The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  He laughed. “It’s not too late. Everyone has to die somehow, and at least it would be interesting.”

  “But if I’m not mistaken,” Maya said, “those who are drawn to the mire by the spirits don’t get run through by a pole, do they?”

  He laughed again, loudly, as if this were the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time. “No, I don’t think they’re capable of that much. Poling is a concrete action taken by humans who are very much alive.” He stopped and gestured toward a part of the bog that was overgrown with trees. “This is the spot I wanted to show you.”

  Maya thought she could make something out between the branches. “A hut?” She followed Göran in.

  “This is Nathalie’s old hut, where she and her friend Julia used to play.”

  Maya looked at the wood, which looked new, and the metal roof, which couldn’t be more than a few years old. She ducked in and opened a small cupboard. It contained comic books and packets of biscuits. They didn’t look old in the least.

  “But it must have been fourteen years since Nathalie was here. This hut has been used recently. It’s in perfect condition.”

  “I know. It’s a funny story—I helped them build it. It’s beyond the statute of limitations by now, I hope. Their parents didn’t know about it. I’m sure they wouldn’t have allowed it. The girls weren’t actually allowed to be out in the bog by themselves. But they wanted to so badly, and I figured it was better if they had a good place I knew about instead of just running around.”

  “But you’ve maintained it all these years?”

  “No, that’s just it. I thought you would want to know; someone… took over this hut once the girls were done with it.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  He lowered his head. “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I want you to know, I have no problem with him, but…”

  “Who is it?”

  “His name is Alex. He’s the caretaker at the manor.”

  “A grown man?”

  “Alex is an adult physically, but mentally he’s immature. He lives in a house near the manor and probably knows this bog better than anyone else.”

  “Why is that?”

  “This is where he spends all his free time. He looks for birds and other animals; he keeps some sort of journal about them. This is his favorite place.”

  Maya looked around. From inside you could see a great distance, although the hut itself was well hidden.

  “This Alex,” she said, “how would you describe him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what does he look like? His posture… how does he walk?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw someone in this area when I was taking pictures around the bog, someone who… seemed to move in a very particular way.”

  “Sure, that could be Alex, he sort of hunches over as he walks,” Göran said, stooping to demonstrate. “As if he wants to be shorter than he is.”

  Maya took out her phone but found that she had no signal.

  “I have to make a call,” she said with an urgent glance at Göran.

  “We can go over to the manor; it’s closer to civilization,” he said. “And maybe we can talk to Alex while we’re at it.”

  “We just finished serving lunch here, but I’m sure there’s some left if you’re hungry,” Agneta said as Maya and Göran stepped into the foyer of the manor house.

  Agneta gave Göran a big hug and smiled at Maya.

  “And the police are back again? Did the Create-your-dream-life course tempt you back, by any chance? Because I hope it’s not bad news.”

  “No,” Maya said. “We just wanted to talk to the caretaker here at the manor.”

  “Alex. I just saw him. Hold on a minute and I’ll get him.”

  She disappeared, but soon returned.

  “I don’t see him anywhere at the moment. He must have gone over to his place. Do you know where he lives?”

  “I do,” Göran said.

  A narrow gravel path led into the forest from the garden. Maya guessed the red-painted cottage she could glimpse down the path had once been a workman’s home.

  “This is his place,” Göran said. “I’ve been to visit him a few times. Nice guy. Quiet, but sweet somehow.”

  They knocked and called out, but there was no Alex in sight.

  “He uses that as a workshop and storage shed,” Göran said, pointing at an outbuilding nearby.

  The door was open. It smelled fresh inside; tools were hung on the wall so tidily it was almost creepy, and the floor was cleaner than in Maya’s own home.

  “Alex?” she called.

  No response there either. Göran went back out as Maya continued to look around Alex’s workshop. There was a map in a plastic tray on the workbench. She bent over it to get a better look.

  It was a dog-eared map of the bog, full of notes and symbols. She realized that some markings showed where he had seen certain birds and other animals. There were others she couldn’t make any sense of.

  She took a picture of the map with her phone and headed for the door; on her way out she enlarged the picture and inspected some of the markings at closer range.

  There were six marks with the same symbol. It was possible that one of them, if she hadn’t misread the map and its directions, was the site where Stefan Wiik was found.

  Tracy’s death wasn’t the only tragic event that summer,” Nathalie said.

  She was sitting in the hospital, staring at Johannes in his bed. The sound of traffic came through the open window; a laugh down on the street, someone starting a car.

  “I thought I would tell you about the other part too. It’s not easy, but I’ve got this far after all. I might as well keep going. I might as well tell you everything.”

  Then she didn’t say anything for more than twenty minutes. She ran her index finger up and down Johannes’s wrist, thinking about that night in August 2002, the end of everything. About twelve-year-old Nathalie, who had lost her best friend after watching Julia’s older sister drown in the mire. About expanding silence and a pain that cut to the bone.

  Why didn’t anyone talk?

