The Seventh Child (32 page)

“I’m convinced that all five boys from that group have received the damned letter. We overheard a conversation between Asger Christoffersen in Aarhus and Peter Trøst—and it’s clear that both got it.”

“Are you wiretapping a
television station
?” The minister’s voice was tinged with a rare incredulity.

“Yes, and an observatory—which has its own antennae out to the entire universe. Once in a while, it’s practical to be able to draw on old connections. You, of all people, have to agree with that.” His tone was sarcastic, provoking.

“What have you told Susanne Ingemann?” The minister stood by the window observing the courtyard.

“That we consider the anonymous letter a psychopathic act that may be the precursor for something much more drastic. Possibly an assassination.
Terror
. You can’t be too careful in the age of terrorism, when even the Ministry of National Affairs is threatened
…
and Kongslund may be at risk too. Little babies blown to pieces by mad Muslims—the news would travel the globe.”

“Yes,” said the minister, instantly captivated. “It’s a dreadful world we live in now.” It was convenient for him to forget the old one.

Malle nodded. “We’re trying to track the envelope and the cutout letters, and I’m about to get the names of every family who adopted a child from Kongslund between 1961 and 1962. Susanne Ingemann is assisting us, even though she isn’t particularly happy about letting us examine the old records.”

“And when you’ve got the names of all the families?”

“Then we’ll find the current addresses of the children. Of course they’ve all long since left home, but once we know the sender’s geographic location we can compare it to the list.”

The minister clenched his hands into tight fists, concealing his neatly manicured nails. “Carl, you’ll have to go through all the materials from Mother’s Aid Society. You’ll have to go to the Family Council and see what you can find. Yes, I know we tried it before—without luck—but now Magna’s influence is no longer what it was. I want every goddamned box in the archives turned inside out—every single folder and binder. I want you to turn over every stone in this country and abroad, where someone may have written that damn name
…
John Bjergstrand
…
as well as every name that may be similar or derived from it. You’ll have to contact the families who adopted children back then and ask whether they were ever approached by a third party who showed more than casual interest in the child they adopted.”

Malle smiled faintly. “Yes, sir. But right now the big problem is Severin.”

The Almighty One slowly unclenched his fists in front of his chin, and the small gesture seemed to signal disapproval. “Severin,” he said. “A rejected little boy who has wasted his potential. A lawyer for all the lost and forlorn and for all the swindlers and frauds who come to Denmark
…
What’s the problem?”

“They met last night, Ole. They weren’t together for very long, but they met.”

The minister’s eyes shifted momentarily.

“I’ve got a man on Severin, and he went directly from his office to Glee Court, where Orla opened the door for him. Like that
…
”—Malle snapped his fingers—“they were reunited.”

“Do we know what they talked about?”

“No, but I think we have a pretty good idea, don’t we?”

“You’ll have to contact him.” He paused. The immigration lawyer and the hard-liner in the same boat. It could be a disaster. Malle had been furious when he learned that Ole Almind-Enevold, during his stint at the university, had loosened his tongue enough to tell Orla that he and Severin had been in the same orphanage.

Malle drew a deep breath. “I’ll be in touch with them and make sure they have no further contact. I’ll also talk to Susanne Ingemann—and Marie Ladegaard—and then I’ll go to Aarhus, since Asger Christoffersen has now become involved. I think we’ll leave it to the Professor to handle Trøst.”

The minister leaned back in his antique chair. A sense of calm descended on his finely drawn, feminine face. Ole had been but a thin boy when they met, a boy whom the other resistance fighters barely noticed—except for the fact that they could use him to run errands and take messages and hairpin triggers from one end of the provincial town to the other. The Germans, they figured, would never suspect such a small boy. Ole had never questioned anything, and
he’d
never hesitated when
he’d
been given a task.

Malle hadn’t thought
he’d
amount to anything more than an errand boy.

When he was first appointed minister in 1979, Malle had begun a discreet investigation of his past, because there were rumors that his mother had been a Communist, and during those years, Communism was taken very seriously. The Sandinistas had been victorious in Nicaragua. The Soviet Union kept Eastern Europe in an iron grip, and May Day was celebrated as a national holiday, with large numbers of people in the streets. Malle allied himself with an old friend from PET, the secret service. Working fast, they’d found nothing to be concerned about. Granted, the newly appointed minister had grown up on a small farm south of Vejle, with a father who disciplined his son with whatever tool was close at hand (this was before the somewhat milder era of the clothes hanger) and a mother who had become a Communist soon after the Russian Revolution. But there was nothing to suggest it had rubbed off on her son. She was the one
who’d
pushed him into the resistance movement (since she figured that the Germans were no more dangerous to her son than her unpredictable husband), and so in effect she had brought him together with Malle.

