The Seventh Child (13 page)

She responded without hesitation. “
You’d
know best.”
He’d
given himself away. “Didn’t you follow him more closely than anyone?”

“A single mother would be the perfect cover. Isn’t that right, Magna?”

She didn’t reply.

“
He’d
had a frightening childhood. Interesting but frightening. Such ferocity. Almost as though something had been passed down to him. To kill a man, and at such a young age.”

She was no match for him. But she couldn’t leave the accusation unchallenged. “He didn’t kill him. I talked to the psychologist
…
” She stopped. She didn’t want him to know anything more than that.

“The psychologist was scared out of his wits, my dear Magna. You must know that. I spoke to Orla right after
…
after the incident. It wasn’t normal. You know that.”

“They never proved it.”

“No, and why do you think? Because I
…
because
we
…
protected him.”

“How about you, Carl? How many people have you killed?” For the first time she uttered his name, hatred providing them with a shared intimacy.

“Yes, I’ve killed people, Magna—but at war. Orla wasn’t at war,” he said. “A fool in the Søborg wetlands is hardly an enemy you have to kill. And certainly not like that.”

Silence filled the room for some time.

“I don’t understand how this started,” he finally said, as if posing his question differently would produce an answer.

Then he left, slamming the front door as he did.

She lit another cheroot and stared at the blue smoke. In her dreams, their staring eyes buried her: children in straight rows, ten thousand at a time. She knew it was too late to escape. Darkness had opened up beneath her.

The small blue elephants would march along the fine web, and she wouldn’t see it come apart before she fell, down, down, down. The web that was supposed to withstand everything would break. Darkness would be her grave.

She could reconcile herself with that. There wasn’t a single song that lasted forever, in spite of what
she’d
told the little ones.

She just didn’t want it to happen yet.

Turning toward Ole Almind-Enevold, Orla Berntsen saw for the first time, just beneath the surface, a coarseness in the smooth, almost feminine features of his boss’s face.

Recent revelations had induced a sense of shock as forceful as a stranger’s embrace, and it had generated a curious awkwardness between them. Fear had arrived at the Ministry of National Affairs—delivered, so to speak, with the daily mail, and it had crawled under the skin of the big man and changed his appearance, indeed, his whole comportment.

The other man’s fear induced anger in Orla Berntsen that he found difficult to conceal, even though he understood everything they’d discussed with the Witch Doctor just minutes before. If Kongslund was embroiled in a scandal like the one suggested by
Independent Weekend,
then the ministry would be exposed to a wave of fanatical persecution by a press that still believed public extermination was the preferred entertainment of the Danish population.

Why did the administration support Kongslund for so many years? Was there a connection between the ministry and these allegations? And, if not, how could its longtime patron, the minister himself, have missed such a deception?

How much of the taxpayers’ money had been pumped into the institution?

Hadn’t the compelling story of Kongslund, and the nation’s vulnerable children, been a significant factor in securing the administration’s election in 2005?

Followed by the question that Knud Taasing would never let go of:
What does the party think about the fact that the highly esteemed orphanage, outwardly protecting the weakest, most vulnerable members of society, secretly aided the strong and powerful?

The symbolism could not be missed. It would topple the nation’s second-in-command just as he was standing on the final step to the throne.

They were a mismatched pair. Orla’s fellow students had thought so even twenty years ago: the taciturn student and his older supervisor, the former minister of justice in an ailing administration recently removed from power. Orla couldn’t have cared less. In the older man
he’d
recognized himself, and
he’d
not hesitated to pay the price of admission to the chambers of power.

It cost him the only friendship
he’d
ever known though. Two young lawyers who had once dreamed of opening a practice together. Søren Severin Nielsen had instead chosen a path that would inevitably lead him to lock horns with state officials. As an advocate for asylum seekers, he defended a flood of darker and darker strangers, with a doggedness that earned him the status of the nation’s leading immigration lawyer. A consummate idealist, he gave voice to anyone able to offer a heartbreaking story of fear, torture, and persecution. Orla Berntsen, meanwhile, followed his own stellar career trajectory, rising straight through the Justice Department and the Ministry of National Affairs, where he defended the prevailing bulwark of the Danish legal system, one that kept out every fraudulent refugee, soldier of fortune, and imposter. The latest case—the decision to deport an eleven-year-old Tamil boy—marked another milestone. Next year, they would be as young as ten when they were driven to the gate at Kastrup Airport and sent home.

“There’s a reason I sent for you.” The minister’s voice was barely audible in his high-ceilinged office.

Here, too, the odor of sweat and deodorant filled his nostrils. Soundlessly Orla Berntsen stretched his fingers behind his back. His hands were tingling, and his newly discovered anger at the man behind the desk pricked like pins on his skin. “If this is about Søren Severin Nielsen’s attempt to stir the press over the expulsion of that Tamil boy, the Witch
…
the PR chief has given them so many legal clauses to support the decision that their heads will spin, when—”

Ole waved his hand dismissively, and Orla fell silent.

