Farewell to Freedom (24 page)

The scent of flowers filled Louise's nose as she made her way across the gravel courtyard. Louise saw the open door to the church and when she spotted the bucket filled with small bouquets outside, she assumed Camilla was already hard at work.

It took a second before she reacted to the voice and looked over toward the pastor's residence, where a heavy silhouette was squatting down over someone that was lying on the stoop in front of the pastor's kitchen door. Louise recognized the blonde hair right away, dropped the wreath, and started running.

The man stood up and seemed a little confused as he pointed down at Camilla and explained, practically tripping over his words, that his name was Otto Birch and he was the sexton.

“She was lying here like this when we arrived a couple minutes ago,” he said. “She's crying and mumbling something about ‘dead,' but she won't really respond,” he said.

“Did something happen to her?” Louise thought of the brutality involved in Kaj Antonsen's death. “Is she bleeding? Does it look like someone hit her?”

Louise leaned over her friend and brushed her hair out of her face, which was frozen in an expression of stubborn denial, like you might see in a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Camilla's sobs were throaty and sounded more like a constant moan interrupted by muddled speech, from which Louise could only pick out a few words like dead, funeral, baby, and church.

Louise took hold of her friend and tried to get her to sit up. She studied Camilla's face and ran a hand through her blonde hair to check whether there were any signs of physical trauma.

“She's in shock,” Otto said, trying to light a cigar.

The pastor was walking over from the parking lot, and when he spotted them he sped up. Jonas was just behind him, but he hadn't noticed the commotion yet because his eyes were glued to the Game Boy he clutched in his hands.

“What happened?” Henrik Holm yelled, breaking into a run.

“Baby, church, dead.…” The words were unclear and running in a continuous loop.

Henrik gave Louise a puzzled look. Louise had managed to get Camilla up into a sitting position, her back leaning against the kitchen door.

Even though she didn't think it would matter, she still stepped out of range of Camilla's hearing before admitting that she'd been afraid of a mental breakdown ever since Kaj Antonsen's murder.

“But maybe it's not so strange that it didn't happen until now,” Louise said, explaining that she'd tried to talk Camilla out of assuming responsibility for the funeral several times. Then Louise went back and sat down on the steps with an arm around her friend.

“The baby is dead,” Camilla mumbled into her shoulder.

Now Louise felt her own tears coming. She knew there wasn't much she could do to alleviate her friend's incapacitating pain. She could only try to comfort her as best she could.

“What is she saying?” Henrik asked, moving in a little closer.

“It's just a bunch of unconnected words.”

Louise shook her head a little, and then looked over to Jonas and noticed how he lit up when he spotted her. But an instant later he stiffened when he spotted Camilla on the steps.

She turned back to Camilla, thinking that she was going to have to call Jakobsen, even though the crisis psychologist had the weekend off.

“Let me hear what she's saying,” Henrik urged. He quickly glanced at the church and asked if the sexton had been over and finished getting things ready.

Otto shook his head and explained that he'd spotted Camilla before he'd ever made it over to the church.

Henrik got up abruptly and started running toward the church door.

When the shout came, Louise was already on her feet.

31

T
HE SHAPE AND SIZE MATCHED A TINY NEWBORN, SO
L
OUISE WAS
prepared when she carefully loosened the towel after having pulled the bundle farther out onto the floor in the triangle of light the sun made through the door opening.

The infant was dead, just as she had guessed. It was a little boy, she confirmed, as she slowly let her eyes move down over his body covered with dried blood and vernix caseosa, which had a faint greenish tinge.

Louise took a deep breath and looked up at Pastor Holm, who was watching from the open door. The stone floor of the church was cold and there was a draft along the floor. The little baby's eyes were closed; his face looked like a dried mask that had never had a chance to be shaped by movement and expressions. Neither his joints nor his muscles were stiff anymore, the way they would be right after death, and he had a rancid smell, not the pleasant baby smell you associated with a newborn.
The greenish tinge could come from an amniotic fluid infection
, Louise thought, clearing her throat before she said anything.

“He might have died right after the birth,” she guessed, straightening partway.

Henrik had a deep furrow in his brow. Then he went and sat down on the bench next to Camilla's altar bouquet. At Louise's request, he dialed 114 and was connected directly to the local police station that served the church's neighborhood.

“Ask for the officer who was here when you found the little girl,” Louise said standing up. She heard Henrik ask for Officer Rasmus Hem, and heard him briefly explaining that they had found the body of an infant wrapped up in the church in the same location where they had found Baby Girl.

“I don't understand what's happening,” Henrik said, shaking his head as he spoke to the officer. He explained that Camilla Lind had found the baby when she walked into the church with flowers for today's funeral. He and Jonas had been in downtown Frederiksberg doing some shopping.

“We left a little after ten, but I didn't go into the church before we left, and we went out the other way, so I didn't notice anything.”

Louise looked at her watch. It was a little past noon. She nodded as Henrik stuck his cell phone back in his pocket and said the police would be right there.

