The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  She wouldn’t answer if he knocked. She would pretend to be asleep, and then she would take it from there. Their relationship could not continue—not as it was now.

  She read for a while longer, then put the book aside. Despite the weather, she decided to go and get some water from up in the manor house.

  She took a jug in each hand, opened the door with one knee, and walked out. A thought was nagging at her subconscious, but it took some time for it to reach the front of her mind.

  When it did, it nearly knocked her over.

  It’s perfectly still out here.

  When did that happen?

  She dropped both jugs and hurried down to the path, in the same direction Johannes had run.

  It was practically storming, thundered through her system as she ran as fast as she could. Practically storming! Just a few minutes ago!

  She had to find him before it was too late.

  TWO

  Detective Leif Berggren looked almost exactly as Maya Linde remembered him, that time four years ago when he had rung her buzzer in Brooklyn although she’d had no idea he and his wife were coming for a visit. “We happened to be in the neighborhood. Do you have time for us to come in?”

  He radiated the same easy-going slyness now, as he stood outside the door of her new house in Fengerskog. His hair a little thinner than last time, cool as a cucumber, in dark jeans and a thick knitted sweater with a zip at the throat.

  “I know you weren’t supposed to come in until Monday morning,” he began after they shared a heartfelt hug, “but something has come up already… although I’m sure you have tons to do with the house and everything. You’ve probably barely had time to move in.”

  “No,” Maya protested. “Tell me!”

  “There’s a probable crime scene not far from here. A guy seems to have been beaten unconscious. We have some pictures, but to tell you the truth, they turned out kind of shitty. It was pretty foggy when the team on duty was out there. So I was thinking, as I was passing by, maybe you’d want to join me? We need a real photographer.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Out on the mire.”

  “Okay,” said Maya. “The mire, of all places.”

  “Nice to see you, Leif,” she said a little while later in the car. “It’s so freaking fantastic that we’re going to be working together again.”

  “Yes, for a little while, at least,” he said. “I’m retiring at sixty-five, just so you know. Two more years.”

  “Okay, so I’ll have to work on my own for the last thirteen years?”

  He laughed. “The last thirteen? Unfortunately, your generation will never be able to retire. Won’t be any money left.”

  “I guess I’ll have to keep toiling away, then. But what are you going to do when you leave, since you’re privileged enough to be able to retire?” Maya asked. “Listen to dance-band music and sell junk full time, or what?”

  She was referring to his hobby, which was importing strange knick-knacks from Asia and persuading friends, acquaintances and anyone else who might possibly be interested to buy them.

  “Junk? Is that the opinion of renowned artist Maya Linde?”

  Maya Linde had had her big breakthrough fifteen years earlier at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition called Rain—and then she had moved to New York. Articles and profiles often brought up her unusual side job: she also worked as a forensic photographer. But the art world and the police world had been blended together within her since childhood: both her parents had been artists, and her mother was also a police officer.

  Maya had come along to the police station in Karlstad many times as a child—it was an hour’s drive from her home in Åmål. Later, in the mid-eighties, when she pursued post-secondary training in photography and landed an internship and summer job at her mother’s workplace, she considered it to be at most a temporary departure from her plan to live as an artist, a necessary evil before she could create the life she wanted. But her work with the police gave her creativity a dimension she would never have predicted, and she didn’t hesitate for a moment when she was offered a part-time position with the Karlstad police after art school.

  To use her camera to depict a body that had taken its last breath was a deeply stirring experience. As was documenting a site where a crime had occurred.

  She never ceased to be fascinated by the way a place that had previously been so ordinary, or an object that had been so inconspicuous, was suddenly imbued with new meaning and took on great value as evidence.

  She had stayed with the Karlstad police for nearly twenty years. When she finally moved to New York at the age of thirty-nine, she managed to secure a part-time job with the ninth precinct in Manhattan’s East Village, which allowed her to keep up her skills.

  Now she was about to resume her position in Karlstad even though, from a purely economic standpoint, she didn’t need it. They had agreed on two days a week, to cover for a colleague who was on sick leave.

  “Junk?” Leif laughed again, turning to the backseat and taking out a plastic bag. “I’ll show you… which color do you want? Blue? Red?” He held up a fistful of reading glasses encased in plastic.

  “I have several pairs already,” she said.

  “Not like this.” He ripped open the plastic and gave her a bright blue pair. The earpieces were connected at the back; they looped around the wearer’s neck.

  “But how do I put them on?”

  “You open them here,” he said, pointing to the bridge. “There’s a magnet so you can split them in front.”

  She opened the glasses, put them on over the top of her head, and clicked the magnet back together. She opened them again and let go; they landed against her chest.

  “See that? No more crumbs all over your glasses because they’re hanging way down on your stomach. Or if you usually wear them up on your head, you always put them down instead, and then they disappear. Right?”

  Maya tried it out a few times. Pop open, pop closed. Put on, take off. “I’ll take them,” she said. “How much?”