When Carl and his closest buddies were sent to Copenhagen in September of 1943, Ole came along, and in Skodsborg, he met Magna for the first time when the Resistance began sending Jews to Sweden. Later, in law school, he met Lykke, and then married on his twenty-first birthday. In 1957, he was asked by Prison Services to finish a project on incarcerated females and their experiences of prison life. Early on in the project, the newly minted jurist with the brutal background developed an interesting thesis with a surprising gender perspective: that imprisonment damaged women far more than it damaged men. He claimed it must be on account of their inability to fulfill humankind’s oldest and strongest instinct: motherhood.

Malle recorded this particular information about Almind-Enevold’s life, and then he put it away, because he saw no reason to share with others these facts. Though, he knew they might serve as his life insurance if Ole ever made him his enemy. The ambitious young jurist with aspirations of a career in politics had a marital issue that was becoming a problem: for three years Ole and Lykke had tried in vain to have children. Despite all their dreams and attempts, Lykke had not conceived.

The young jurist was furious over his wife’s perceived lack of commitment to this part of life—no doubt because
he’d
dreamed of having a son for so long and couldn’t imagine a life without one after suffering through his childhood with a wordless, violent father in a low-ceilinged house in the sticks.

Lykke had robbed him of the chance to prove that everything could be made better. That patterns could be broken.

And in this very situation, Fate had risen—lazily, as always, to veil its intentions—and lifted its skinny hand, until it seemed as though it waved at the mortal and the godless down in the inferno. This was April 1960. A single, unforeseen difficulty sufficed. And there are those who say that while both God and the Devil seem to be created in the image of man, Fate, in all its capriciousness, is the feminine counterpart to those two gruff gentlemen.

The Almighty One interrupted Malle’s train of thought. “But, Carl, why is it happening now?”

Malle didn’t respond.

“It’s crucial that we find out.”

Malle hesitated a moment, then he said, “There’s one last thing that I’m not sure how to tackle.” This was an extremely rare admission for a man with his reputation.

He leaned in. “There’s a detective out there—or, rather, a retired chief homicide inspector—who has contacted the current head of the homicide department
…
and given him a tip that’s connected to the Kongslund Affair.”

Almind-Enevold arched his brows, his face suddenly growing pale.

“He has, as far as I am aware, suggested to his former colleague that he look at an older, unsolved case about a dead woman, a mysterious death on the beach near Kongslund. That’s all I know. I didn’t learn this from the homicide chief but from one of his subordinates
…
who reports to me.”

“I see.”

“But I’ll have to look into it.”

“By all means, yes.” This was the last explicit order the minister would give his old ally before Fate struck with a force no one could have predicted.

Carl Malle rose without further comment and left the office.

PART III

EVA

16

THE KING’S SKODSBORG

May 12, 2008

Kongslund was built during the very months the Constitution was completed, and it wouldn’t have been possible without inspiration from the king who was loved by all the people. According to myth.

And when the orderly rows of ladies from Mother’s Aid Society were looking for a fitting home for Denmark’s unwanted offspring, what location could have been a better fit than the favorite spot of the People’s King? The king himself was the son of a loose woman—from whom he had been separated as a young boy—and as an adult,
he’d
taken a common woman as his illegitimate wife and so enjoyed the ordinary pleasures of everyday life. When
he’d
soared to heaven without leaving an heir, his branch of the royal family died, much like the carp in the pond in the Deer Gardens where
he’d
loved to fish.

Ah yes.
He’d
loved Kongslund.
He’d
signed the Constitution absentmindedly, in between two fishing trips.

I must have missed something. That’s what I was thinking during those days when the ministry intensified the hunt for the anonymous letter writer.

Something decisive must have happened before I’d been old enough to understand—something so discreet that it hadn’t left a single trace for me to find.

I went through the documents that might shed light on the mystery, scrutinizing even the most minuscule details.

In the months after I was found at Kongslund, there were eight little beds in the infant room—four against the north wall and four against the south wall. That much I knew. When the room was fully occupied, eight little milk bottles hung from a contraption in the ceiling, utilizing an ingenious string and pulley system the woman on the night shift employed to lower a bottle to a fussy child, who could then satisfy its hunger without dropping the bottle in the bed. I’ve heard Magna deny the use of the bottle device to curious reporters. Later she claimed that my worry about the children being lonely had clouded my outlook and caused me to hallucinate. “My dear little Inger Marie, you’ve turned elephant trunks to strings!” she laughed. But her voice revealed her deception, and the babies in the infant room shared secrets with one another long before the adults thought it possible.

