out to be
really
old.” He shook his head a third time. “That branch wasn’t picked up on any forest floor nearby—it had been indoors for many years—and who the
hell
takes a very, very old branch outside to leave on a beach? Why would anyone do that?”
Unable to answer any of the questions, the reporter simply waited quietly.
“And then a little to the east, in the direction of the water, a few feet from her head, we found a small piece of rope. But it wasn’t an ordinary rope. It was a relatively thick rope fashioned into a little noose. And that made us really nervous, because given its placement next to the deceased’s head, it seemed to symbolize some kind of hanging
…
but the worst part
…
”—he hesitated before continuing—“the very worst was of course the bird.”
He pronounced the last word in a near whisper.
“The bird?”
“Yes. A small bird was due north of the body—near her left hand. She was on her stomach, remember. The bird’s neck was broken, and given its proximity to the body we asked the medical examiner to determine time of death. It had died that same night. That’s why we sent a description of the crime scene to FBI specialists in Washington—the ones who search for serial killers. But, because of the attacks on the Twin Towers, it took them a long time to get back to us. They had enough to do. When they sent us the results of their analyses, they tried to reassure us. They didn’t believe we had a serial killer on our hands. Yet, if there was a connection between the dead woman and the objects we found on the beach that day, they couldn’t explain it. The FBI had never seen a pattern that even remotely resembled what
we’d
found that morning on Bellevue. If it was a pattern, that is.”
The inspector fell silent again.
“So they told you it was most likely a coincidence?” The reporter’s question carried a hint of disappointment.
“Yes, that’s right. By all accounts, it was a set of coincidences, odd coincidences, but still. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. But we did. Or at least I did. And I still do. That little bird is always in my mind’s eye.”
The reporter put his finger on the recorder’s “Off” button and said, “But there’s nothing peculiar about a dead bird on a beach. A cat could have broken its neck and dragged it there before being chased off.”
The chief inspector stared at the young interviewer for a long moment. “Yes, of course. It is all entirely possible. But it wasn’t a baby seagull or a blackbird gone astray. Wasn’t even a damned
sparrow
…
” Anger flashed in his eyes. “It was a bird that never would’ve flown off to die on some damned beach in the middle of the night, and
that
was the problem.”
Once more the older man’s gaze returned to that morning on the beach, to details only he could see. The reporter lifted his recorder off the table to catch the inspector’s concluding remarks.
Later, in the newsroom, the assembled journalists could hear those remarks as clearly as when they were spoken just inches from the microphone. The old chief’s words didn’t sway the editor, though. He rejected the story with an irritable snort.
“We can’t print that kind of nonsense! Readers will think we’ve lost our minds.”
“It was a small golden canary,” the chief inspector had said into the microphone. The speaker crackled a moment. “Understand?”
The reporter was silent.
And for quite some time, the chief inspector had remained quiet too.
“That was the problem,” he finally said. “Have you ever heard of a canary flying to a beach in the middle of the night, landing at the very edge of the sea, and breaking its own neck? That’s goddamned impossible.”
In the next instant, a scraping noise could be heard from the speaker as the inspector rose from his chair.
“That woman was murdered. I am convinced of that. And it’s the sickest crime I’ve ever encountered.”
But, as noted, his statement was never published. And the editorial staff forgot, as they are wont to do, everything about the story they found too far-fetched to print.