The Man From Beijing

by Unknown

  Her years as a judge had taught her that there were many different forms of madness that could drive people to commit horrendous crimes. But she had also learned that forensic psychiatrists did not always succeed in exposing criminals who merely pretended to be mentally ill.

  She switched off the television and went down to the basement, where she had created a little cellar of red wines complete with several wine lists and order forms from a number of importers. Only a few years ago it had dawned on her that, thanks to her children moving out, the family finances had changed fundamentally. She now felt she could afford to spend money on something special and had decided to buy a few bottles of red wine every month. She enjoyed studying the lists and picking out new wines to try. Paying five hundred kronor or so for a bottle seemed to her an almost forbidden pleasure.

  It was cool in the cellar. She checked that the temperature was fourteen degrees Celsius, then sat down on a stool between the racks. Down there, among all the bottles, she could feel at peace with the world. Given the alternative of soaking in a warm pool, she would have preferred to sit in her cellar surrounded on this particular day by one hundred and fourteen bottles lying in their racks.

  But then again, was the peace she could experience in her cellar really genuine? When she was a young woman, if anybody had suggested to her that one day she would become a wine collector, she would never have believed her ears. She wouldn’t merely have denied any such possibility, she would have been upset. As a student in Lund she had been in sympathy with the left-wing radicals who, in the late 1960s, had questioned the validity of university education and the very foundations of the society in which she would eventually work. In those days, collecting wine would have been regarded as a waste of time and effort, a typically middle-class and hence objectionable hobby.

  She was still sitting there lost in thought when she heard Staffan moving around on the floor above. She put the wine lists away and went back upstairs. He had just taken the chicken stew out of the fridge. On the table were a couple of evening newspapers he had brought with him from the train.

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘I gather something awful’s happened in Hälsingland.’

  ‘Nineteen people have been killed.’

  ‘Teletext said that the number of dead wasn’t yet known.’

  ‘These are the latest editions. They’ve killed practically the whole population of a hamlet up there. It’s incredible. How did it go with the judgement you were working on?’

  ‘It’s finished. I acquitted him. I didn’t have any choice.’

  ‘The papers are all abuzz.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘You’re going to come in for some stick.’

  ‘No doubt. But I can suggest that the reporters might like to check what the law says, and then decide if they’d prefer us to go over to lynch law in Sweden.’

  ‘These mass murders are going to detract attention from your case.’

  ‘Of course. What’s a petty little rape compared with a brutal mass murder?’

  They went to bed early that night. He would be in charge of an early train the following morning, and she had failed to find anything of interest on the television. She had also decided which wine she was going to buy. A case of Barolo Arione 2002, at 252 kronor per bottle.

  She woke up with a start at midnight. Staffan was sleeping soundly by her side. She was fairly frequently woken up by pangs of hunger in the middle of the night. She put on her dressing gown, went downstairs to the kitchen, made herself a cup of weak tea and a couple of sandwiches.

  The evening papers were still lying on the kitchen table. She leafed absent-mindedly through one of them – it was hard to form a clear picture of what had happened in that little village in Hälsingland. But there was no doubt that a large number of people had been brutally murdered.

  She was just going to put the paper to one side when she gave a start. Among the dead were several people called Andrén. She read the text carefully, then checked in the other paper. The same there.

  She stared hard at the page in front of her. Could this really be true? Or did she remember wrongly? She went to her study and took out from a desk cupboard a folder of documents wrapped in a red ribbon. She switched on the desk lamp and opened the folder. As she hadn’t brought her glasses down with her, she borrowed a pair of Staffan’s. They were not as strong as hers, but they were usable.

  The folder contained all the documents connected with her parents. Her mother had been dead for more than fifteen years. She had been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas and died within three months.

  She eventually found the photograph she had been looking for in a brown envelope. She took out her magnifying glass and examined the picture. It depicted a group of people in old-fashioned clothes standing in front of a house.

  She took the photograph with her to the kitchen. In one of the newspapers there was a general view of the village where this major tragedy had taken place. She examined the picture carefully through her magnifying glass. She paused at the third house and began comparing the two photographs.

  She had remembered rightly. This hamlet that had been struck down by unannounced evil was not just any old place. It was the village in which her mother had grown up. Everything fitted – it was true that her mother’s surname had been Lööf as a child, but as her parents had both been alcoholics, she had been placed with a family called Andrén. Birgitta’s mother had rarely mentioned those days. She had been well looked after, but had always longed to be acquainted with her real parents. However, they had both died before she was fifteen, and so she had to stay in the village until she was considered old enough to find work and look after herself. When she met Birgitta’s father, the names Lööf and Andrén disappeared from the scene. But now one of them had returned with a bang.

  The photograph lying among her mother’s papers had been taken in front of one of the houses in the village where the mass murders had been perpetrated. The facade of the house, the ornamental carving around the windows, was exactly the same in the old photograph as in the newspaper.