  Why did everything get so quiet?

  That last day began in her room in their house in Mossmarken. She remembered waking up to the radio and the sound of the coffee-maker. The sputtering sound she used to think was cozy and comforting now seemed like a persistent scraping, an angry hiss. Her soft bed, which had always felt so wonderful, now seemed slack and full of despair. The mouths in the wood grain on the ceiling were screaming for real, louder than ever before.

  The box of cornflakes and the milk were out when she got up; an empty bowl and cold spoon awaited her.

  “Good morning.” Her mother’s voice; how ghostlike it sounded in her memory now.

  “Where’s Dad?” Nathalie asked, even as she saw his red shirt bob past the kitchen window before he stepped through the door, his hands black with oil. A gust from the dry garden before the door closed behind him.

  “Morning, Natti. Sleep well?”

  The memory of words that no longer existed. The words from the last day. They floated around in her, drifting through the inside of her body, extinguishing hope and starting fires. How could words that no longer existed hurt so much?

  Nathalie continued to stroke Johannes’s wrist; she didn’t notice how rough she was being. Her breathing grew shallow.

  Everyone who lived around the bog was supposed to gather at the Nordströms’ that evening; they were supposed to have some sort of meeting, and after dinner her parents started setting out bottles. They each mixed a drink before their guests began to arrive.

  “We’re going to have the other grown-ups round tonight,” her mum said. “You can have some chips to take up to your room, if you want.”

  And then they arrived. Göran. Agneta and Gustav. Yvonne and Peder. A few more from other homes and farms. The memory was hazy.<
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  Nathalie remembered falling asleep and waking up suddenly. She recalled loud, agitated voices. The silence that followed once all the guests had left the house. Her head was spinning. Then she heard more arguing. Her father’s voice, furious.

  And the shots.

  She remembered the shots.

  She was no longer stroking Johannes’s wrist. She was holding it, squeezing it, as if to keep from falling. As if it were the only solid object there was to hold on to.

  She remembered how she went to the kitchen, how she saw her mother lying bloody on the floor. The blue tunic Nathalie had picked out for her a few years earlier.

  Blue? You think so, really? Sure, maybe.

  Her dad, Jonas, right next to her mum.

  He’s broken. His head is broken. Call the police. Dad’s head is broken and he’s lying on the floor next to Mum. There’s blood and it’s just pouring out, their blood is leaving them. I can’t stop it…

  Wait outside.

  I’m waiting outside.

  How she went out to the car and waited inside it until the police and ambulance came.

  After that there was a gap in time before everything inside her shut down and turned off; it felt like she was floating around among the stars with her parents; they were dancing around, laughing and holding each other.

  Had she died and gone to heaven too?

  She felt like there was no border between them and her; it was like they were the love they felt for each other, which sparkled at school ceremonies and on sunny autumn days and in the car on the way to the swimming hole, which hid in her mother’s eyes and her father’s voice.

  At the same time, panic slowly drilled its way into her, like sharp, ice-cold steel. It was a promise on the way to being broken, a promise about her whole life, which lay bleeding in the kitchen. And the bright light, blue like Mum’s tunic. All that blue, blue everywhere.

  The song of sirens.

  And the questions afterward, the answers.

  “There’s no good way to say this, Nathalie. We believe your dad shot your mum and then himself.”

  I want to get out of here. Now.

  Can you take me away from here, now?

  How do you get away from yourself?

  Leif wasn’t answering his phone so Maya left a message. But eventually she lost patience and hopped into her car to drive through the forest and on to the E45 highway toward Karlstad.

  She was already pulling into the car park outside Leif’s apartment building by the time he called her back.

  “Are you home?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m coming up. Straightaway.”

  He met her in the hall, a curious expression on his face.

  “You came all the way here on your day off?” he said. “Must be something important.”

  “Coffee?” Maya asked, out of breath.

  “Coffee,” Leif replied, heading for the kitchen.

  Maya impatiently took a seat at the kitchen table as Leif took out two mugs.

  Then she told him what she’d found in the caretaker’s cottage. Leif leaned back, listening with his arms crossed. Maya concluded by showing him the picture of the map on her phone.

  “So you’re saying…” He shifted in his seat. “You think…”

  Maya lowered her head and looked at him. “I think the spots he’s marked could be other sacrificial sites. Anyway, he marked almost the exact place where we found Stefan Wiik.”

  “But why?” Leif asked. “Who is he?”

  “He’s been working at the manor as a caretaker for a few years. He’s slightly developmentally delayed, they say.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “I just heard…”

  They didn’t speak for a long time. The cuckoo clock on the wall ticked off the seconds with a reluctant, muted creak.

  “First we’ll go and investigate the places he’s marked,” Leif said at last. “We won’t make a big deal of it. Just the two of us. To check it out.”

  They printed out the map and found a compass and shovel in Leif’s storage room. Then they drove all the way there, one car following the other through the forest. Forest, forest, forest. Maya had almost forgotten how much forest there could be in this region.

