She emphasized each and every one of the last three words. One. Last. Time.
“It was the other way around for me,” said the father. “For all these years, I’ve been inclined to believe she was still alive, that I would get to see her again some day. I refused to believe she was dead. With every year that passes I imagine her one year older. And now…” His gaze fixed on a point beside Maya. “She was somehow still twenty-one years old. She didn’t look a day older than when I said good-bye on the morning she disappeared. Everything I imagined, everything I built up and believed all those years just fell to pieces.”
He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I had given her a haircut the day before she disappeared; she always used to ask me to cut her hair. She still had that hairstyle. It was…” The father ran his hand along one temple. “It was sort of short here, and longer at the back. It wasn’t very attractive,” he said with a chuckle, “but Sara didn’t care. ‘It’s fine, Dad,’ she would say.”
He collapsed in his seat and ran his hands back and forth over his head.
Nothing could compare to meeting a person whose last hope has just vanished, the hope of seeing a child or a relative alive again. The circumstances might vary; the details were always different, but the space the bereaved moved in always seemed to be the same. There was nothing to hold on to. Nothing at all.
“Are you a police officer?” the mother asked quietly.
Maya shook her head. “I’m a photographer. I’ve been taking pictures of the discovery sites, among other things.”
“Do you know about the coins? I heard she had a bunch of coins in her pockets.”
Maya looked the woman straight in the eye. “I’m the wrong person to answer that type of question.”
“But what does it mean? Why did she have them? Where did she get them?”
Maya gestured toward Leif’s office just as the door opened. “He’s the one you should ask about that sort of thing.”
“Counting Stefan Wiik, who disappeared in 2012, we now have six bodies,” Leif Berggren said later as they sat in the conference room of the police station in Karlstad. He pointed at a map with the discovery sites marked. Next to it was the list of names and pictures of all the known victims. Maya noted that he had his clever spectacles under his chin. A red pair.
“All the victims ended up there in the last twelve years,” he went on. “Tina Gabrielsson, who was in the bog the longest, vanished in 2004. All the bodies have similar head injuries, from blunt force trauma; they all had a pole through their bodies and a large number of coins in one or more bags in their pockets. Mostly ten-kronor coins. Almost exclusively. They all went missing in March or October, and as you can see here, there was one every other year. For a reason we aren’t yet aware of.”
“This also corroborates the theory that Johannes Ayeb was intended to be the next victim,” Maya said. “It’s been two years since the last victim vanished. Karl Fahlén.”
“Yes; that’s our assumption,” Leif said.
Since the excavations had begun, Maya had been working more than the sixteen hours a week they had originally agreed on. She tried to attend as many briefings as possible and spent most of the rest of her time in the field. At the moment she was listening in the company of around a dozen others.
“Where are we with the caretaker?” wondered a member of the investigative team.
“I’m getting to that,” said Leif. “We’ve searched Alex Hagman’s home. We have seized tools, clothing, shoes and anything that might bear traces of links to the victims. Alex himself has chosen not to say a word, so at present we haven’t got anything out of him.”
Maya was tired. Her eyelids drooped and her thoughts were vaulting around inside her head. Distracted, she was sketching out Mossmarken on a piece of paper and marking three of the inhabited places she knew best: Göran’s house, the manor house, and the Larssons’ farm. She drew a line from one point to the next. All but two of the crime scenes were near the road. Practical, if you didn’t want to carry a body very far.
She observed the triangle formed by the lines and noted that all the sites were within that area.
It’s like the Bermuda Triangle, she thought.
“But as I was saying, to return to the victims,” Leif said. “We know there’s one every other year. The first was in 2004. But if we back up two years from there—where do we end up? Well, 2002. And who remembers what happened in 2002?” He paused briefly. “We had two tragic incidents in Mossmarken, but we also found…”
“The Lingonberry Girl,” said one of the officers.
“Exactly,” said Leif. “A human sacrifice from the Iron Age, run through with a pole. So it’s not a bold guess to say that what we’ve just found in the mire has something to do with the Lingonberry Girl. An unusual sort of copycat, maybe; a madman with a bad sense of humor; or maybe it’s something else entirely. It may well turn out that there’s something all the victims have in common: maybe they were all members of a cult or God knows what; but it could also be that the purpose is most important and the victims were chosen at random, that it could have been anyone.”
He bent forward and looked through his documents.
“What’s more, as most of you already know, the medical examiner found traces of narcotics in Karl Fahlén’s body. It’s the kind that’s injected intramuscularly, which is an advantage in an assault and might tell us something about the attacker’s method.”
“How does that relate to Alex Hagman?” asked one of the officers.
“That’s just it—the motive and to some extent the method don’t match Alex. He’s got a mild mental handicap, which doesn’t fit in with what we’ve learned so far.”
Leif had spoken to the manager of the manor house, who was shaken and upset by the accusations. They were not good publicity for Quagmire Manor, and she vehemently asserted that she was absolutely convinced Alex was innocent.
