The Man from Beijing

17

Birgitta Roslin found what she was looking for at the very back in a corner of the Chinese restaurant. One of the red ribbons was missing from the lamp hanging over the table.

She stood absolutely still and held her breath.

Somebody was sitting here, she thought. Then from here headed for Hesjövallen.

It must have been a man. Definitely a man.

She looked around the restaurant. The young waitress smiled. Loud Chinese voices were coming from the kitchen.

It struck her that neither she nor the police had begun to understand the scope of what had happened. It was bigger, more profound, more mysterious, than they could possibly have realised.

They knew nothing, in fact.

She sat at the table, poking absent-mindedly at the food from the buffet. She was still the only customer in the restaurant. She beckoned to the waitress and pointed at the lamp.

‘There’s a ribbon missing,’ she said.

At first the waitress didn’t seem to understand what she meant. She pointed again. The waitress nodded in surprise. She knew nothing about the missing ribbon. She bent down and looked under the table, in case it had fallen down there.

‘Gone,’ she said. ‘I no see.’

‘How long has it been missing?’ asked Roslin.

The waitress looked at her in confusion. Roslin repeated the question, as she thought the waitress hadn’t understood.

The waitress shook her head impatiently. ‘Don’t know. If this table is not good, please change.’

Before Roslin could answer, the waitress had gone off to attend to a group of customers who had just entered the restaurant. She guessed that they were local government officials. When she heard them talking, she realised that they were conference delegates discussing the high levels of unemployment in Hälsingland. Roslin continued poking and nibbling at her food as the restaurant began to fill up. There was far too much for the young waitress to cope with on her own. Eventually, a man emerged from the kitchen and helped her to clear away the dishes and wipe the tables.

After two hours, business began to slacken. Roslin was still playing with her food, but ordered a cup of green tea and passed the time by thinking through everything that had happened to her since she had arrived in Hälsingland.

The waitress came back to her and asked if there was anything else the lady wanted. Roslin said, ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

There were still some customers eating. The waitress spoke to the man who had been helping her, then came back to Roslin’s table.

‘If you want to buy the lamp, I can fix it,’ she said with a smile.

Birgitta Roslin smiled back.

‘No lamp,’ she said. ‘Were you open on New Year’s Eve?’

‘We are always open,’ said the waitress. ‘Chinese working times. Always open when others are closed.’

‘Can you remember your customers?’ she asked, not expecting an answer.

‘You have been here before,’ said the waitress. ‘I remember customers.’

‘Can you remember if anybody was sitting at this table on New Year’s Eve?’

The waitress shook her head.

‘This is good table. There are always customers here. You are sitting here now. Tomorrow somebody else is sitting here.’

Birgitta Roslin could see that it was hopeless asking such vague questions. She must be more precise. After a short pause, it struck her how to proceed.

‘At New Year,’ she began, ‘was there a customer you had never seen before?’

‘Never?’

‘Never. Neither before nor after.’

She could see that the waitress was racking her brains.

The last of the lunch customers were leaving. The telephone on the counter rang. The waitress answered and noted down a takeaway order. Then she came back to Roslin’s table. In the meantime someone in the kitchen had started playing music.

‘Beautiful music,’ said the waitress with a smile. ‘Chinese music. You like it?’

‘Nice,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘Very nice.’

The waitress hesitated. Finally she nodded, hesitantly at first, but then more confidently.

‘Chinese man,’ she said.

‘Sitting here?’

‘On the same chair as you. He ate dinner.’

‘When was that?’

She thought for a moment.

‘In January. But not New Year. Later.’

‘How much later?’

‘Maybe nine, ten days?’

Roslin bit her lip. That could fit in. The violence at Hesjövallen took place during the night between 12 and 13 January.

‘Could it have been a couple of days later?’

The waitress fetched a diary in which all bookings were recorded.

‘Twelfth of January,’ she said. ‘He sat here then. He had not booked a table, but I remember other customers who were here.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Chinese. Thin.’

‘What did he say?’

The waitress’s answer was immediate and surprised her.

‘Nothing. He pointed at what he wanted.’

‘But he was definitely Chinese?’

‘I tried to speak Chinese with him, but he said only “silent”. And pointed. I think he wanted to be alone. He ate. Soup, spring rolls, nasi goring and dessert. He was very hungry.’

‘Did he have anything to drink?’

‘Water and tea.’

‘And he said nothing from start to finish?’

‘He wanted to be alone.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He paid. Swedish money. Then he left.’

‘And he never came back?’

‘No.’

‘Was he the one who took the red ribbon?’

The waitress laughed. ‘Why he do that?’

‘Does that red ribbon have any special meaning?’

‘It’s a red ribbon. What can it mean?’

‘Did anything else happen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After he’d left?’

‘You ask many strange questions. Are you from Internal Revenue? He does not work here. We pay tax. All who work here have papers.’

‘I just wondered. Did you ever see him again?’

The waitress pointed to the window.

‘He went to right. It was snowing. Then he was gone. He never came back. Why do you ask?’

‘I might know him,’ said Birgitta Roslin.

She paid and left. She turned right outside the restaurant. She came to a crossroads and paused to look around. One side road contained several boutiques and a car park. The other one was a cul-de-sac. At the end was a little hotel with a sign behind a pane of glass that had cracked. She looked around in all directions once more, studied the hotel sign again.

She went back to the Chinese restaurant. The waitress was sitting down, smoking, and gave a start when the door opened. She stubbed out her cigarette immediately.

‘I have another question,’ said Roslin. ‘That man sitting at the table in the corner — was he wearing an overcoat, or some other kind of outdoor clothes?’

The waitress thought for a moment. ‘No, no coat,’ she said. ‘How you know that?’

‘I didn’t know. Finish your cigarette. Thank you for your help.’

The hotel door was broken. Somebody had tried to break it open, and the lock looked as if it had only been mended temporarily. She walked up a few steps to reception, which was simply a counter in front of a doorway. There was nobody there. She shouted. Nothing. She discovered a bell and was about to ring it when she suddenly realised there was somebody standing behind her. It was a man, so thin that he was almost transparent, as if he were seriously ill. He was wearing strong glasses and smelled of alcohol.

‘Are you looking for a room?’

She could detect traces of a Gothenburg dialect in his voice.

‘I just want to ask some questions. About a friend of mine who I think stayed here.’

The man shuffled away his slippers making a clopping noise with each step. He eventually turned up behind the desk. Hands shaking, he produced a hotel ledger. Roslin could never have imagined that hotels like the one she now found herself in still existed. It felt like she had been whisked back through time to a film from the 1940s.

‘What’s the name of the guest?’

All I know is that he’s Chinese.’

The man pushed the ledger aside, staring hard at her and shaking his head. Roslin guessed he must be suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

‘It’s normal to know the names of one’s friends. Even if they are Chinese.’

‘He’s a friend of a friend.’

‘When is he supposed to have stayed here?’

How many Chinese guests have you had here? she wondered. If there’s been even just one staying here, you must know about it.

‘At the beginning of January.’

‘I was in the hospital then. A nephew of mine looked after the hotel while I was away.’

‘Perhaps you could call him?’

‘I’m afraid not. He’s on an Arctic cruise at the moment.’

The man peered short-sightedly at the pages of the ledger.

‘We have in fact had a man from China staying here,’ he said suddenly. A Mr Wang Min Hao from Beijing. He stayed here for one night. On the twelfth of January. Is that the man you’re looking for?’

‘Yes,’ said Birgitta Roslin, scarcely able to contain her excitement. ‘That’s the one.’

The man turned the ledger so that she could read it. She took a piece of paper from her bag and made a note of the details. Name, passport number and something that was presumably an address in Beijing.

‘Thank you,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘You’ve been a big help. Did he leave anything behind in the hotel?’

‘My name’s Sture Hermansson,’ said the man. ‘My wife and I have been running this hotel since 1946. She’s dead now. I will soon be dead as well. This is the last year the hotel will exist. The building is going to be demolished.’

‘It’s sad when things turn out like that.’

Hermansson grunted disapprovingly.

‘What’s sad about that? The place is a ruin. I’m also a ruin. There’s nothing odd about old people dying. But I think this Chinaman actually did leave something behind.’

He disappeared into the room behind the counter. Birgitta Roslin waited.

She was just beginning to wonder if he’d died when he finally reappeared. He had a magazine in his hand.

‘This was in a wastebasket when I came back from the hospital. A Russian woman does the cleaning for me. As I have only eight rooms, she can manage it on her own. But she’s careless. When I came back from the hospital I checked through the hotel. This was still in the Chinaman’s room.’

Sture Hermansson handed her the magazine. It was Chinese, detailing Chinese exteriors and people. She suspected that it was a PR brochure for a company rather than a magazine as such. On the back of it were carelessly written Chinese characters in ink.

‘You’re welcome to take it,’ said Hermansson. ‘I can’t read Chinese.’

She put it in her bag and prepared to leave.

‘Many thanks for your help.’

Hermansson smiled. ‘It was nothing. Are you satisfied?’

‘More than satisfied.’

She was heading for the exit when she heard Hermansson’s voice behind her.

‘I might have something else for you. But you seem to be in a hurry — perhaps you don’t have time?’

Birgitta Roslin went back to the counter. Hermansson smiled. Then he pointed towards something behind his head. Roslin didn’t understand at first what she was supposed to see. There was a clock hanging on the wall and a calendar from a garage promising quick and efficient service on all Ford cars.

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘Your eyes must be even worse than mine,’ said Hermansson.

He took a wooden pointer from underneath the counter.

‘The clock’s slow,’ he explained. ‘I use this pointer to adjust the hands. It’s not a good idea for a rickety old body like mine to stand on a stepladder.’

He pointed up at the wall, next to the clock. All she could see was a ventilator. She still didn’t understand what he was trying to show her. Then she realised: it wasn’t a ventilator, but an opening in the wall for a camera lens.

‘We can find out what this man looked like,’ said Sture Hermansson, looking pleased with himself.

‘Is it a surveillance camera?’

‘It certainly is. I made it myself.’

‘So you take pictures of everybody who stays in your hotel?’

‘Video films. I don’t even know if it’s legal. But I have a button I press under the counter. The camera films whoever is standing there.’

He looked at her with an amused smile.

‘I’ve just filmed you, for instance,’ he said. ‘You’re in exactly the right place to make a good picture.’

Roslin accompanied him into the room behind the counter. This was evidently where he slept, as well as being his office. Through an open door she could see an old-fashioned kitchen where a woman stood washing dishes.

‘That’s Natasha,’ said Hermansson. ‘Her real name’s something different, but I think all Russian women should be called Natasha.’

He looked at Roslin, and his face clouded over.

‘I hope you’re not a police officer,’ he said.

‘Certainly not.’

‘I don’t think she has all the right papers. But as I understand it, that applies to most of our immigrant workers.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘But I’m not a police officer.’

He started sorting through the video cassettes, all of which were dated.

‘Let’s hope my nephew remembered to press the button,’ he said. ‘I haven’t checked the films from the beginning of January. We had hardly any guests then.’

After a lot of fumbling around that made Birgitta Roslin want to snatch the cassettes out of his hands, he found the right one and switched on the television. Natasha flitted through the room like a silent shadow, and disappeared.

Hermansson pressed the play button. Roslin leaned forward. The picture was surprisingly clear. A man with a large fur hat was standing at the counter.

‘Lundgren from Järvsö,’ said Hermansson. ‘He comes to stay here once a month in order to be left in peace so that he can drink himself silly in his room. When he’s drunk, he sings hymns. Then he goes back home. A nice man. Scrap dealer. He’s been coming to stay with me for nearly thirty years. I give him a discount.’

The television screen started flickering. When the picture became clear again, two middle-aged women were standing in front of the counter.

‘Natasha’s friends,’ said Hermansson solemnly. ‘They come now and then. I’d rather not think about what they do for a living. But they’re not allowed to entertain guests in this hotel. Mind you, I suspect they do so when I’m asleep.’

‘Do they also get a discount?’

‘Everybody gets a discount. I don’t have any set prices. The hotel’s been operating at a loss since the end of the 1960s. I actually live off a little portfolio of stocks and shares. I rely on forestry and heavy industry. There’s only one piece of advice I give to my trusted friends.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Swedish industrial stocks. They’re unbeatable.’

A new picture appeared on the screen. Birgitta Roslin sat up and took notice. The man’s picture was very clear. A Chinese man, wearing a dark overcoat. He glanced up at the camera. It seemed almost as if he were looking her in the eye. Young, she thought. No more than thirty, unless the camera’s telling a lie. He collected his key and disappeared from the screen, which went black.

‘My eyes are not too good,’ said Hermansson. ‘Is that the man you’re looking for?’

‘Was it the twelfth of January?’

‘I think so. But I can check with the ledger and see if he checked in after our Russian friends.’

He stood up and went to the reception counter. While he was away Birgitta Roslin managed to play through the pictures of the Chinese man several times. She froze the picture at the moment when he looked straight at the camera. He’s noticed it, she thought. Then he looks down and turns his face away. He even changes the way he is standing, so that his face can’t be seen. It all went very quickly. She rewound the tape and watched the sequence again. Now she could see that he was on his guard all the time, looking for the camera. She froze the picture again. A man with close-cropped hair, intense eyes, tightly closed lips. Quick movements, alert. Perhaps older than she’d first thought.

Hermansson came back.

‘It looks like we’re right,’ he said. ‘Two Russian ladies checked in, using false names as usual. And then came this man, Mr Wang Min Hao from Beijing.’

‘Would it be possible to make a copy of this film?’

Hermansson shrugged.

‘You can have it. What use is it to me? I installed this camera and video set-up for my own amusement. I wipe the cassettes every six months. Take it.’

He put the cassette in its case and handed it to her. They went back into the lobby. Natasha was cleaning the globes over the lights that illuminated the hotel entrance.

Sture Hermansson gave Birgitta Roslin’s arm a friendly squeeze.

‘Are you going to tell me now why you’re so interested in this Chinese man? Does he owe you money?’

‘Why on earth should he?’

‘Everybody owes everybody else something. If somebody starts asking about people, there’s usually money involved somewhere.’

‘I think this man can provide the answers to certain questions,’ said Roslin. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they are.’

‘And you’re not a police officer?’

‘No.’

‘But you don’t come from these parts, do you?’

‘No, I don’t. My name is Birgitta Roslin, and I come from Helsingborg. I’d be grateful if you’d get in touch if he turns up again.’

She wrote her address and telephone number on a piece of paper and gave it to Sture Hermansson.

When she emerged into the street she noticed that she was sweating. The Chinese man’s eyes were still following her. She put the cassette into her bag and looked around, unsure of what to do next. She really should be on her way back to Helsingborg — it was already late afternoon. She went into a nearby church and sat down in a pew at the front. It was chilly. A man was kneeling by one of the thick walls, repairing a plaster joint. She tried to think straight. A red ribbon had been found in Hesjövallen. It had been lying in the snow. By coincidence she had succeeded in tracing it to a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese man had eaten there the evening of 12 January. Later that night or early the next morning, a large number of people had died in Hesjövallen.

She thought about the picture on Sture Hermansson’s videotape. Was it really feasible for one lone man to carry out all those murders? Were there others involved whom she didn’t know about yet? Or had the red ribbon ended up in the snow at Hesjövallen for an entirely different reason?

She found no answer. Instead she took out the brochure that had been left in the wastebasket. That also made her doubt whether there was any connection between Wang Min Hao and what had happened at Hesjövallen. Would a murderer really leave such obvious clues behind?

The light inside the church was dim. She put on her glasses and leafed through the brochure. One of the spreads was a picture of a skyscraper in Beijing and Chinese characters. On other pages were columns of figures and photographs of smiling Chinese men.

What interested her most was the Chinese writing on the back of the brochure. It brought Wang Min Hao very close to her. He was probably the one who had written it. As a reminder of something? Or for some other reason?

Who could read this stuff? The moment she asked the question, she knew the answer. Her distant and Red revolutionary youth suddenly came to mind. She left the church and stood in the churchyard with her mobile phone in her hand. Karin Wiman, a friend from her student days in Lund, was a Sinologist and worked at the university in Copenhagen. No one answered, but she left a message asking Karin to call her back. Then she returned to her car and found a large hotel in the centre of Hudiksvall with vacant rooms. Hers was spacious and on the top floor. She switched on the television and saw on teletext that snow was forecast for that night.

She lay on her bed and waited. She heard a man laughing in one of the neighbouring rooms.

The ringing phone woke her. It was Karin Wiman, who sounded somewhat baffled. When Birgitta Roslin explained what she wanted, her friend urged her to find a fax machine and send her the page with the Chinese characters.

She was able to use the fax at the front desk, then went back to her room to wait. It was dark outside now. She would soon call home and explain that, because the weather had taken a turn for the worse, she would be staying another night.

Karin Wiman called at half past seven.

‘The characters are carelessly drawn, but I think I can work out what they mean.’

Birgitta Roslin held her breath.

‘It’s the name of a hospital. I’ve tracked it down. It’s in Beijing. Called Longfu. It’s in the centre of town, on a street called Mei Shuguan Hutong. It’s not far from China’s biggest art gallery. I can send you a map if you like.’

‘Please do.’

‘OK, now you can tell me why you want to know all this. I’m very curious. Has your old interest in China been resurrected?’

‘Perhaps. I’ll tell you more later. Can you send the map to the fax machine I used?’

‘You’ll have it in a few minutes. But you’re being too secretive.’

‘Just be patient for a while. I’ll tell you everything.’

‘We should get together.’

‘I know. We see far too little of each other.’

Birgitta Roslin went down to the front desk and waited. The map of central Beijing arrived momentarily. Karin had marked it with an arrow.

Roslin noticed that she was hungry. Her hotel didn’t have a restaurant, so she grabbed her jacket and went out. She would study the map when she came back.

It was dark in town, few cars, hardly any pedestrians. The man at the front desk had recommended an Italian restaurant in the vicinity. She went there and ate in the sparsely occupied dining room.

By the time she left, it had started snowing. She headed back to her hotel.

She suddenly stopped. For some reason she had the feeling she was being watched. But when she looked round, she couldn’t see anybody.

She hurried back and locked her room door, securing it with the chain. Then she stood behind the curtains and looked down onto the street.

The same as before. Nobody to be seen. Just the snow falling, more and more densely.

18

Birgitta Roslin slept badly that night. She woke up several times and went to the window. It was still snowing. The wind was creating high drifts along house walls. The streets were deserted. At about seven she was woken up once and for all by snowploughs clattering past.

Before going to bed she had called home with the details of the hotel she had checked into. Staffan had listened but not said much.

That he didn’t express any surprise on hearing she wasn’t on her way back made her both angry and disappointed. There was a time when we learned not to dig too deeply into each other’s emotional lives, she thought. Everyone needs some private space. But that shouldn’t develop into indifference. Is that where we’re headed? Are we there already?

