The Man From Beijing Read online

  He made a few notes in his diary, switched off the lamp and soon fell asleep.

  The next day London was enveloped in thick cloud. Ya Ru got up as usual at five o’clock and listened to the Chinese news on his shortwave radio. Then he checked the world stock markets on a computer, spoke to two of his managing directors about various ongoing projects, and made himself a simple breakfast of fruit.

  At seven he left the flat with the silk bag in his pocket. There was one potential shortcoming in his plan. He didn’t know what time Birgitta Roslin usually ate breakfast. If she was already in the dining room when he got there, he would have to wait until the following day.

  He walked up towards Trafalgar Square, paused for a couple of minutes to listen to a lone cellist playing on the pavement with an upturned hat at his feet. He donated a few coins and continued north. He turned off Tottenham Court Road and came to the hotel. There was a man at the reception desk he hadn’t seen before. He went up to the counter and took one of the hotel’s business cards. As he did so he noticed that the sheet of paper had disappeared from Birgitta Roslin’s mail slot.

  The door to the dining room was standing open. He saw Birgitta Roslin right away. She was sitting at a table by the window, evidently just beginning her breakfast, and was being served coffee by a waiter.

  Ya Ru held his breath and thought for a second. He decided not to wait after all. This was his moment. He took off his overcoat and approached the head waiter. He explained that he wasn’t a guest but would like to have breakfast. The head waiter was from South Korea. He led Ya Ru to a table diagonally behind the one where Birgitta Roslin was leaning over her plate.

  Ya Ru looked around the restaurant. There was an emergency exit in the wall closest to his table. As he went to collect a newspaper, he tried the door and discovered it was unlocked. He returned to his table, ordered tea and waited. Many of the tables were still empty, but Ya Ru had noted that most of the keys were not behind the desk at reception. The hotel was almost full.

  He took out his mobile phone and the business card he had picked up. Then he dialled the number and waited. When the receptionist answered, he said he had an important message for one of the guests, Birgitta Roslin.

  ‘I’ll put you through to her room.’

  ‘She’ll be in the dining room,’ said Ya Ru. ‘She always has breakfast at this time. I’d be grateful if you could find her. She usually sits at a window table. She’ll be wearing a blue dress; her hair is dark and cut short.’

  ‘I’ll ask her to come and take the call.’

  Ya Ru held the phone in his hand with the line open until he saw the receptionist enter the dining room. Then he hung up, slipped it into his pocket and at the same time took out the silk bag of ground glass. As Birgitta Roslin stood up and accompanied the receptionist out through the door, Ya Ru walked over to her table. He picked up her newspaper and looked around, as if making sure that the guest sitting there really had left. He waited while a waiter topped up cups of coffee at a neighbouring table, all the time keeping a close eye on the door to reception. When the waiter had moved on, Ya Ru opened the bag and tipped the contents into the half-empty cup of coffee. Birgitta Roslin came back into the dining room. Ya Ru had already turned round and was about to return to his own table.

  At that moment the windowpane shattered, and the sound of a rifle shot combined with the noise of falling glass. Ya Ru had no time to realise that something had gone wrong, catastrophically wrong. The bullet hit him in his right temple and killed him instantly. All his important bodily functions had already ceased when his body fell onto a table and knocked over a vase of flowers.

  Birgitta Roslin stood there motionless, just like all the other guests in the dining room, the waiters and waitresses and a head waiter clutching a dish of hard-boiled eggs. The silence was broken by somebody screaming.

  Birgitta stared at the dead body lying on the white tablecloth. It still hadn’t dawned on her that it had anything to do with her. A vague thought that London was being subjected to a terrorist attack flew through her head.

  Then she felt a hand grabbing hold of her arm. She tried to pull herself free as she turned round.

  It was Ho standing behind her.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ said Ho. ‘Just follow me. We can’t stay here.’

  Ho ushered Birgitta out into the lobby.

  ‘Give me your key. I’ll pack your bag while you pay your bill.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t ask any questions. Just do as I say.’

  Ho was gripping her arm so tightly that it hurt. Chaos had broken out in the hotel. People were screaming and yelling, running back and forth.

  ‘Insist on paying,’ said Ho. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  Birgitta understood. Not what had happened, but what Ho said. She stood at the desk and bellowed at one of the bewildered receptionists that she wanted to settle her bill. Ho disappeared into one of the lifts and returned ten minutes later with Birgitta’s suitcase. By then the hotel lobby was teeming with police officers and paramedics.

  Birgitta had paid her bill.

  ‘Now we’re going to walk calmly out of the door,’ said Ho. ‘If anybody tries to stop you, just say that you have a plane to catch.’

  They elbowed their way out into the street without anybody hindering them. Birgitta paused and looked back. Ho dragged at her arm once again.

  ‘Don’t turn round. Just walk normally. We’ll talk later.’

