The Man From Beijing

by Unknown

  ‘You’re not here in Hudiksvall?’

  ‘I’m at home in Helsingborg.’

  ‘Helsingborg? We have a restaurant there. Also family. It’s called Shanghai. Food as good as here.’

  ‘I’ll go there for a meal. Provided you help me.’

  She remained seated by the telephone, waiting. When it rang, it was her son. She asked him to call back later, as she was expecting a call. Half an hour later, the call came.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Li.

  ‘Maybe?’

  ‘My cousin thinks the man might have been in restaurant once.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last year.’

  ‘But he’s not certain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you tell me his name?’

  Birgitta made a note of the name and the telephone number of the restaurant in Söderhamn, then hung up. After a brief pause to think things over, she called police headquarters in Hudiksvall and asked to speak to Vivi Sundberg. She expected to have to leave a message, so was surprised when Vivi Sundberg came to the phone.

  ‘How’s it going with the diaries?’Vivi asked. ‘Still finding them interesting?’

  ‘They’re not easy to read. But I have time. Anyway, congratulations on your breakthrough. If I understand things correctly you have both a confession and a possible murder weapon.’

  ‘This can hardly be the reason that you’re calling.’

  ‘Of course not. I wanted to bring your attention back to my Chinese restaurant one more time.’

  She told Vivi about the Chinese cousin in Söderhamn, and that LarsErik Valfridsson might have eaten at the restaurant in Hudiksvall.

  ‘That could explain the red ribbon,’ said Birgitta in conclusion. ‘A loose thread.’

  Vivi Sundberg seemed only vaguely interested.

  ‘We’re not worried about that ribbon at the moment. I think you can understand that.’

  ‘But I wanted to tell you even so. I can give you the name of the waiter who might have served the man, and his telephone number.’

  ‘Thank you for letting us know.’

  When the call was over Roslin phoned her boss, Hans Mattsson. She had to wait for some time before he could take the call. She told him she expected to be cleared for work when she went to see her doctor in a couple of days.

  ‘We’re drowning,’ said Mattsson. ‘Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say we’re being choked. All the cutbacks have strangled Swedish courts. I never thought I’d live to see it.’

  ‘To see what?’

  ‘A price put on having a state governed by law. I didn’t think it was possible to give democracy a monetary value. If you don’t have a state functioning on the basis of law, you don’t have democracy. We’re on our knees. There’s a creaking and scraping and groaning coming from under the floorboards of this society of ours. I’m really worried.’

  ‘It’s hardly possible for me to take care of all the things you’re talking about, but I promise to look after my own trials again.’

  ‘You’re more than welcome.’

  She dined alone that evening as Staffan had to spend the night in Hallsberg between two shifts. She continued to leaf through the diaries. The only entries she paused to read properly were those at the end of the last volume. It was June 1892. JA was now an old man. He lived in a little house in San Diego, suffering pains in his legs and his back. After a lot of haggling he would buy ointments and herbs from an old Indian medicine man; he found they were the only medications that helped him. He wrote about his extreme loneliness, about the death of his wife, and the children who had moved so far away – one of his sons now lived in the Canadian wilderness. He never mentioned the railway.

  The diary ended in the middle of a sentence. It’s 19 June 1892. He notes that it has been raining during the night. His back is aching more than usual. He had a dream.

  And his notes stopped there. Neither Birgitta Roslin nor anybody else in this world would ever know what he had dreamed about.

  She leafed backwards through the diary. There was nothing to indicate that he knew the end was nigh, nothing in his notes paving the way for what was soon to happen. A life, she thought. My death could look the same; my diary, if I had kept one, would be unfinished. Come to that, whoever manages to conclude his or her story, to write a final period before lying down and dying?

  She put the diaries back into the plastic bag and decided to post them the next day. She would follow what was happening in Hudiksvall the same way as everybody else.

  She looked up a list of chief judges in the different regions of Sweden. The chief judge at the Hudiksvall district court was Tage Porsén. This will be the trial of his life, she thought. I hope he’s a judge who enjoys publicity. Birgitta knew that some of her colleagues both hated and were afraid of being confronted by journalists and television cameras.

  At least, that was the case among her generation and those who were older. She didn’t know what the younger generation thought about publicity.

  The thermometer outside the kitchen window indicated that the temperature had fallen. She switched on the television to watch the evening news. Then she would go to bed. The day spent with Karin Wiman had been very eventful and also very tiring.

  She had missed the beginning of the news bulletin, but it was obvious that something dramatic had happened in connection with the Hesjövallen case. A reporter was interviewing a criminologist who was verbose but serious. She tried to work out what was going on.

  When the crime expert had finished speaking, the screen was filled with pictures from Lebanon. She cursed, switched over to teletext and discovered immediately what had happened.

  Lars-Erik Valfridsson had taken his own life. Despite being checked every fifteen minutes, he had managed to tear a shirt into strips, make a noose and hang himself. Although he had been discovered almost immediately, it had not been possible to revive him.

  Birgitta Roslin switched off the television. Her head was swimming. Had he been unable to live with all the guilt weighing him down? Or was he mentally ill?