There was an electric kettle in her room. She made a cup of tea and sat down with the map Karin Wiman had sent her. The room was in semi-darkness, the only light coming from a reading lamp and from the muted television. The map was difficult to read, but she found the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. It brought back memories.

Roslin put the map down and thought about her daughters and their generation. The conversation with Karin had reminded her of the person she had once been herself. So near and yet so far, she thought.

Those days were crucial. In the midst of all my naive chaos, I was convinced that the way to a better world was via solidarity and liberation. I’ve never forgotten that feeling of being at the very centre of the world, at a time when it was possible to change everything.

But I’ve never lived up to the insights I had at that time. In my worst moments I’ve felt like a traitor. Not least to my mother, who encouraged me to rebel. But I suppose, if I’m honest with myself, my political will was really no more than a sort of varnish I spread over my existence. The only thing that really penetrated was my determination to be an honest judge. That’s something nobody can take away from me, she concluded.

She drank her tea and made plans for the day. She would visit the police again and tell them what she’d discovered. This time they would have to listen. They hadn’t exactly achieved a breakthrough in the investigation so far. When she checked into her hotel she had heard some Germans in the lobby discussing what had happened in Hesjövallen. This was news abroad as well as at home. A blot on the copybook of innocent Sweden, she thought. Mass murder has no place in this country. Such things only happen in the United States, or occasionally in Russia, but not here, in a little remote and peaceful village in the depths of the Swedish forests.

It was still snowing when Birgitta Roslin went to the police station again. The temperature had fallen. The thermometer outside the hotel said minus seven degrees Celsius. The pavements had not yet been cleared. She walked carefully to avoid slipping.

It was quiet in the station’s reception area. A lone officer was reading messages on a noticeboard. The woman at the telephone switchboard was motionless, staring into space.

Roslin had the impression that the Hesjövallen massacre hadn’t occurred, that the whole thing was a fantasy someone had made up.

‘I’m looking for Vivi Sundberg.’

‘She’s in a meeting.’

‘Erik Huddén?’

‘He’s there as well.’

‘Is everybody in the meeting?’

‘Everybody. Apart from me.’

‘How long is it going to last?’

‘Impossible to say. Maybe all day.’

The woman in reception opened the door to let in the officer who had been reading the noticeboard.

‘I think there’s been a breakthrough,’ she said in a low voice, and left.

Birgitta Roslin sat down and leafed through a newspaper. Police officers occasionally came and went through the glass door. Journalists and a television team arrived. She half expected to see Lars Emanuelsson.

A quarter past nine. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. Then she gave a start on hearing a voice she recognised. Vivi Sundberg was standing in front of her. She looked very tired, with black shadows around her eyes.

‘You wanted to speak to me.’

‘If I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Of course you’re disturbing me. But I assume it’s important. You know the drill by now.’

Birgitta Roslin followed her through the glass door and into an empty office.

‘This isn’t my office,’ said Sundberg. ‘But we can talk here.’

Birgitta Roslin sat down on an uncomfortable visitor’s chair. Vivi Sundberg remained standing, leaning against a bookcase filled with red-backed files.

Roslin braced herself, thinking that the situation was preposterous. Sundberg had already decided that no matter what she had to say, it would be irrelevant to the investigation.

‘I think I’ve found something,’ she said. ‘A clue, I suppose you could call it.’

Sundberg’s face was expressionless. Roslin felt challenged.

‘What I have to say is so important you should ask someone else to be present.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m convinced of it.’

Vivi Sundberg left the room and returned swiftly with a man who introduced himself as District Prosecutor Robertsson.

‘I’m in charge of the preliminary investigation. Vivi tells me you have something to tell us. You are a judge in Helsingborg, is that right?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Is Prosecutor Halmberg still there?’

‘He’s retired.’

‘But he still lives in Helsingborg, doesn’t he?’

‘I think he’s moved to France. Antibes.’

‘Lucky man. He enjoyed a decent cigar, that one. Jurors often used to faint when he lit up in the back rooms during breaks in a trial. He started to lose cases when they introduced a smoking ban. He thought it was due to melancholy and cigar deprivation.’

‘I’ve heard stories about that.’

The prosecutor sat down at the desk. Sundberg had returned to her place by the bookcase. Birgitta Roslin described in detail what she had discovered. How she had recognised the red ribbon, traced it to the restaurant, then found out that a Chinese man had been visiting Hudiksvall. She put the video cassette on the desk together with the brochure in Chinese and explained what the roughly written characters on the back cover meant.

Robertsson was staring hard at her. Vivi Sundberg was examining her hands. Then Robertsson grabbed hold of the cassette and stood up.

‘Let’s take a look at this. Now, right away.’

They went to a conference room where an Asian lady was clearing away the coffee mugs and paper bags. Birgitta Roslin bristled at the brusque way in which Vivi Sundberg ordered the cleaning woman to leave the room. After a great deal of difficulty and a succession of curses Robertsson eventually managed to make the video recorder work.

Somebody knocked on the door. Robertsson raised his voice and said they couldn’t be disturbed. The Russian women appeared on the screen but soon left. The picture flickered. Wang Min Hao took centre stage, looked at the camera, then left. Robertsson rewound and paused the tape at the moment when Wang looked at the camera. Sundberg had also become interested now. She closed the blinds on the nearest window, and the picture became clearer.

‘Wang Min Hao,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘Assuming that’s his real name. He turns up here in Hudiksvall out of nowhere on the twelfth of January. He spends the night in a little hotel, having first plucked a red ribbon out of a lampshade hanging over a table in a restaurant. That ribbon is later found at the crime scene in Hesjövallen.’

Robertsson had been standing in front of the television screen, leaning over it. He sat down again. Vivi Sundberg opened a bottle of mineral water.

‘Strange,’ said Robertsson. ‘I take it you’ve checked that the red ribbon really did come from that restaurant?’

‘I’m sure it did.’

‘What’s going on?’ said Vivi Sundberg vehemently. ‘Are you conducting some kind of private investigation?’

‘I don’t want to get in your way,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘I know you’re very busy.’

Suddenly Sundberg left the room.

‘I’ve asked them to bring the lamp from that restaurant,’she said when she came back.

‘They don’t open until eleven o’clock,’ said Roslin.

‘This is a small town,’ said Sundberg. ‘We’ll get hold of the owner and order him to open up.’

‘Make sure the media mob doesn’t hear about this,’ warned Robertsson. ‘Just imagine the headlines if they do.“Chinaman behind the Hesjövallen Massacre”?’

‘That’s hardly likely after our press conference this afternoon,’ said Sundberg.

So the girl on the switchboard had been right, Roslin thought. Something has happened and will be made public today. That’s why they’re only half interested.

Robertsson started coughing. It was a violent attack, and he turned red in the face.

‘Cigarettes,’ he said. ‘I’ve smoked so many cigarettes that if they were laid out end to end they would stretch from the centre of Stockholm to somewhere south of Södertälje. From about Botkyrka onwards they had filters. Not that they improved things at all.’

‘Let’s talk this over,’ said Vivi Sundberg, sitting down. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble and irritation in this building.’

Now she’s going to bring up the diaries, Roslin thought. Today will end with Robertsson digging up something to charge me with. Hardly obstructing justice, but there are other possibilities.

But Sundberg made no mention of the diaries, and Birgitta Roslin had the feeling there was a mutual understanding between them, despite Sundberg’s attitude. What had happened was nothing her coughing colleague needed to know about.

‘We will definitely look into this,’ said Robertsson. ‘We have no preconceived ideas, but there are no other clues indicating a Chinese man.’

‘What about the weapon?’ Roslin asked. ‘Have you found it?’

Neither Sundberg nor Robertsson answered. They’ve found it, Roslin thought. That’s what’s going to be announced this afternoon. Of course it is.

‘We can’t comment on that at the moment,’ said Robertsson. ‘Let’s wait for the lamp to arrive and compare the ribbons. If they are in fact the same, then this information will become a serious part of the evidence. We’ll keep the cassette, of course.’

He reached for a notepad and started writing.

‘Who has seen this Chinese man?’

‘The waitress in the restaurant.’

‘I often eat there. The young one or the old one? Or the miserable old crank in the kitchen? The one with the wart on his forehead?’

‘The young one.’

‘She varies from being modestly shy to very cheekily flirty. I think she’s bored to tears. Anybody else?’

‘Anybody else who did what?’

Robertsson sighed.

‘My dear colleague, you’ve surprised us all with this Chinaman that you’ve pulled out of your hat. Who else has seen him? The question couldn’t be more straightforward.’

‘A nephew of the hotel owner. I don’t know his name, but Sture Her-mansson said he was in the Arctic.’

‘In other words, this investigation is beginning to take on unheard-of geographical proportions. First you produce a mysterious Chinese man. And now you tell us there’s a witness in the Arctic. They’ve been writing about this business in Time and Newsweek, the Guardian phoned me from London, and the Los Angeles Times has also expressed interest. Has anybody else seen this Chinese person? I hope whoever you mention isn’t currently in the Australian outback at the moment.’

‘There’s a maid at the hotel. She’s Russian.’

Robertsson sounded almost triumphant when he responded.

‘What did I tell you? Now we’ve got Russia involved as well. What’s her name?’

‘She’s known as Natasha. But according to Sture Hermansson her real name is something different.’

‘Maybe she’s here illegally,’ said Vivi Sundberg. ‘We sometimes find Russians and Poles who shouldn’t be here.’

‘But that’s hardly relevant at the moment,’ said Robertsson. ‘Is there anyone else who’s seen this Chinese man?’

‘I don’t know of anyone,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘But he must have come and gone somehow. By bus? Or taxi? Surely someone must have noticed him?’

‘We’ll look into it,’ said Robertsson, putting down his pen. ‘Assuming this turns out to be important.’

Which you don’t believe it is, Roslin thought. Whatever other line of investigation you have, you think it’s more important.

Sundberg and Robertsson left the room. Roslin felt tired. The probability of what she’d discovered having anything to do with the case was low and getting lower. Her own experience was that strange facts often turned out to be red herrings.

While she waited, growing more and more impatient, she paced up and down the conference room. She had come across so many prosecutors like Robertsson in her life. Sundberg was also typical of the women police officers who gave evidence in her courts, but they rarely had hair as red as hers.

Sundberg came back, followed shortly by Robertsson and Tobias Ludwig. He was holding the plastic bag containing the red ribbon, and Vivi Sundberg was carrying the lamp from the restaurant.

The ribbons were laid out and compared. There was no doubt that they were identical.

They sat around the table again. Robertsson summarised briefly what Birgitta Roslin had told them. He’s good at making an effective presentation, she noted.

When he finished, nobody had any questions. The only one to speak was Tobias Ludwig.

‘Does this change anything with regard to the press conference we’ll be holding later today?’

‘No,’ said Robertsson. ‘We’ll look into this. But in due course.’

Robertsson declared the meeting closed. He shook hands and left. When Birgitta Roslin stood up, she received a look from Vivi Sundberg she interpreted as meaning she should stay behind.

When they were alone, Vivi Sundberg closed the door and came straight to the point.

‘I’m surprised you’re still involving yourself in this investigation. Obviously, what you’ve discovered is remarkable. We will investigate further. But I think you’ve already gathered that we have other priorities at the moment.’

‘Can you tell me anything?’

Sundberg shook her head.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you have a suspect?’

‘As I’ve said, we’ll make an announcement at the press conference. I wanted you to stay behind for an entirely different reason.’

She stood up and left the room. When she came back she was carrying the diaries Roslin had been forced to hand over a couple of days earlier.

‘We’ve been through them,’ said Vivi Sundberg. ‘I have decided that they’re irrelevant to the investigation. And so I thought I would demonstrate my goodwill by allowing you to borrow them. You’ll have to sign for them. The only condition is that you return them when we ask for them back.’

Roslin wondered for a moment if she was about to fall into a trap. What Sundberg was doing was not permissible, even if it wasn’t criminal. Birgitta Roslin had nothing to do with the investigation. What might happen if she accepted the diaries?

Vivi Sundberg noticed that she was hesitating.

‘I’ve spoken to Robertsson,’ she said. ‘He had nothing against it provided you sign a receipt.’

‘From what I’ve read so far they contain information about the Chinese working on the transcontinental railway line in the United States.’

‘In the 1860s? That’s nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.’

Sundberg put the diaries into a plastic bag on the table. In her pocket she had a receipt that Roslin duly signed.

Sundberg accompanied her to the reception area. They shook hands at the glass door. Roslin asked when the press conference was scheduled.

‘Two o’clock. Four hours from now. If you have a press pass you can come in. It will be packed. This is too big a crime for a little town like ours.’

‘I hope you’ve made a breakthrough.’

Vivi Sundberg paused before replying.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘I think we’re on the way towards a result.’

She nodded slowly as if to emphasise what she was saying.

‘We now know that all the people in the village were related,’ she said. ‘All the dead, that is. There’s a family connection.’

‘Everybody except the boy?’

‘He was related as well. But he was just visiting.’

Birgitta Roslin left the police station, thinking hard about what was going to be announced a few hours later.

A man caught up with her on the snow-covered pavement.

Lars Emanuelsson smiled. Birgitta Roslin felt an urge to hit him. At the same time, she couldn’t help being impressed by the man’s persistence.

‘We meet again,’ he said. ‘Over and over you visit the police. The judge from Helsingborg hovers indefatigably on the periphery of the investigation. You must understand why I’m curious.’

‘Put your questions to the police, not to me.’

Lars Emanuelsson turned serious.

‘Rest assured, I already have. But I still haven’t got any answers, which is annoying. I’m forced to speculate. What is a judge from Helsingborg doing in Hudiksvall? How is she involved in the horrific things that have been happening here?’

‘I have nothing to say.’

‘Just tell me why you’re so unpleasant and dismissive.’

‘Because you won’t leave me in peace.’

Lars Emanuelsson nodded in the direction of the plastic bag.

‘I noticed that you were empty-handed when you went in the station earlier this morning. And now you’re coming out with a heavy plastic bag. What’s in there? Documents? Files? Something else?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Never talk to a journalist like that. Everything is my business. What’s in the bag, what isn’t. Why don’t you want to answer?’

As Birgitta Roslin started to walk away, she slipped and fell down in the snow. One of the old diaries tumbled out of the bag. Lars Emanuelsson rushed to help, but she pushed away his hand as she put the book back. Her face was red with anger as she hurried away.

‘Old books,’ Emanuelsson shouted after her. ‘Sooner or later I’ll find out what they mean.’

She didn’t stop to brush off the snow until she reached her car. She started the engine and switched on the heater. When she came out onto the main road, she started to calm down. She put Lars Emanuelsson and Vivi Sundberg out of her mind, took the inland route, stopped in Borlänge for a meal, then turned into a car park just outside Ludvika shortly before two o’clock.

The radio news bulletin was short. The press conference had just begun. According to what they had heard, the police had arrested a man on suspicion of mass murder in Hesjövallen. More information was promised in the next bulletin.

Birgitta Roslin resumed her journey, then stopped again an hour later. She turned off cautiously onto a timber track, afraid that the snow would be so deep that her car might get stuck. She switched on the radio. The first thing she heard was Robertsson’s voice. A suspect was being interrogated. Robertsson expected him to be charged that afternoon or evening. That was all he could say at the moment.

A hubbub of sound filled the radio when he had finished speaking, but Robertsson declined to comment further.

When the news bulletin was over, she turned off the radio. Some heavy chunks of snow fell from a fir tree next to the car. She unbuckled her seat belt and got out. The temperature was still falling. She shuddered. What had Robertsson said? A male suspect. Nothing more. But he had sounded confident, just as Sundberg had given the impression of being confident that a breakthrough had been achieved.

This is not the Chinese man, she thought.

She restarted the engine and continued her journey. She forgot about the next news bulletin.

She stopped in Örebro and took a room for the night. She left the bag of diaries in the car.

Before falling asleep, she felt an almost irresistible longing for another human being. Staffan. But he wasn’t there. She could hardly remember what his hands felt like.

The following day, at about three in the afternoon, she arrived back home in Helsingborg. She put the plastic bag of diaries in her study.

By then she knew that a man in his forties, as yet unnamed, had been charged by Prosecutor Robertsson. But there were no details — the media ranted on about the lack of information.

Nobody knew who he was. Everybody was waiting.

19

That evening Birgitta Roslin watched the television news with her husband. Prosecutor Robertsson talked about a breakthrough in the investigation. Vivi Sundberg was hovering in the background. The press conference was chaotic. Tobias Ludwig failed to keep the reporters under control, and they almost tipped over the lectern at which Robertsson was standing. He was the only one who remained calm. Eventually he was interviewed alone on camera and explained what had happened. A man aged about forty-five had been arrested in his home outside Hudiksvall. There had been no drama, but to be on the safe side they had called in reinforcements. The man had been charged on suspicion of involvement in the Hesjövallen massacre. For technical reasons Robertsson was not prepared to reveal his identity.

‘Why won’t he do that?’ wondered Staffan.

‘Any other people involved could be warned, evidence could be destroyed,’ said Birgitta, hushing him.

Robertsson released no details, but the breakthrough had come as a result of several tips from the general public. They were checking various leads and had already held a preliminary interrogation.

The interviewer pressured Robertsson with more questions.

Has he confessed?

No.

Has he admitted to anything at all?

I can’t comment on that.

Why not?

We are at a crucial stage in the investigation.

Was he surprised when he was arrested?

No comment.

Does he have a family?

No comment.

But he lives near Hudiksvall.

Yes.

What’s his job?

No comment.

In what way is he connected to all the people who have been killed?

You must realise that I can’t comment on that.

But you must also understand that our viewers are interested in what has happened. This is the second most serious outbreak of violence that has ever taken place in Sweden.

Robertsson raised his eyebrows in surprise.

What was worse?

The Stockholm Bloodbath.

Robertsson couldn’t help laughing out loud. Birgitta Roslin groaned at the sheer cheek of the interviewer.

The two incidents can hardly be compared. But I’m not going to argue with you.

What happens next?

We will interrogate the suspect again.

Who is his defending counsel?

He’s asked for Tomas Bodström, but he probably won’t get him.

Are you sure you have arrested the right man?

It’s too early to say. But for the moment I’m happy with the fact that he’s been charged.

The interview ended. Birgitta turned down the sound. Staffan looked at her.

‘Well, what does the judge have to say about this?’

‘They obviously have some evidence, or they would never have been allowed to charge him. But he’s been locked up on grounds of suspicion. Either Robertsson is being cautious, or he doesn’t have anything more concrete.’

‘Did just one man do all this?’

‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that he was alone just because he’s the only one who’s been arrested.’

‘Can it really be anything but an act of madness?’

Birgitta sat in silence for a moment before replying.

‘Can an act of madness be meticulously planned? Your answer is as good as mine.’

‘So we’ll have to wait and see.’

They drank tea and went to bed early. He stretched out his hand and stroked her cheek.

‘What’s on your mind?’ he said.

‘I was thinking about what a lot of forest there is in Sweden.’

‘I thought perhaps you might be thinking it was good to get away from everything.’

