The Forest Lake Mystery Read online

  “You see, my dear Captain, these blasted doctors create nothing but trouble. The district medical officer, who just between you and me is a clown, has found out by opening up the little corpse that the child had taken nourishment. Another equally sagacious lackey of the species medicus has backed him up. I have the girl’s statement that the child was killed immediately, but as our wise penal code distinguishes very distinctly between greater or lesser speed in the expedition of such a small creature to the hereafter, the facts must be established clearly. If the girl is correct in her statement, says medical science, the child we’ve found isn’t Marie Andersen’s – that’s the girl’s name – but a completely different one. Since Marie, however, has confessed that she has given birth to a child and killed it, there is a possibility that there may be another child at the bottom of this damned marl pit and that must be investigated. The girl insists on her story and the wise doctors on theirs, so the lake must be emptied.”

  The Captain laughed.

  “Do you really think, my dear sir, that it’s necessary to empty the quarry to ascertain that? Suppose that you found a whole regiment of children’s corpses on the bottom, what would you do about it?”

  The magistrate scratched his head.

  “Try to find a corresponding regiment of child murderers, I suppose. With the morals our society has, there’s plenty of that sort of thing around, you know.”

  “Oh – is Denmark really such an immoral place?” asked the Captain.

  The magistrate shook his head.

  “Oh no – I actually think there’s an excess of so-called morality rather than the opposite. The way society and the law treat a poor girl who gets into trouble, it’s really not a surprise that she becomes anxious and strangles her baby. Ah well, it’s not me who has to make the laws – let’s leave that to those who do. I just have to reach judgement according to them. I’ve got to get to the bottom of the case even though it would annoy me if I was forced to empty the quarry. The district medical officer, that ossified… – enough said – maintains that if the girl’s child was killed immediately, it isn’t this child, and just to convince – and be rid of – him as soon as possible, I’ll have to set an Archimedes’ screw in motion, probably tomorrow. By the way, I’ve written to the young policeman, Holst, who’s a protégé of one of my friends in the capital, and who’s supposed to be smart at finding out about similar cases on the quiet. Those people in there have such a wealth of material and the doctors seem to have finished annoying the life out of me. They do nothing but bloody pester both the living and the dead.”

  The Captain leant back in his chair and blew large rings with the cigar smoke.

  “Empty the lake? Well, that’s one solution, I suppose, but if I were in your position, I wouldn’t do it. That business about nourishment is a matter of little importance and since the girl has confessed, the case seems clear cut to me. No, I definitely wouldn’t do it. Suppose, as I say, that the bottom is covered with bodies – what then?”

  The magistrate laughed.

  “Oh, there’s not much danger of that. It’s all rather simple really. Draining it is easy, as the lake is high up and there’s a deep ditch which runs past the forest. We can go up there together tomorrow and watch.”

  The Captain called his daughter, who was sitting at the piano in the living room playing for the magistrate’s housekeeper, an older relative.

  “Ulla,” he said, “now they’re going to empty the water out of our lake up there in the forest, so we might as well go home to Malmö immediately.”

  Ulla laughed.

  “You’d think Pappa was in love with that lake. In the three weeks we’ve been here, he’s visited it every single day. I thank you very much, sir, that we will now be free of it – it was beginning to bore me. That young detective was just as captivated by the lake as Pappa. He’d probably be just as annoyed if he came back and found it empty.”

  Ulla blushed slightly at the thought of the young ‘detective’ and turned her head away.

  “The young lady can ask him herself,” said the magistrate with a little smile. “He’s coming up here tomorrow, in a work capacity. If you want to renew your acquaintance, you could do me the honour of lunching here, along with the Lieutenant.”

  Ulla blushed even more.

  “Is he going to help with emptying the lake up there?” growled the Captain.

  “Not exactly,” said magistrate, “but I have some matters I wish to discuss with him. Afterwards we can go up and look at how the work is going.”

  The Captain got to his feet.

  “Shall we play another round, sir?”

  * * *

  They did. Later that evening, as the Captain and his daughter were taking the fifteen minute walk home from the magistrate’s house, the Captain was in a bad mood. Ulla asked with a smile if Pappa had lost many games.

  “No,” he said, “but now I must leave. That idea of emptying the lake is just too absurd for words.”

  “But that doesn’t have to have consequences for us, Pappa,” objected Ulla.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he replied sharply and walked on in silence.

  Ulla thought Pappa’s mood had become worse since the day they found the child’s corpse up there and met the ‘detective’. Ulla blushed; she was spending rather a lot of time thinking about the young man, but he was handsome and very courteous. Tomorrow she would get to meet him once again.

  III

  Eigil Holst received the magistrate’s invitation to come to the lake with some surprise; he had thought the matter closed. It was not very complicated and he had seen in the newspapers how everything had gradually come to light. But since it was possible that there was something or other with the evidence that they wanted his opinion on – it was him after all who had first reported the case – he easily got official permission to attend and he was happy for the opportunity for a trip to his favourite spot. The gentlemen criminals in the capital were already beginning to go on their summer holidays and there wasn’t terribly much to do in town.

