Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

‘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.

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.’