“Then we ought to go out and keep the door locked until they arrive,” she said, taking one last glance at the bundle in the blue towel.

“It's just so strange to have two such similar events one right after the other,” he said, heading for the door. “Officer Hem thought it was related to all the media coverage following the discovery of the abandoned baby here, that maybe someone decided to copy that.”

“That is quite possible,” Louise admitted. “Copycats aren't all that uncommon. My immediate guess is that the child has been dead for twenty-four hours and that he might have been stillborn to begin with. It doesn't look like the birth took place in a hospital. If it had, he would have been cleaned up and his umbilical cord clamped.”

“No, it looks more like a birth that happened without any professional assistance,” the pastor agreed, pulling the door to the church closed. Then he nodded a couple of times as if he were trying to convince himself of something.

When Louise emerged from the church, Camilla was still sitting on the steps of the house with her eyes closed and her back against the kitchen door. Jonas was sitting cross-legged on the gravel in the courtyard with his Game Boy on the ground next to him.

Henrik walked over and helped him up, then picked up the Game Boy, and they started slowly moving toward the residence.

“We'll go in the other way,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to the sexton, who was sitting on the stairs as if he wasn't really sure what he should do.

“There's a baby in the church,” the pastor said to Otto. “I called the police. We're going to keep the door closed until they arrive.”

“What about the funeral?” Otto asked, standing up with difficulty.

“It will have to be postponed.”

A confused expression passed over the elderly sexton's face as his schedule for the whole day was instantly canceled, but then he nodded and glanced up at the church clock, which now said quarter to twelve.

Louise watched Jonas as he disappeared with his father.
Poor little guy
, she thought, wondering if he shouldn't be offered a chance to talk to Jakobsen too. That was twice in fourteen days that something so devastating had happened right outside his front door. Then Louise walked over to Camilla and sat down next to her.

“You're going to have to get up. The police will be here soon, and they're definitely going to want to talk to you.”

Her friend was just staring into space. Then her eyelids shuddered a little, and she turned to look at Louise.

“I don't know if I'm up to that,” she said so softly that Louise had to lean over to hear. “It feels like somebody drained out everything that's usually inside me. Suddenly I'm the figure with the scythe who appears in people's back seats right before a traffic accident happens.”

Camilla was as pale as a corpse, and her words emerged through lips that hardly moved, as if her face had grown stiff along with the rest of her body.

A dove had hopped up to the second step of the stairs and had its back to them, poking at something on the step. Louise watched it before taking a deep breath and psyching herself up to tell Camilla what they'd found in the church.

“You were right. The baby was dead. But it was probably a stillbirth, so it wouldn't have made any difference if you had gotten here sooner.”

Louise was silent for a bit before finally taking her eyes off the dove and then adding, “If that's even the kind of thing you're thinking about?”

The dove flew away when Louise stood up, holding out a hand to Camilla and pulling her up.

32

T
HERE WERE CUPS OUT ON THE KITCHEN TABLE AND THE KETTLE
was on. It was warm in the kitchen, a little stuffy. The sun had been shining in the big windows over the long kitchen table.

Louise settled Camilla on the bench and took a seat while Henrik remained standing, a little hesitant.

“I have an op-ed column I need to finish writing, but I don't suppose there's any point starting on that before the police have been here,” he said, setting milk and sugar out on the table.

His words hung in the air as silence took over the room, because no one was really sure how to respond.

Louise finished making the coffee and poured some into Camilla's cup before filling her own. She was familiar with Henrik Holm's columns in the paper. He was one of the people the media turned to when they needed a religious point of view, a “media priest” as he was sarcastically called by some of the slightly harsh satirists. For her part, Louise had always found him to be a good, plain-talking writer, and she enjoyed reading his weekly column.

“Why here?” Camilla asked, finally breaking the wordless vacuum.

“Basically, it just makes sense,” Henrik said, explaining that in Germany there were still churches that had little trapdoors to leave newborns. “It's really not such a ludicrous idea to choose a church if you're in that situation,” he continued, adding that he would much rather the unhappy mothers choose his church than toss the baby into a river.

“But who decides to give birth outside the system, without a doctor or a midwife or anything?” Camilla wondered out loud to herself.

They were interrupted by the sharp ring of the doorbell, and the pastor stood up to go let the police in and accompany them over to the church.

Exactly. Who
does
decide to give birth completely alone?
Louise thought. She hadn't heard anyone coming up the kitchen steps, so she jumped a little when there was a hard knock on the door.

It was the sexton, who stuck his gray-haired head in while the rest of him stayed out on the stoop.

“Someone is here for the funeral and insists on knowing why it's been postponed,” he announced. “He says he's from the police, but he doesn't have his badge.”

Louise got up and went out to fill Mikkelsen in on what had happened. Two police cars had just pulled up in the courtyard next to the church, almost as if they felt at home there. Louise heard one officer yell to another that the techs would be there within five minutes.