The minister didn’t care about Tamil children. “Carl Malle paid a visit to Magna,” he said quietly. “She had
…
nothing
to report.”

Orla was silent.

“Naturally, Kongslund is innocent of the charge. I assume you understand that.” His words sounded old-fashioned.

Though it wasn’t a question, Orla replied, just as quietly, “Yes.”

“Do you know anything?”

An echo of the voices
he’d
heard throughout his childhood.
Do you know anything?

As always, he answered, “No. Nothing.”
He’d
never really known anything. His mother would sit in the same blue armchair that had once belonged to her father, never uttering a word about the past. About his father
who’d
disappeared. When
she’d
been silent long enough, he would escape to the wetlands, where
he’d
squat by the banks of the creek. It was there, one summer night, that he defeated the strongest enemy
he’d
ever encountered, throwing his evil eye out among the lily pads. In his mind’s eye he could still see it lying in green slime on a sorrel leaf, resembling an illustration from the fiction magazine
Horror
. He felt no remorse. It was the same evil eye that
he’d
fantasized had transformed his father into a rock. Oddly, he found it divested of its power by the water (an observation that would have been of interest to the bearded confessors at Kongslund).

“Well, that’s all then,” the minister said, interrupting his bizarre recollection. Like rigid tin soldiers, these few words marched across the vast no man’s land between them.

The chief inspector had retired from the homicide department at Copenhagen Police headquarters on the very day Denmark entered the Iraq War: March 21, 2003. That gave him exactly eight months, one week, and four days to take all the overtime hours
he’d
earned as compensatory leave before the end of the year. He spent the first week watching Saddam Hussein’s retreat on television.

More than five years later, he was still sitting there—in his favorite chair—watching Channel DK, known for its unambiguous support of law and order and a strong police force.
He’d
left very few unresolved cases behind, but the few that had been shelved had followed him into retirement. He thought about them almost every day.

His wife had often told their only child—a daughter—that he was
obsessed
, and he had merely nodded in agreement.

He was
obsessed
with patterns that hadn’t been exposed and explained.

He’d
perused the newspaper on the morning of May 7, and with growing interest, read about the case concerning the anonymous letters that had been sent to both the Ministry of National Affairs and
Independent Weekend
. Something he saw troubled him.

Rereading the article, he studied the photograph that had been used to illustrate the story. He furrowed his now nearly white brow as he scrutinized the big old villa in the picture, the tall windows, the ivy-clad walls, the magnificent corner towers, and the black roof with its seven chimneys.

It suddenly occurred to him what had vexed him all these years. He now realized
he’d
made an unforgivable mistake in September 2001, when they found that dead woman on the beach at Bellevue. In his mind’s eye, he inspected the woman’s body once more, as it lay in the morning mist by the water’s edge. And for the umpteenth time, he saw the props—
he’d
never stopped calling them that, even after the FBI’s experts had assured him there was no pattern in the finding.

As always, and with the same intensity as before, he sensed the ominous presence of an invisible opponent.

And again he felt a disquieting unease: though the case had been filed an accident, something really had been wrong.

The eye. The book. The branch. The rope. The bird.
Had he missed anything?

He closed his eyes, seeing it all again.

The poor little bird had a broken neck and white sand in its eyes. Its beak was half-open.

That image haunted him almost more than any other.
He’d
never understood how it happened.

But there was another prop they’d never told anyone about, and that’s the one he recognized when he opened the newspaper.
The photograph.

They had found no identification on the dead woman, but they had found an old photo. They had assumed that it originated from the part of the world where the technical examination had suggested she was from.

For that reason they’d never tried to publish the image, and anyway, it would have hardly gotten any coverage during those hectic days. So no one had seen the photo of the house with seven chimneys—the very same one printed in
Independent Weekend
.

They had sent it to the police in Australia and New Zealand, along with a photo of the dead woman, hoping that someone would recognize the exotic villa. No one had, of course, and now he knew why.
He’d
made a critical error.

The motive lay a few hundred yards up the Øresund coast. The chief inspector was certain of it: the mansion in the photograph—the only personal item on the dead woman—was Kongslund, the orphanage that had now become the center of a mystery involving an adopted boy whom the newspapers claimed might just be the tip of the iceberg in a very deep and dark secret in the nation’s soul.

The child of an unknown woman. A deep secret.

Was he overinterpreting, he wondered. His sense of duty overruled his feelings of doubt, as always. When he mentioned the revelation to his wife, she looked at him with alarm (she would much prefer he stayed put in his chair). He ignored her protests and called police headquarters.

He was patched through to his successor and explained his suspicions—that the two mysterious events were connected. The successor, out of politeness and respect for a man
who’d
devoted many years of his life serving the state, let him finish before he said, “We no longer have the case here. The ministry has asked Carl Malle to continue the investigation.”