The Man From Beijing

by Unknown

  ‘OK, I won’t. I won’t say a thing.’

  The call was over. Birgitta didn’t understand what was going on.

  Hong Qiu was dead. But the man with the red ribbon had come back.

  34

  After a sleepless night Birgitta Roslin called the Hotel Eden just before 7 a.m. The phone rang for a considerable amount of time without anybody answering.

  She had tried to deal with her fear. If Ho hadn’t come from London and told her that Hong Qiu was dead, she wouldn’t have reacted so strongly to Sture Hermansson’s call. But she assumed that because Hermansson hadn’t been in touch again during the night, nothing further had happened. Perhaps the man was still asleep.

  She waited another half-hour. She had several days ahead of her without any trials and hoped to work her way through all the piled-up paperwork and spend some time pondering her final decision regarding the sentence for the four Vietnamese criminals.

  The telephone rang. It was Staffan from Funchal.

  ‘We’re taking a side trip,’ he said.

  ‘Over the mountains? Down in the valleys? Along those beautiful paths through all the flowers?’

  ‘We’ve booked tickets on a big sailing boat that’s going to take us out to sea. We maybe out of mobile phone range for the next couple of days.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere. It’s the children’s idea. We’ll be unqualified crew members together with the captain, a cook and two real sailors.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘We’re already at sea. It’s lovely weather. But unfortunately there’s no wind yet.’

  ‘Are there lifeboats? Do you have life jackets?’

  ‘You’re underestimating us. Tell me you hope we have a good time. If you like I can bring you a little bottle of seawater as a souvenir.’

  It was a bad connection. They yelled out a few words of farewell. When Birgitta replaced the receiver, she suddenly wished she had gone to Funchal with them, even though Hans Mattsson would have been disappointed and her colleagues irritated.

  She called the Hotel Eden again. Now the line was busy. She waited, tried again after five minutes – still busy. She could see through the window that the beautiful spring weather was continuing. She was too warmly dressed and changed her clothes. Still busy. She decided to try from downstairs in her office. After checking the fridge and making a grocery list, she dialled the Hudiksvall number one more time.

  A woman replied in broken Swedish. ‘Eden.’

  ‘Can I speak to Sture Hermansson, please?’

  ‘You can’t,’ yelled the woman.

  Then she shouted something hysterically in a foreign language that Birgitta assumed was Russian.

  It sounded as if the telephone had fallen onto the floor. Somebody picked it up. Now it was a man who answered. He spoke with a Hälsingland accent.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Can I speak to Sture Hermansson, please?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Who am I speaking to? Is this Hotel Eden?’

  ‘Yes. But you can’t speak to Sture.’

  ‘My name’s Birgitta Roslin and I’m calling from Helsingborg. I was contacted around midnight by Sture Hermansson. We arranged to speak again this morning.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  She took a deep breath. A brief moment of dizziness. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We don’t know. It looks as if he’s managed to cut himself with a knife and bled to death.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘My name’s Tage Elander. Not the former prime minister, my surname doesn’t have an r before the l. I run a wallpaper factory in the building next door. The hotel maid, the Russian woman, came running in a few minutes ago. Now we’re waiting for the police and an ambulance.’

  ‘Has he been murdered?’

  ‘Sture? Who the hell would want to murder Sture? He seems to have cut himself on a kitchen knife. As he was alone in the hotel last night, nobody heard his cries for help. It’s tragic. He was such a friendly man.’

  Birgitta wasn’t sure she had understood correctly. ‘He can’t have been alone in the hotel.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he had guests.’

  ‘According to the maid, the hotel was empty.’

  ‘He had at least one paying guest. He told me that last night. A Chinese man in room number twelve.’

  ‘It’s possible I misunderstood. I’ll ask her.’

  Birgitta could hear the conversation in the background. The Russian maid was still hysterical.

  Elander came back to the telephone. ‘She insists there were no guests here last night.’