‘From what? You?’

‘Me. And all the trials. A little midlife crisis.’

She snuggled up closer.

‘Sometimes I think: What’s going on? It’s unfair, I know. You, the children, my job, what else can I ask for? But there are other things. What used to make us tick when we were younger. Not only understanding, but making a difference. If you take a look around, the world has only got worse.’

‘Not in every way. We smoke less, we have computers, mobile phones.’

‘It’s as if the whole world is falling apart. And our courts are pretty useless when it comes to preserving any kind of moral decency in this country.’

‘Is this what you were thinking about when you were up there in the north?’

‘I suppose so. I’m a little depressed. But perhaps you need to be a little depressed sometimes.’

They lay there without speaking. She expected him to reach for her, but nothing happened.

We’re not there yet, she thought, disappointed. But at the same time she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel able to make the move herself.

‘We should go away for a while,’ he said eventually. ‘Some conversations are better during daylight hours rather than right before going to sleep.’

‘Maybe we should go on a pilgrimage,’ she said. ‘Do what tradition tells us to do, take the route to Santiago de Compostela. Put rocks in our backpacks, every one representing a problem we’re wrestling with. Then, when we’ve found solutions, we take the rocks out and lay them by the roadside, one by one.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. But I don’t know if my knees are up to it.’

‘If you carry things that are too heavy, you might get heel spurs.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Something nasty in your heels. A good friend of mine’s had it. Ture, the vet. He’s been through hell.’

‘We should become pilgrims,’ she mumbled. ‘But not just yet. I need to get some sleep. So do you.’

The next day Birgitta Roslin contacted her doctor to confirm her follow-up appointment in five days. Then she gave the house a thorough clean, no more than glancing at the plastic bag with the diaries. She spoke to her children about arranging a surprise party for Staffan’s birthday. Everybody agreed it was an excellent idea, and she called to invite their friends. She listened to the occasional news bulletins from Hudiksvall. Information seeping out from the embattled police HQ was scanty, to say the least.

It was not until late afternoon that she sat down at her desk and took out the diaries. Now that a man had been charged with the murders, her own theories seemed less important. She thumbed through until she came to the last page she had read.

The telephone rang. It was Karin Wiman. They set up a time for Birgitta to visit the following day.

In his diary notes JA continued complaining about nearly everybody he had to work with and was responsible for. The Irish are idle drunkards, the few black men the railway company employs are strong but unwilling to make an effort. JA longs for slaves from the Caribbean islands that he’s heard about. Only lashes of the whip can induce these strong men to really make use of their strength. He wishes he were able to whip them like one could whip oxen or donkeys. Birgitta Roslin was unable to establish which race he disliked most. Perhaps the ‘Red Indians’, the Native Americans for whom he had so much contempt. Their reluctance to work, their two-faced cunning, were worse than anything he’d come across among the scum he was forced to kick and beat into submission to ensure the eastern advancement of the railway. He also wrote regularly about the Chinese: he would be only too pleased to drive them into the Pacific Ocean and make them choose between drowning and swimming back to China. But he can’t deny that the Chinese are good workers. They don’t drink hard liquor, they keep themselves clean and they obey the rules. Their only weakness is their predilection for gambling and strange religious ceremonies. JA continually tries to justify his reasons for disliking these people who in fact are making his job easier. Some lines were almost impossible to make out, but Birgitta Roslin thought he must be suggesting that the industrious Chinese were cut out for this work, and nothing else. They had reached a level that would never be raised, no matter what was done to help them.

The people JA holds in highest esteem are the ones from Scandinavia. The army of workers building the railway contains a little colony of Nordic labourers: a few Norwegians and Danes, but more Swedes and Finns. I trust these people. They don’t try to fool me, as long as I keep an eye on them. And they’re not afraid of hard work. But if I turn my back on them, they’re transformed into the same gang of thugs as all the rest of them.

Birgitta Roslin pushed the diary aside and stood up. Whoever this railway foreman had been, she found him more and more repulsive. A man from a simple background who had emigrated to America. And then he suddenly found himself with enormous power over other people. A brutal person who had become a little tyrant. She got dressed to go out and went for a long walk through the city in order to shake off the disgust she felt.

It was six o’clock when she switched on the radio in the kitchen. The news bulletin began with Robertsson’s statement. She stood as if transfixed, listening. In the background was the noise of flashbulbs and scraping chairs.

As on earlier occasions, he was clear and precise. The man who had been charged the day before had now confessed that he, and he alone, had committed all the murders at Hesjövallen. At eleven o’clock in the morning he had requested, through his lawyer, to speak again to the female police officer who had first interrogated him. He had also asked for the prosecutor to be present. His motive, he said, was revenge. There would have to be several more interrogations before it could be established just what he had been taking revenge for.

Robertsson concluded with the details that everybody had been waiting for.

‘The man charged is Lars-Erik Valfridsson. He is a bachelor, employed by a firm that carries out excavation and rock-blasting operations. He has been sentenced several times in the past for assault and battery.’

The flashbulbs continued to pop. Robertsson began answering questions from the barrage fired at him by the mass of journalists. The female broadcaster faded out Robertsson’s voice and embarked on a summary of what had happened so far. Roslin left the radio on but turned her attention to teletext. There was nothing new, only a summary of what Roberts-son had said. She switched off both the television and the radio and sat down on the sofa. Robertsson’s voice had convinced her that he was sure they had found the murderer. She had listened to enough prosecutors to be able to draw conclusions about the sincerity of what he had said. He was convinced he was right. And honest prosecutors never based their indictments on revelations or guesses, but on facts.

It was too soon to draw conclusions. But she did so nevertheless. The man who had been arrested and charged was certainly not Chinese. She went back to her study and replaced the diaries in the plastic bag. There was no longer any need for her to study these unpleasantly racist and misanthropic jottings from more than a hundred years ago.

In the evening she and Staffan had a late dinner. They only referred in passing to what had happened. The evening papers he had brought home from the train had nothing to add to what she already knew. In one of the photographs from the press conference she noticed Lars Emanuelsson with his hand raised, wanting to ask a question. She shuddered at the thought of their meetings. She mentioned that she would be going to visit Karin Wiman the following day and would probably stay overnight. Staffan knew Karin and had known her late husband.

‘Go,’hesaid. ‘It’lldoyou good. When doyou haveto see the doctor again?’

‘In a few days. He’s bound to say I’m ready to go back to work.’

The next morning the telephone rang shortly after Staffan had left for the railway station, when she was packing her suitcase. It was Lars Emanuelsson.

‘What do you want? How did you get this number? It’s unlisted.’

Emanuelsson snorted. ‘A journalist who doesn’t know how to dig up a telephone number, no matter how secret it is, should take up another profession.’

‘What do you want?’

‘A comment. Big earth-shattering events are taking place in Hudiksvall. A prosecutor who doesn’t seem all that self-confident nevertheless looks us straight in the eye. What do you say to that?’

‘Nothing.’

Lars Emanuelsson’s friendly tone, artificial or not, disappeared. His voice became sharper, more impatient.

‘Let’s cut the crap. Answer my questions. Otherwise I’ll start writing about you.’

‘I have absolutely no information at all about what that prosecutor has announced. I’m just as surprised as the rest of the nation.’

‘Surprised?’

‘Use whatever word you like. Surprised, relieved, indifferent, take your pick.’

‘Now I’m going to ask you some simple questions.’

‘I’m going to hang up.’

‘If you do I’ll write that a judge in Helsingborg who recently left Hudiksvall in a hurry refuses to answer any questions. Have you ever had your house besieged by paparazzi? It’s very easy to make that happen. In the old days in this country a few carefully placed rumours would soon lead to the gathering of lynch mobs. A flock of excited journalists is very reminiscent of a mob like that.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Answers. Why were you in Hudiksvall?’

‘I’m related to some of the victims. I’m not saying which ones.’

She could hear him breathing heavily while he thought that over, or perhaps noted it down.

‘That’s probably true. Why did you leave?’

‘Because I wanted to go home.’

‘What were those old books in that plastic bag you took out of the police station?’

She thought briefly before answering.

‘Some diaries that belonged to one of my relatives.’

‘Is that true?’

‘It’s true. If you come here to Helsingborg I’ll hold one of them out of the door to show you. I look forward to seeing you.’

‘I believe you. You must understand that I’m only doing my job.’

‘Is that it, then?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

Birgitta Roslin slammed the phone down hard. The call had made her sweat. But the answers she had given had been true and unevasive. Lars Emanuelsson wouldn’t have anything to write about. But she was impressed by his persistence.

Although it would have been easier to take the ferry to Elsinore, she drove down to Malmö and over the long bridge she used to cross only by bus. Karin Wiman lived in Gentofte, north of Copenhagen. Birgitta Roslin lost her way twice before she finally connected to the right road and then the coast route north. It was cold and windy but the sky was clear. It was eleven o’clock by the time she found Karin’s attractive house. It was the house she lived in when she got married, and it was the house in which her husband had died ten years ago. It was white, two storeys, surrounded by a large, mature garden. Birgitta recalled that you could see the sea over the rooftops from the top floor.

Karin Wiman emerged from the front door to greet her. She had lost weight, and she was paler than Birgitta remembered. Was she ill, perhaps? They embraced, went inside, left Birgitta’s suitcase in the room she would be sleeping in and toured the house. Not much had changed since Birgitta was last there. Karin had evidently wanted to leave everything as it was when her husband was still alive. What would Birgitta have done in that situation? She didn’t know. But she and Karin Wiman were very different. Their lasting friendship was based upon that fact. They had developed armour that absorbed or deflected the metaphorical blows they sometimes landed on each other.

Karin had made lunch. They sat in a conservatory full of plants and perfumes. Almost immediately, after the first tentative sentences, they began talking about their student years in Lund. Karin, whose parents had a stud farm in Skåne, had enrolled in 1966, Birgitta the following year. They had met in the students’ union at a poetry reading and soon became friends despite their differences. Karin, given her background, was very self-confident. Birgitta, on the other hand, was insecure and tentative.

They became involved in National Liberation Front activities, sat as quiet as mice and listened to speakers, mainly young men who seemed to know everything, going on about the necessity of rebelling and stirring up trouble. But what inspired them most was the fantastic feeling of being able to create a new world order, a new reality — they were involved in shaping the future. And it wasn’t only the NLF that gave them a grounding in political agitation. There were lots of other organisations expressing their solidarity with the freedom movements mushrooming in the poverty-stricken countries of the developing world and working to evict the old colonial powers. And a similar mood prevailed in local politics. Young Swedes were rebelling against everything old-fashioned and out of date. It was, to coin a phrase, a wonderful time to be alive.

Both of them had joined a radical group in left-wing Swedish politics known as the Rebels. For a few hectic months they had led a cult-like existence where the mainstay was brutal self-criticism and a dogmatic adherence to Mao Zedong’s interpretations of revolutionary theory. They had cut themselves off from all other left-wing alternatives, which they regarded with contempt. They had smashed their classical music records, emptied their bookshelves and lived a life modelled after that of Mao’s Red Guard in China.

Karin asked if Birgitta remembered their notorious visit to the spa resort of Tylösand. She remembered it, all right. The Rebel cell they belonged to had held a meeting. Comrade Moses Holm, who later became a medical practitioner but was barred because he not only used drugs but also provided them to others, had proposed that they should ‘infiltrate the bourgeois group-sex decadents who spend the summer bathing and sunbathing at Tylösand’. After lengthy discussions it was agreed, and a strategy was drawn up. The following Sunday, at the beginning of July, nineteen comrades hired a bus and went to Halmstad and Tylösand. Parading behind a portrait of Mao, surrounded by red flags, they marched down to the beach, past all the astonished sunbathers. They chanted slogans, waved Mao’s Little Red Book, then swam out into the sea with the portrait of Mao raised. Then they assembled on the beach, sang ‘The Red Flag’, condemned fascist Sweden in a short speech, and urged the collected workers to unite, arm themselves and prepare for the revolution that was just around the corner. Then they returned home and spent the next few days evaluating their ‘attack’.

‘What do you remember about it?’ asked Karin.

‘Moses. Who maintained that our invasion of Tylösand would be recorded in the history of the imminent revolution.’

‘What I remember is that the water was really cold.’

‘But I have no memory of what we thought at the time.’

‘We didn’t think anything. That was the point. We obeyed the thoughts of other people. We didn’t realise that we were supposed to act like robots in order to liberate mankind.’ Karin shook her head and burst out laughing. ‘We were like little kids. We took ourselves so seriously. We claimed that Marxism was science, just as true as anything said by Newton or Copernicus or Einstein. But we were also believers. Mao’s Little Red Book was our Bible. We didn’t realise that what we were waving was not the word of God, but a collection of quotations from a great revolutionary.’

‘I remember having doubts,’ said Birgitta. ‘Deep down. Just as I did when I visited East Germany. I remember thinking: This is absurd, it can’t go on for much longer. But I didn’t say anything. I was always afraid that my uncertainty would be noticed. And so I always yelled out the slogans louder than anybody else.’

‘We lived in a state of unparalleled self-delusion, even though we meant well. How could we possibly believe that Swedish workers enjoying a bit of sun would be prepared to arm themselves and overthrow the present system in order to start something new?’

Karin Wiman lit a cigarette. Birgitta recalled that she had always been a smoker, always felt instinctively for a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches.

They carried on talking until evening about friends they had known and what had become of them. Then they went for a walk through the little town. Birgitta realised that both she and Karin had the same need to think their way back into the past in order to understand more of their current life.

‘Still, it wasn’t all naivety and lunacy,’ said Birgitta. ‘The idea of a world based on solidarity is still very much alive in me today. I like to think that, despite everything, we stood up to be counted, we questioned conventions and traditions that could have tipped the world even further to the right.’

‘I’ve stopped voting,’ said Karin. ‘I don’t like it, but I can’t find any political truth that I can subscribe to. But I do try to support movements that I believe in. And they do still exist, in spite of it all, just as strong and intractable. How many people today do you think care about the feudal system in a little country like Nepal? I do. I sign petitions and send money.’

‘I barely know where Nepal is,’ said Birgitta. ‘I have to admit that I’ve become lazy. But sometimes I still long for that feeling of goodwill that was everywhere. We weren’t just crazy students who thought we were at the centre of the world, where nothing was impossible. There really was such a thing as solidarity.’

Karin burst out laughing.

They made dinner together. Karin mentioned that the following week she would be going to China to take part in a major conference on the early Qin dynasty, whose first emperor laid the foundations for China as a united realm.

‘What was it like when you first visited the land of your dreams?’ Birgitta asked.

‘I was twenty-nine when I went there for the first time. Mao had already gone, and everything was changing. It was a big disappointment, difficult to cope with. Beijing was a cold, damp city. Thousands and thousands of bicycles that sounded like an enormous swarm of grasshoppers, but then I realised that, even so, an enormous change had come about. People had clothes to wear. Shoes on their feet. I never saw anybody in Beijing starving, no beggars. I remember feeling ashamed. I had flown into this country from all the riches we take for granted; I had no right to regard developments in China with contempt or arrogance. I began to fall in love with the thought that the Chinese had won the trial of strength in which they had been embroiled. That was when I finally made up my mind what I was going to do with my life: become a Sinologist. Before that moment I’d had other ideas.’

‘Like what?’

‘You’ll never believe me.’

‘Try me!’

‘I’d thought of becoming a professional soldier.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘You became a judge. How does anyone make these decisions?’

After dinner they returned to the conservatory. The lights made the white snow outside glow. Karin had lent her a sweater, as it was becoming rather cold. They had drunk wine with the meal, and Birgitta was feeling a bit tipsy.

‘Come with me to China,’ said Karin. ‘The flight doesn’t cost an arm and a leg now. I’m bound to be given a big hotel room. We can share it. We’ve done that before. I remember the summer camps when you and I and three others shared a little tent. We were lying more or less on top of one another.’

‘I can’t,’ said Birgitta. ‘I’ll probably be cleared to go back to work.’

‘Come with me to China. Work can wait.’

‘I’d like to. But you’ll be going there again sometime, right?’

‘Of course. But when you get to our age, you shouldn’t put things off unless you have to.’

‘We’ll live for a long time yet. We’ll live to an old age.’

Karin said nothing. Birgitta realised that she’d put her foot in it. Karin’s husband had died at the age of forty-one. She had been a widow since then.

Karin understood what her friend was thinking. She stretched out her hand and stroked Birgitta’s knee.

‘It’s OK.’

They continued talking. It was almost midnight when they retired to their rooms. Birgitta lay down on her bed with her mobile phone in her hand. Staffan was due home at midnight and had promised to call.

She had almost dozed off when the telephone in her hand began to vibrate.

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘Nearly.’

‘Did everything go well?’

‘We’ve been talking non-stop for more than twelve hours.’

‘Will you be coming home tomorrow?’

‘I’ll sleep as long as I can. Then I’ll head home.’

‘I assume you’ve heard what’s happened? He’s said how he went about it.’

‘Who?’

‘The man in Hudiksvall.’

She sat up immediately.

‘I know nothing at all. Tell me!’

‘Lars-Erik Valfridsson. The man they charged. The police are looking for the weapon at this very moment. He evidently told them where he’d buried it. A home-made samurai sword, according to the news.’

‘Is that really true?’

‘Why would I tell you something that isn’t true?’

‘Of course you wouldn’t. But anyway. Has he said why?’

‘Nobody has said anything apart from it being revenge.’

When the call was over, she remained sitting up. During the whole day with Karin she hadn’t devoted a single thought to Hesjövallen. Now everything that had happened came flooding back into her mind.

Perhaps the red ribbon would have an explanation that nobody had foreseen?

Why couldn’t Lars-Erik Valfridsson also have eaten at that Chinese restaurant?

She lay down and switched off the light. She would go home tomorrow. She would send the diaries back to Vivi Sundberg and start work again.

There was no way she would go to China with Karin, even if that was what she would really like to do above all else.

20

When Birgitta Roslin got up the next morning, Karin Wiman had already left for Copenhagen, as she had an early lecture. She had left a note on the kitchen table.

Birgitta. I sometimes think that I have a path inside my head. For every day that passes it gets a bit longer and penetrates deeper into an unknown landscape where it will eventually peter out one of these days. But that path also meanders backwards. Sometimes I turn round, like I did yesterday during all the hours we were talking, and I see things that I’d forgotten about, or prevented myself from remembering. I want us to continue with these conversations. The bottom line is that friends are all we have left. Or rather, perhaps, the last line of defence we can fight to maintain. Karin.

Birgitta put the letter in her bag, drank a cup of coffee and prepared to leave. Just as she was about to close the front door, she noticed some flight tickets on a table in the hall. She noted that Karin was booked to fly with Finnair from Helsinki to Beijing.