“I can vouch for him; he’s no killer,” Agneta said. “There is no kinder man on earth; he is the very picture of goodness. He’s trustworthy. And hardworking. He’s been working for me for several years; I think I can say I know him.”
Maya had been there when Leif spoke to Agneta. She had seen the shadow that passed over Agneta’s face when she spoke of Alex. The doubt. That tiny, tiny drop of uncertainty in a sea of conviction.
Could he be the one, after all?
Alex certainly didn’t fit the image of a calculating murderer. But to call him the very picture of goodness could hardly be a legitimate description.
He’d had to change schools several times during his youth due to his violent behavior; he hadn’t been able to sit quietly at his desk or follow instructions. His mental disability had never been fully investigated; he and his family had, in various ways, opposed any attempt at examination.
Only after his school years, when he landed a job as a lumberjack, did he settle down, once he was able to spend time in nature every day and do physical labor. His mother died young and his father passed away soon after he started working at the manor. He had no friends. Alex appeared to be alone in the world, with nature and animals as his only interests beyond his job.
His medical records said that he liked to seek out and create patterns, and Agneta could confirm this. Once he had discovered that the fence was broken in three different places. He destroyed it in two more spots, presumably so it would better match the image in his head.
“I had to shake him by the collar a little that time,” Agneta said with a faint smile, “and explain that if he’s going to work here he has to fix fences, not break them.”
It had gotten too warm in the room at the police station, and one of the officers stood up to open a window.
“But Alex is the only lead we have?” one of the investigators asked.
Leif nodded and ran his hands over his tired face.
“The usual confessions from run-of-the-mill crazies have been coming in, naturally, as well as lots of tips about people who were
in the area or have acted strangely in one way or another in recent years. But for the moment our focus is on Alex Hagman; he has some explaining to do.”
“How is Johannes Ayeb doing?” an officer asked.
“We’re hoping, of course, that Johannes will regain consciousness soon, but unfortunately there’s not much the doctors can tell us about when that might happen. We simply have to wait for him to recover.”
At that instant, Leif’s phone rang.
“Look at this,” he said to the others before picking up. “This is what we’ve been waiting for—information on the samples we took from Alex Hagman’s cottage.”
The group fell silent and followed every shift in Leif’s expression.
“Okay, thanks. Now we know,” he said at last, ending the call.
He looked at the others with an expression that suggested he felt more baffled than satisfied.
“There we have it. The noose is tightening—we’ve got a match. They found Johannes’s DNA on one of Alex’s shovels.”
Nathalie couldn’t sleep. The night wind whined down the chimney, branches struck the window, darkness tiptoed around her. Everything that was happening—what was she supposed to do with it?
All the dead bodies.
Everything rising to the surface.
She had been in for questioning twice. Questioned for information, as they said, about her activities and observations in and around the manor and the bog.
They repeatedly asked her about what had happened when she found Johannes. How she had discovered the grave that suddenly wasn’t there.
They asked about her relationship to the area, what she was doing there. She didn’t want to hide anything, so she told them all about her parents, information they already knew, and how she had lived in Mossmarken as a child. She was starting to get used to it, talking about what she hadn’t been able to talk about before.
And they asked about the caretaker, Alex. What she thought of him, whether there was anything she had noticed.
“Like what?” she asked.
“You know… whether he acted oddly.”
“Well, I mean, he’s kind of special. You knew that, didn’t you?”
He had once brought down some wood for her, she said. Another time he had fixed a window latch. He was quiet but helpful. Did they consider that odd?
The officers looked at her with a mixture of pity and suspicion. She realized this made her feel unnecessarily ingratiating and she told them about the time Alex fixed the door lock, and how she had felt the situation was slightly threatening; it had occurred to her that he might in fact be perfectly right in the head. That it might all be an act.
“But for him to have anything to do with this… is that what you think?” she said.
“We don’t think anything at the moment. We’re investigating,” said the police inspector.
Then, at last, she told them what she had seen and heard when she set off into the bog to look for Johannes. In the darkness and fog that settled after the storm, she had seen vague shadows, sure, maybe, now that she thought about it. But it was hard to say—they seemed to flicker before her eyes in the dark, so perhaps they were only illusions. Although there had also been the sounds. The sounds? Yes, agitated whispers and retreating steps.
The officers fell silent, but she could tell what they were thinking. And you’re telling us this now?
It started with Johannes. The words buzzed through her head now, in bed. If she hadn’t gone after him, if she’d let him sink. The thoughts cut like knives, paralyzing her.
It would all have remained hidden.
How could she think that way?
She gathered her strength and got up. She pulled on her dressing gown and rubber boots, grabbed her torch, and stepped into the night to pee.
Veils of clouds cut across the sky.
Everything appeared to be dark up at the manor, in the witching hour.
She hurried back inside and locked the door behind her. Just as she was crawling back into bed, she caught sight of a figure in the dark, over at the edge of the forest.