  “A hundred kronor, but eighty for you.”

  “I’ll give you sixty.”

  “Seventy.”

  “Deal.”

  After a ten-minute car ride with Lasse Stefanz on the stereo, they arrived at the scene of the crime. They turned off the road just where Dalsland ended and Värmland began, and the country road got narrower and narrower until it was just a pitted gravel path surrounded by forest on both sides. Then they saw the shabby old sign on the side of the road.

  Mossmarken.

  “Here it is,” Leif said.

  Mossmarken, the name of the area surrounding Quagmire Manor and the mire, had once been a destination for local school groups—she had been there herself, as a child—until a little boy disappeared without a trace on a field trip about a decade earlier. Maya had been living in New York at the time and her parents had told her about the incident. Afterward, all similar outings had stopped. It was too dangerous out on the bog, people thought; there were too many treacherous spots across too large an area.

  And now a young man had been found unconscious next to the jogging path. An examination revealed that he had a head injury, and the most likely scenario was that he had met someone out on the bog who had attacked him.

  Leif parked in the little car park. Maya took her camera bag from the boot and they headed for an information board that stood at the very beginning of the bog area.

  Mossmarken Nature Reserve

  The nature reserve at Mossmarken is made up of diverse habitats and includes several different important biotopes such as old-growth pine forest and carr, but its main feature is the large peat bog. It is home to many threatened species. Some species that thrive here include the rare weissia moss and blemished lichens, as well as a number of amphibians and birds, such as the pool frog and the capercaillie.

  The bog is also interesting from a historical perspective. There is reason to believe that it was used as a ritual
site for sacrificing tools, food and even people during the Iron Age. Decomposition occurs very slowly due to the oxygen-deficient, acidic environment, and at the start of the twenty-first century a so-called “bog body” dated to around 300 B.C. was found here. It belonged to a girl of about seventeen; her hair, clothing and a gold amulet were preserved. She is called the Lingonberry Girl, and today she can be seen at the Museum of Cultural History in Karlstad.

  An eight-kilometer jogging path encircles the bog. There are also boardwalks for those who wish to cross the bog. The area is extremely marshy in certain areas, and visitors are discouraged from straying from the marked trails. Enjoy at your own risk.

  “Do you remember when they dug up that bog body?” Leif asked.

  “Yes,” Maya said hesitantly. “That rings a bell.”

  “It was a pretty big to-do, but it settled down quickly.”

  They began to walk into the forest. They could see the blue and white police tape about a hundred meters on.

  And then the landscape opened up.

  Maya stopped short. A serene, wide-open space expanded before her: waves of yellowed grass and moss under the great white sky. Here and there, low pines jutted up like skinny arms out of a sea.

  It took her breath away. It was bewitching.

  “Oh my God, it’s beautiful,” she said.

  Leif glanced her way. “Beautiful? Yeah, maybe. In its own way.”

  They discussed the photographs she needed to take. She would focus on the spot where the man had left the path, and also the site where he had been found, on a boardwalk about ten meters into the bog. Beyond that, she would take survey shots.

  “But nothing too artistic; these are documentary photographs, Maya.”

  “I didn’t know you could tell the difference,” she said.

  “Of course I can. What are you saying about me? I saw your latest exhibition. Last spring.”

  “You did? What did you think?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. Time to work now.”

  She decided to start with the path. There was nothing remarkable about the ground at that particular site. There were a number of shoe prints all on top of each other, and they were quite difficult to make out, as one would expect on a jogging path. She took out a ruler for scale and placed it next to the prints. As she was adjusting the focus for a survey shot, she noticed a flash of something in the background, through the viewfinder.

  “There’s something over there,” she said, heading across to it. She crouched down and soon discovered two gold ten-kronor coins in the grass alongside the trail.

  Leif caught up with her. He pulled on some gloves, picked up the coins, and inspected them. They were perfectly shiny.

  “Well done, Maya,” he said, carefully putting them in a bag. “How did they miss these yesterday?”

  This area seemed less untouched. The prints here were deeper, and the ground around them more disturbed. Several bushes and trees were damaged, and long sticks of various width were spread out among the bushes. They studied the broken ends of the wood. They looked relatively fresh.

  “Take pictures here too,” Leif said. “It’s not out of the question that the actual attack took place nearby.”

  Then it was time to go into the bog to photograph the place where the man had been found.

  They made their way out on to the walkways, which felt decently solid. Maya stopped and looked around.

  The sun was back behind the clouds. The area felt less welcoming.

  In certain spots, it looked like you could walk on the ground, or at least jump from tussock to tussock. In other places, it looked marshy, and in yet others the foliage was more compact.

  She could make out a large, palace-like structure on the other side of the bog, half hidden by the pines. That must be Quagmire Manor, she thought.

  She stepped cautiously off the walkway. It wasn’t easy to walk here. The tussocks were firm and tall; the ground between them was soft and wet. All of a sudden, one foot slipped down between two tussocks. She had time to see the dark bog water close over her ankle and she felt the ground latch on to her foot and drag it down.