She took the ferry from Elsinore. It was windy. After landing she stopped at a corner shop displaying placards announcing that Lars-Erik Valfridsson had confessed. She bought a bundle of newspapers and drove home. Her reserved, taciturn Polish cleaning lady was waiting for her in the hall. Birgitta had forgotten that this was the day she was scheduled to come. They exchanged a few words in English as Birgitta paid her. When she was finally alone in the house, she sat down to read the newspapers. As usual, she was amazed to see how many pages the evening papers could devote to facts that were extremely sparse. What Staffan had said in their brief telephone conversation the previous evening contained at least as much information as the newspapers made a fuss about.

The only new item was a photograph of the man assumed to have committed the murders. The picture was probably an enlargement of a passport or driver’s licence photograph and showed a man with a featureless face, narrow mouth, high forehead and thin hair. She found it hard to imagine this man committing the barbaric murders in Hesjövallen. He looks like a Low Church pastor, she thought. Hardly a man with hell in his head and his hands. But she knew that she was going against her better judgement. She had seen so many criminals come and go in her court whose appearance suggested they couldn’t possibly have committed the crimes they were charged with.

It was only when she had discarded the newspapers and switched on teletext that her interest was really aroused. The main item there was the discovery by the police of what was presumably the murder weapon. The precise location had not been revealed, but it had been dug up where Lars-Erik Valfridsson had said they would find it. It was a rather poor home-made copy of a Japanese samurai sword. But the edge was very sharp. The weapon was currently being examined in the hope of finding fingerprints and, above all, traces of blood.

Something wasn’t right. She had an advertising pamphlet for the Chinese restaurant in her bag. She called the number and recognised the voice of the waitress she had spoken to. She explained who she was. It took a few seconds before the waitress caught on.

‘Have you seen the newspapers? The picture of the man who murdered all those people?’

‘Yes. Terrible man.’

‘Can you remember if he’s ever had a meal at your restaurant?’

‘No, never.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Never while I’m on duty. But other days my sister or my cousin work. They live in Söderhamn. They have restaurant there. We take turns. Family firm.’

‘Will you do something for me?’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘Ask them to look at the picture in the newspapers. If they recognise him, please call me.’

The waitress made a note of Roslin’s telephone number.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Roslin.

‘Li.’

‘Mine’s Birgitta. Thank you for helping me.’

‘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 Lars-Erik 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 undergrowth 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 to 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.

‘Write it down and send it to me,’ said Vivi Sundberg again. ‘Thank you for getting in touch.’

‘What about the diaries?’

‘I suppose you’d better send them back to us now.’

When the call was finished, Birgitta felt relieved. Despite everything, her efforts had not been in vain. Now she could hand everything over to somebody else. With luck the police would be able to track down the true murderer, whether he had acted alone or had accomplices. She would not be surprised in the least if a man from China had been involved.

The following day Birgitta Roslin went to see her doctor. It was a windy winter’s day with gusts blowing in from the sound. She felt impatient, couldn’t wait to get back to work.

She only had to wait for a few minutes before it was her turn. The doctor asked how she was, and she said she felt fully restored. A nurse took a blood sample, and Birgitta sat down in the waiting room once more.

When she was called into the examination room, the doctor took her blood pressure and came straight to the point.

‘You seem to be in good form, but your blood pressure is still way too high. We’ll have to keep on trying to pin down the cause. I’m going to put you on sick leave for two more weeks. And I’m also going to refer you to a specialist.’

It was only when she was back out on the street and hit by the freezing cold wind that the results really sunk in. She was very worried about the possibility of being seriously ill, despite her doctor’s assurances that this was not the case.

She stood in the middle of the square with the wind behind her. For the first time in many years, she felt helpless. While she was standing motionless, she felt her mobile phone vibrating in her overcoat pocket. It was Karin, who wanted to thank Birgitta for having visited her.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m standing in a square,’ said Birgitta. ‘And at this very moment I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.’

She told Karin about her visit to the doctor. It was a frozen telephone call. She promised to call back before Karin left for China.

When she got home and opened her garden gate, it started snowing, and the wind increased.

21

That same day she went to the district court and spoke to Hans Mattsson, She could see that he was worried and dejected when she told him that she was still on sick leave.

He peered pensively at her over his glasses.

‘That doesn’t sound good. I’m starting to worry about you.’

‘You don’t need to, according to my doctor. The blood counts aren’t what they should be, and my blood pressure needs to be reduced. I’m being referred to a specialist. But I don’t feel ill, just a bit tired.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Hans Mattsson. ‘I’ve been feeling tired for the last thirty years. The biggest pleasure I have to look forward to nowadays is when I can sleep in.’

‘I’ll be off for another two weeks. Then we’ll just have to hope that it’s sorted itself out.’

‘Take as long as you need. I’ll speak to the National Courts Administration and see what they can do to help us out. As you know, you’re not the only one who’s away. Klas Hansson has leave of absence to chair an inquiry for the EU in Brussels. I doubt if he’ll ever come back. I’ve always suspected that he’s been tempted by grander things than presiding over a court of law.’

‘I’m sorry to cause you problems.’

‘You’re not causing me problems. It’s your blood pressure that’s doing that. Have a rest. Look after your roses and come back when you are healthy again.’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘I don’t grow roses. I certainly don’t have a green thumb.’

‘That’s what my grandmother used to say. When you were told not to work so much, she thought you should concentrate on growing your imaginary roses. I think it’s a nice image. My grandmother was born in 1879. The same year as Strindberg published The Red Room. An odd thought. The only thing she ever did in her life, apart from giving birth to children, was darn socks.’

‘OK, I’ll do that,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘I’ll go home and look after my roses.’

The next day she posted the diaries and her notes to Hudiksvall. When she handed over the parcel and was given the receipt, she had the feeling she was closing a door on the happenings in Hesjövallen. She felt relieved, and committed herself to the preparations for Staffan’s birthday party.

Most of the family plus several friends were assembled when Staffan Roslin came home after being in charge of an afternoon train from Alvesta to Malmö and then travelling off-duty to Helsingborg. He stood in the doorway in his uniform plus a shaggy old fur hat, struck dumb, while the welcoming party sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’. It was a relief for Birgitta to see everyone sitting around the table. What had happened in Hälsingland, as well as her high blood pressure, seemed less important when she was able to drink in the feeling of calm that only her family could give her. Naturally, she wished Anna had been able to come home from Asia, but she had declined the invitation when Birgitta finally reached her via a noisy mobile phone connection in Thailand. It was very late by the time the guests had left and only family members remained. She had talkative children who loved to spend time together. She and her husband sat on the sofa, listening with amused interest to the conversations. She occasionally topped up everybody’s glass. The twins, Siv and Louise, were goingto sleep in the spare room, but David had booked himself into a hotel, despite Birgitta’s protests. It was four in the morning when the party broke up. Only the parents were left to clean up, fill the dishwasher and put the empty bottles in the garage.

‘That really was a lovely surprise,’ said Staffan when they eventually sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I’ll never forget it. I feel so positive. Earlier on I was feeling utterly fed up with wandering back and forth through train carriages. I spend all my time travelling, but I never arrive anywhere. That’s the curse of train drivers and conductors. We spend all our time in our glass bubbles.’

‘We should do this more often. Let’s face it, it’s at moments like this that life takes on a different meaning. Not just duty and doing what needs to be done.’

‘And now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re going to be off work for another two weeks. What are you going to do?’

‘Hans Mattsson talks passionately about his longing to sleep in. Maybe that’s what I should do for a few days.’

‘Go somewhere warm for a week. Take one of your friends with you.’

She shook her head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But who?’

‘Karin Wiman?’

‘She’s going to China, to work.’

‘Isn’t there anybody else you could ask? Maybe you could go away with one of the twins?’

That was a very tempting thought. ‘I’ll see what they have to say. But first I need to find out if I really can go off somewhere. Don’t forget that I need to see a specialist.’

He stretched out a hand and placed it on her arm. ‘I hope you’re telling me the whole story. Do I need to be worried?’

‘No. Not unless my doctor is lying to me. But I don’t think he is.’

They sat up for a bit longer before going to bed. When she woke up later that morning Staffan had already left. So had the twins. She had slept until half past eleven. A Hans Mattsson morning, she thought.

She spoke on the telephone to Siv and Louise after lunch, but neither of them had time to go away, although they would both have loved to take a holiday with their mother. She also received a call informing her that due to a cancellation, she would be able to see the specialist the following day.

At about four there was a ring at the door. She wondered if she was about to receive another free Chinese meal. But when she opened it, she found Detective Chief Inspector Hugo Malmberg standing there with snow in his hair and old-fashioned overshoes on his feet.

‘I happened to bump into Hans Mattsson. He mentioned that you were unwell — in confidence, as he knows we’re old friends.’

She let him in. Despite his huge size, he had no problem bending down to take off his overshoes.

They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. She told him about her high blood pressure and blood counts, and that it was not unusual for women of her age.

‘My high blood pressure is ticking away like a time bomb inside me,’ said Malmberg glumly. ‘I take medication, and my doctor says the readings are OK; but I’m worried even so. Nobody in my family has ever died of a tumour. Everybody, women as well as men, has been floored by strokes and heart attacks. Every day I have to make an effort to overcome my worries.’

‘I’ve been in Hudiksvall,’ said Roslin. ‘You were the one who gave me Vivi Sundberg’s name. Did you know I went there?’

‘It comes as a surprise, I have to admit.’

‘Do you remember the circumstances? I discovered that I was related to one of the families murdered in Hesjövallen. Since then it’s become clear that all the murder victims were related through marriage. Do you have time?’

‘My answering machine says I’m out on police business for the rest of the day. As I’m not on standby, I can sit here all night if need be.’

‘Until the cows come home? Isn’t that what they say?’

‘Or until the riders of the Apocalypse thunder past and annihilate us all. Anyway, entertain me with all the horrors I don’t need to get involved in.’

‘Are you being cynical?’

He frowned, and growled. ‘Don’t you know me better than that? After all these years? I’m offended.’

‘That wasn’t the intention.’

‘Fire away. I’m listening.’

As he seemed to be genuinely interested, Birgitta told him in detail what had happened. He listened carefully, interpolated the occasional question, but seemed convinced that she was being meticulous. When she had finished he sat for a while without speaking, staring at his hands. Birgitta knew that Hugo Malmberg was regarded as an exceptionally competent police officer. He combined patience with speed, a methodical approach with intuition. She had heard that Malmberg was one of the most sought after teachers in the Swedish police academy. Although his day job was in Helsingborg, he was often called in by the national CID to assist in especially difficult cases elsewhere in the country.

It suddenly occurred to her that it was odd he hadn’t been summoned to help out with the investigation into the Hesjövallen murders.

She put it to him point-blank, and he smiled.

‘They have in fact asked. But nobody told me that you had been involved and made some remarkable discoveries.’

‘I don’t think they like me,’ Birgitta Roslin said.

‘Police officers tend to be very keen on protecting their own feeding bowls. They were eager for me to travel up there and advise, but they lost interest once Valfridsson had been arrested.’

‘He’s dead now.’

‘But the investigation continues.’ Malmberg sighed.

‘Nevertheless, you know now that he didn’t do it.’

‘Do I?’

‘You’ve heard what I had to say.’ She looked at him in earnest.

‘Remarkable goings-on, plausible facts. Things that obviously ought to be fully investigated. But the main line of investigation, Valfridsson, doesn’t get any worse simply because the man happens to commit suicide.’

‘He didn’t do it. What happened that night between the twelfth and thirteenth of January was much bigger than anything a man with a few assault convictions and an ancient homicide would be capable of.’

‘You may be right. But you could also be wrong. Over and over again it turns out that the biggest fishes swim around in the most placid of pools. Bicycle thieves become bank robbers; rowdies turn into professional hit men willing to kill anybody for a sum of money. So why shouldn’t a guy who gets drunk and beats up a few people and maybe even kills the odd one simply go to pieces and commit a horrific crime like the one in Hesjövallen?’

‘But there was no motive,’ she insisted.

‘The prosecutor talks about revenge.’

‘For what? What could justify revenge on a whole village? It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘If the crime doesn’t make sense, the motive doesn’t need to either,’ Malmberg said.

‘Whatever, I think Valfridsson was a red herring.’

‘Is a red herring. What did I say? The investigation continues even if he’s dead. Let me ask you a question. Is your idea of a mysterious Chinese man being responsible much more plausible? How in God’s name can you link a little village in the north of Sweden with a Chinese motive?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We shall have to wait and see. And you must make sure to get better soon.’

It was snowing even more as he prepared to leave.

‘Why don’t you take a holiday? Go somewhere warm?’

‘Everybody keeps saying that. I’ll have to clear it with my doctor first.’

She watched him disappear into the swirling snow. She was touched to think that he’d taken the time to visit her.

By the following day the snow had moved on. She kept her appointment with the specialist, had blood samples taken, and was informed that it would be a week or more before all the test results were available.

‘Are there things I’m not allowed to do?’ she asked her new doctor.

‘Avoid unnecessary exertions.’

‘Am I allowed to go on holiday?’

‘That would do you good.’

‘I have another question. Should I be afraid?’

‘No. As you don’t have any other symptoms, you’ve no reason to worry.’

‘So I’m not going to die?’

‘Of course you are. Eventually. So am I. But you’ll be OK as long as we can get your blood pressure down to reasonable levels.’

When she emerged into the street, she recognised that she had been anxious, not to say afraid. Now she felt relieved. She decided to go for a long walk. But she hadn’t gone far before she paused.

The thought struck her from out of the blue. Or maybe she had already reached a decision without knowing it. She went into a cafe and phoned Karin Wiman. The line was busy. She waited impatiently, ordered a coffee, leafed through a newspaper. Tried again. Still busy. She didn’t get an answer until her fifth attempt.

‘I’m going with you to Beijing.’

Birgitta couldn’t get the same flight — she would arrive a day later. Staffan was fine with the idea, even pleased for her.

The evening before she left, Birgitta rummaged through a cardboard box in the garage. Down at the very bottom she found what she was looking for: her old well-thumbed copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. On the inside of the red plastic cover she had written a date: 19 April 1966.

I was a little girl then, she thought. Innocent in almost every way. I’d only once been with a young man, Tore, from Borstahusen, who dreamed of becoming an existentialist and regretted not having much of a beard. I lost my virginity to him in a freezing cold garden shed smelling of mould. All I remember is that he was almost unbearably awkward. Afterwards, all the sticky goo on our bodies became such an embarrassment that we parted as quickly as possible and never again looked each other in the eye. I still wonder what he told his friends. And then came the political storm that carried me away. But I never managed to live up to the knowledge of the world that I acquired. After some time with the Rebels, I hid myself away. I never managed to work out why I’d allowed myself to be lured into what was almost a religious cult. Karin joined the Communist Party. I became linked with Amnesty International, and now I have no political connections at all.

She sat on a pile of old car tyres and skimmed the Little Red Book. She came across a photograph between two of the pages: it was of her and Karin Wiman. She remembered the occasion. They had squeezed into a photo booth at Lund railway station — it was Karin’s idea as usual. She laughed out loud when she saw the photo, but was also scared by the thought of how long ago it was.

The cold wind, she thought. Old age comes creeping up behind me. She put the book of quotations in her pocket and left the garage. Staffan had just come home. She sat down opposite him in the kitchen as he ate the evening meal she had prepared for him.

‘So, is my Red Guard wife ready to go?’ he asked.

‘I’ve just fetched my Little Red Book.’

‘Spices,’ he said. ‘If you want to give a present, bring back some spices. I always maintain there are smells and tastes in China that you don’t find anywhere else.’

‘What else do you want?’

‘You, healthy and happy

‘I think I can deliver that.’

He offered to drive her to Copenhagen the next day, but she thought it would be enough if he took her to the station.

It was a beautiful, clear winter’s day when Staffan Roslin drove his wife to the railway station and waved as her train left the platform. At Kastrup airport she checked in without difficulty and got the aisle seats she wanted on both flights, to Helsinki and Beijing. As the plane took off, and she had the feeling that she was emerging from a locked room, she smiled at the elderly Finn sitting beside her. She closed her eyes, declined anything to eat or drink before reaching Helsinki, and thought back to the time when China had been her paradise, both on earth and in her dreams.

She woke up as the plane began its descent into Helsinki. The wheels came into contact with the concrete of the runway, and she had two hours to fill before her flight to Beijing was due to depart. She sat down on a bench underneath an old aeroplane hanging from the ceiling of the departure hall. It was cold. Through the large picture windows facing the runways, she could see the breath of the ground staff as they worked. She thought about the latest conversation she’d had with Vivi Sundberg a couple of days earlier. Birgitta had asked if they had made any stills from the film in the home-made surveillance camera. They had, and Sundberg didn’t even ask why when Birgitta had asked for a copy of the picture of the Chinese man. The following day an enlargement of the photograph arrived in the post. Now it was in her bag. She took the picture out of the envelope.

So you are one in a billion Chinese faces, Birgitta thought. I shall never find you. I shall never discover who you are. And if the name you gave was genuine. And above all, what you did.

She slowly made her way to the departure gate for the flight to Beijing. A queue was already forming. This is where Asia begins, she thought. Borders are distorted by airports, closer but at the same time further away.

Her seat was 22C. Next to her was a dark-skinned man working for a British company in the Chinese capital. They exchanged a few pleasantries, but neither of them wished to become involved in a serious conversation. She curled up under her blanket. Her excitement had now given way to a feeling of having embarked upon a journey without being properly prepared. What would she actually do in Beijing? Wander the streets, look at people and track down museums? It was quite certain that Karin Wiman wouldn’t have much time to spend with Birgitta. She wondered if something of the insecure Rebel still survived inside her.

Halfway through the flight, just as they crossed the border into China, the captain announced that a sandstorm had made it impossible to land in Beijing. They would land in a town called Taiyuan and wait for the weather to improve. After landing they were bussed to a freezing cold terminal where well-wrapped-up Chinese were waiting in silence. The time difference was making her feel tired and unsure of her first impressions of China. The countryside was covered in snow, the airport surrounded by hills, and on a nearby road she could see buses and ox carts.

Two hours later the sandstorm in Beijing had died down. The flight took off, then landed again. When she had passed through all the controls, she found Karin waiting for her.

‘The Rebel has landed,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Beijing!’

‘Thank you. It hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m really here.’

‘You are in the Middle Kingdom. At the centre of the world. In the centre of life.’

That evening of the first day, she found herself standing on the nineteenth floor of the hotel, in the room she was sharing with Karin. She gazed out over the glittering, gigantic city and felt a shiver of expectation.

In another skyscraper at the same time stood a man looking out over the same city and the same lights as Birgitta Roslin.

He was holding a red ribbon in his hand. When he heard a subdued knock on the door behind him, he turned round slowly to receive the visitor for whom he had been waiting impatiently.

22

On her first morning in Beijing, Birgitta Roslin went out early. She had breakfasted in the gigantic dining room with Karin Wiman, who then hurried off to attend her conference, having explained how she was looking forward to hearing what was to be said about the old emperors. For Karin Wiman history was in many ways more alive than the real world in which she lived.