  Something doesn’t add up, she thought. It can’t be him. Why did he kill himself, why did he confess and why did he lead the police to a buried samurai sword?

  It simply doesn’t make sense.

  She sat down in the armchair she used for reading, but switched off the lamp. The room was in semi-darkness. Somebody laughed as they went past in the street. She would often sit here and contemplate her work.

  She returned to the beginning. It was too much, she thought. Perhaps not too much for a ruthless and obsessed man to carry out. But too much for a man from Hälsingland with no more of a criminal background than a few cases of assault. He confesses to something he didn’t do. Then he gives the police a weapon he’s made himself and hangs himself in his cell. I might be wrong, of course, but I don’t think it adds up. They arrested him far too quickly. And what on earth could be the revenge he claimed was his motive?

  It was midnight when she finally got up from her armchair. She wondered if she ought to call Staffan, but he might well be asleep by now. She went to bed and turned off the light. In her thoughts she was wandering around the village once more. Over and over again she envisaged the red ribbon that had been found in the snow, and the picture of the Chinese man from the hotel’s home-made surveillance camera. The police must know something I don’t know, why Lars-Erik Valfridsson was arrested and what might have been a plausible motive. But they are making a mistake by locking themselves into one single line of investigation.

  She couldn’t sleep. When she could no longer deal with all the tossing and turning, she put on her dressing gown and went downstairs again. She sat at her desk and wrote a summary of all the events that linked her to Hesjövallen. It took her almost three hours to relive in detail all the things she knew. As she wrote she was nagged by the feeling that there was something she’d missed, a connection she hadn’t seen. Her pen seemed to her like a chainsaw clearing the undergrowt
h in a forest, and she needed to be careful in case there was a young deer hiding there. When she finally straightened her back and raised her arms over her head, it was four in the morning. She took her notes to her chair, adjusted the lamp and started reading them through, trying to look between the words, or rather behind them, searching for something she’d overlooked. But nothing unusual attracted her attention, no link that she should have noticed sooner.

  But she was convinced: this couldn’t be the handiwork of a lunatic. It was too well organised, too cold-blooded, to have been carried out by anyone but a totally calm and cool killer. Possibly, she noted in the margin, one should ask if the man had been in the place before. It was pitch dark, but he might have had a powerful torch. Several of the doors were locked. He must have known exactly who lived where, and probably also had keys. His motive must have been very compelling, so that he never hesitated for one second.

  A thought suddenly struck her, something that hadn’t occurred to her before. Had the man who committed the murders shown his face to those over whom he raised his sword or sabre? Did he want them to see him?

  That’s a question for Vivi Sundberg to answer, she thought. Was the light on in the rooms where the dead bodies were found? Had they looked into the face of death before the sword fell?

  She put her notes away; it was nearly five. She checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window and saw that the temperature had fallen to minus eight Celsius. She drank a glass of water and went to bed. She was on the point of falling asleep when she was dragged up to the surface again. There was something she’d missed. Two of the dead bodies had been tied to each other. Where had she seen that image before? She sat up in bed in the darkness, suddenly wide awake. She had seen a description of a similar scene somewhere.

  The diaries. She went downstairs, laid them all out on the table and started looking. She found the passage she was searching for almost immediately.

  It’s 1865. The railway is meandering eastward, every sleeper, every rail, is torture. The workers are struck down by illnesses. They’re dropping like flies. But the flood of replacement workers from the West means the work can continue at the high speed that is essential if the whole of the gigantic railway programme is not to be crippled by financial collapse. On one occasion, to be more precise on 9 November, JA hears that a Chinese slave ship is on its way from Canton. It’s an old sailing ship, only used now for shipping kidnapped Chinese to California. Trouble breaks out on board when food and water begin to run out as the vessel is becalmed for an unusually long period. In order to quash the revolt, the captain resorts to methods of unparalleled cruelty. Even JA, who doesn’t hesitate to use both fists and whips to make his labourers work harder, finds what he hears distressing. The captain seizes some of the leading troublemakers, kills them and ties them to other Chinese who are still alive, two at a time. Then they are forced to lie on deck, one of each pair slowly starving to death, the other decomposing. JA notes in his diary that ‘the punishment is excessive’.

  Could there be a link? Perhaps one of them in Hesjövallen had been forced to lie with a dead body lashed to his or her own? For a whole hour perhaps, maybe less, maybe more? Before the final blow brought release?

  I missed that, she thought. Did the Hudiksvall police miss it as well? They can’t have read the diaries all that carefully before I was allowed to borrow them.

  But another question suggested itself, even if it seemed to be basically implausible. Did the murderer know about the events described in JA’s diary? Was there a remarkable link spanning both time and space?

  Maybe Vivi Sundberg was more cunning than Roslin thought.

  Perhaps Vivi Sundberg even appreciated her stubbornness. She was a woman who had probably experienced problems with her annoying male colleagues.