  When they arrived at the Mossmarken car park, she walked to Leif’s car and got into the passenger seat. They examined the map and decided which mark they should try to find first.

  Twilight was falling like a silk curtain. They walked briskly across the bog, following the map as best they could.

  Fifteen minutes later they were approaching the spot where the pole ought to be. They split up and searched separately. They walked back and forth on the walkway, next to the walkway, out over the bog. This particular area was easy to walk on; there was no water lying in wait between every step. The problem was finding the mark. On the map it covered an area almost fifty meters in diameter.

  “Oh hell,” Leif called.

  And then: “Here. Here it is, Maya! Something’s sticking up over here!”

  Leif dug carefully as Maya aimed the torch and tried to assist him by moving tussocks and piles of dirt out of the way. She spent long moments just crouching down and looking at the surface; every tussock was like its own world, with various colors of moss and delicate webs of tiny, bell-like flowers.

  Just under an hour later, they saw something in the peat. Something that didn’t appear to belong there.

  Leif knelt. He pressed lightly with his fingertips, drawing his hand across the smooth surface, almost stroking away the dirt. At last he straightened his back and turned to Maya.

  “Shit, Maya, I think it’s… skin. Or leather.” He hastily wiped his nose with his wrist. “I could be wrong, but… I think it could be a person down there.”

  An hour after that, they were met by technicians and a patrol car in the car park. They walked as a group to the discovery site in their white protective garb, like a procession of ghosts across the walkway. Once again, a tent was erected on the bog to protect any evidence.

  And then hours passed. Morning broke into a new day. The only sound came from the camera and the protective gear when someone moved. And now and then, a brief comment or question.

  “How will we handle that?”

  “Brush, please.”

  “Here’s something.”

  It really was a person, down there in the ground.

  Maya allowed the lens of the camera to follow the progression as the body emerged bit by bit. An arm, a head, an ear. A woman, encapsulated in the turf, embraced by nature.

  “Check the pockets,” Leif said to the technician bent over the body. He paced back and forth as he watched her fingers search the clothing that remained.

  A few minutes later, she held up a familiar cloth bag.

  “Recognize this?”

  Leif took the bag, opened it, and studied its contents. He met Maya’s gaze and gave a short nod.

  Maya put the camera aside and went to sit down nearby.

  She turned away from the crime scene and gazed out at the bog. The dull sky, the silhouettes of trees. They were fortunate—there was no breeze, so the cold was tolerable even though she was dressed too lightly.

  Dusk fell again and tiredness embraced Maya. For the first time she heard someone ask Leif how they had found the body. He told them about the map and the marks.

  “So there are more sites?” the person said.

  And Leif squatted on his heels, took off his gloves, and ran his hands over his face. “Yes,” he said at last. “There are more.”

  FIVE

  Maya tied on her muddy boots, hung the camera bag over her shoulder, and headed out into the chilly morning. She was greeted by the sound of a woodpecker, a mechanical clatter across fields and pastures.

  Her body was buzzing with lack of sleep.

  Three hours in bed: that was all she had got the night before. The same went for the night before that. She had experienced a lot of things in her
life, but what was happening now was beyond anything else: the proud barking of the dogs as they found one body after the next, the spotlights like sad stars shining above site after site, barricades going up.

  There weren’t enough staff, so Leif had to call in reinforcements and extra crews.

  In just a week they had dug five human corpses out of the mire—and they weren’t dealing with historical discoveries.

  Tina Gabrielsson, forty-eight, from Trollhättan, who had disappeared after a business trip to Karlstad in March 2004.

  Sergio Manchini, fifty-nine. Went missing while jogging at Hunneberg Park in Vänersborg, March 2008.

  Eira Wallgren, seventy-seven. Disappeared after a visit to her husband’s grave in Nygård Cemetery in Åmål, October 2010.

  Karl Fahlén, sixty-two. Last seen outside his house in Mellerud, where he lived alone, in October 2014.

  The last victim they found turned out to be twenty-one-year-old Sara Månsson, who vanished on her way home to Edsleskog in October 2006.

  Her face was leathery but perfectly intact, and her parents were able to identify her in the usual way. As if she had died only very recently.

  Yes. It’s her.

  After ten years.

  Maya had met Sara’s parents at the police station. They were waiting to talk to Leif as she walked by. She greeted them and asked if they wanted anything to drink.

  “No, thank you,” they replied.

  They were so alike that she was taken aback: the same wavy, short hairstyle; the same plain colors and slight frames; the same dutiful gestures and friendly tones, devoid of happiness. As if they had supported each other until they grew together, as if they needed to be two of the same kind to keep from falling over.

  “I never actually believed that she would be found,” the mother said.

  Maya sat down across from them.

  “So in some ways, this is still like finding peace with a dreadful reality,” she went on. “To have the opportunity to bury her, maybe find out what happened. And above all, the part I always thought was unattainable: to see her one last time. To get to touch her one last time.”