Birgitta had been given a map by a young lady at the front desk who was very beautiful and spoke almost perfect English. A quotation came into her mind. The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. It was one of Mao’s sayings that kept cropping up in the heated debates that were held in the spring of 1968.

The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance. The words echoed in her mind as she left the hotel and passed the silent and very young men dressed in green who were guarding the entrance. The carriageway in front of her was wide with many traffic lanes. Cars everywhere, hardly any bicycles. The street was lined with imposing bank buildings and also a five-storey bookshop. People were standing outside the shop with large plastic sacks full of bottles of water. After only a few paces Birgitta could feel the pollution in her throat and nose and the taste of metal in her mouth. In sites not already occupied by buildings, the arms of tall cranes were in constant motion. It was obvious that she was in a city undergoing fundamental and hectic change.

A man was pulling an overloaded cart piled high with what looked like empty chicken cages; he seemed to be in the wrong century. Apart from that she could have been anywhere else in the world.

When I was young, she thought, I saw in my mind’s eye an endless mass of Chinese peasants in identical quilted clothes toiling with picks and spades, surrounded by chanting revolutionaries waving red flags, transforming rocky hills into fertile fields. The teeming crowds are still here, but in Beijing at least, in the street where I am now standing, the people are not as I anticipated. They are not even on bicycles; they have cars, and the women are wearing elegant high-heeled shoes as they march along the pavements.

During those days when the Swedish masses were preparing to assemble in town squares and chant the sayings of the great Chinese leader, in Birgitta’s imagination all Chinese people were dressed in identical baggy grey-blue uniforms, wore identical caps, had the same close-cropped hair and furrowed brows.

Occasionally, in the late 1960s, when she had received an issue of the illustrated magazine China, she had been surprised by all the healthy-looking people with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes raising their arms to the god that had come down from heaven, the Great Helmsman, the Eternal Teacher, and all the other names he had been given, the mysterious Mao. But he had not actually been mysterious. That would become clearer as time passed. He was a politician with a shrewd feeling for what was happening in the gigantic Chinese Empire. Until independence in 1949 he had been one of those unique leaders that history very occasionally produces. But after coming to power he brought about much suffering, chaos and confusion. Nevertheless, nobody could take away from him the fact that, like a modern emperor, he had resurrected the China that was by this stage well on the way to becoming a world power.

Standing now outside her gleaming hotel with its marble portals and elegantly dressed receptionists speaking flawless English, she felt as if she’d been transported into a world she knew nothing about. Was this really the society in which the upswing of the peasants’ revolt had been such a major event?

That was forty years ago, she thought. More than a generation. Then I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgement was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.

It took Birgitta Roslin more than an hour to get to Tiananmen Square — the Square of Heavenly Peace. It was the biggest square she had ever seen. She approached it via a pedestrian passage under Jianguomennei Dajie. The place was teeming with people on all sides as she walked across it. Wherever she turned there were people taking photographs, waving flags, selling bottles of water and picture postcards.

She stopped and looked around. The sky above her was hazy. Something was missing. It was some time before it dawned on her what it was.

There were no birds at all. But people were milling around everywhere, people who wouldn’t notice if she stayed or suddenly left.

She remembered the images from 1989, when the young students had demonstrated in support of their demands to be able to think and speak freely, and the final solution when tanks had rumbled into the square and many of the demonstrators had been massacred. This is where a young man had been standing with a white plastic bag in his hand, she thought. The whole world saw him on television, and people held their breath. He had stood in front of a tank and refused to give way. Like an insignificant little tin soldier he personified all the resistance a human being is capable of. When they tried to pass by the side of him, he moved sideways as well. What happened in the end she didn’t know. She had never seen a picture of that. But all those crushed by the tracks of the tanks or shot by the soldiers had been real people.

These events were the second starting point for her relationship with China. A large part of her life was embedded in the period between being a Rebel who invoked Mao Zedong to proclaim absurdly that the revolution had already begun among Swedish students in 1968 and the image of the young man standing in front of the tank in 1989. In just over twenty years she had developed from a young and idealistic student to a mother of four children and a district judge. The concept of China had always been a part of her. First as a dream, then as something she realised she didn’t really understand at all, as it was so big and full of contradictions. She discovered that her children had a very different idea of China. They associated it with enormous future possibilities, just as the dream of America had characterised her own generation and that of her parents. To her surprise, David had recently told her that when he had children he would try to hire a Chinese nanny so that they could learn the language from the very start.

She wandered around Tiananmen Square, watching people take photographs and the police who were a constant presence. In the background was the building where, in 1949, Mao had proclaimed the birth of the Republic. When she started to feel cold, she walked the long way back to her hotel. Karin had promised to skip the formal lunches and eat with her instead.

There was a restaurant on the top floor of the skyscraper in which they were staying. They were given a window table with views over the vast city. Birgitta told her about her long walk to the enormous square and her reflections on their youth.

They ate several small Chinese dishes and finished off the meal with tea. Birgitta produced the brochure with the handwritten Chinese characters Karin had deciphered as the name of the hospital Longfu.

‘I intend to devote my afternoon to visiting that hospital,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s always a good idea to have something specific to do when you’re wandering around in a city you don’t know. Anything at all would do. If you don’t have a plan, your feet get tired. I don’t have anybody to visit, and nothing in particular that I want to see. But who knows, I might find a sign with these characters on it. I can come back here and tell you that you were right.’

They parted outside the lifts. Karin needed to hurry back to her conference. Birgitta went to their room on the nineteenth floor and lay down on the bed to rest.

She had started to sense it during her morning walk through the streets — a feeling of listlessness that she couldn’t quite pin down. Surrounded by people, or alone in this anonymous hotel in the gigantic city, she felt her identity starting to fade away. Who would miss her if she got lost? Who would even notice that she existed?

She had had a similar experience previously, when she was very young. Suddenly ceasing to exist, losing her grip on her identity.

She felt impatient and got up, then stood by the window. A long way down below was the city, all the people, each one with his or her dreams that Birgitta knew nothing about.

She gathered the clothes that were scattered around the room and locked the door behind her. All she was doing was whipping up feelings of unrest that were becoming increasingly difficult to handle. She needed to move about, get to know the city. Karin had promised to take her to a performance of the Peking Opera that evening.

According to the map, Longfu was quite a trek. But she had plenty of time. She walked along the straight and apparently endless streets until she finally came to the hospital, after having passed a large art gallery.

Longfu consisted of two buildings. She counted seven storeys, all in white and grey. The windows on the ground floor were barred. The blinds were closed, and old flowerboxes filled with withered leaves stood on the window ledges. The trees outside the hospital were bare; the brown, parched lawns were covered in dog dirt. Her first impression was that Longfu looked more like a prison than a hospital. She entered the grounds. An ambulance drove past, then another. Next to the main entrance was a notice in Chinese. She compared it with what was written in the brochure — she had come to the right place. A doctor in a white coat was standing outside the entrance, smoking and talking loudly into a mobile phone.

She went back out onto the street and wandered around the big residential area. Wherever she looked old men were sitting on the pavements playing board games.

It was when she came to the corner of the extensive hospital grounds that it dawned on her what she had seen without thinking about it. On the other side of the street was a new skyscraper. She took the Chinese brochure out of her pocket. There was the building. There was no doubt about it. On the very top floor was a terrace, the likes of which she had never seen before. It projected from the side of the building like the forecastle of a ship. The facade of the skyscraper was covered in dark-tinted glass panels. Armed guards stood outside the high entrance. Presumably the building contained offices rather than residences. She stood on the lee side of a tree where she was partly protected from the freezing cold wind. Some men came out of the tall doors, which seemed to be made of copper, and stepped into waiting black cars. A tempting thought struck her. She checked that she still had the photograph of Wang Min Hao in her pocket. If he was somehow connected with this building, perhaps one of the guards might recognise him. But what would she say if they nodded and said he was indeed in there?

She couldn’t make up her mind what to do. Before she showed anybody the photograph, she must think up a reason for wanting to see him. Obviously, she couldn’t mention the murders in Hesjövallen. But whatever she said would need to be plausible.

A young man stopped by her side. He said something that she couldn’t make out. Then she realised that he was speaking English to her.

‘Are you lost? Can I help you?’

‘I’m just looking at that handsome building over there. Do you know who owns it?’

He shook his head in surprise.

‘I study to be vet. I know nothing of tall buildings. Can I help you? I try to teach me speak better English.’

‘Your English is very good.’ She pointed up at the projecting terrace. ‘I wonder who lives there?’

‘Somebody who is very rich.’

‘Can you help me?’ she said. She took out the photograph of Wang Min Hao. ‘Can you go over to the guards and ask them if they know this man? If they ask why you want to know, just say somebody asked you to give him a message.’

‘What message?’

‘Tell them you’ll fetch it. Come back here. I shall wait by the hospital entrance.’

‘Why not ask them yourself?’ he said.

‘I’m too shy. I don’t think a Western woman on her own should ask about a Chinese man.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Yes.’

She tried to look as casual as possible, but was beginning to regret her ploy. However, he took the photograph and was about to leave.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘Ask them who lives up there, on the top floor. It looks like an apartment with a big terrace.’

‘My name is Huo,’ he said. ‘I will ask.’

‘My name’s Birgitta. Just pretend to be interested.’

‘Where you from? USA?’

‘Sweden. Ruidian, I think it’s called in Chinese.’

‘I do not know where that is.’

‘It’s almost impossible to explain.’

As he started to cross the road, she turned and hurried back to the hospital entrance.

An old man on crutches came slowly out of the open entrance door. She suddenly had the feeling that she was exposing herself to danger. She calmed herself down by noting that the street was full of people. A man who had killed a lot of people in the north of Sweden might get away with it. But not someone who murdered a Western tourist in a busy street. In broad daylight. China couldn’t afford that.

The man with the crutches suddenly fell over. The young police officers on guard by the entrance made no move. She hesitated, but then helped the man back onto his feet. A mass of words came tumbling out of his mouth, but she didn’t understand, nor could she tell if he was grateful or angry. He smelled strongly of spices — or alcohol. He continued walking through the grounds towards the street.

Huo came back. He appeared to be calm and wasn’t looking furtively around. Birgitta went to meet him.

He shook his head.

‘Nobody has seen this man.’

‘Nobody knew who he was?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Who did you show the picture to?’

‘The guards. Another man came as well. From inside the house. He had sunglasses. Do I pronounce that right? “Sunglasses”?’

‘Very good. Who lives on the top floor?’

‘They did not answer that.’

‘But somebody lives there?’

‘I think so. They did not like the question.’

‘Why not?’

‘They told me to go away.’

‘So what did you do?’

He looked at her in surprise.

‘I went away.’

She took an American ten-dollar bill from her purse. He didn’t want to accept it at first. He returned the photograph of Wang Min Hao and asked which hotel she was staying at, made sure she knew her way back there, then bowed politely as he said goodbye.

On the way back to the hotel she once again had the vertiginous feeling that she could be swallowed up by the mass of humanity at any moment and never found again. She felt so dizzy that she was obliged to lean against a wall. There was a tea house not far away. She went in, ordered tea and biscuits, and tried to take long, deep breaths. Here it was again, the feeling of panic that had occasionally overwhelmed her in recent years. The long journey to Beijing had not provided any release from the worries that were weighing her down.

She thought about Wang again. I could track him here, but no further.

She paid her bill, surprised by how expensive it was, then braced herself once more to face the bitterly cold wind.

That evening they went to the theatre located inside the enormous Qianmen Jianguo Hotel. Earphones were available, but Karin Wiman had arranged the services of interpreters. During the whole of the four-hour performance, Birgitta sat leaning to one side, listening to the young woman’s frequently incomprehensible summaries of what was happening onstage. Both she and Karin were disappointed, as they soon realised that the performance consisted of extracts from various classical Peking operas, no doubt top class, but aimed exclusively at tourists. When the show finished and they were finally able to leave the freezing cold auditorium, they both had stiff necks.

Outside the theatre they waited for the car the conference had placed at Karin’s disposal. At one point Birgitta had the impression she had caught sight of the young man Huo, who had earlier addressed her in English amid the hustle and bustle of the street.

It happened so quickly that she hadn’t really registered his face before it had vanished again.

When they arrived at their hotel, Birgitta looked over her shoulder, but nobody was there, nobody she recognised, at least.

She shuddered. The fear she felt seemed to have come from nowhere. But it was Huo she had seen outside the theatre; she was certain of it.

Karin asked if she fancied a nightcap, and she did.

An hour later, Karin was asleep. Birgitta was standing by the window, gazing out over the glittering neon lights.

She was still worried. How could Huo have known that she was there? Why had he followed her?

When she finally crept into bed beside her sleeping friend, she regretted having produced the photograph of Wang Min Hao.

She felt cold. She lay awake for many hours. The chill of the Beijing winter’s night embraced her.

23

There were snow flurries the following day. Karin had risen at six o’clock in order to check through the lecture she was due to deliver. Birgitta woke up and saw her friend on a chair near the window, reading by the light from a standard lamp; it was still dark outside. She experienced a vague feeling of envy. Karin had chosen a life involving travels and contact with foreign cultures. Her own life was played out in courtrooms featuring a constant duel between truth and lies, arbitrary decisions and justice: outcomes were usually uncertain and often frustrating.

Karin noticed that Birgitta was awake.

‘It’s snowing,’ she said. ‘Not a lot. You never get heavy snowfalls in Beijing. It’s powdery, but quite sharp, like grains of sand from the desert.’

‘You are a busy bee. Up so early.’

‘I’m nervous. There’ll be so many people listening to what I have to say, bending over backwards to find errors.’

Birgitta sat up and moved her head tentatively.

‘I still have a stiff neck.’

‘Peking operas demand a high level of physical stamina.’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing another one. But without an interpreter.’

Karin left shortly after seven. They arranged to meet again that evening. Birgitta slept for another hour, and by the time she’d finished breakfast it was nine o’clock. Her worries from the previous day had vanished. The face she thought she had recognised outside the theatre must have been a figment of her imagination. The range of her fantasies sometimes surprised her, although she should have been used to them.

She sat in the large reception area where silent servants armed with feather dusters were busy cleaning marble columns. She felt annoyingly idle and decided to look for a department store where she could buy a Chinese board game. And she had also promised Staffan some spices. A young male concierge marked the way to a suitable store on her map. She changed some money in the hotel, then went out. It was not quite as cold as it had been. Occasional snowflakes were whirling around in the air. She pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose and set off.

It took her almost an hour to get to the department store. It was on a street called Wangfuijing Dajie, occupied a whole block and, when she stepped in through the imposing entrance doors, felt like a gigantic labyrinth. She was immediately caught up in the crush. She noticed people on all sides giving her curious looks and commenting on her clothes and appearance. She looked in vain for a notice in English. As she made her way towards one of the escalators, she was shouted at in bad English by various sales staff.

On the third floor she found a department selling books, paper goods and toys. She spoke to a young shop assistant, but unlike the hotel staff she didn’t understand what Birgitta said. The assistant said something into an intercom, and within seconds an older man appeared beside her and smiled.

‘Board games,’ said Birgitta. ‘Where can I find those?’

‘Mah-jong?’

He led her to another floor, where she suddenly found herself surrounded by shelves containing all kinds of board games. She picked out two, thanked the man for his help and went to one of the cash registers. Once the games had been wrapped up and placed in a large, colourful plastic bag, she found her own way to the food department. She could smell spices and soon found a large selection in small, pretty paper packets. After buying some she sat down in a cafeteria near the entrance. She drank tea and ate a Chinese cake that was so sweet she had trouble getting it down. Two small children came to stand and stare at her until they were called brusquely back by their mother at a neighbouring table.

Just before getting up to leave, Birgitta had the feeling she was being watched. She looked around, tried to scrutinise several faces, but there was no one she recognised. She was annoyed by these imaginings and left the store. As the plastic bag was heavy, she took a taxi back to the hotel and wondered what to do for the rest of the day. She wouldn’t be able to see Karin until late that evening — Karin had a formal dinner that she would have liked to skip, but couldn’t. Birgitta decided to visit the art gallery she had passed the previous day. She knew the way there. She remembered having seen several restaurants where she could have a meal if she felt hungry. It had stopped snowing now, and the clouds had broken up. She felt younger, more energetic than in the morning. Just now, I’m that freely rolling stone we used to dream of becoming when we were young, she thought. A rolling stone with a stiff neck.

The main building of the gallery looked like a typical Chinese tower with small platforms and projecting roof details. Visitors entered through two majestically imposing doors. As the gallery was so big, she decided to restrict herself to the ground floor. There was an exhibit on how the People’s Liberation Army had used art as a propaganda weapon. Most of the paintings were in the familiar style she recalled from the illustrated Chinese magazines in the 1960s. But there were also some non-figurative paintings depicting war and chaos in bright colours.

Wherever she went, she was surrounded by guards and guides, mainly young women in dark blue uniforms. None of them spoke English.

She spent a few hours in the art gallery. It was nearly three o’clock when she left, glancing at the hospital and behind it the skyscraper with the jutting-out terrace. Quite close to the gallery was a simple restaurant; she was given a place at a corner table after she had pointed at various plates of food on other diners’ tables. She also pointed at a bottle of beer and noticed how thirsty she was when she began drinking. She ate far too much, then drank two cups of strong tea in order to overcome her drowsiness while thumbing through several postcards she’d bought at the gallery.

Then it hit her. She had had enough of Beijing, although she’d only been there for two days. She felt restless, missed her work and had the feeling that time was simply slipping through her fingers. She couldn’t continue wandering aimlessly around the streets. She needed something specific to do, now that the board games and the spices had been bought. First she needed to go back to her hotel and rest, then come up with a proper plan — she had another three days, two of them alone.

When she came back out onto the street, the sun had disappeared behind the clouds again, and it felt much colder. She wrapped her jacket tightly around her and wound her scarf over her mouth and nose.

A man came up to her with a piece of paper and a small pair of scissors in his hand. In broken English he begged her to allow him to clip her silhouette. He produced a file of plastic pockets with other silhouettes he had made. Her first reaction was to say no, but she changed her mind and took off her woolly hat, removed her scarf and posed in profile.

The silhouette he made was astonishingly good. He asked for five dollars, but she gave him ten.

The man was old and had a scar on one cheek. She would have loved to hear his life story, if only that had been possible. She put the silhouette into her bag; they bowed to each other and went their separate ways.

She hadn’t the slightest idea of what was happening when the attack took place. She felt an arm wrapped around her neck, bending her backwards, and at the same time somebody snatched her bag. When she screamed and tried to hang on to it, the arm around her neck tightened. She was punched in the stomach and left gasping for breath. She collapsed onto the pavement. It had come about so quickly and lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. A passing cyclist stopped to try to lift her to her feet, together with a woman who put down her heavy grocery bags in order to help. But Birgitta Roslin was unable to stand up. She sank down onto her knees and passed out.

