It takes a Scandinavian mother to write like this: ‘Why murder a nine-year-old girl? She wasn’t raped. Rape is the only motive I know of for the murder of little girls, unless the killer is a close relative.’ Linda Segtnan’s The Eighth House benefits from this bluntness. Its author, a historical researcher based in Stockholm, was browsing through a newspaper archive in 2018 when a photograph of nine-year-old Birgitta Sivander caught her attention.
The girl lived in a village called Perstorp in southern Sweden until one evening in May 1948 she went out to the football field and did not return. A search was organised, the human chain making its way into the nearby forest in the middle of the night to look for her. They found her clogs. Then they found her:
A pile of stones in a watery ditch. The forester feels feverish. There’s a ringing in his ears; he is at sea amid a storm. Beside one of the stones, a pale hand rises out of shallow water. He feels his body start to tremble. His voice sounds like someone else’s as he calls out for the police.
The investigation concluded that Birgitta had been chased through the forest and hit on the head with an object before her body was covered with stones. Nobody was ever convicted of her murder. A 14-year-old boy was the prime suspect. He was taken from his family and kept in a detention centre for months.
So the book is a true-crime whodunnit. So far, so what? Two things make it exceptional. The first is access.
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