  The magistrate received him warmly and invited him to lunch, which Holst gladly accepted. He had a very sensitive nature and the bureaucratic rigidity with which some of the judges treated him when he came into contact with them in their official capacity made him feel uncomfortable. He found the divide that qualifications and rank raised between superior and subordinate police officers unreasonable. When working, he was courteous and carried out the orders he was given precisely, but it pained him that the majority of his superiors seemed to completely forget that he, with his training and his service position in the Army, might feel offended by this lack of respect.

  The magistrate perceived their relationship quite differently. He treated Holst with the utmost courtesy and kindness and, while lunch was being prepared, he seated him in a comfortable chair in his large private office with a good morning cigar and brought him up to date with the ridiculous dispute between the legal authorities and their medical counterparts. Holst smiled; it wasn’t the first time he’d come across this sort of thing. Doctors always found it difficult to appreciate that their divine knowledge had limits and nowhere had their authority been more exuberantly embraced than in forensic medicine. In all probability, the district medical officer’s ‘discovery’ of the remnants of food in the child corpse was of very little importance. Now that it had been determined that the corpse had been in the water for five months, it could very well be that different decompositions or water which had seeped in had resulted in the so-called remnants of food, and as the girl was telling the truth about everything else, there was little reason to believe that she would be lying about this.

  What the magistrate actually wanted with Holst was to persuade him to discreetly present their case to the medical authorities in the healthcare council, which he had learnt that Holst happened to have good access to through the different occasions when he had had the opportunity to convince the council or the chairman of the committee. They
had already discussed this together when Holst had reported the find. Holst was happy to promise to do what little he could and by degrees tried to dissuade the magistrate from having the lake emptied.

  Admittedly it was infatuation, sentimentality even, but he wanted so much to retain his little spot in the forest. He didn’t reveal that, but it lay behind his efforts. However, the magistrate wouldn’t budge on that point. He was rather pedantic and since the district medical officer had stated publicly that it had to be another child, it had to be documented that he – as the magistrate – was right, even if he had to have the much larger Esrum Lake emptied. Holst had half a mind to say that it was most fortunate that Esrum Lake was not in the magistrate’s jurisdiction because he seemed to be a man who stuck firmly to his guns.

  Shortly before lunch Captain Ankerkrone and his daughter arrived. The Captain greeted Holst kindly and Ulla sent him a little coy nod of recognition which he received with the honour due. Holst, as previously touched on, was not someone who paid much attention to the fair sex. He had few opportunities to meet women in their homes and the many women he was able to meet ‘outside’, as he called it, he approached with armed neutrality. In this case, it was another matter; he was the magistrate’s guest in a friendly, pleasant home and strove to be as gracious as possible.

  Ulla was slightly surprised at the apparent change in his manner, but, as she said to herself, he was so full of vitality that one forgot about the other thing. The other thing was him being a ‘detective’. Holst and Ulla became really good friends; they sat next to each other at lunch and Holst took the opportunity on the sly to look into her bright eyes and enjoy her fresh, enchanting smile. Ulla took good notice and sparkled with even greater freshness, if that were possible.

  The Captain was in low spirits. There was no way he could be persuaded to allow Ulla to come with them to the marl pit; one had no idea of what grisly horrors the pond could be housing in its depths, and although Holst laughed and assured him that the danger was very little and that, on the contrary, it would be most stimulating if the young lady would accompany them on such a beautiful stroll, the Captain was adamant and Ulla had to remain with the magistrate’s housekeeper, not at all an amusing prospect for her.

  * * *

  By the time they arrived at the marl pit, the work was well underway. It was being presided over by the district constable, an old soldier who had served in both wars against Prussia as a warrant officer in the cavalry; a reliable man, but strictly limited as far as the intellect was concerned. He was an excellent organiser, both at bird shoots and work of a more representative nature, and knew how to put a sheen on local festivities. It was a pleasure to watch him marching at the head of the procession at the local bird shoots, and his speech in praise of the king on these festive occasions – the king of the country, that is, not of the birds – was something of an event in itself that was only impaired by the fact that he made more or less the same speech three times a year and had done it for almost the same period of time that the country’s ruler had reigned. But each time he delivered it, he said that he found a new aspect to dwell on.

  The emptying of the marl pit was something of an event for him and his organising talent had not let him down. The stone wall had been broken through at three places and three screws were working simultaneously, driven by the locomobile from the parish’s cooperative threshing plant that was located at a farm near the forest. The town’s blacksmith and ‘mechanical coachman’, as he was called, had constructed an axle which spun in a way which was a joy to watch, and while the townsfolk stood by the wicket fence, the constable, accompanied by the wheezing of the locomobile, was in charge of the ‘systematic emptying’, his way of referring to the work that was underway.