When she recovered consciousness she was on a stretcher in an ambulance with sirens blaring. A doctor was pressing a stethoscope onto her chest. Everything was a blur. She remembered having her bag stolen. But why was she in an ambulance? She tried to ask the doctor with the stethoscope. But he answered in Chinese: she deduced from his gestures that he wanted her to keep quiet and not move. Her throat felt very tender. Perhaps she had been seriously injured? The thought scared her stiff. She might have been killed. Whoever had attacked her hadn’t hesitated to do so, despite the broad daylight in a busy street.

She started crying. The doctor reacted by feeling her pulse. Even as he did so the ambulance came to a halt, and the back doors were opened. She was transferred to another stretcher and wheeled along a corridor with very bright lights. She was sobbing uncontrollably and didn’t notice being given a tranquilliser. She drifted away as if on a groundswell, surrounded by Chinese faces that seemed to be swimming in the same waters as she was: their heads, bobbing up and down in the waves, were preparing to accept the Great Helmsman as he approached the shore after a long and strenuous swim.

When she regained consciousness she was in a room with dimmed lights and drawn curtains. A man in uniform was sitting on a chair next to the door. When he saw that she had opened her eyes, he stood up and left the room. Shortly afterwards two other men in uniform entered the room, accompanied by a doctor who spoke to her in English with a strong American accent.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I don’t know. I’m tired. My throat hurts.’

‘We have examined you carefully. You survived that unfortunate incident without serious injury.’

‘Why am I here? I want to go back to my hotel.’

The doctor bent down closer to her face.

‘The police need to talk to you first. We don’t like it when foreign visitors are treated badly in our country. We are ashamed. Whoever attacked you must be found.’

‘But I didn’t see anything.’

‘I’m not the one you need to talk to.’

The doctor stood up and nodded to the two men in uniform, who carried their chairs over to her bed and sat down. One of them, the interpreter, was young, but the man asking the questions was in his sixties. He had tinted glasses, which meant that she couldn’t see his eyes. He started asking questions without either of the men having introduced themselves. She had the vague impression that the elderly man didn’t like her at all.

‘We need to know what you saw.’

‘I didn’t see anything. It all happened so quickly.’

‘All the witnesses have agreed that the two men were not masked.’

‘I didn’t even know there were two of them.’

‘What did register with you?’

‘I felt an arm around my neck. They attacked me from behind. They snatched my bag and punched me in the stomach.’

‘We need to know everything you can tell us about these two men.’

‘But I didn’t see anything.’

‘No faces?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hear their voices?’

‘I didn’t even know they said anything.’

‘What happened just before you were attacked?’

‘A man cut my silhouette. I’d paid him and was about to leave.’

‘When your silhouette had been cut — did you see anything then?’

‘Such as?’

‘Anybody waiting?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you that I didn’t see anything at all?’

When the interpreter had translated her answer the police officer leaned towards her and raised his voice.

‘We are asking these questions because we want to catch the men who attacked you and stole your bag. That’s why you should answer without losing your temper.’

The words cut her. ‘I’m just telling you the way it was.’

‘What did you have in your bag?’

‘Some cash, not a lot, Chinese, and some American dollars. A comb, a handkerchief, some pills, a pen, nothing important.’

‘We found your passport in an inside pocket of your jacket. I gather you are Swedish. Why are you here in China?’

‘I came here on holiday, with a friend.’

The elderly man thought that over. His face was expressionless.

‘We didn’t find a silhouette,’ he said eventually.

‘It was in my bag.’

‘You didn’t say that when I asked you. Is there anything else you’ve forgotten?’

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. The interrogation was over. The elderly police officer said something, then left the room.

‘When you feel better we’ll take you back to your hotel. We’ll come back to you later and ask a few more questions for the records.’

The interpreter mentioned the name of her hotel without her having said it.

‘How do you know the name of the hotel I’m staying at? The key was in my bag.’

‘We know things like that.’

He bowed and left the room. Before the door closed, the doctor with the American accent came back into the room.

‘We need you for a few more minutes,’ he said. ‘Some blood tests, an assessment of your X-rays.’

My watch, she thought. They didn’t take that. She checked it. A quarter to five.

‘When can I go back to my hotel?’

‘Soon.’

‘My friend will be very worried if I’m not there.’

‘We’ll arrange transport back to your hotel. We’re very keen to make sure that our foreign guests are not disappointed by our hospitality, despite the fact that unfortunate incidents do occasionally take place.’

She was left alone in the room. Somewhere in the distance she heard somebody screaming, a lonely cry echoing down the corridor.

She chewed over what had happened. The whole episode seemed surreal — the sudden shock at having been grabbed from behind, the punch in the stomach and the people who had helped her.

But they must have seen something, she thought. Have the police asked them? Were they still there when the ambulance arrived? Or did the police get there first?

She had never been attacked before in her life. She had been threatened, but never physically assaulted. This was the first time she was the victim.

She felt afraid but knew this was usual after a person had been attacked. Fear, but also anger, a feeling of having been humiliated, distress. And a lust for revenge. Just now, lying in bed, she would not have protested if the two men who had mugged her had been forced to kneel down and shot through the back of the head.

A nurse came into the room and helped her to dress. She had a pain in her stomach and a graze on her knee. When the nurse gave her a comb and held up a mirror in front of her, she could see that she was very pale. So this is what I look like when I’m scared, she thought. I won’t forget it.

The doctor returned as she sat on the bed, ready to go back to her hotel.

‘The pain in your neck will pass, probably as soon as tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me.’

Three police officers were standing in the corridor, waiting for her. One of them was carrying a frightening-looking automatic weapon. They accompanied her down in the lift and stepped into a police car. She had no idea where she was, didn’t even know the name of the hospital where she had been treated. At one point she thought she might have recognised one side of the Forbidden City, but wasn’t sure.

The sirens had been switched off. She was grateful not to have to return to her hotel in a car with flashing blue lights. She recognised the hotel entrance and got out of the car, which moved away even before she had time to turn round. She was still wondering how they could have known where she was staying.

She explained at the front desk that she had lost her key and was given another without question. It happened so quickly that she realised it must have been prepared in advance. The woman behind the counter smiled. She knows, Birgitta thought. The police have been here, told the staff about the assault and prepared them for her return with no key.

As she walked towards the lifts, she thought she should be grateful, but instead she felt uneasy. That feeling was not banished when she entered her room. She could see that somebody had been there. But the maid had come earlier in the day. It was possible of course that Karin had stopped in briefly, to pick up something or to change clothes. But what was there to prevent the police from making a discreet search? Or somebody else, for that matter?

What betrayed the unknown visitor was the plastic carrier bag with the board games. She saw immediately that it wasn’t where she had left it. She looked around the room, slowly, so that nothing would escape her notice. But it was only the bag that had been moved and not put back.

She went to the bathroom. Her toiletries bag was exactly where she had left it that morning. None of the contents were missing.

She went back into the room and sat on a chair by the window. Her suitcase was lying with the lid open. She went to examine the contents, lifting out each item of clothing, one by one. If somebody had searched through it, they had done it carefully to avoid detection.

It was only when she came to the bottom of the case that she stopped dead. There ought to be a torch and a box of matches there. She always took them with her on her travels, ever since the year before she married Staffan when she had visited Madeira and there had been a power cut that lasted for more than a day. She had been out for an evening walk by the steep cliffs on the outskirts of Funchal when everything went black. It had taken her hours to grope her way back to the hotel. After that she always carried a torch and a box of matches in her suitcase. The torch was there, but no sign of the matches. The matchbox had a green label and came from a restaurant in Helsingborg.

She went through the clothes once more without finding the box. Had she put it in her bag? She did sometimes do that, but she had no memory of moving it from her suitcase. But who would take a box of matches from a room being searched surreptitiously?

She sat down on the chair by the window again. That last hour in the hospital, she thought. Even at the time I had the feeling that I was being kept there unnecessarily. What were the test results they were waiting for? Was the real reason that they wanted me out of the way while the police searched my hotel room? But why? After all, I was the one who had been mugged.

There was a knock on the door. Birgitta gave a start. She could see through the peephole that there were police officers in the corridor. She opened the door anxiously. These were new officers, not the ones she had seen at the hospital. One was a woman, short, about the same age as Birgitta. She was the one who did the talking.

‘We just want to make sure that everything is all right.’

‘Thank you.’

The policewoman indicated that she wanted to enter the room. Birgitta stepped to one side. One policeman stood outside the door, another one inside. The woman led the way to the chairs by the window and placed a briefcase on the table. Something about her behaviour surprised Birgitta Roslin, without her being able to put her finger on what it was.

‘I’d like you to study some pictures. We have information from some witnesses and think we might know who carried out the attack.’

‘But I didn’t see anything. An arm, perhaps? How can I identify an arm?’

The police officer wasn’t listening. She produced some photographs and placed them on the table in front of Birgitta Roslin. All of them were of young men.

‘Perhaps you saw something without having registered it.’

There was obviously no point in protesting. Birgitta leafed through the pictures, and it occurred to her that these were young men who might eventually commit a crime that would result in their being executed. Naturally, she didn’t recognise any of them. She shook her head.

‘I’ve never seen any of them before.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Certain.’

‘None of them?’

‘None.’

The policewoman replaced the photographs in the briefcase. Birgitta noticed that her fingernails were badly bitten.

‘We shall catch the people responsible for the attack,’ said the woman. ‘How much longer will you be staying in Beijing?’

‘Three days.’

The officer nodded, bowed and left the room.

You knew that, Birgitta thought as she fastened the safety chain. That I would be staying for three more days. Why ask me something you knew already? You can’t fool me as easily as that.

She closed her eyes and thought that she should call home.

When she woke up it was dark outside. The pain in her neck was beginning to subside. But the attack seemed even more menacing now. She had a strange feeling that the worst hadn’t actually happened yet. She took out her mobile phone and called Helsingborg. Staffan wasn’t at home, nor did he answer his mobile phone. She left a message, considered calling her children, but decided not to.

She went through the contents of her bag in her head one more time. She had lost sixty dollars. But most of her cash was locked up in the little safe in the wardrobe. She stood up and went to check the safe. It was still locked. She keyed in the code and went through the contents. Nothing was missing. She closed the door and relocked it. She was still trying to work out what had struck her as odd about the policewoman’s behaviour. She stood by the door and tried to call up the scene in her mind’s eye. But in vain. She lay down on the bed again. Thought again about the photographs the policewoman had taken out of her briefcase.

She suddenly sat up. She had opened the door. The policewoman had indicated that she wanted to come in and Birgitta had moved to one side. Then the woman had walked straight over to the chairs by the window. She hadn’t even cast a glance at the open bathroom door, or the part of the room with the large double bed.

Birgitta Roslin could think of only one explanation. The policewoman had been in the room before. She didn’t need to look around. She already knew where everything was.

Birgitta stared at the table where the briefcase and the photographs had been lying. She hadn’t recognised any of the faces she had been asked to study. But was that perhaps really what the police wanted to check? That she couldn’t identify anybody in the pictures? It was not a question of her possibly being able to recognise one of her attackers. On the contrary. The police wanted to make sure that she really hadn’t seen anything.

But why? She stood by the window. A thought she had entertained while still in Hudiksvall came back into her mind.

What has happened is big, too big for me alone.

Fear flooded her before she had time to prepare herself. It was more than an hour before she could pluck up the courage to take the lift to the dining room.

Before she went in through the glass doors, she looked around. But there was nobody there.

24

Birgitta Roslin had been crying in her sleep. Karin Wiman sat up in bed and gently touched her shoulder in order to wake her up.

Karin had come back very late that evening. To make sure that she didn’t lie awake for hours, Birgitta had taken one of the sleeping pills she so seldom used but always had with her.

‘You must have been dreaming,’ said Karin. ‘Something sad that made you cry.’

Birgitta couldn’t remember any dreams. The inner landscape she had just left was completely empty.

‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly five. I’m tired, I need to sleep a bit longer. Why were you crying?’

‘I don’t know. I must have been dreaming, even if I don’t remember what.’

Karin lay down again. She soon fell back to sleep. Birgitta got up and opened a little gap in the curtains. The early-morning traffic was already under way. A few flags straining at their moorings told her that it was going to be another windy day in Beijing.

The fear she had felt after being mugged returned. But she resolved to fight against it, just as she had when she had received numerous threats as a judge. She ran through in her mind once again what had happened, this time being as critical as she possibly could. In the end she was left with the almost embarrassing feeling that her imagination had got the better of her. She suspected conspiracy at every turn, a chain of events that she made up, whereas in reality they were unconnected. She had been mugged; her bag had been snatched. Why the police should be involved in the attack now seemed beyond her comprehension — no doubt they were doing all they could to help. Perhaps she had been crying about herself and her fantasies?

She switched on the lamp and tilted it backwards so that the light didn’t fall on Karin’s side of the bed. Then she started to leaf through the Beijing guidebook she had brought with her. She ticked off in the margin things she wanted to see during the days she had left. First of all she wanted to visit the Forbidden City that she had read so much about and been entranced by ever since she first became interested in China. Another day she wanted to visit one of the Buddhist temples in the city. She and Staffan had often agreed that if by any chance they felt the need to become more closely acquainted with the spiritual world, only Buddhism would fit the bill. Staffan had pointed out that it was the one religion that had never gone to war nor resorted to violence in order to spread its message. It was important for Birgitta that Buddhism recognised only the god that everybody had latent inside his or her self. Understanding its creed meant slowly waking up that inner god.

She went back to bed and slept for a few more hours, then woke up to see Karin naked, stretching and yawning in the middle of the room. An old Rebel with a body that was still quite well preserved, she thought.

‘Now there’s a pretty sight,’ she said.

Karin gave a start, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong.

‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was until a minute ago. This time I woke up without crying.’

‘Did you dream?’

‘I expect so. But I don’t remember anything. The dreams slipped away and hid. No doubt I was a teenager and unlucky in love.’

‘I never dream about my youth. But I do sometimes imagine myself very old.’

‘We’re not far from that state.’

‘Not yet. I’m concentrating on lectures that I hope are going to be interesting.’

She went into the bathroom, and when she emerged she was fully dressed.

Birgitta still hadn’t mentioned the mugging. She wondered if she should keep it to herself. Among all the emotions surrounding the event was a feeling of embarrassment, as if she should have been able to avoid what had happened. She was normally very alert.

‘I’m going to be just as late this evening again,’ said Karin. ‘But it will be all over by tomorrow. Then it’ll be our turn.’

‘I have long lists,’ said Birgitta. ‘Today it’s going to be the Forbidden City.’

‘Mao used to live there,’ said Karin. ‘Some people maintain that he consciously tried to imitate one of the old emperors. Most likely Qin, who we talk about day after day. But I think that’s malicious slander. Political slander.’

‘His spirit no doubt hovers over the whole conference,’ said Birgitta. ‘Off you go now; work hard and think clever thoughts.’

Karin left, full of energy. Instead of giving in to envy, Birgitta leaped out of bed, did a few half-hearted press-ups, and prepared to spend a day in Beijing without any conspiracies or worried glances over her shoulder. She devoted the morning to exploring the mysterious labyrinth that made up the Forbidden City. Over the middle gate in the vividly pink-coloured wall, once used exclusively by emperors, hung a large portrait of Mao. Birgitta noticed that all the Chinese who passed through the red gates touched their gold mountings. She assumed it was some kind of superstition. Perhaps Karin could explain it.

She walked over the worn stones that paved the inner courtyard of the palace and recalled that when she had been a Red Rebel, she had read that the Forbidden City comprised 9,999 and a half rooms. As the Divine God had ten thousand rooms, naturally, the Divine Son could not have more. She doubted if that were true.

There were lots of visitors despite the cold wind. Most were Chinese, moving with reverence through the rooms to which their ancestors had been denied entrance for generations. What a gigantic revolution this was, Birgitta Roslin thought. When a people liberates itself, every individual acquires the right to dream his own dreams and has access to the forbidden rooms where oppression was created.

Every fifth person in the world is Chinese. When my family is gathered together, if we were the world, one of us would be Chinese. So we were right after all when we were young. Our Red revolutionary prophets, not least Moses, who was the most educated theoretically, reminded us over and over again that it was impossible to discuss the future without taking China into account.

Just as she was about to leave the Forbidden City, she discovered to her surprise a cafe from an American chain. The sign screeched at her from a red-brick wall. She watched to see how passing Chinese reacted. Some stopped and pointed, others even went inside, while most didn’t seem to take any notice of what Birgitta considered to be a disgraceful sacrilege. China had become a different kind of mystery since the first time she had tried to understand the Middle Kingdom. But that’s not right, she told herself. It must be possible to understand how there can be an American cafe in the Forbidden City given how the world moves on.

She had lunch at a little restaurant and was again surprised to see how expensive the bill was. Then she decided to try to find an English newspaper at the hotel and drink a cup of coffee in the bar in the huge reception area. She found a copy of the Guardian at the newspaper kiosk and sat down in a corner where an open fire was burning merrily. Some American tourists stood up and announced in very loud voices that they were now going to climb the Great Wall of China. She took an instant dislike to them.

When would she go to see the Wall? Perhaps Karin would have time on the last day before they had to fly home? How could one possibly visit China and not see the Wall that, according to modern legend, was one of the few human constructions that could be seen from space?

The Wall really is something I have to see, she thought. No doubt Karin has been there before. But she’ll have to do it for my sake.

A woman suddenly appeared in front of her table. She was about the same age as Birgitta, with sleeked-back hair. She smiled and gave the impression of great dignity. She addressed Birgitta Roslin in immaculate English.

‘Mrs Roslin?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Do you mind if I sit down and join you? I have an important errand.’

‘Please do.’

The woman was wearing a dark blue suit that must have been very expensive.

She sat down.

‘My name is Hong Qiu,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you if I didn’t have something very important to talk to you about.’

She gestured discreetly to a man hovering in the background. He came up to their table and placed upon it Birgitta’s bag, as if it were an exceedingly valuable gift, before bowing and withdrawing.

Birgitta looked at Hong Qiu in surprise.

‘The police found your bag,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘It is humiliating for us to accept that one of our guests has been exposed to an unfortunate incident, and so I was asked to return it to you.’

‘Are you a police officer?’

Hong Qiu continued to smile.

‘Certainly not. But I’m sometimes asked to perform certain services for our authorities. Is there anything missing?’

Birgitta opened her bag. Everything was still there apart from the money. To her surprise she also discovered that the box of matches she’d been unable to find was actually there in her bag.

‘The money is missing.’

‘We are confident of catching the criminals. They will be severely punished.’

‘But they won’t be condemned to death, I hope?’

There was an almost indiscernible reaction in Hong Qiu’s face, but Birgitta noticed it.

‘Our laws are strict. If they have committed serious crimes before, it’s possible that they might receive the death sentence. But if they show signs of having reformed, they may get away with prison.’

‘But what happens if they don’t express any regret?’

The response was evasive. ‘Our laws are clear and unambiguous. But nothing is certain. We make judgements according to the particulars of a case. Punishment doled out in accordance with routines can never be justified.’

