The Man from Beijing

26

Some thirty-five miles west of Beijing, not far from the ruins of the Yellow Emperor’s palace, were several grey buildings surrounded by high walls. They were sometimes used by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. The buildings looked less than imposing from the outside and comprised several large conference rooms, a kitchen and a restaurant, and were surrounded by grounds where the delegates could stretch their legs or conduct intimate private conversations. Only those in the innermost circles of the Communist Party knew that these buildings, which were always referred to as the Yellow Emperor, were used to house the most important discussions about the future of China.

And that is precisely what was happening one winter’s day in 2006. Early in the morning a number of black cars drove in at high speed through the gates in the wall, which closed again immediately. A fire was burning in the largest of the conference rooms. Nineteen men and three women were gathered there. Most of them were over sixty, the youngest about thirty-five. Everybody knew everybody else. As a group they formed the elite that in practice governed China, both politically and economically. The president and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces were absent. But delegates would report back to both when the conference was over and present the proposals they had all agreed upon.

There was only one item on the agenda for today. It had been formulated as a matter of great secrecy, and all those present had been sworn to silence. Anybody who broke that oath need have no doubt that he or she would disappear from public life without a trace.

In one of the private rooms a man in his forties was pacing restlessly. In his hand was the speech he had been working on for months, which he was due to deliver this morning. He knew that it was one of the most important documents ever to be presented to the inner circle of the Communist Party since China had become independent in 1949.

Yan Ba, who worked in futurology at Beijing University had been given the assignment by the president of China himself two years previously. From that day onward he had been relieved of all his professorial duties and assigned a staff of thirty assistants. The whole project had been shrouded in maximum secrecy and supervised by the president’s personal security service. The speech had been written on just one computer to which only Yan Ba had access. Nobody else had seen the text he was now holding in his hand.

Not a single sound penetrated the walls. According to rumour the room had once been a bedroom used by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing; after Mao’s death she had been arrested together with three others, the so-called Gang of Four, put on trial and had later committed suicide in prison. She had demanded absolute silence in whatever room she slept in. Builders and decorators had always travelled in advance to insulate her bedroom, and soldiers had been sent out to kill any dogs that might bark within hearing range of any temporary accommodation she was staying in.

Yan Ba checked his watch. It was ten minutes to nine. He would begin his lecture at precisely a quarter past. At seven o’clock he had taken a pill prescribed by his doctor. It was supposed to make him calm but not drowsy. He could feel that the nervousness really was ebbing away. If what was written on the papers in his hand became reality, there would be earth-shattering consequences throughout the world, not merely in China. But nobody would ever know that he was the person who had devised and formulated the proposals that had been put into practice. He would simply return to his professorship and his students. His salary would increase, and he had already moved into a larger flat in central Beijing. The pledge of secrecy he had signed would affect him for the rest of his life. Responsibility, criticism and perhaps also praise for what happened would go to the relevant politicians to whom he, like all other citizens, owed allegiance.

He sat by the window and drank a glass of water. Big changes do not take place on the battlefield, he thought. They happen behind locked doors. Alongside the leaders of the United States and Russia, the president of China is the most powerful man in the world. He must now make some momentous decisions. The people assembled here are his ears. They will listen to what Yan Ba has to say and make their judgements. The outcome will slowly seep out from the Yellow Emperor to the world at large.

Yan Ba was reminded of a journey he had made a few years earlier with a geologist friend. They had travelled to the remote mountainous regions where the source of the Yangtze River is located. They had followed the winding and increasingly narrow stream to a point where it was no more than a trickle of water.

His friend had put down his foot and said: ‘Now I am stopping the mighty Yangtze in its tracks.’

The memory of that incident had dogged him throughout the laborious months during which he had been working on his lecture about the future of China. He was now the person with the power to change the course of the mighty river.