  There was no doubt about it. A couple of nights previously, people had been murdered in the house where her mother grew up. Could it be her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed? The newspapers wrote that most of the dead were old people.

  Her mother’s foster-parents would be more than ninety years of age now. Perhaps.

  She shuddered at the thought. She seldom if ever thought about her parents. She even found it difficult to recall what her mother looked like. But now the past came unexpectedly rushing towards her.

  Staffan entered the kitchen. As always, he made hardly a sound.

  ‘You make me jump when I don’t know you’re coming,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you up?’

  ‘I felt hungry.’

  He looked at the papers lying on the table. She told him about the conclusion she’d reached and was becoming more and more convinced that what she suspected was in fact the truth.

  ‘But it’s pretty remote,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘It’s a very thin thread connecting you to that little village.’

  ‘Thin, but remarkable. You have to admit that.’

  ‘Maybe. But you have to get some sleep.’

  She lay awake for ages before dozing off. That thin thread became stretched almost to the breaking point. She slept fitfully, and her sleep was broken by thoughts about her mother. She still found it hard to see traces of herself in her mother.

  She dropped off to sleep eventually and woke up to find Staffan standing at the foot of the bed, hair damp from the shower, putting on his uniform. I’m your general, he used to tell her. Without a weapon in my hand, only a pen to cancel tickets.

  She pretended to be still asleep and waited until the door closed behind him. Then she jumped up and switched on the computer in her study. She went through several search engines, looking for as much information as she could find. The eve
nts that had taken place in Hälsingland still seemed to be shrouded in uncertainty. The only thing that appeared clear was that the weapon used was probably a large knife or something similar.

  I want to know more about this, she thought. At least I want to know if my mother’s foster-parents were among those murdered the other night. She searched until eight o’clock, when she put all thoughts about the mass murders aside to consider the day’s trial concerning two Iraqi citizens accused of smuggling people.

  It was a further two hours before she had gathered together her papers, glanced through the preliminary investigation notes and taken her seat in court. Help me now, dear old Anker, to get through this day as well, she pleaded. Then she tapped her hammer lightly on the desk in front of her and asked the prosecuting counsel to open the proceedings.

  There were high windows behind her back.

  Just before she sat down, she had noticed that the sun was beginning to break through the thick clouds that had moved in over Sweden during the night.

  6

  By the time the trial was over two days later, Birgitta Roslin knew what her verdict would be. They were guilty, and the elder of the two men, Abdul ibn Yamed, who was the ringleader, would be sentenced to three years and two months in prison. His assistant, the younger man, Yassir al-Habi, would get one year. Both men would be deported on release.

  The sentences given were similar to what had gone before. Many of the individuals smuggled into Sweden had been threatened and assaulted when it transpired that they were unable to pay what they owed for the forged immigration papers and the long journey. She had taken a particular dislike to the elder of the two men. He had appealed to her and the prosecutor with sentimental arguments, claiming that he never retained any of the money paid by the refugees but donated it all to charities in his homeland. During a break in proceedings the prosecuting counsel had stopped by for a cup of coffee and mentioned in passing that Abdul ibn Yamed drove around in a Mercedes worth almost a million kronor.

  The trial had been strenuous. The days had been long, and she had no time to do more than eat and sleep and study her notes prior to returning to the bench. Her twin daughters phoned and invited her to Lund, but she didn’t have time. As soon as the case was over, she was faced with a complicated one involving Romanian credit card swindlers.

  She had no time to keep abreast of what was happening in the little village in Hälsingland, missing the morning newspapers and the evening TV news bulletins.

  The morning Roslin was due to start preparing for the trial of the swindlers from Romania, she discovered that she had a note in her diary about an appointment with her doctor for a routine annual check-up. She considered postponing it for a few weeks. Apart from feeling tired, being out of shape and occasionally suffering anxiety attacks, she couldn’t imagine there being anything wrong with her. She was a healthy person who led an unadventurous life and hardly ever even had a cold. But she didn’t cancel the appointment.

  The doctor’s office was not far from the municipal theatre. She left her car on the side street where it was parked and walked to the surgery from the court. It was cold, fine weather with no wind at all. The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had melted away. She stopped by a shop window and contemplated a dress. But the price tag gave her a shock, and she moved on.

  In the waiting room was a newspaper whose front page was laden with news about the mass murders in Hälsingland. She had barely got as far as picking it up when she was summoned by the doctor. He was an elderly man who reminded her of Judge Anker. Roslin had been his patient for ten years. He had been recommended by one of her legal colleagues. He asked her how she felt, if she’d had any pains, and having noted her responses he passed her on to a nurse who took a blood sample from one of Roslin’s fingertips. She then sat in the waiting room. Another patient had claimed the newspaper. Roslin closed her eyes and waited. She thought about her family, what each of them was doing, or at least where they were, at that very moment. Staffan was on a train heading for Hallsberg, he wouldn’t be home until late. David was working in AstraZeneca’s laboratory just outside Gothenburg. It was less certain where Anna was: the last time she had been in touch was a month ago, from Nepal. The twins were in Lund and wanted their mother to visit them. She dozed off and was woken up by the nurse shaking her by the shoulder.