‘I work in the law — I’m a judge. Only an extremely primitive legal system can ever resort to capital punishment, which seldom if ever has a preventative effect.’

Birgitta Roslin regretted the meddlesome tone of her comments. Hong Qiu listened attentively, but her smile had disappeared. A waitress approached them, but Hong Qiu dismissed her with a shake of the head. Birgitta Roslin had the distinct impression that a pattern was being repeated. Hong Qiu didn’t react to the news that Birgitta was a judge — she knew that already.

In this country they know all there is to know about me, she thought. Or am I imagining it?

‘Naturally I’m pleased to have my bag back. But you must realise that I’m surprised by the way this has happened. You bring it to me, but you are not a police officer — I don’t know what or who you are. Have the people who stole my bag been arrested, or did I misunderstand what you said? Did somebody find it after the muggers had thrown it away?’

‘Nobody has been arrested, but the police have their suspicions. The bag was found not far from where it was stolen.’

Hong Qiu started to stand up. Birgitta Roslin stopped her.

‘Tell me who you are. An unknown woman suddenly appears from nowhere and returns my bag.’

‘I work on security matters. As I speak both English and French, I am sometimes asked to perform certain tasks.’

‘Security? So you are in fact a police officer. Despite what you said.’

Hong Qiu shook her head.

‘Security goes beyond police responsibility. It goes deeper, down to the very roots of society. I’m sure that’s true in your country as well.’

‘Who asked you to look me up and return my bag?’

‘A duty officer at Beijing’s central lost property office.’

‘Lost property? Who had handed in my bag?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How could he know the bag belonged to me? It doesn’t contain any identity card or anything with my name.’

‘I assume he was informed by the relevant police authorities investigating the case.’

‘Are you saying there is more than one department dealing with muggings?’

‘It’s normal for police officers with various specialities to work together.’

‘In order to find a lost bag?’

‘In order to solve a serious attack on a guest in our country.’

She’s going round and round in circles, Birgitta thought. I’ll never get a proper answer out of her.

‘I’m a judge,’ said Birgitta Roslin again. ‘I’ll be staying here in Beijing for a few more days. As you seem to know all about me I hardly need to tell you that I’ve come here with a friend who is spending every day talking about your first emperor at an international conference.’

‘A knowledge of the Qin dynasty is important for an understanding of my country. But you are wrong if you think I know much about who you are and why you have come to Beijing.’

‘Since you were able to produce the bag I had lost, I’m going to ask you for some advice. What do I need to do to get entry into a Chinese court of law? It doesn’t need to be an especially remarkable trial, I just want to follow the proceedings and perhaps ask a few questions.’

‘I can arrange that for tomorrow. I can go with you.’

The immediate answer startled Birgitta Roslin. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance. You seem to have an awful lot to do.’

‘No more than I decide is important.’ Hong Qiu stood up. ‘I’ll contact you later this afternoon to let you know where we can meet tomorrow.’

Birgitta was about to mention her room number, but then it struck her that Hong Qiu no doubt knew that already.

She watched Hong Qiu walk through the bar towards the entrance. The man who had been carrying the bag and another man joined her before they disappeared from Birgitta’s sight.

She looked at the bag and burst out laughing. There is an entrance, she thought, and also an exit. A bag is lost, and found again. But what actually happens in between, I have no idea. There’s a risk that I won’t be able to distinguish between what’s going on in my mind and what actually happens in reality.

Hong Qiu called an hour later, just after Birgitta had returned to her room. Nothing surprised her any more. It was as if unseen people were observing every move she made and could say exactly where she was at any given moment. Like now. She came into the room, and the telephone rang immediately.

‘Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ said Hong Qiu.

‘Where?’

‘I’ll pick you up. We shall visit a court in an outlying suburb of Beijing. I chose it because a female judge will be on duty there tomorrow.’

‘I’m most grateful.’

‘I want to do everything we possibly can to make up for that unfortunate incident.’

‘You’ve already done that. I feel surrounded by guardian angels.’

After the phone call Birgitta emptied her bag onto the bed. She still found it hard to accept that the box of matches had been in there rather than in her suitcase. She opened the box. It was half empty. Somebody’s been smoking, she thought. The box was full when I put it in my case. She took out the matches and looked inside. She didn’t really know what she expected to find. All it is is a matchbox, she thought. She felt annoyed as she put the matches back into the box and replaced it in her bag. She was going too far again. Her imagination was running away with her.

She devoted the rest of the day to a Buddhist temple and a long drawn-out dinner in a restaurant not far from her hotel. She was asleep when Karin tiptoed into their room and she merely turned over when the light was switched on.

The next day they got up at the same time. As Karin had overslept, she didn’t have a chance to do much more than confirm that the conference would come to an end at two o’clock. After that she would be free. Birgitta told her about the visit she was going to make to a Chinese court, but still didn’t mention her mugging.

Hong Qiu was waiting in reception. She was wearing a white fur coat today; Birgitta felt almost embarrassingly underdressed standing by her side. But Hong Qiu noted that she was wearing warm clothes.

‘Our courts of law can be rather chilly,’ she said.

‘Like your theatres?’

Hong Qiu smiled. She can’t know that we attended a Peking opera a few nights ago, Birgitta thought — or can she?

‘China is still a very poor country. We are approaching the future with great humility and hard work.’

Not everybody’s poor, Birgitta thought cynically. Even my untrained eye can see that your fur coat is genuine and extremely expensive.

A car with a chauffeur was waiting outside the hotel. Birgitta had a vague feeling of reluctance. What did she actually know about this woman she was following into a car with an unknown man behind the wheel?

She persuaded herself that there was no danger. Why couldn’t she just be thankful for the kindness and consideration they were surrounding her with? Hong Qiu sat silently in a corner of the back seat with her eyes half closed. They travelled very fast down a very long street. After a few minutes Birgitta Roslin hadn’t the slightest idea in which part of Beijing she was.

They stopped outside a low, concrete building with two police officers guarding the entrance. Over the door was a row of Chinese characters in red.

‘The name of the district court,’ said Hong Qiu, who had noticed what Birgitta was looking at.

As they walked up the steps to the entrance, the two police officers presented arms. Hong Qiu didn’t seem to react. Birgitta wondered who her companion really was. She could hardly be simply a messenger girl whose job was to return stolen handbags to foreign visitors.

They continued along a deserted corridor and came to the courtroom itself, which was wood-panelled and austere. On a high dais at one of the short sides sat two men in uniform. The place between them was empty. There were no members of the public present. Hong Qiu led the way to the front bench, where two cushions had been placed. Everything has been prepared, Birgitta thought. The performance can begin. Or is it simply that I’m being courteously received even in this courtroom?

They had barely sat down when the accused was escorted in between two security officers. A middle-aged man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a dark blue prison uniform. His head was bowed. Sitting beside him was a defence lawyer. Sitting at another table was the man Birgitta assumed to be the prosecutor. He was dressed in civilian clothes, a bald, elderly man with a furrowed face. The woman judge entered the courtroom from a door behind the podium. She was in her sixties, small and stout. When she sat down, she looked almost like a child sitting at the table.

‘Shu Fu has been the leader of a criminal gang that specialises in stealing cars,’ said Hong Qiu in a low voice. ‘The others have already been sentenced. As Shu is the leader of the gang and a recidivist, he’ll probably get a stiff sentence. He’s been treated mildly in the past, but because he’s betrayed the trust put in him and continued his criminal activities, the court is bound to give him a more severe punishment.’

‘But not the death penalty?’

‘Of course not.’

Hong Qiu had not liked her last question. The answer sounded impatient, almost dismissive. That wiped the smile off her face, Birgitta thought. But is this a real trial or is the whole thing being staged and the sentence already decided?

The voices were shrill and echoed around the courtroom. The only one who never said a word was the accused, who just sat there, staring down at the floor. Hong Qiu occasionally translated what was being said. The defence lawyer was not making any great effort to support his client — but then that was not unusual in a Swedish court either, Birgitta thought. The whole trial became a dialogue between the prosecutor and the judge. She couldn’t work out the function of the two assistants sitting on the podium.

The trial was over in less than half an hour.

‘He’ll get about ten years hard labour,’ said Hong Qiu.

‘I didn’t hear the judge say anything that sounded like a sentence.’

Hong Qiu made no comment. When the judge stood up, everybody else followed suit. The convicted man was led away. Birgitta never managed to catch his eye.

‘Now we shall meet the judge,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘She has invited us to tea in her office. Her name is Min Ta. When she’s not working, she spends her time looking after two grandchildren.’

‘What’s her reputation?’

Hong Qiu didn’t understand the question.

‘All judges have a reputation, more or less accurate. Seldom very wide of the mark. I’m reputed to be a mild but very firm judge,’ Birgitta explained.

‘Min Ta follows the law. She’s proud of being a judge. And so she is also a true representative of our country.’

They went through the low door at the back of the dais and were received by Min Ta in her spartan and freezing cold office. A clerk served tea. They sat down. Min Ta immediately began to talk in the same shrill voice as she had used in the courtroom. When she finished, Hong Qiu translated what she had said.

‘It is a great honour to meet a colleague from Sweden. She has heard many positive comments about the Swedish legal system. Unfortunately she has another trial coming up shortly, otherwise she’d have loved to discuss the Swedish legal system with you.’

‘Please thank her for inviting me,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘Ask her what she thinks the sentence will be. Were you right in guessing about ten years?’

‘I never go into a courtroom without being thoroughly prepared,’ said Min Ta when she had heard the translation of the question. ‘It’s my duty to use my time and that of the other legal officers efficiently. There was no doubt in this case. The man had confessed; he’s a recidivist; there were no extenuating circumstances. I think I’ll give him between seven and ten years in prison, but I shall ponder carefully before deciding.’

That was the only question Birgitta had the possibility of asking. Then it was Min Ta who fired a whole series of questions for her to answer. Birgitta wondered in passing exactly what Hong Qiu said in her translations. Perhaps she and Min Ta were in fact conducting a conversation about something entirely different?

After twenty minutes Min Ta stood up and explained that she would have to return to the courtroom. A man came in with a camera. Min Ta stood next to Birgitta Roslin, and a photograph was taken. Hong Qiu was standing to one side, out of camera range. The two judges shook hands, and they both went into the corridor together. When Min Ta opened the door Birgitta noticed that the courtroom was now packed.

They returned to the car and drove off at high speed. When they stopped, it was not at the hotel but outside a pagoda-like tea house on an island in an artificial lake.

‘It’s cold,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘Tea warms you up.’

Hong Qiu led her to a room screened off from the rest of the tea house. Two teacups were waiting on a table, beside which stood a waitress with a teapot in her hand. Everything that happened to Birgitta today was meticulously planned. From having been just another tourist, she had been transformed into an especially important visitor to China. She still didn’t know why.

Hong Qiu suddenly started talking about the Swedish legal system. She gave the impression of being very well read. She asked questions about the murders of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh.

‘In an open society you can never guarantee a person’s safety one hundred per cent,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘You have to pay prices in all kinds of societies. Freedom and safety are always jostling for position.’

‘If you are really intent on murdering somebody, it can never be prevented,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘Not even an American president can be protected.’

Birgitta Roslin detected an undertone in what Hong Qiu had said, but was unable to put her finger on it.

‘We don’t often hear about Sweden,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘But just recently news has reached our papers about a horrific mass murder.’

‘I happen to know a bit about it,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘Even though I wasn’t involved. A suspect was arrested, but he committed suicide. Which is a scandal in itself, no matter how it happened.’

As Hong Qiu was displaying polite interest, Birgitta described what had happened in as much detail as she could. Hong Qiu listened attentively, asked no questions, but occasionally asked for something to be repeated.

‘A madman,’ said Birgitta Roslin in conclusion. ‘Who managed to take his own life. Or another madman the police haven’t succeeded in finding yet. Or something completely different, with a motive and a cold-blooded, brutal plan.’

‘What would that be?’

‘As nothing seems to have been stolen it must be a combination of hatred and revenge.’

‘What do you think?’

‘Who should they be looking for, do you mean? I don’t know. But I find it hard to accept the theory of a lone madman.’

Birgitta elaborated on what she called the Chinese lead. She started from the beginning, when she discovered she was related to some of the dead, and then the astonishing next phase involving the Chinese visitor to Hudiksvall. When she noticed that Hong Qiu really was listening intently, she found it impossible to stop. In the end she took out the photograph and showed it to Hong Qiu.

Hong Qiu nodded slowly. Just for a moment she seemed lost in her own thoughts. It suddenly occurred to Birgitta that Hong Qiu recognised the face. But that was implausible. One face in a billion?

Hong Qiu smiled, returned the photograph and asked what Birgitta intended to do for the remainder of her time in Beijing.

‘Tomorrow I hope my friend will be able to take me to see the Great Wall of China. Then we’ll be flying home the following day.’

‘I’m afraid I’m busy and won’t be able to help you.’

‘You have already done more than I could ever have asked for.’

‘In any case, I shall come to bid you farewell before you leave.’

They said goodbye outside the hotel. Birgitta Roslin watched the car with Hong Qiu leaving through the hotel gates.

Karin came back at three o’clock and, with a sigh of relief, threw most of the conference material into the wastebasket. When Birgitta suggested a trip to the Great Wall of China the following day, Karin agreed immediately. But first, she wanted to go shopping. Birgitta accompanied her from one shop to the next, to semi-official markets in side streets and dimly lit boutiques filled with all kinds of bargains, from old lamps to wooden sculptures depicting evil demons. Weighed down with parcels and packages, they hailed a taxi as dusk began to fall. Karin was feeling tired, so they ate at the hotel. Birgitta spoke to the concierge and arranged a trip to the Wall for the following day.

Karin was asleep, but Birgitta curled up in a chair and watched Chinese television with the sound turned down. She occasionally felt stabs of fear originating from the previous day’s events. But she had made up her mind once and for all to say nothing about it, not even to Karin.

The following day they drove out to the Great Wall of China. There wasn’t even a breath of wind, and the dry cold felt less intrusive. They wandered around the Wall, duly impressed, and took pictures of each other or handed the camera to a friendly local who was only too pleased to snap them.

‘So, we came here in the end,’ said Karin. ‘With a camera in our hands, not Mao’s Little Red Book.’

‘A miracle must have taken place in this country,’ said Birgitta. ‘Not brought about by gods but by people with astounding courage.’

‘In the cities, at least. But poverty is apparently still widespread in the countryside. What will they do when hundreds of millions of peasants finally decide they’ve had enough?’

‘ “The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance.” Perhaps that mantra has a fundamental truth built in, despite everything?’

‘Nobody in those days told me that China could be as cold as this. I’ve almost frozen to death.’

They returned to their waiting car. Just as Birgitta was walking down the steps from the Wall, she glanced back over her shoulder, for one last look at the Wall.

What she saw instead was one of Hong Qiu’s men reading a guidebook. There was no doubt about it. He was the one who had walked up to her table with her bag.

Karin waved impatiently from the car. She was cold, wanted to get going.

When Birgitta turned round again, the man had vanished.

25

That last evening in Beijing Birgitta Roslin and Karin Wiman stayed in their hotel. They sat around in the bar drinking vodka cocktails, discussing various possible ways of rounding off their visit to China. But the vodka made them so tipsy and tired that they decided to eat in the hotel. Afterwards, they spent hours talking about how their lives had turned out. It was as if things had been predetermined by their youthful revolutionary dreams of a Red China. Now they had actually made the trip there and found a country that had undergone fundamental change, but perhaps hadn’t turned out as they had once imagined it would. They stayed in the dining room until they were the only ones left. Several blue silk ribbons hung down from the lampshade over their table. Birgitta leaned over towards Karin and whispered that perhaps they should each take one of those ribbons as a souvenir of their trip. Karin used a small pair of nail scissors to snip off a couple of ribbons when none of the waiters was watching.

Karin fell asleep when they had finished packing their bags. The conference had been very tiring. Birgitta sat on the sofa with almost all the lights out. She suddenly felt old. She’d come this far; there was a bit still left to go, then the path would suddenly peter out, and she would be consumed by darkness. She had already begun to notice that the path was sloping downward, only slightly; but the bottom line was that she could do nothing to change its direction. Think of ten things you still want to achieve, she whispered to herself. Ten things you still have left to do. She sat down at the little desk and began writing in a notebook.

What did she still have left that she really wanted to experience? One of the things she hoped for was to see and enjoy a grandchild, perhaps even several. Also, she and Staffan had often talked about visiting various islands. The only ones they had been to so far were Iceland and Crete. One of their dream journeys was to Galápagos, another to Pitcairn Island, where the blood from the mutineers on the Bounty was still flowing through the veins of the inhabitants. Learn a few more languages? Or at least improve her French, a language she had once spoken quite well.

But the most important thing was for her and Staffan to succeed in reawakening their relationship. She sometimes felt very sad when the thought struck her that they might decline into old age without any of the old passion remaining alive.

No journey was more important than that.

She tore the sheet of paper, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Why should she need to write down what was already posted clearly and unmistakably on the church doors of her inner self?

She undressed and snuggled into bed. Karin was breathing calmly in the other bed. She suddenly had the feeling that it was time for her to go home, to be declared fit and start work again. Without her everyday routines she would never be able to fulfil any of the dreams lying in wait for her.

She hesitated for a moment, then reached for her mobile phone and sent a text message to her husband. ‘On the way home. Every journey starts with a step forward. So does the journey home.’

Birgitta woke up at seven o’clock. Although she had slept no more than five hours, she felt wide awake. A faint headache reminded her of the vodka cocktails the evening before. Karin was asleep, swaddled in her sheet, one hand hanging down to the floor. Birgitta carefully tucked it in under the sheet.

The dining room was already busy, despite the early hour. She looked around to see if she could recognise any of the faces. She had no doubt that the man she had recognised at the Great Wall was one of Hong Qiu’s entourage. Perhaps it was just that the Chinese state had taken her under its wing, to ensure that no more accidents would happen?

She ate her breakfast, leafed through an English newspaper, and was just about to return to her room when Hong Qiu suddenly appeared at her table. She was not alone. Alongside her were two men Birgitta had not seen before. Hong Qiu nodded to the men, who withdrew and sat down. She said something to a waitress and shortly afterwards was served a glass of water.

‘I hope all’s well,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘How was your trip to the Wall?’

‘The Great Wall was impressive. But it was cold.’

She looked Hong Qiu provocatively in the eye, hoping to see from her reaction if Hong Qiu realised that the scout had been noticed. But Hong Qiu’s face remained expressionless. She did not reveal her cards.

‘There’s a man waiting for you in a room next to this dining room,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘His name’s Chan Bing.’

‘What does he want?’

‘He wants to inform you that the police have arrested a man who was involved in the attack when you lost your bag.’

Birgitta felt her pulse rate increase. There was something sinister about what Hong Qiu said.

‘Why doesn’t he come in here if he wants to speak to me?’

‘He’s in uniform. He doesn’t want to disturb your breakfast.’