  “Shit!” She tottered, but pulled her foot out and made it back up onto the walkway.

  “Take it easy,” Leif said.

  “This isn’t… walking around in here isn’t exactly child’s play,” she said.

  “This is where he was,” Leif said as he pointed ahead of them.

  Maya came closer. “Here?”

  Leif nodded.

  A hollow of water had formed in the part of the bog where the man had been found unconscious.

  “I thought there was firm ground around here,” Maya said.

  “This might be what they call a floating mat,” Leif said. “A carpet of dead and living plants that sits on top of the water and makes a quagmire. The ground must have sunk where the guy fell in, and then the water rose a little, I would guess.”

  Maya began to take photos.

  “A messy situation,” she said as she clicked away.

  “Huh?”

  “A quagmire, in a figurative sense. A predicament, difficult to get out of. A hazard. Seems like the whole world is one big quagmire these days.”

  “Oh. Heaven knows you’re right about that,” Leif sighed.

  “Okay, so what exactly happened to him?”

  “It’s not clear. A woman from the manor house found him, and he had some head injuries, likely caused by some sort of blunt object. That’s all we’ve got.”

  “No one saw anything around here?”

  Leif shook his head. “No witnesses, just the woman who found him. Nathalie Ström is her name.”

  “And how did she find him—was she out for a run too?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She’s a biologist or something, working on samples, so she moves around the area a lot. She knew him a little, too. Apparently he’s a student over at one of the art schools.”

  “Oh!” Maya exclaimed in surprise, looking up from the viewfinder. “He is? I’ll be damned. Maybe I’ll recognize the name. Who is he?”

  “Johannes. Johannes Ayeb.”

  Maya shook her head. “Never heard of him.”

  When they were finished, Maya wanted to spend some time taking photos for her own use. She was already there, after all, and it was such an unusual place.

  “May I have half an hour before we go?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Leif replied. “Just be careful.”

  “I read the sign.”

  She ventured further into the bog, planning to take a few preliminary shots. She had already decided to return in her free time with her medium-format film camera.

  It was so quiet and empty out on the bog. A little creak here, a little pop there. And then, after a while, the whoosh of an owl flying by; she recognized it by the rounded wingtips.

  The minutes passed and Maya realized she would have to head back soon. She made her way up a rise, where she had a clearer view of the area. She could get a better look at the manor house in one direction and some sort of large works site on the opposite side. Maybe that was the old peat quarry she’d heard of. Just past that site she could see several smaller houses all in a line along one side of the mire.

  She wanted to photograph a particular little pine further on in the bog. It looked like a bonsai tree with its knobbly branches and perfectly flat top. She just had to get a tiny, tiny bit closer.

  All her concentration was on her lens as she cautiously stepped off the boardwalk and used her feet to feel her way forward. It was a little drier here, and easier to walk. But suddenly she tripped over something, lost her balance, and fell—equipment and all.

  No, no, no. Why couldn’t I just be happy taking pictures from the path? she managed to think before she felt the dampness.

  There would be no more photos today.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Nathalie placed her fingers at her temples as she sat next to Johannes’s bed in the hospital in Ka
rlstad. He hadn’t woken from his unconscious state yet.

  She reached out and gently touched her fingertips to his hand. Tubes ran from the respirator to his mouth. A monotonous, mechanical sound.

  It looked serious, she thought. Not good.

  A nurse was sitting half hidden behind a partition, reading a book. She had explained to Nathalie that she was there to keep an eye on the equipment and on Johannes, that patients in his condition were never left alone. “But don’t mind me,” she said with a wink. “You can pretend I don’t exist.”

  Nathalie had been sitting next to him drowsing off and on for hours, losing track of time. Of orientation. As if something inside her had been shaken about and had begun to toss and turn. Memories surfaced from her childhood, ones that she had never opened up to before. Or not so much memories, but faces. Faces from the past. She saw her parents, as if they were deep down under water. She saw her friend from that time, a vague image of how she remembered her round cheeks and curious eyes.

  It was scary, so she pushed it away. But somehow, she realized, it had also calmed her. She didn’t know if she was about to fall apart or into place.

  After a while, Nathalie went down to the cafeteria and bought a magazine and a cup of coffee. She sat down and gazed out the window. Later she took the lift back up again.

  When she returned to the room, a woman was standing beside Johannes’s bed. She was fidgeting, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  Nathalie stopped in the doorway. “Hi,” she said at last.

  The woman looked up. “Hi,” she said, her expression confused. “Are you… Nathalie?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Maria,” the woman said, approaching her with an outstretched hand. “Johannes’s mum. I heard about you.” Her handshake was surprisingly steady. “I only found out what happened this morning.”

  “I’ve been here all night, so he hasn’t been alone,” Nathalie said. “Or, I mean, he wouldn’t have been alone anyway, but…”