The Seventh Child (87 page)

“Marie, I’d like to show you my scrapbook on the foundling’s arrival—and then I’ll tell you the story of
…
everything.” She said this as though it were the most natural thing in the world, as though she didn’t sense my desperation at all. To my surprise, there were tears in her eyes. As usual, I had no right to pressure her. She had always taken care of both of us in our shared world.

She raised her right hand to pull the white scrapbook from the shelf…

It was the last movement I registered.

She fell hard against the shelves, spun around, and collapsed in front of me. She lay on the floor beneath the window with its view of Strandvejen and the undertaker business across the street, and it didn’t take me long to understand that she was gone. Not just for a little while, but forever.

That’s how shockingly fast it happened, and with an ease that contradicted her aura, not to mention the tremendous work
she’d
left behind. That’s how easily she left life—her life, my life, everybody’s life—and the world
she’d
been repairing for her whole existence. It seemed almost absurd.

The scene reminded me of the only two other deaths I’d witnessed at close hand: Magdalene, who lay grotesquely crumpled at the foot of the slope with the broken wheelchair beside her; and Eva,
who’d
fallen on the beach and lay with one eye staring at the sky.

I hadn’t felt a fear that intense since the night Eva reached for me and in a moment of insanity called me
Jonna
—perhaps not since the morning the invalid woman in the neighboring house called me over and told me I was old enough to hear the truth only she could tell me. A secret that would have an immense impact on me.

The babbling of an idiotic old woman.

As deformed as she was,
she’d
leaned halfway over the armrest—misshapen as I myself—and had tried to smile reassuringly, but of course
she’d
failed because of her grotesque lisp. At that moment I hated her with all my heart.

It is not fair that you die, Marie, without knowing the truth
,
she’d
said in a voice that would have scared any child.

Since Gerda showed me the articles about Magdalene in the
Søllerød Post,
she’d
become my best friend, even though I’d never—until then—actually met her. It sufficed that she lived in the house next door and was as deformed, unwanted, and chained to that slope as I was: an elderly version of myself. She was a person I could talk to and ask for advice, and she would answer in ways only I would understand.

She’d
seen the person who arrived at Kongslund with the carry-cot, she told me, lisping—
the messenger
;
she’d
been awake that morning when the foundling was placed outside the backdoor by the southern annex; and
she’d
seen something so bizarre that she had never revealed it to anyone. But she wanted me to know before she died.

It was almost prophetic. She only had a few seconds to live.

It wasn’t a stranger who brought the carry-cot
, she said, staring at me with her one ailing eye—and at that moment her peculiarly corroded, old-fashioned wheelchair tipped over the edge and tumbled down the same way the king had back when
he’d
challenged the future of an entire nation. I don’t remember whether she screamed or not.

Do people who can only lisp through the roof of their mouth even scream?

She never completed her sentence. And of course I didn’t tell the police I was there.

Magna was the only one who might have felt it. But naturally, she was silent.

According to the officers who later searched the slope—spiking batons into the soil that old Captain Olbers had fertilized so generously (to their surprise they found old parchment paper with remnants of butter)—there was a plausible reason for the accident: it was, as mentioned, the day after the moon landing and the invalid had probably had an accident while pursuing adventure, looking for miracles in the sky. After all, there was a telescope affixed to the wheelchair’s armrest—completely smashed when found, as though someone had stomped it into the soil.

“The poor old loony,” the supervising officer sighed.

I’d found a single piece of paper in the living-room hutch—on which the old invalid had written some almost illegible sentences about what
she’d
seen the morning of the foundling’s arrival, plus a few other scribbles about the Olbers family. I could just decipher it.
She’d
never written anything else. I took the paper with me and later entered the words into the blue notebooks I called Magdalene’s diaries, and hid them in my bureau.

In Magna’s case, the police also found the circumstances of her death suspicious, but impossible to explain or prove.

To be on the safe side, I went through Magna’s apartment before I left. Mainly I was hoping to find the Protocol—but of course that was already on its way to Australia. The day after the police discovered that Magna had sent a package out of the country, I brought out Eva’s letter from the desk and changed the date from 2001 to 2008, using the same technique that Gerda had used.

The number 8 looked a little flat, but no one would notice it with a cursory glance, I thought. Magna’s fear that her apartment would be ransacked had rubbed off on me, yet I couldn’t make myself destroy the final words Eva had written to her child.

This was the alteration that threw off Knud Taasing, much to my satisfaction. At first
he’d
believed that Eva was still alive—since the letter had been sent in April of 2008—and in that way I had erased any trace of an unknown woman’s death on a beach near Kongslund in 2001.

It was that simple.

At the same time, I made sure that if either Carl Malle or Knud Taasing figured out that Magna had sent the Protocol to Eva in Australia, which was quite likely, they would never assume it would be returned. They would think Eva was alive and well somewhere, and would receive the package.

Since the Protocol could contain a detailed description of Magna’s unmistakable suspicion that I was responsible for Eva’s death—I was sure that was a possibility—this illusion was absolutely crucial.

It was only Knud Taasing’s shrewdness that later ruined this part of my plan. And it was only because Magna had listed Gerda as the sender that I avoided exposure.