Birgitta Roslin flung her arms out wide in resignation. ‘I don’t have a problem with talking to people in uniform.’

She stood up and put her napkin down on the table. At that very moment Karin came into the room and looked at them in surprise. Birgitta was forced to explain what had happened, and introduced Hong Qiu.

‘I don’t really know what’s going on,’ she said to Karin. ‘The police have evidently caught one of the men who mugged me. Have your breakfast in peace. I’ll be back when I’ve heard what the police officer has to say.’

‘Why haven’t you said anything about this before?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘You’re worrying me now instead. I think I’m getting angry.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘We have to leave for the airport at ten o’clock.’

‘That’s two hours away.’

Birgitta followed Hong Qiu. The two men were still hovering in the background. They went down the corridor leading to the lifts and stopped outside a door standing ajar. As she stepped inside, Birgitta could see that it was a little conference room. At the far end of the oval table sat an elderly man smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a dark blue uniform with lots of stripes. His cap was lying on the table in front of him. He stood up and bowed to her, gesturing to a chair by his side. Hong Qiu stood by the window in the background.

Chan Bing had bloodshot eyes and thin hair combed back. Birgitta Roslin had the impression that the man sitting next to her was very dangerous. He drew deeply on his cigarette. There were already three butts in the ashtray.

Hong Qiu said something; Chan nodded. Birgitta tried to remember if she had met anybody with more red stars on his epaulettes than this man had.

Chan Bing’s voice was hoarse when he spoke. ‘We arrested one of the two men who attacked you. We ask you to point him for us.’

Chan Bing’s English was hesitant, but he could make himself understood.

‘But I didn’t see anything.’

‘Always you see more than you think.’

‘They were behind me the entire time. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.’

Chan’s face was expressionless.

‘You in fact do. In tense, dangerous situations you see through the back of your head.’

‘That might be true in China, but not in Sweden. I have never heard of an accused being found guilty because somebody saw him through eyes in the back of their head.’

‘There are other witnesses. It is not only you who will point out your attacker. Other witnesses will identify him also.’

Birgitta looked appealingly at Hong Qiu, who was staring at a spot way above her head.

‘I have to fly home,’ said Birgitta. ‘My friend and I must leave this hotel two hours from now and go to the airport. I have my bag back. The help I’ve received from the police in this country has been excellent. I might well write an article for a Swedish legal magazine describing my experiences and the gratitude I owe to China. But I will not be able to identify a possible attacker.’

‘Our request for your cooperation is not unreasonable. The laws in this country say you have a duty to be at the police’s disposal when they are solving a serious crime.’

‘But I’m about to go home. How long will it take?’

‘Unlikely more than a day.’

‘That’s not possible.’

Hong Qiu had approached without Birgitta noticing. ‘We will naturally help you to rebook your tickets,’ she said.

Birgitta Roslin slammed her hand down on the table. ‘I am going home today. I refuse to extend my stay by another day.’

‘Chan Bing is a very high-ranking police officer. What he says goes. He can force you to stay in China.’

‘Then I demand to speak to my embassy.’

‘Of course.’

Hong Qiu placed a mobile phone on the table in front of Birgitta and a piece of paper with a telephone number. ‘The embassy will open one hour from now.’

‘Why should I be forced to go along with this?’

‘We don’t want to punish an innocent man, but nor do we want a guilty man to go free.’

Birgitta Roslin stared at her and realised that she would be forced to stay in Beijing for at least one more day. They had made up their minds to keep her here. The best I can do is to accept the situation, she thought. But nobody is going to force me to identify an attacker I have never seen before.

‘I must speak to my friend,’ she said. ‘What will happen to my baggage?’

‘The room will still be reserved in your name,’ said Hong Qiu.

‘I take it you’ve already arranged that. When was it decided that I should be forced to stay? Yesterday? The day before? Last night?’

She received no reply. Chan Bing lit another cigarette and said something to Hong Qiu.

‘What did he say?’ asked Birgitta.

‘That we must hurry up. Chan Bing is a busy man.’

‘Who is he?’

Hong Qiu explained while they were walking along the corridor. ‘Chan Bing is a very experienced detective. He is responsible for incidents that affect people like you, guests in our country.’

‘I didn’t like him.’

‘Why not?’

Birgitta Roslin stopped. ‘If I’m going to stay on for another day, I want you to be with me. Otherwise I’m not going to leave this hotel until the embassy is open and I’ve spoken to them.’

‘I’ll be there.’

They continued to the dining room. Karin Wiman was just about to leave her table when they arrived. Birgitta explained what had happened. Karin eyed her even more curiously.

‘Why didn’t you say anything about this before? Then we’d have been prepared for something like this, that you might have to stay on.’

‘Like I said, I didn’t want to worry you. I didn’t want to worry myself either. I thought it was all over. I’d got my bag back. But now I’m going to have to stay until tomorrow.’

‘Is it really necessary?’

‘The policeman I just spoke to didn’t seem the type to change his mind.’

‘Do you want me to stay as well?’

‘No, you go. I’ll follow tomorrow. I’ll call home and explain what’s happened.’

Karin was still hesitant. Birgitta steered her towards the exit.

‘Go. I’ll stay and sort this business out. Apparently the laws in this country say that I’m not allowed to leave until I’ve helped them.’

‘But you said you didn’t see whoever it was who attacked you.’

‘And that’s what I’m going to tell them, and stick to it. Go now! When I get home we’ll have to get together and look at our pictures of the Wall.’

Birgitta watched Karin walk towards the lifts. As Birgitta had taken her coat down to the dining room, she was ready to leave right away.

She travelled in the same car as Hong Qiu and Chan Bing. Motorcycles with wailing sirens cleared a way through the dense traffic. They passed through Tiananmen Square and continued along one of the wide central streets until they turned off into the entrance of an underground garage guarded by police officers. They took a lift up to the fourteenth floor, then walked along a corridor past uniformed men who eyed her curiously. Now it was Chan Bing walking beside her, not Hong Qiu. She is not the most important person in this building, Birgitta thought. Here it’s Mr Chan who calls the shots.

They came to the anteroom of a large office where police officers jumped to attention. The door closed behind them in what she assumed was Chan’s office. A portrait of the country’s president hung on the wall behind his desk. She saw that Chan had a modern computer and several mobile phones. He pointed to a chair. Birgitta sat down. Hong Qiu had remained in the anteroom.

‘Lao San,’ said Chan Bing. ‘That’s the name of the man you will soon meet and pick out from among nine others.’

‘How many times do I have to repeat that I didn’t see the men who attacked me?’

She suddenly felt afraid. All too late it occurred to her that both Hong Qiu and Chan Bing might know that she was looking for Wang Min Hao. That was why she was here. In some way she had become a danger. The question was: to whom?

They both know, she thought. Hong Qiu is not present because she already knows what Chan Bing is going to talk to me about.

The photograph was still in the inside pocket of her coat. She wondered whether she ought to produce it and explain to Chan Bing why she had gone to the place where she was attacked. But something told her not to. Just now it was Chan Bing playing the cat, and she was the mouse.

Chan shuffled some papers on his desk — not because he was going to read them, she could see that, but to fill in time while he made up his mind what to say.

‘How much money was stolen?’ he asked.

‘Sixty American dollars. And rather less in Chinese money.’

‘Rings? Jewellery? Credit card?’

‘Everything else was returned to me.’

There was a buzz from a telephone on his desk. Chan answered, listened, then hung up.

‘They’re ready,’ he said. ‘Now you see the man who attacked you.’

‘I thought there was more than one?’

‘Only one of the men who attacked you can still be interrogated.’

So the other man is dead, Birgitta thought, and began to feel sick. She wished she wasn’t here in Beijing. She ought to have insisted on going home with Karin Wiman. She had entered some kind of trap.

They went along a corridor, down some steps and through a door. The light was dim. A police officer was standing next to a curtain.

‘I’ll leave you alone,’ said Chan Bing. ‘As you understand, the men can’t see you. Speak into microphone on the table if you want somebody to walk forward or turn in profile.’

‘Who will I be speaking to?’

‘You speak to me. Take good time.’

‘There’s no point. I don’t know how many times I have to say that I didn’t see the faces of my attackers.’

Chan Bing didn’t reply. The curtain was pulled to one side, and Birgitta Roslin was left alone in the room. On the other side of the one-way mirror were a number of men in their thirties, simply dressed, some extremely thin. Their faces were new to her. She didn’t recognise any of them — even if she thought for a brief moment the man on the far left was a bit like the man caught on Sture Hermansson’s surveillance camera in Hudiksvall. But it wasn’t him. This man’s face was rounder, his lips thicker.

Chan Bing’s voice came from an invisible speaker. ‘Take time.’

‘I have never seen any of these men before.’

‘Let the impressions mature.’

‘Even if I stay here until tomorrow, none of my impressions will change.’

Chan Bing didn’t answer. She pressed the microphone button in annoyance.

‘I have never seen any of these men before.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now look carefully at this one.’

The man standing fourth from the left on the other side of the oneway mirror took a step forward. He was wearing a quilted jacket and patched trousers. His thin face was unshaven.

Chan Bing’s voice sounded tense. ‘Have you seen this man before?’

‘Never.’

‘He’s one of the men who attacked you. Lao San, twenty-nine years, previously punished for many crimes. His father was executed for murder.’

‘I’ve never seen him before.’

‘He has confessed to the crime.’

‘So you don’t need me anymore, then?’

A policeman who had been hidden in the shadows behind her stepped forward and closed the curtain. He beckoned her to follow him. They returned to the office where Chan Bing was already waiting. There was no sign of Hong Qiu.

‘We want to thank you for your help,’ said Chan. ‘Now remains only some formality. A record is being written out.’

‘A record of what?’

‘The confrontation with the criminal.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘I’m not a judge. What would happen to him in your country?’

‘That depends on the circumstances.’

‘Naturally our law system works the same way. We judge the criminal, his will to confess and the special circumstances.’

‘Is there any risk that he will be sentenced to death?’

‘Hardly,’ said Chan drily. ‘It is Western prejudice that in our country we condemn simple thieves to death. If he had used weapon it would be different.’

‘But his accomplice is dead?’

‘He resisted arrest. The two policemen he attacked are in intense care.’

‘How do you know that he was guilty?’

‘He resisted arrest.’

‘He might have had other reasons for that.’

‘The man you recently saw, Lao San, has confessed that it was his accomplice.’

‘But there is no proof?’

‘There is confession.’

It was clear to Birgitta that she would never be able to overcome Chan’s patience. She decided to do what she was asked to do, then leave China as quickly as possible.

A woman in police uniform came in with a file. She was careful to avoid looking at Birgitta.

Chan Bing read out what was written in the minutes. Birgitta thought he seemed to be in a hurry now. His patience is at an end, she thought. Or something else. He has what he wants, maybe.

In a long-winded document Chan Bing confirmed that Mrs Birgitta Roslin, Swedish citizen, had been unable to identify Lao San who was the perpetrator of the serious assault to which she had been subjected.

Chan Bing finished reading and handed the document over to her. It was written in English.

‘Sign,’ said Chan Bing. ‘Then you can go home.’

Birgitta Roslin read both pages carefully before adding her signature. Chan Bing lit a cigarette. He seemed to have forgotten already that she was there.

Hong Qiu entered the room. ‘We can go now,’ she said. ‘It’s all over.’

Birgitta said nothing on the way back to the hotel.

‘I assume there wasn’t a suitable flight available for me today?’

‘I’m afraid you will have to wait until tomorrow.’

There was a note for her at the front desk saying that she had been rebooked with Finnair the following day. She was about to say goodbye when Hong Qiu offered to collect her later for dinner. Birgitta agreed immediately. Being alone in Beijing was the last thing she wanted just now.

She entered the lift and thought of Karin, on her way home, airborne and invisible high up in the sky.

She called home immediately, but had problems working out the time difference. When Staffan answered, she could hear that she had woken him up.

‘Where are you?’

‘Still in Beijing.’

‘Why?’

‘I was delayed.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Here it’s one in the afternoon.’

‘Aren’t you on the way to Copenhagen now?’

‘I’m sorry if I woke you. I’ll be arriving at the same time I was supposed to arrive tomorrow, but a day later.’

‘Is everything OK?’

‘Everything’s fine.’

The connection was cut off. She tried to call again, but couldn’t get through. She sent a text confirming the change in plans.

When she finished, she looked around and had the feeling that somebody had been in her room while she had been detained by the police. Her suitcase was open. Her clothes were not as she had packed them. The night before, she had tried closing the lid to make sure that nothing was catching. She tried closing the lid again now, but it was impossible.

Then she realised — identifying an attacker was nothing more than a means of getting her out of her hotel room. Everything had gone very quickly once Chan Bing had finished reading the minutes to her. He must have been informed that whoever was searching her room had finished.

It’s not about my case, she thought. The police are searching my room for other reasons. Just as Hong Qiu suddenly appears at my table out of thin air.

There’s only one possible explanation. Somebody wants to know what I’m doing with a photograph of an unknown man outside the skyscraper next to a hospital. Perhaps that man isn’t such a mystery after all?

The fear she had felt earlier now hit her with full force. She started searching for cameras and microphones, looking behind pictures, examining lampshades, but she found nothing.

At the agreed time she met Hong Qiu in the lobby. Hong Qiu suggested they go to a famous restaurant, but Birgitta didn’t want to leave the hotel.

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Mr Chan Bing is a very trying man. All I want to do is to have a quick bite to eat, then go to sleep. I’m going home tomorrow.’

The final sentence was intended as a question. Hong Qiu nodded.

‘Yes, you’re going home tomorrow.’

They sat down by one of the tall windows. A pianist was playing on a small stage in the middle of the huge room, which contained both aquariums and fountains.

‘I recognise that tune,’ said Birgitta Roslin. ‘It’s an English song from the Second World War. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Perhaps it’s about us?’

‘I’ve always wanted to visit the Nordic countries. Who knows?’

Birgitta drank red wine. It made her tipsy on an empty stomach.

‘It’s all over now,’ she said. ‘I can go home. I’ve got my bag back and I’ve seen the Great Wall of China. I’ve convinced myself that the Chinese peasants’ revolt has made enormous strides forward. What has happened in this country is nothing less than a human miracle. When I was young I longed to be one of those marching with Mao’s Little Red Book in my hand, surrounded by thousands of other young people. You and I are about the same age. What did you dream of?’

‘I was one of the marchers.’

‘Convinced?’

‘We all were. Have you ever seen a circus or a theatre full of children? They screech with sheer joy. Not necessarily because of what they are seeing, but because they are together with a thousand other children in a tent or in a theatre. No teachers, no parents. They rule the world. If there are enough of you, you can be convinced of anything at all.’

‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

‘I’m about to answer it now. I was like those children in the tent. But I was also convinced that without Mao Zedong, China would never be able to raise itself out of its poverty. Being a Communist meant fighting against destitution and poverty.’

‘What happened next?’

‘What Mao had constantly warned against. That restlessness and dissatisfaction would always be there. But the dissatisfaction was caused by various different expectations. Only a fool thinks you can step into the same river twice. Today, I can see clearly how much of the future Mao predicted.’

‘Are you still a Communist?’

‘Yes. So far nothing has convinced me that there is any other way to combat the poverty, still so widespread in our country, than working together with my comrades.’

Birgitta gestured with one arm and accidentally knocked her wine glass, spilling a few drops on the tablecloth.

‘This hotel. When I wake up and look around, I could be anywhere in the world.’

‘There’s a long way to go yet.’

The food was served. The pianist had stopped playing. Birgitta was wrestling with her thoughts. Eventually she put down her knife and fork and looked at Hong Qiu, who stopped eating immediately.

‘Tell me the truth now. I’m about to go home. You don’t need to play games with me any longer. Who are you? Why have I been kept under surveillance all the time? Who is Chan Bing? Who was that man I was supposed to pick out? I don’t believe all that nonsense about it being connected with my bag and a foreigner being the victim of an unfortunate attack.’

She had expected Hong Qiu to react in some way, to drop some of the defences she had been hiding behind all the time, but she was unmoved.

‘What else could it be about, apart from the attack?’

‘Somebody has searched my room.’

‘Is anything missing?’ Hong Qiu asked.

‘No. But I know somebody has been there.’

‘If you like I can talk to the hotel’s head of security.’

‘I want you to answer my questions. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing, apart from my wanting our guests to feel secure in our country.’

‘Am I really supposed to believe that?’

‘Yes,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘I want you to believe what I say.’

Something in her voice led Birgitta Roslin to lose the desire to ask any further questions. She knew she wouldn’t get any answers. She would never know if it was Hong Qiu or Chan Bing who had been keeping watch on her all the time. There was an entrance and an exit, and Birgitta was running backwards and forwards down a corridor between them, with a blindfold over her eyes.

Hong Qiu accompanied her back to her room. Birgitta took hold of Hong Qiu’s wrist.

‘No more interference? No more muggers? No more people with faces I recognise suddenly turning up?’

‘I’ll collect you at twelve o’clock.’

Birgitta Roslin slept fitfully that night. She got up at the crack of dawn and had a quick breakfast in the dining room. She didn’t recognise any of the waitresses or guests. Before leaving her room she had hung the do not disturb notice and sprinkled some bath salts on the mat just inside the door. When she came back she could see that nobody had beenin the room.

As agreed, she was collected by Hong Qiu. When they came to the airport, Hong Qiu led her through a special security gate so that she didn’t need to queue.

They said their goodbyes at passport control. Hong Qiu handed over a small parcel.

‘A present from China.’

‘From you or the country?’

‘From both of us.’

Birgitta wondered if she might have been unfair to Hong Qiu after all. Perhaps she had only been doing her best to help the foreign visitor to forget the mugging.

‘Have a good flight,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘Maybe we’ll meet again one of these days.’

Birgitta went through passport control. When she turned round, Hong Qiu had vanished.

Only when she had settled down in her seat and the plane had taken off did she open the parcel. It was a porcelain miniature of a young girl waving Mao’s Little Red Book over her head.

Birgitta put it in her bag and closed her eyes. Her relief at being on the way home at last made her feel very tired.

When she arrived in Copenhagen, Staffan was there to meet her. That evening she sat by his side on the sofa and told him stories about the trip. But she said nothing about the mugging.

Karin Wiman called. Birgitta promised to visit her in Copenhagen as soon as possible.

The day after she got back, she went to see her doctor. Her blood pressure had gone down. If it stayed stable, she would be able to return to work in a few more days.

It was snowing lightly when she emerged into the street again. She could hardly wait to go back to work.

The next day she was in her office by seven in the morning and began sorting through the papers that had piled up on her desk, even though she was not officially back at work yet.

Snow was falling more heavily now, a layer growing thicker on her window ledge.

She placed the statuette from Hong Qiu, which had red cheeks and a big victorious smile, next to the telephone. She took the surveillance photograph out of her inside pocket and put it at the bottom of a drawer in her desk.

When she closed the drawer, she had the feeling that it was all over at last.