She turned out her lamp and cautiously approached the window. Just ten meters from the cottage was a man in a dark coat, staring straight at the house.
She couldn’t tell who it was.
Gustav?
But why would he be out there at that time of night? Or was it a guest at the manor, out on a night walk?
Trembling, she carefully fastened the blanket and sheets over the three windows. She stood in the center of the room and examined them, looking for gaps, but didn’t find any. Then she picked up her phone and crawled into bed. She wondered if there was any friend she could call, someone in another time zone who could still help her feel less ill at ease.
But she had a poor signal and decided not to try. Instead she laid her head on her pillow and closed her eyes.
All she could hear was her own breathing, shallow and shivery. It took a long time for her to relax and drift into deep, dreamless sleep.
Maya had arrived at the police station early to get some evidence photography out of the way.
Alex Hagman’s shovel, the one with Johannes Ayeb’s DNA on it, was the top priority, and several fingerprints had been secured and colored with fluorescing dye. Alex Hagman himself had been taken into custody and his cottage cordoned off for further investigation.
Maya placed the shovel on her studio table and inserted a filter that would make the fluorescing agent clearly visible on film.
The shovel looked almost new; the metal of its handle and blade were bright red. She adjusted its position, propping it up where needed and reducing glare so that the prints would be as clear as possible.
It took her about an hour to get good pictures of three unique fingerprints. She entered the photos into the digital archive where the leader of the investigation could reach them.
She liked being back at her old workplace. Naturally, many things had changed in the years she’d been gone—all the rooms had been renovated and all the technology updated—but, for the most part, it felt the same.
“Something’s missing, though,” Leif said that night while visiting Maya’s house. “Beyond the stories of Alex’s violence at school, the most conspicuous thing we’ve found is one mildly—by today’s standards—pornographic image on his computer. It’s a naked woman on a beach drinking out of a goddamn coconut.”
Maya had insisted he leave work early for once so he could come and have dinner at her place. At first he protested, saying that if he was going to take time off he wanted to spend it with his wife, whom he’d hardly seen since this all started, so Maya simply called to invite Birgitta too. They could stay over in the guest room if it got too late.
They were sitting in Maya’s living room, drinking coffee and cognac. But they couldn’t seem to avoid shop talk.
“There’s nothing in what we found on Alex that can answer the why,” Leif went on as his wife leafed through one of Maya’s photography books.
“Agneta says he seeks patterns in what he sees and does,” Maya said. “Birds appearing in different spots at different times; the way other animals move around…”
“Yes, I know,” said Leif. “But what does that have to do with the victims in the bog?”
“Well, all the victims were sunk and poled in an identical manner,” Maya said. “I’m just saying that might be the answer for why: Alex is creating patterns.”
“That seems far-fetched,” Leif said grimly, reaching for his snifter of cognac.
“I know,” Maya sighed. “But is there anything to suggest that Alex is… superstitious or particularly interested in history?” she asked, watching the fire reflected in Leif’s eyes.
“No,” he said, “that’s just it—we haven’t turned up anything like that. And Alex himself is still refusing to talk.”
“But it’s no coincidence that all the victims were killed after the Lingonberry Girl was discovered, and that there are almost exactly two years between
each disappearance. It has to be connected somehow.”
“Of course, but the question is how it’s connected to Alex. I mean—was it his interest in patterns and order? He didn’t even live here when it all started, did he?” Leif asked skeptically.
“No, I don’t believe it either,” Maya said. “Whoever committed these murders isn’t trying to copy the Lingonberry Girl for the fun of it, or to create any patterns. But it’s clearly a ritual of some sort. After all, sacrifice is a rather particular action.”
“Pretty old-fashioned, if you ask me,” Leif said.
“Sure, but often it’s about maintaining a relationship, about communicating with invisible forces. Maybe that’s exactly what our killer is doing—or thinks he’s doing. To get what he wants or be spared what he doesn’t want. And I’m absolutely with you, it doesn’t mesh at all with what we know about Alex Hagman. I can’t picture him carrying out any of this.”
“No,” said Leif, “but he sure as hell did point out exactly where these people were on his map.”
“Yes,” Maya said. “But maybe he only discovered the poles and marked them for that reason, just as he did with the species of birds. Maybe they were landmarks for him.”
They fell silent for a while.
Birgitta looked up from her book. “You should hear yourselves.”
“Why’s that?” Leif asked.
“Communicating with invisible forces,” she parroted.
Maya laughed.
Leif shook his head in resignation. “You know,” he said, staring straight ahead.
“What?”
“I feel like… I could go along with just about anything at the moment; I don’t have much more to give. I thought I did, but in this type of situation I feel like I don’t have what it takes. I’m just too tired. I don’t have the energy to think. I want to potter around in the garden, or some damn thing. Play golf.”
“You’ve never golfed,” Birgitta said. “And the garden is dead now. It’s autumn.”
The Forbidden Place Page 18