It would be hypocritical—and that’s not my inclination, at least not any longer—if I ended this account claiming that I regret everything that has happened.

Naturally I don’t.

I can’t think of anything that could have been done differently. As I see it, the fatal flaws in my plan were unintentional—and impossible to anticipate.

It’s not until now that I see the overall pattern clearly: Eva, Magna, and Dorah in that order—and the bizarre course of events surrounding Dorah’s son, which mystified us for such a long time.

When I found Dorah in 2001 and demanded that she tell her son how
he’d
come from Kongslund, I ought to have predicted her son’s reaction. I acknowledge that now. That day he called Magna and demanded to know what went on back then. And
he’d
been furious.

Of course my foster mother, who at the time knew nothing about Gerda’s monumental gesture to save Kongslund’s honor and existence, denied any involvement when she talked to him on the phone—but her voice must have revealed a measure of panic, even though in this instance she was actually innocent.

Because even though Magna didn’t know what had happened, she did remember the name of the woman from Svanemøllen: Dorah.
He didn’t believe a word I was saying
, she wrote in the Protocol.

Lars Laursen, Dorah’s son, had immediately realized that all answers would be found at Kongslund, and
he’d
spent the following year investigating its history including the bizarre circle of powerful people who orbited it.
He’d
talked to all the former employees he was able to track down, and
he’d
used just about every hour of his free time to synthesize and analyze his findings, which revealed the myths and rumors about Kongslund’s secret activities in collusion with powerful men—and with that the party’s involvement in what was being kept secret.

He was obsessed, and when he told me much later about his rage and ill-fated determination, I recognized it completely.
He’d
concluded that the national minister must be the central figure in the orphanage’s shady past—aside from Magna, whom he had no way of getting close to—and he had a plan that seemed logical and feasible, if also time-consuming: Ministers need chauffeurs. He was a chauffeur. At the time he worked for a limousine service in Aarhus. Kongslund’s protector for fifty years was a minister, and ministers frequently hired new drivers. Lars Laursen was hired on his third attempt. It took him another five years to become a driver for the national minister, and this immense patience can only be ascribed to the doggedness that pervaded his people in the East Jutland hills.

When Lars began working for the Ministry of National Affairs, he was putting the finishing touches on his plan. That was immediately before the Kongslund Affair erupted. These are the kind of coincidences—however great and seemingly accidental—that Fate finds most intriguing.

And when he came to see me after Dorah’s death, he told me everything that had happened since I’d entered his mother’s life:
he’d
tried to get as close to Almind-Enevold as possible, and he was now his chauffeur. Maybe he would find more information, he said; maybe, over the next few weeks, we could be of use to one another. Even before his mother’s death,
he’d
sent Knud Taasing an anonymous letter after reading his articles in
Independent Weekend
.

Naturally I was terrified at the thought of having this strange, naive man digging around in the Kongslund Affair and finding out things I didn’t want leaked to the public; for that reason I rather impolitely declined his offer, solemnly warning him about proceeding in the matter. The Kongslund Affair was both dangerous and impossible to penetrate, I told him.

Everything changed when I found the Protocol at Gerda’s and discovered my own role as Magna had described it.

It was at that time that I decided to commit homicide, and I have to emphasize that this decision has been my only fully intentional plan to murder, though perhaps my cohorts from the Elephant Room will find that hard to believe.

I’d been sitting in my bed in the King’s Room for hours, thinking about Magna’s revelation concerning my actual arrival at Kongslund. On the third day I walked to the only remaining phone booth in Søllerød and called Lars Laursen, who sat alone in his apartment in Frederiksberg.

He listened to the shocking information I shared with him.

I told him of the
delivery
—his delivery—and about the duplicity that implicated him, without apologizing for my previous refusal to cooperate. I think he was too upset to scold me anyway.

In words that could not be misinterpreted, I explained to him that Almind-Enevold had been behind all these mysterious
deliveries
that Kongslund secretly facilitated, and that he, Lars, was presumably the son of a wealthy and powerful man but that every trace of his biological parents was effectively and irrevocably erased.

I emphasized—brutally—that he would never be able to find his roots because the Almighty One had destroyed every piece of information regarding his origins. It was exactly the same thing that had happened in the case of John Bjergstrand, I said.

I was aware that Fate, at this moment, could pick one of two paths: either the predictable one or the interesting one; and of course I had no doubt as to which my old buddy would choose. It would be very unlike the Master of Life’s Coincidences to let that kind of chance slip away.

I, myself, would be nowhere near the scene of the crime and would make sure to appear to have no motive whatsoever.

I simply never imagined that such a determined murderer might miss his target. The bullet had entered half an inch from his hated boss’s heart, and that was yet another one of Fate’s insane ideas, which probably had the old Master dancing the polka up there in his heavenly bed. When
I
—without a weapon and without wanting to—could cause the death of three people with a simple unintended push, how could a deliberate shot miss its target by a fraction? The man from Helgenæs had the steadiest hands that have ever held the steering wheel of a car, and yet he must have trembled when he fired at the heart of the Almighty One.
He’d
carried him into the basement of the parliament building assuming that he was as dead as a doornail.