  ‘All you need to do is check the ledger. Room number twelve. A man with a Chinese name.’

  Elander put down the phone again. Birgitta could hear that the maid whose name might be Natasha had started to cry. She also heard a door shutting and different voices speaking in the background. Elander picked up the receiver again. ‘I’ll have to stop there. The police and the ambulance have arrived. But there is no hotel ledger.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s vanished. The maid says it’s always on the counter. But it’s gone.’

  ‘I’m certain there was a guest staying in the hotel last night.’

  ‘Well, he’s not here now. Maybe he’s the one who stole the ledger?’

  ‘It could be worse than that,’said Birgitta. ‘He might have been the one holding the kitchen knife that killed Sture Hermansson.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. Maybe it’s best if you speak to one of the police officers.’

  ‘I’ll do that. But not right now.’

  She replaced the receiver. She had remained standing while taking the call, but now she had to sit down. Her heart was hammering in her chest.

  Everything was falling into place. If the man she thought had murdered the inhabitants of Hesjövallen had returned, asked about her and then vanished with the hotel ledger, leaving behind a dead hotel owner, it could mean only one thing. He had come back in order to kill her. When she asked the young Chinese man to show the guards the photograph from Sture Hermansson’s camera, she could never have imagined the consequences. For obvious reasons the murderer had assumed she lived in Hudiksvall. Now that mistake had been corrected. He had been given the correct address by Hermansson.

  Her panic increased. The mugging, Hong Qiu’s death, the bag that had been stolen and then recovered, the visit to her hotel room – everything was connected. But what would happen now?

  She dialled her husband’s number, feeling desperate. But no signal. She cursed his sailing adventure under her breath. She tried the number of one of their daughters, with the same result.

  She called Karin Wiman. No response there either.

  The panic gave her no breathing room. She had to get out of there.

  Once she had reached that decision, she acted as she always did in difficult situations: rapidly and firmly, with no hesitation. She called Hans Mattsson and got through to him even though he was in a meeting.

  She told him she had a virus and ended the call abruptly.

  Birgitta went upstairs and packed a small suitcase. Hidden inside an old textbook from her student days were some five- and ten-pound notes from a previous trip to England. She was sure that the man who had killed Sture Hermansson must be on his way southward. He might even have set off during the night if he was travelling by car. Nobody had seen him leave.

  It dawned on her that she had forgotten the hotel’s surveillance camera. She called the Hotel Eden. This time a coughing man answered. She didn’t bother to explain who she was.

  ‘There’s a surveillance camera in the hotel. Sture Hermansson used to take pictures of his guests. It’s not true that the hotel was empty last night. There was at least one guest.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Are you a police officer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  �
�You heard what I said. Who I am is unimportant.’

  She replaced the receiver. It was half past eight by now. She left the house, hailed a taxi, asked to be taken to the station and was soon on board a train to Copenhagen. Her panic was now being transformed into a defence of her actions. She was convinced that she wasn’t imagining the danger. Her only hope now was to take advantage of the assistance Ho had offered her.

  In the departure hall at Kastrup she saw on a display that there was a flight to London in two hours. She bought a ticket with an open return. After checking in she sat down with a cup of coffee and called Karin Wiman. But she hung up before Karin had a chance to answer. What could she say to her? Karin wouldn’t understand, despite what Birgitta had told her when they met a few days earlier. The kind of things that happened to Birgitta Roslin didn’t happen in Karin Wiman’s world. They didn’t happen in her own world either, truth be told, but an unlikely chain of events had driven her into the corner where she now found herself.

  She arrived in London after an hour’s delay: the airport was in a state of chaos due to a terror alert after an unattended suitcase had been discovered in one of the departure lounges. It was late in the afternoon before she managed to get to central London and found herself a room in a three-star hotel on a street off Tottenham Court Road. Once she had settled in and, with the aid of a sweater, sealed the draughty window overlooking a grim courtyard, she lay down on the bed feeling exhausted. She had dozed for a few minutes during the flight, but was kept awake by a child that kept screaming until the wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow. The mother, who seemed far too young to be one, had eventually collapsed in tears herself, thanks to the screeching child.