Yan Ba picked up a list of the delegates who had begun to assemble in the conference room. He was familiar with all the names and never ceased to be astonished that they were gathering to listen to him. This was a group of the most powerful people in China: politicians, a few military men, economists, philosophers and not least the so-called grey mandarins who devised political strategies that were constantly being measured against reality. There were also a few of the country’s leading commentators on foreign affairs and representatives from the security organisations. All were part of an ingenious mix that made up the centre of power in China, with its population of more than a billion.

A door opened silently and a waitress dressed in white came in with the cup of tea he had ordered. The girl was very young and very beautiful. Without a word she put down the tray and left the room again.

When the time came at last, he examined his face in the mirror and smiled. He was ready to put down his foot and stop the river in its tracks.

It was completely silent when Yan Ba moved up to the lectern. He adjusted the microphone, arranged his papers and peered out at his audience, which looked shadowy in the dim light.

He started talking about the future: the reason he was standing there, why the president and the polituro had called on him to explain what major changes were now necessary. He told his audience what the president had said to him when he was given his task.

‘We have reached a point where a new and dramatic change of direction is required. If we don’t make the change, or if we make the wrong one, there is a serious risk that unrest could break out. Not even our loyal armed forces would be able to stand up to hundreds of millions of furious peasants intent on rebellion.’

That was how Yan Ba had seen his task. China was faced with a threat that had to be met by discerning and bold countermeasures. If not, the country could collapse into the same state of chaos it had experienced so many times before in its history.

Hidden behind the men and the few women sitting before him in the semi-darkness were hundreds of millions of peasants waiting impatiently for a new life, like the lives the expanding middle classes in urban areas were enjoying. Their patience was running out, developing into boundless fury and demands for immediate action. The time was ripe; the apple would soon fall to the ground and begin to decay if they did not rush to pick it up.

Yan Ba began his lecture by miming a symbolic fork in the road with his hands. ‘This is where we are now,’he said. ‘Our great revolution has led us here, to a point that our parents could never even have dreamed of. For a brief moment we can pause at this fork in the road and turn round and look back. In the distance is the destitution and suffering we come from. It is recent enough for the generation before ours to remember what it was like, living like rats. The rich landowners and the old public officials regarded the people as soulless vermin, fit for nothing apart from working themselves to death. We both can and should be astonished at how far we have progressed since then, thanks to our great party and the leaders who have led us along the right paths. We know that truth is always changing, that new decisions must constantly be made in order to ensure that the old principles of socialism and solidarity will survive. Life does not stop to wait; new demands are being made of us all the time, and we must seek out the knowledge to enable us to find the solutions to these new problems. We know that we can never attain an everlasting paradise to call our own. If we do believe that, paradise becomes a trap. There is no reality without struggle, no future without battles. We have learned that class differences will always manifest themselves, just as circumstances in the world keep on changing, countries going from strength to weakness and then back to strength. Mao Zedong said that there is constant unease under the skies, and we know that he was right — we are on a ship that requires us to navigate through channels whose depth we can never judge in advance. For even the sea floor is constantly shifting: there are threats to our existence and our future that cannot be seen.’

Yan Ba turned a page. He could sense the total concentration in the room. No one moved; everyone waited for what came next. He had planned to talk for five hours. That is what the delegates were expecting. When he told the president his lecture was written, he had been told that no pauses would be allowed. The delegates would have to remain in their seats from start to finish.

‘They must see the whole picture,’ the president had said. ‘The whole must not be split up. Every pause brings with it a risk that doubts would crop up, cracks in the coherent understanding that what we must do is necessary.’

He devoted the next hour to a historic overview of China, which underwent a series of dramatic changes not just during the last century but throughout the many centuries since Emperor Qin first laid the foundation of a united country. It was as if within this Middle Kingdom a long chain of hidden explosive charges had been laid. Only the most outstanding leaders, the ones with the sharpest visionary eyesight, would be able to predict the moments when the explosions would take place. Certain of these men, including Sun Yat-sen and not least Mao, had possessed what the ignorant population regarded as an almost magic ability to interpret their times — and would bring about the explosions that someone else, let us call her the nemesis divina of history, had placed along the invisible path that the Chinese nation had to traverse.