  They came to where Ho lived and went up to her flat on the second floor. There was a man there, in his twenties. He was very pale and talked excitedly to Ho. Birgitta could see that Ho was trying to calm him down. She took him into an adjacent room where the agitated conversation continued. When they returned, the man was carrying a bundle that looked like it might contain a pool cue. He left the flat. Ho stood by the window, looking down into the street. Birgitta slumped onto a chair. She had only just realised that the man who died had fallen onto the table next to the one where she’d been sitting.

  She looked at Ho, who had now left the window. She was very pale. Birgitta could see that she was trembling.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘You were the one who was supposed to die,’ said Ho. ‘He was going to kill you. I must tell it exactly as it is.’

  Birgitta shook her head.

  ‘You have to be clear,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  ‘The man who died was Ya Ru. Hong Qiu’s brother.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He tried to kill you. We managed to stop him at the very last moment.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You could have died because you gave me false information about the hotel you were staying at. Why did you do that? Did you think you couldn’t trust me? Are you so confused that you can’t distinguish between friends and people who are anything but?’

  Birgitta raised her hand. ‘You’re going too fast. I can’t keep up. Hong Qiu’s brother? Why would he want to kill me?’

  ‘Because you knew too much about what happened in your country. All those people who died. Ya Ru was presumably behind it all – that’s what Hong Qiu thought, at least.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I can’t say. I don’t know.’

  Birgitta was thinking. When Ho was about to speak again, Birgitta raised her hand to stop her.

  ‘You said “we,” ’ said Birgitta after a while. ‘The man who just left your flat was carrying something. Was it a rifle?’

  ‘Yes. I had decided that San should keep an eye on you. But there was nobody with your name at the hotel you told me you were staying at. It was San who realised that this hotel was closest. We saw you through the window. When Ya Ru came up to your table after you’d been called away, I realised that he was going to kill you. San took out his rifle and shot him. It all happened so quickly that nobody in the street caught on. Most people probably thought it was a motorbike backfiring. San ha
d the rifle hidden in a raincoat.’

  ‘San?’

  ‘Hong Qiu’s son. She sent him to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hong Qiu wasn’t only afraid for her own life and yours. She was just as afraid for her son. San was convinced that Ya Ru had killed his mother. So he didn’t need much encouragement to get his revenge.’

  Birgitta felt sick. She was slowly beginning to realise what it was all about. It was as she had suspected earlier but rejected because it seemed so preposterous. Something in the past had triggered the deaths of all those people in Hesjövallen.

  She reached out and grabbed hold of Ho. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Is it all over now?’

  ‘I think so. You can go home. Ya Ru is dead. Neither you nor I know what will happen next. But at least you won’t be a part of the story any more.’

  ‘How am I going to be able to live without knowing how it all ends?’

  ‘I’ll try to help you.’

  ‘What will happen to San?’

  ‘No doubt the police will find witnesses who will say that a Chinese man shot another Chinese man. But nobody will be able to finger San.’

  ‘He saved my life.’

  ‘He probably saved his own life by killing Ya Ru.’

  ‘But who is this man that everybody’s afraid of?’

  Ho shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can answer that. In many ways he’s a representative of the new China that neither Hong Qiu nor I nor Ma Li, nor even San for that matter, want to have anything to do with. There are major struggles going on in our country about what’s going to happen next. What the future is going to look like. Nobody knows; nothing is assured. You can only do what you think is right.’

  ‘Such as killing Ya Ru?’

  ‘That was necessary.’

  Birgitta went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. When she put the glass down, she knew that she had to go home now. Everything that was still unclear would have to wait. All she wanted to do was to go home, to get away from London and everything that had happened.

  Ho accompanied her in a taxi to Heathrow. After a wait of four hours she succeeded in finding a seat on a flight to Copenhagen. Ho wanted to wait until the plane had left, but Birgitta asked her to leave.

  When she got back to Helsingborg she opened a bottle of wine and emptied it during the course of the night. She slept most of the next day. She was woken up by Staffan’s call to say that their boat trip was over. She couldn’t stop herself from bursting into tears.

  ‘What’s the matter? Has something happened?’

  ‘No, nothing. I’m tired.’

  ‘Should we pack up and come home?’

  ‘No. It’s nothing. If you want to help, just believe me when I say it’s nothing. Tell me about your sailing adventure.’

  They spoke for a long time. She insisted on his telling her in detail about their trip, about their plans for that evening and for the next day. When they finished talking, she had calmed herself down.

  The following day she declared herself fit again and went back to work. She also made a telephone call to Ho.

  ‘Soon I’ll have lots to tell you,’ said Ho.

  ‘I promise to listen. How’s San?’

  ‘He’s agitated, scared, and he misses his mother. But he’s strong.’

  After hanging up Birgitta remained seated at the kitchen table.

  She closed her eyes.

  The image of the man lying in a heap over the table in the hotel dining room was slowly fading away, and soon hardly any of it remained.