  When Birgitta woke with a start she found she had slept for three hours. Dusk was already falling. She had intended to look for Ho at her home address in Chinatown that same day, but now she decided to wait until tomorrow. She took a short walk to Piccadilly Circus and went into a restaurant. Shortly afterwards a large party of Chinese tourists came in through the glass doors. She stared at them in a state of rising panic but managed to gain control of herself. After her meal she returned to the hotel and sat in the bar with a cup of tea. When she collected her room key she noticed that the hotel had a Chinese night porter. She wondered if it was only now that Chinese people were popping up all over Europe, or if it was an earlier development that she hadn’t noticed before.

  She thought back over what had happened, with the return of the Chinese man to the Hotel Eden and Sture Hermansson’s death. She was tempted to call Vivi Sundberg but resisted the urge. If the hotel register was missing, a photograph in the do-it-yourself surveillance camera was unlikely to make much of an impression on the police. Moreover, if the police thought the death was an accident, there would be no point in making a call. But she did dial the hotel’s number. There wasn’t even an answering machine to say the place was closed – not for the season, but probably for good.

  Unable to shake off her fear, she barricaded the door with a chair and checked the window locks carefully. She went to bed, surfed through the television channels, but rather than whatever was flickering past on the screen, she kept seeing a sailing boat beating its way over the sea from Madeira.

  She woke up in the middle of the night to find the television still on, now showing an old black-and-white James Cagney gangster movie. She switched off the lamp that was shining directly into her face and tried to go back to sleep. But failed. She lay awake for the rest of the night.

  It was drizzling outside when she got up and drank coffee without eating anything. After borrowing an umbrella from reception, where there was now a young woman of Asian apparance, perhaps from the Philippines or Thailand, Birgitta stepped out into the streets of London. Most of the restaurants were still closed. Hans Mattsson, who travelled the world in search of new taste sensations, had once said that the best way of finding really good restaurants, be they Chinese, Iranian or Italian, was to look out for ones that were open in the mornings, because they didn’t only cater to tourists. At Ho’s address there was a restaurant on the ground floor, as she had described. It was closed. The building was constructed of red brick, with an alley on either side. She decided to ring the bell by the door leading to the building’s flats.

  But something made her hesitate. She crossed the streettoacafe–open in the morning – and ordered a cup of tea. What did she actually know about Ho? And what did she know about Hong Qiu, come to that? One day Hong Qiu had suddenly turnedupat her restaurant table out of nowhere. Who had sent her? Couldit have been Hong Qiu who sent one of her burly bodyguards after Karin Wiman and Birgitta when they visited the Great Wall? There was one fact Birgitta couldn’t avoid: both Hong Qiu and Ho knew a great deal about who she was. And all this was because of a photograph.

  Were her suspicions on the mark? Had Hong Qiu turned up in order to entice her away from the hotel? Perhaps it wasn’t even true that Hong Qiu had died in a car accident. Maybe Hong Qiu and the man who called himself Wang Min Hao were somehow or other both involved in what had happened at Hesjövallen. Had Ho come to Helsingborg for the same reason? Could she have known that a man was on his way once more to the little Hotel Eden?

  She tried to recall what she had told Hong Qiu in their various conversations. Too much, she now realised. What surprised her was that she hadn’t been more careful. Hong Qiu had been the one who raised the matter. A throwaway remark that the mass murders in Hesjövallen had been an item in the Chinese mass media? Was that really plausible? Or had Hong Qiu merely enticed Birgitta to walk out onto the ice in order to watch her slip and then helped her back onto dry land once she had found out what she wanted to know?