I kept returning in my mind to the old villa’s early years, as I looked for the clues I was sure must have been deposited along the way.

Magdalene’s grandfather had only just finished the foundation when the most significant event of his life occurred. The last absolute monarch’s favorite place when he visited his summer residence, the nearby Skodsborg Palace, was on the hill above the building site. In mid-March 1847, he stumbled on a tree root and slid down the slippery slope, landing with a thud on top of the only remaining tree stump at the building site.

As fate would have it, the builder who stood at the bottom of the slope, witnessed the king’s fall. Terrified, he rushed over and crouched down beside him. The king then opened his eyes and observed the completed foundation of a big villa, and thus was the destiny of the hill sealed with a pure, happy coincidence. The house was move-in ready at the same time that popular democracy replaced absolute monarchy in Denmark; and according to legend, the king was more eagerly involved in the construction of the beautiful villa by the sound than in the drafting of the nation’s Constitution. Slightly winded, he trudged through the thicket—relieved to have escaped court life, not to mention the dull meetings in the state council, which he preferred to doze through—announcing his arrival with a cheerful greeting to the workers, “What a lovely spot this is, with beeches all about her.” Magdalene’s grandfather would later recount the enthusiastic pronouncements the king would make as he puffed on his pipe, singeing the outer strands of his majestic mustache. Sometimes when the last absolute monarch ran out of tobacco,
he’d
pick up interesting little leaves and twigs and burn them in clouds of bluish-black smoke.

“I see you’ve done exactly what you said you would do. You built the future owner a small room between the towers, with a view of the sound and the Swedish coast,” the majesty puffed through the smoke.

“But that was Your Majesty’s own suggestion,” the architect protested, with an appropriate measure of humility.

In her journals, Magdalene repeated her grandfather’s descriptions of His Majesty sitting under the beeches—often with his long telescope aimed at the sound and Hven. When construction was completed, the king gave this telescope to Kongslund’s architect as a token of his appreciation. In the final days before completion, His Royal Majesty appeared in the forest with the great love of his life on his arm. “Here’s the palace I’ve told you about, Louise,” he said, the tobacco in his pipe glowing so brightly you could hardly see his mouth behind his goat’s beard and the cloud of smoke that enshrouded him.

“When this house is finished, I’ll yield all claim to power,” he added, almost humbly, as though he were presenting a child to the commoner Miss Louise Rasmussen. She smiled at her plump, lovable husband. “Then I think it’ll have been worth all the hard work,” she said rather cryptically, as was her habit. A few years earlier, she had—and I view this as proof that women are the ones who weave the chaotic actions of men into a comprehensible pattern—given up a child for adoption in secret following an affair with a chamberlain by the name of Berling.

The People’s King died less than twenty years later, near the end of 1863; for some time
he’d
known it was impossible for him to have children, not even with the passionate Louise Rasmussen in his bed. You might say that the country adopted a new royal family due to the lack of a natural, biological one.

“Marie!” There was a rapping on my door, and I jumped. As I did so often, without knowing why, I’d connected the various stories about Kongslund with the solving of my mystery. Absurd fantasies.

“You’ll have to come downstairs right away!” Susanne yelled in the hallway.

I stood, my hand still resting on the old telescope, and opened the door.

It was rare to see Susanne Ingemann in such a state.

Her beautiful face shone as though
she’d
run up a flight of stairs three times the length of Kongslund.

She’d
handled the visits from the newspaper and the TV station with all the composure that Magna had recognized in her, and she hadn’t given the reporters any inkling of the fated universe behind Kongslund’s walls. If they sensed anything behind the thick doors, Susanne Ingemann had resolutely locked them out, and if they’d still suspected that deep secrets were buried inside the villa, they hadn’t come one step closer in the preceding days.

It was different with Carl Malle, and Susanne left me no choice. “You’ll have to come downstairs,” she said, whispering now, as though she regretted having yelled.

He sat in the sunroom with a cup of oolong tea—Magna’s and now also Susanne’s favorite—and the delicate porcelain was nearly buried within his giant fist.
He’d
hardly changed in all the years that had elapsed since he was a regular guest at Kongslund, during Magna’s heyday. The smile in his tanned face had retained an openness that convinced most people that he was an honest and good policeman.

Susanne and I knew better.