  36

  A few days before midsummer, Birgitta Roslin conducted her last trial before the holidays. She and Staffan had rented a cottage on the island of Bornholm. They would stay there for three weeks, and the children would come to visit, one after the other. The trial, which she estimated would take two days, concerned three women and a man who had been robbing people in car parks and roadside camping sites. Two of the women came from Romania; the man and the third woman were Swedish. What struck Roslin most was the brutality displayed, especially by the youngest of the women on two occasions, when they had attacked people in caravans at overnight camping sites. She had hit one of the victims, an elderly man from Germany, so hard on the head with a hammer that it split his skull. The man had survived, but if the hammer had landed an inch either way he could well have died. On the other occasion she had stabbed a woman with a screwdriver that missed her heart by a fraction of an inch.

  The prosecutor, Palm, had described the gang as ‘entrepreneurs active in various branches of criminal activity’. Besides spending nights touring car parks between Helsingborg and Varberg, they had also spent days stealing from shops, especially fashion boutiques and salesrooms specialising in electronic equipment. Using specially prepared suitcases whose linings had been ripped out and replaced by metal foil, so that the alarm didn’t go off when they left the shops, they had stolen goods worth almost a million kronor before they were caught. But they made the mistake of returning to the same fashion boutique near Halmstad and were recognised by the staff. They all confessed, and the stolen goods were recovered. To the surprise of the police, which Birgitta shared, they did not argue and blame one another when it came to sorting out who did what.

  It was rainy and chilly the morning she walked to the courthouse. It was also mainly in the mornings that she was still troubled by the events that culminated at the London hotel.

  She had spoken to Ho twice on the telephone. Both times she was disappointed because she thought Ho had been evasive, not telling her what happened after the shooting drama. But Ho had insisted that Birgitta must be patient.

  ‘The truth is never simple,’Ho said. ‘It’s only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries.’

  But she had been told one piece of information by Ho, something that frightened her almost more than anything else. The police had discovered in the dead Ya Ru’s hand a small silk bag containing the remains of extremely fine powder made from broken glass. The British detectives had been unable to work out what it was, but Ho told Birgitta it was an old, sophisticated Chinese method of killing people.

  She had been as close to death as that. Sometimes, but always when she was alone, she was stricken by violent sobbing attacks. She hadn’t even mentioned this to Staffan. She had kept it to herself ever since getting back home from London. Staffan had no idea of how she really felt.

  A week after Ya Ru’s death, she received a call from somebody she would have preferred not to talk to: Lars Emanuelsson.

  ‘Time passes,’ he said. ‘Any news?’

  For a brief moment she was afraid that Lars Emanuelsson had somehow found out that Birgitta Roslin was the intended victim in the London hotel.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose the police in Hudiksvall have changed their minds, have they?’

  ‘About the dead man being the murderer? An insignificant, unimportant, presumably mentally defective man who commits the most brutal mass murder in Swedish criminal history? It might just be true, of course. But I know that many people wonder. Such as me. And you.’

  ‘I don’t think about it. I’ve put it behind me.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite true.’

  ‘You can think whatever you like. What do you want? I’m busy.’

  ‘How are things with your contacts in Hudiksvall? Are you still talking to Vivi Sundberg?’

  ‘No. Will you please go away now?’

  ‘Obviously I want you to get in touch with me when you do have something to report. My experience tells me that there are still an awful lot of surprises concealed behind those terrible goings-on in that little village up north.’

  ‘I’m hanging up now.’

  She wondered how much longer Lars Emanuelsson would continue pestering her. But perhaps she would miss his persistence when it finally stopped.

 
That morning shortly before midsummer she came to her office, gathered together all the documents relating to the case, spoke to one of the court secretaries about a date in the autumn for sentencing, then headed for the courtroom. The moment she entered it she noticed Ho sitting in the back row of the public gallery, in the same seat as the last time she’d been in Helsingborg.

  She raised a hand in greeting and could see that Ho smiled back at her. She scribbled a couple of lines on a scrap of paper, explaining to Ho that there would be an adjournment for lunch at noon. She beckoned to one of the ushers and pointed out Ho. He took her the note; Ho read it and nodded to Birgitta.

  Then Birgitta turned her attention to the sorry-looking rabble in the dock. When it was time to pause for lunch, they had reached a stage in the proceedings that indicated there would be no problem in concluding matters the following day.

  She met Ho in the street, where she was waiting under a tree in full blossom.

  ‘I take it something’s happened and that’s why you’re here?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can meet you this evening. Where are you staying?’

  ‘In Copenhagen. With friends.’

  ‘Am I wrong in thinking you’ve got something important to tell me?’

  ‘Everything is clearer now. That’s why I’m here. And I’ve brought something for you.’

  ‘What?’

  Ho shook her head. ‘We can talk about that this evening. What have they done? The gang on trial?’

  ‘Robbery. Violent assault. But not murder.’

  ‘I’ve been observing them. They’re all frightened of you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. But they know that I’m the one who’s going to decide their sentences. Given all the trouble they’ve caused, that probably feels pretty scary.’