  Why had Ho spent so much time in the public gallery of Birgitta’s courtroom? She didn’t understand Swedish. Or perhaps she did? And then she had suddenly had to rush back to London. What if Ho had only been there in order to keep an eye on Birgitta? Perhaps Ho had an accomplice who had spent hours rummaging through Birgitta’s home while the judge was sitting in court?

  Right now I need somebody to talk to, she thought. Not Karin Wiman, she wouldn’t understand. Staffan or my children. But they are out at sea and unreachable.

  Birgitta was just about to leave the cafe when she saw the door on the other side of the street open. Out came Ho, who started walking towards Leicester Square. It seemed to Birgitta that Ho was on her guard. Birgitta hesitated before emerging into the street and following her. When they came to the square, Ho entered the little park, then turned off towards the Strand. Birgitta kept expecting Ho to turn round to check if anybody was following her. She finally did just before they came to Zimbabwe House. Birgitta had time to lower her umbrella to hide her face but almost lost Ho until she caught sight of her yellow raincoat again. As they approached the Savoy Hotel, Ho opened the heavy door to a big office block. Birgitta waited for a few minutes before going up to read on the well-polished brass nameplate that it was the English-Chinese chamber of commerce.

  She retraced her steps and selected a cafe in Regent Street just off Piccadilly. Sitting down with a cup of coffee she dialled one of the numbers on Ho’s business card. An answering machine invited her to leave a message. She hung up, prepared what she wanted to say in English, then dialled the number again.

  ‘I did as you said. I came to London because I think I’m being pursued. Right now I’m sitting in Simon’s, a cafe next to Rawson’s fashion house on Regent Street, just off Piccadilly. It’s now ten o’clock. I’ll stay for an hour. If you haven’t been in touch by then, I’ll call you again later.’

  Ho arrived forty minutes later. Her garish yellow raincoat stood out among the dark clothes most people were wearing. Birgitta had the feeling that even this was of some significance.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  A waitress took Ho’s order for tea before Birgitta could answer. She explained in detail about the man who had turned up at the hotel in Hudiksvall, that it was the same man she’d told her about before, and th
at the hotel owner had been killed.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘I haven’t come all the way to London to tell you about something I’m not sure of. I’ve come here because this all really happened, and I’m scared. This man asked specifically about me. He was given my address, the house where I live. Now I’m here. I’m doing what Ma Li or actually Hong Qiu said to you and you said to me. I’m scared, but I’m also angry because I suspect that neither you nor Hong Qiu has been telling the truth.’

  ‘Why should I lie? You’ve come a long way to London, but don’t forget that my journey to visit you was just as long.’

  ‘I’m not being told everything that’s going on. I’m not hearing any explanations, although I’m convinced they exist.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ho. ‘But you’re forgetting that it’s possible neither Hong Qiu nor Ma Li knew any more than they said.’

  ‘I didn’t see it clearly when you came to Sweden to visit me,’ said Birgitta, ‘but I do now. Hong Qiu was worried that somebody would try to kill me. That’s what she said to Ma Li. And the message was passed on to you, three women in succession to warn a fourth that she was in danger. But not just any old danger. Death. Nothing less than that. Without realising it, I’ve put myself at risk, the extent of which I’m only now beginning to comprehend. Am I right?’

  ‘That’s why I went to see you.’

  Birgitta leaned forward and took Ho by the hand. ‘Help me to understand. Answer my questions.’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘You can. It wasn’t the case that you had somebody with you when you came to Helsingborg, was it? It’s not the case that at this very moment there’s somebody keeping an eye on us, is it? You could have called somebody before coming here.’

  ‘Why would I have done that?’

  ‘That’s not an answer, it’s a new question. I want answers.’

  ‘I didn’t have anybody with me when I went to Helsingborg.’

  ‘Why did you sit in my courtroom for two whole days? You couldn’t understand a word of what was said, after all.’

  ‘No.’

  Birgitta changed over into Swedish. Ho frowned and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’