He rose halfway out of his chair, bowing slightly. “Marie Ladegaard. Thank you for finally allowing me to ask a couple of questions.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

Susanne sat on the sofa, her back to the garden and the sound, and I chose the chair directly across from Carl Malle—at a distance but with direct eye contact.

“Marie,” Susanne said, “Carl would like to ask you a few things in connection with the anonymous letters.”

“I doubt I can be of any assistance.” I rebuffed her request crisply and, just to be sure, I delivered my formal statement with a faint lisp.

Malle studied my face for a moment, his brows furrowed. Then he said, “Marie, Susanne is helping me find the children who, as adults, may have had something to do with
…
this matter. The minister wants a thorough investigation. The press is out of control, and the ministry cannot ignore that. Journalists are seeing conspiracies everywhere.” He opened his hand and put the teacup down roughly. “The letter writer was so clever as to send their nonsense to several people who are connected to this place
…
I assume you two didn’t receive any letter?”

The question seemed to be an afterthought.

I shook my head.

“I see,” he said.

“But how can the police help Kongslund?” I asked. “Do you need access to confidential archives? Are you going to ransack the house?” My indignant objections were already on the tip of my tongue.

But my growing anger only caused Malle to smile. His teeth were white, every bit as strong as a young man’s. “We’re not going to
ransack
, Marie. Susanne is an old friend of the minister’s, and this case is of great concern to the children whom Kongslund has aided and protected for decades. A little informal contact and mutual assistance can only be beneficial. And besides, I’m not a policeman anymore.”

Susanne sat silently, her pale face framed by the red aureole that men found so attractive.

“Highly confidential records can never become a shared matter,” I said.

“The problem is,” Malle replied, “there aren’t any records here. They’re gone with the wind.”

I said nothing, but made a concerted effort to hide my satisfaction at seeing Malle so frustrated. They had been certain that Susanne would cooperate. When it all came down to it, however, her commencement as director of Kongslund in 1989 was no more a coincidence than the recipients of the anonymous letters in May 2008 had been.

“We can’t find names or addresses of
any
of the biological parents of the seven children who were in the Elephant Room that Christmas in 1961,” Malle said. “You’re the only one whose origins we know about—because you don’t have any.” The security advisor paused briefly, as though
he’d
just delivered an exceptional joke. “But right now it seems like you’re all foundlings, and that’s what we find really puzzling.
Where are the papers?
” He glanced at Susanne, who of course didn’t have an answer.

And
he’d
never dare ask the questions any more explicitly in my presence. Each of us knew that.

I thought of Magna and permitted myself a little smile. “Nemesis,” I said, lisping audibly on each
s
.

Malle allowed my impertinence, surprisingly, to pass unchallenged. Presumably he wouldn’t want to risk a confrontation at this stage of the conversation. “There ought to be baptism documents—copies of those—or birth certificates,” he said instead.

He was right. The children who weren’t baptized because their biological mothers left the minute their babies had been delivered would have at least shown up with a little note that read:
Unnamed child, born this date at the Rigshospital.

“Where are they?” the big man demanded. For a moment he sounded like an unhappy child at a birthday party treasure hunt.

I didn’t reply, because there was nothing to say. I knew better than anyone that those papers no longer existed, that the only trace of them was only a few feet above his head, in the secret compartment of the large cabinet, behind the lemon-tree carvings.

“And there ought to be other documents as well. Mother’s Aid Society prepared meticulous certificates of both the biological parents and the adoptive parents
…
The old good-hearted aunties made a point of doing that.
So it must have all been there
…
once upon a time.”

Surprisingly, he knew a great deal about the procedures back then. And he had just revealed a possible explanation for one of the mysteries I had encountered but had never untangled: How had Malle located Orla and Severin when they were kids running about between the hedges in Søborg and didn’t even know themselves that they’d been at Kongslund their first year? How was he able to contact those two at a time when nobody but their adoptive parents and the matron at Søborg ought to have known anything about their past and present address? Until Malle’s visit, I had thought
he’d
had another way to access the papers that were kept with the authorities—but his frustration showed very clearly that this had never been the case.

It raised an uncomfortable thought, because the first explanation was that the source of his close contact with Orla and Severin and Peter as children was
Kongslund itself
…
In other words,
Magna
.

I just couldn’t believe it.

I didn’t think my foster mother would voluntarily share that information with a man like Malle, who for all these years had been the right-hand man of Ole Almind-Enevold. And that left only one other possibility, which I had to this point eliminated as being too far-fetched: they had simply kept the children in the infant room under surveillance; they’d followed them when they left Kongslund, and followed them to their new homes.