  When the magistrate and his guests turned up, the constable’s predominant attitude swung over into modest subservience. He observed Holst with some suspicion; it annoyed him that a police officer from the city had been invited to be a guest of the magistrate. He considered himself to be at least the equal of Holst who, when it came to it, was only a sergeant while he could call himself an inspector if he wanted to – and he did want to, by the way, but did so mostly out in the country districts. The magistrate laughed at the technical arrangements and Holst hid a quiet smile, but immediately went over to the constable and expressed such an open and unmistakably favourable appreciation of the work that the constable’s stiffness towards him disappeared and he felt a certain pleasure in being able to show the gentleman from in there what the local police were able to stage.

  In the meantime, the quarry was slowly being emptied; in places it was fourteen to fifteen feet to the bottom and the slope of the bank was steep. There were no fish at all; it seemed quite uninhabited, nor was there any trace of the clothes that the girl had said she had wrapped around the little corpse.

  Holst was standing by the fence next to the Captain and the magistrate, looking a little wistfully over the yellow banks that were being revealed as the water gradually ran out. Suddenly, he felt a pressure on his arm; it was the Captain, who had taken a cramp-like grip on his wrist, just for a second before letting go.

  Holst looked at his neighbour in surprise; the Captain’s face was strikingly pale and his eyes were focused on the bottom of the quarry. Holst looked in the same direction and pulled himself up straight. That looked strange – what could it be?

  At the same moment, there came a shout from the men along the fence – all eyes were turned towards the edge where the water had been pumped out of a hollow near the bench, approximately in the area where the child’s corpse had appeared. Holst stared at the spot and in the surface of the receding water there was something dazzlingly white beginning to emerge, pliant and round against the yellow bank. The water continued to sink and, with his blood freezing in his veins, he saw the body of a completely naked woman, stretched on her back and held down by two heavy stones, one tied with a rope round her feet, the other round her neck. Everyone flocked forward as the magistrate made his way with difficulty down the steep bank. A deep hush descended, except for the hiss of the locomobile and the creak of the screws, while the assembled men stood speechless, uncomprehending and almost paralysed by their profound, silent horror.

  Little by little, a whisper spread from man to man; the work stopped and slowly, without being commanded, the men approached the body, untied the ropes and took hold. They carried it up the slope and laid it down in the grass near the bench. Holst and the magistrate followed them up, while the Captain came over to the bench and leant against the back support; he had gone very pale. None of them spoke.

  The magistrate was dumbfounded; think that such a thing could happen in his peaceful jurisdiction – a murder, and one committed in the very recent past. He already felt how the whole country’s attention would be directed at what he was up to, anticipating the magnitude of a task with little prospect of a result. He turned to Holst.

  “May the devil take that doctor,” he hissed softly between his teeth.

  At that moment, by a strange coincidence, the district medical officer came over the fence by the quarry. He pushed through the assembled throng of men and stood in front of the corpse, face to face with his adversary. The magistrate soon recovered his poise; he bowed to the doctor with an ironic smile and gathered his intellectual superciliousness into a joke.

  “It’s certainly not Marie Andersen’s child.”

  It sounded jarring and sharp through the eeriness that was oppressing everyone.

  The district medical officer gave him a serious look in return.

  “No,” he said, “but it could be the mother of the other child.”

  The magistrate tensed his lips and turned towards the quarry.

  “Kirkeskov,” he yelled to the constable, “Get the water out of this damned pit, even if it turns out to be stuffed full of corpses. Let’s get it all done while we’re at it.”

  The crowd retreated silently until only the magistrate, his guests and th
e doctor were standing by the body. Holst observed it thoroughly. It was a young woman of medium height, well developed, with luxuriant, blond hair. Her features were harmonious and beautiful, strangely well-preserved, her facial expression peaceful, her eyes closed under the pale eyebrows; a strangely white, firm marble body, more statue than corpse.

  The doctor broke the silence.

  “She hasn’t drowned; she was already dead when put into the pit. There can therefore be no question of suicide.”

  He bent over the corpse and examined it closely.

  “No more than twenty-five – more likely younger – it’s a murder, sir, a full-blown murder.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” snapped the magistrate. “I can just about see that for myself – we can take the preliminary post-mortem immediately, if you wish! The full autopsy can take place in its own time.”

  Holst stepped aside and rushed down the slope to take a closer look at the spot where the body had lain. It struck him that, in the clay where the corpse’s head had been, there were some pieces of clothing and a cotton apron, apparently dragged down there by the stone that was tied round the neck. He motioned to the magistrate, who came down to him.

  “Sir,” he said, “aren’t these the rags the child murderer talked about?”

  “Yes, you’re right…” The magistrate bent down and examined the clothes. “Exactly that.”

  “They were lying under the corpse’s head – you can see the imprint here. That means,” continued Holst as if to himself, “that the body of this woman has been lowered into the pit sometime after the child’s corpse. Not all that long after.”

  The magistrate looked questioningly at him.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I think the child’s body, gradually, as the clothes around it became saturated with water, disentangled itself from them and finally just hung loosely to them. The body of the woman was quite naturally lowered at the same spot, the only one where access to the water was fairly easy, and came to rest on the clothes around the child’s body. So when I threw the large stone out the other day – that one,” said Holst, pointing to a large stone which had been exposed in the surface of the water, “the movement in the water released the child’s body and brought it to the surface.”