  Birgitta Roslin slept until ten, got up and saw from Staffan’s schedule that he was due back in Helsingborg at about three o’clock. She was just about to sit down and make a call to Sundberg when there was a ring at the front door. When she answered it, she found a short Chinese man standing with a takeaway meal wrapped up in plastic in his hand.

  ‘I haven’t ordered anything,’ said Birgitta Roslin in surprise.

  ‘From Li in Hudiksvall,’ said the man with a smile. ‘It costs nothing. She wants you to call her. We are family business.’

  ‘The Shanghai Restaurant?’

  The man smiled.

  ‘Restaurant Shanghai. Very good food.’

  He bowed and handed over the package, then left through the gate. Birgitta unpacked the food, sniffed at it and enjoyed the aroma, and put it in the fridge. Then she called Li. This time it was the irritable man who answered. She assumed it was the temperamental father, who held sway in the kitchen. He shouted for Li, who came to the phone.

  ‘Thank you very much for the food,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘It was a lovely surprise.’

  ‘Have you tasted it?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m waiting until my husband comes home.’

  ‘He also likes Chinese food?’

  ‘Yes, he likes it a lot. You wanted me to call.’

  ‘I spoke to Mother about the lamp,’ she said. ‘And the red ribbon that is missing.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve met her.’

  ‘She’s at home. Comes here to clean sometimes. But she notes down when she here. On twelfth of January she did cleaning. In morning before we opened.’

  Birgitta Roslin held her breath.

  ‘She say that on this very day she dusted down all the paper lamps in this restaurant, and she was sure no ribbons were missing. She would have noticed.’

  ‘Could she have been mistaken?’

  ‘Not my mother. Is it important?’ Li asked.

  ‘It could very well be,’ said Birgitta. ‘Many thanks for telling me about it.’

  She replaced the receiver. It rang again immediately. This time it was Lars Emanuelsson.

  ‘Don’t hang up,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your opinion of what’s happened.’

  ‘I have nothing to say.’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That he turned up as a suspect? Lars-Erik Valfridsson?’

  ‘I know nothing about him apart from what I’ve read in the newspapers.’

  ‘But not everything is printed there.’

  He was egging her on. She was curious.

  ‘He has ill-treated his two ex-wives,’ said Lars Emanuelsson. ‘The first one managed to run away. Then he found a lady from the Philippines and enticed her here through a mass of false pretences. Then he beat her up to within an inch of her life before some neighbours caught on and reported him, and he was duly sentenced. But he’s done worse things than that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Murder. As early as 1977. He was still young then. There was a fight over a moped. He hit the young man on the head with a large stone, killing him instantly. He was examined by a forensic psychiatrist who judged that Lars-Erik could well turn to violence again. He presumably belonged to that small group of people regarded as potentially dangerous to society. I expect the police and the prosecutor thought they’d found the right man.’

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  ‘Time will tell. But you can gather the way I’m thinking. That should be enough of an answer to your question. I wonder what conclusions you’ve drawn. Do you agree with me?’

  ‘I’ve been paying no more attention to this case than any other member of the general public. Surely it must have dawned on you that I grew tired of your calls a long time ago.’

  Lars Emanuelsson didn’t seem to hear what she said. ‘Tell me about the diaries. They must have something to do with this case.’

  ‘I don’t want to receive any more calls from you.’

  She hung up. The phone rang again immediately. She ignored it. After five minutes of silence she called police HQ in Hudiksvall. It took ages before she got through t
o the operator, whose voice she recognised. She sounded both jittery and tired. Sundberg was not available. Birgitta Roslin left her name and telephone number.

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ said the girl. ‘It’s chaos here.’

  ‘I can understand that. Please ask Vivi Sundberg to call me when she gets the chance.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘She knows who I am. That’s a sufficient answer to your question.’

  Vivi Sundberg called the following day. The news bulletins were dominated by the scandalous happenings in the Hudiksvall jail. The minister of justice had gone out of his way to promise an investigation into the circumstances and to find out who was responsible. Tobias Ludwig gave as good as he got in his sessions with journalists and television cameras. But the consensus was that the suicide should never have happened.

  Sundberg sounded tired. Birgitta Roslin decided not to ask any questions about the latest developments. Instead, she explained about the red ribbon and spelled out the thoughts she had noted down in the margin of her notes.

  Sundberg listened without comment. Birgitta could hear voices in the background and didn’t envy Sundberg the tension that must have police headquarters in its grip.

  Birgitta ended by asking if the lights had been on in the rooms where the dead bodies had been found.

  ‘Your suspicions are in fact justified,’ said Vivi. ‘We’ve been wondering about that. All the lights were on. In all the rooms but one.’

  ‘The one with the dead boy?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you have an explanation?’

  ‘You must realise that I can’t discuss that with you over the telephone.’

  ‘Of course not. I beg your pardon.’

  ‘No problem. But I’d like to ask you to do something. Write down all you know and think about what happened in Hesjövallen. I’ll take it upon myself to look into the red ribbon business. But all the rest of it – write everything down, and send it to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t Lars-Erik Valfridsson who committed these murders,’ said Birgitta Roslin.

  Those words came from nowhere. She was just as surprised as Vivi Sundberg must have been.