Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

He expresses himself well, Roslin thought. A man with emotions, who can write.

The gallows is dismantled, the body and the sleepers carried off in different directions. There is a fight between several Chinese who want the rope used to hang O’Connor.

The telephone rang. It was Sundberg.

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No.’

‘Can you come down? I’m in reception.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Come down and I’ll tell you.’

Vivi Sundberg was waiting by the open fire.

‘Let’s sit down,’ she said, pointing to some chairs and a sofa around a table in the corner.

‘How did you know I was staying here?’

‘I made enquiries.’

Roslin began to suspect the worst. Sundberg was reserved, cool. She came straight to the point.

‘We are not entirely without eyes and ears, you know,’ she began. ‘Even if we are only provincial police officers. No doubt you know what I’m talking about.’

‘No.’

‘We are missing the contents of a chest of drawers in the house I was kind enough to let you into. I asked you not to touch anything. But you did. You must have gone back there at some time during the night. In the drawer you emptied were diaries and letters. I’ll wait here while you get them. Were there five or six diaries? How many bundles of letters? Bring them all down. When you do, I shall be kind enough to forget all about this. You can also be grateful that I went to the trouble of coming here.’

Birgitta Roslin could feel that she was blushing. She had been caught in flagrante, with her fingers in the jam jar. There was nothing she could do. The judge had been found out.

She stood up and went to her room. For a brief moment she was tempted to keep the diary she was reading just then, but she had no idea exactly how much Sundberg knew. Her seeming uncertainty about how many diaries there were was not necessarily significant — she could have been testing Roslin’s honesty. She carried everything she had taken down to reception. Vivi Sundberg had a paper bag into which she put all the diaries and letters.

‘Why did you do it?’ she asked.

‘I was curious. I can only apologise.’

‘Is there anything you haven’t told me?’

‘I have no hidden motives.’

Sundberg eyed her critically. Roslin could feel she was blushing again. Sundberg stood up. Despite being powerfully built and overweight, she moved daintily.

‘Let the police take care of this business,’ she said. ‘I won’t make a song and dance about you entering the house during the night. We’ll forget it. Go home now, and I’ll carry on working.’

‘I apologise.’

‘You have already.’

Sundberg left the hotel and got into the police car waiting outside. Birgitta Roslin watched it drive away in a cloud of snow. She went up to her room, fetched a jacket, and took a walk along the shore of the ice-covered lake. The wind came and went in chilly gusts. She bowed her head. She felt slightly ashamed.

She walked all the way round the lake and was warm and sweaty when she returned to the hotel. After a shower and a change of clothes, she thought about what had happened.

She had now seen her mother’s room and knew that it was her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed. It was time to go home.

She went down to reception and asked to keep the room for one more night. Then she drove into Hudiksvall, found a bookshop and bought a book about wines. She wondered whether to eat again at the Chinese restaurant she’d visited the previous day, but chose an Italian place instead. She lingered over her meal and read the newspapers without bothering to see what had been written about Hesjövallen.

She drove back to the hotel, read some pages of the book she had bought, went to bed early.

She was woken up by her phone ringing. It was pitch dark. When she answered nobody was there. There was no number on the display.

She suddenly felt uncomfortable. Who had called?

Before going back to sleep she checked to make sure the door was locked. Then she looked out of the window. There was no sign of anybody on the road to the hotel. She went back to bed, thinking that the next day she would do the only sensible thing.

She would go home.

She was in the breakfast room by seven o’clock. The windows looked out over the lake, and she could see that it had become windy. A man approached, pulling a sledge with two well-bundled children as passengers. She recalled the days when she had spent so much time and effort dragging her own children up slopes that they could sledge down. That had been one of the most remarkable periods of her life — playing with her children in the snow, and at the same time worrying about what judgement to pass in a complicated lawsuit. The children’s shouts and laughter contrasting with the frightening crime scenes.

She had once worked out that during the course of her career, she had sent three murderers and seven people guilty of manslaughter to prison. Not to mention several more sentenced for grievous bodily harm, who could count themselves lucky that their crimes had not resulted in murder.

The thought worried her. Measuring her activities and her best efforts in terms of people she had sent to prison — was that really the sum of her life’s work?

As she ate she avoided looking at the newspapers, which were naturally wallowing in the events at Hesjövallen. Instead she selected a business supplement and leafed through the stock market listings and discussons about the percentage of women represented on the boards of Swedish companies. There were not many people at breakfast. She refilled her coffee cup and wondered if it might be a good idea to take a different route home. A touch further west, perhaps, through the Värmland forests?

She was interrupted in her thoughts by somebody addressing her. A man sitting alone at a table several feet away.

‘Are you talking to me?’

‘I just wondered what Vivi Sundberg wanted.’

She didn’t recognise the man and didn’t really understand what he was asking about. Before she had a chance to reply, he stood up and walked over to her table. Pulled out a chair and sat down.

He was in his sixties, red-faced, overweight, and his breath was foul.

‘I’d like to eat my breakfast in peace.’

‘You’ve finished eating. I just want to ask you a few questions.’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘Lars Emanuelsson. Freelance journalist. Not a reporter. I’m better than that lot. I’m not a hack. I do my homework and what I write is thoroughly researched and stylishly written.’

‘That doesn’t give you the right to prevent me from eating my breakfast in peace.’

Lars Emanuelsson stood up, and sat down on a chair at the next table.

‘Is that better?’

‘A bit. Whom do you write for?’

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. First I need to get the story, then I’ll decide where to offer it. I don’t sell my work to just anybody.’

She was irritated by his self-importance. She was also repulsed by his smell — it must have been a very long time since he had last taken a shower. He came off as a caricature of an intrusive reporter.

‘I noticed that you had a chat with Vivi Sundberg yesterday. Not an especially cordial exchange of views, I would say. More like two cockerels, marking their territory. Am I right?’

‘You are wrong. I have nothing to say to you.’

‘But you can’t deny that you spoke with her?’

‘Of course I can’t.’

‘I wonder what a judge from another town is doing up here. You must have something to do with this investigation. Horrible things happen in a little hamlet up north, and Birgitta Roslin comes rushing up from Helsingborg.’