  ‘You can go in to the doctor now.’

  Surely I’m not so exhausted that I need to drop off in a doctor’s waiting room, Roslin thought as she returned to the doctor’s office and sat down.

  Ten minutes later Birgitta Roslin was standing in the street outside, trying to come to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t be working for the next two weeks. The doctor had introduced sudden and unexpected disorder into her life. Her blood pressure was far too high, and coupled with her anxiety attacks caused the doctor to insist on two weeks’ leave from work.

  She walked back to the court and spoke to Hans Mattsson, a chief judge and her immediate superior. They managed to work out between them a way of dealing with the two cases she was currently embroiled in. She spoke to her secretary, posted a few letters she had written, called at the chemist’s to pick up her new medication, then drove home. The lack of anything to do was paralysing.

  She made lunch, then flopped down on the sofa with the newspaper. Not all the bodies in Hesjövallen had been named publicly. A detective by the name of Sundberg made a statement and urged the general public to contact the police with any information. There were still no leads, but the police were sure, no matter how hard it might be to believe, that they were looking for only the one killer.

  On another page a public prosecutor called Robertsson claimed that the investigation was progressing on a very large scale totally without prejudice. The police in Hudiksvall had received the assistance that they had requested from the central authorities.

  Robertsson seemed to be confident of success: ‘We shall catch whoever did this deed. We shall not give up.’

  An article on the next page was about the unrest that had spread throughout the Hälsingland forests. Many villages in the area had few inhabitants. There was talk of people acquiring guns, of dogs, alarms and barricaded doors.

  Birgitta Roslin slid the newspaper to one side. The house was empty, silent. Her sudden and unwanted free time had come out of the blue. She went down to the basement and fetched one of the wine lists. She decided to order the case of Barolo Arione online. It was really too expensive, but she felt the urge to treat herself. She thought about doing some cleaning, an activity that was almost always neglected in her household. But she changed her mind just as she was about to bring out the vacuum cleaner. She sat down at the kitchen table and tried to assess her situation. She was on sick leave, although she wasn’t really ill. Is having high blood pressure really being ill? Maybe she really was close to burning herself out, and perhaps it could affect her judgement in court?

  She looked at the newspaper in front of her on the table and thought again about her mother and her childhood in Hälsingland. An idea struck her. She picked up the telephone, rang the local police station and asked to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Hugo Malmberg. They had known each other for many years. At one time he had tried to teach her and Staffan to play bridge, without arousing much enthusiasm.

  She heard Malmberg’s gentle voice at the other end of the line. Most people imagine police officers sound gruff; Hugo would convince them otherwise. He sounded more like a cuddly pensioner sitting on a park bench feeding the birds.

  She asked how he was and wondered if he had time to see her. He agreed. She’d walk.

  An hour later, Birgitta Roslin entered Hugo Malmberg’s office with its neat and tidy desk. Malmberg was on the phone, but he gestured, inviting her to sit down. The call concerned an assault that had happened the previous day.

  Malmberg hung up and smiled at her. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I’d rather not, thank you.’

  ‘Meaning what
?’

  ‘The police station’s coffee is just as bad as the brew they serve up in the district court.’

  He stood.

  ‘Let’s go to the conference room,’ he said. ‘This telephone rings nonstop. It’s a feeling I share with every other decent Swedish police officer – that I’m the only one who’s really working hard.’

  They sat down at the oval table, cluttered with empty coffee mugs and water bottles. Malmberg shook his head disapprovingly.

  ‘People never clean up after themselves. They have their meetings, and when they’ve finished they disappear and leave all their rubbish behind. How can I help? Have you changed your mind about those bridge lessons?’

  She told him about what she’d discovered, about her connection to the mass murders.

  ‘I’m curious,’ she said. ‘All I can gather from what’s in the papers and the news bulletins is that many people are dead, and the police don’t have any leads.’

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad I don’t work in that district right now. They must be going through sheer hell. I’ve never heard of anything like it. In its way it’s just as sensational as the Palme murder.’

  ‘What do you know that isn’t in the newspapers?’

  ‘There isn’t a single police officer the length and breadth of the country who isn’t wondering what happened. Everybody has a theory. It’s a myth that police officers are rational and lack imagination. We start speculating about what might have happened right away.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  He shrugged and thought for a moment before answering.

  ‘I know no more than you do. There are a lot of bodies, and it was brutal. But nothing was stolen, if I understand things correctly. The probability is that some sick individual was responsible. What lies behind it, goodness only knows. I assume the police up there are lining up known violent criminals with psychological problems. They’ve doubtless been in touch already with Interpol and Europol in the hope of finding a clue that way, but such things take time. That’s all I know.’