Needless to say, Yan Ba spent most of this part of his lecture talking about Mao and his era. Mao founded the first Communist dynasty. Not that the word ‘dynasty’ was used — that would have aroused echoes of the previous rule of terror — but everyone knew that was how the peasants who had spearheaded the revolution regarded Mao. He was an emperor, despite the fact that he allowed ordinary people to enter the Forbidden City and didn’t force them to step to one side, at risk of being beheaded if they didn’t, when the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman, went past. The time had now come, Yan Ba explained, to turn back once more to Mao and accept with humility that he had been right about how the future would evolve, even though he has been dead for thirty years. His voice was still very much alive; he had the capabilities of a prophet and a scientist to see into the future, to shine his own kind of light into the dark of future decades.

But what had Mao been right about? There was a lot he had got wrong. The leader of the first Communist dynasty had not always treated his contemporaries the way he should have. He had been at the forefront when the country had been liberated, and the dream of freedom, the spiritual content of the liberation struggle itself, according to Yan Ba, was about the right of even the poorest peasant to hope for a better future without risking being beheaded by some despicable landowner. Instead, the landowners were now the ones who would be decapitated; it would be their blood that enriched the earth, not that of the poor peasants.

But Mao had been wrong in thinking that China would be able to make enormous economic advances in just a few years. He maintained that one iron foundry should always be sufficiently close to another for the workers to see the smoke from each stack signalling to one another. The Great Leap Forward, which was supposed to project China into both the present and the future, was a huge mistake. Instead of large-scale industrial production, there were people in their backyards melting down old forks and saucepans in primitive furnaces. The Great Leap Forward failed; Chinese workers were unable to jump over the bar because their leaders raised it too high. It was now impossible for anyone to deny, even though Chinese historians had to be sparing with the truth when describing difficult times, that millions of people had starved to death. There was a period of some years when Mao’s rule was not unlike earlier imperial dynasties. Mao had locked himself into his rooms in the Forbidden City and never admitted that the Great Leap Forward had been a failure. Nobody was allowed to talk about it. But nobody could know what Mao actually thought. In the writings of the Great Helmsman there was always an area conspicuous by its absence: he concealed his innermost thoughts. No one knows if Mao ever woke up at four in the morning, the bleakest time of day, and wondered just what he had done. Did he lie awake and see the shadows of all the starving, dying people who had been sacrificed at the altar of his impossible dream, the Great Leap Forward?

Instead, Mao counter-attacked. Counter-attacked what? Yan Ba asked rhetorically, and paused for several seconds before answering. Counterattacked his own defeat, his own failed policies, and the danger that there might be whispering in the shadows, a backstairs coup. Mao’s exhortation to ‘bombard the headquarters’ — a new kind of explosive charge, you might say — was his reaction to what he saw around him. Mao mobilised young people, just as everyone does in a state of war. Mao exploited young people the way France, England and Germany did when they marched them off to the battlefields of the First World War to die with their dreams choked by the slushy mud. There was no need to go on about the Cultural Revolution — that was Mao’s second mistake, an almost entirely personal vendetta against the forces in society that challenged him.

By then Mao had started to grow old. The question of his successor was always at the top of his agenda. When the next in line, Lin Biao, turned out to be a traitor and perished in a plane crash on his way to Moscow, Mao began to lose control. But to the very end he continued to issue challenges to those who would outlive him. There would be new class warfare; new groups would try to benefit at the expense of others. Or as Mao repeated as a mantra, ‘Each individual will be replaced by his opposite.’ Only the stupid, the naive, anyone who refused to see, would imagine that China’s future was assured once and for all.

‘Now,’ said Yan Ba, ’Mao — our great leader — has been dead for thirty years. We can see that he was right. But he was unable to identify precisely the conflicts he predicted would come. Nor did he try to do so, because he knew that was impossible. History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.’

Yan Ba noticed that the audience was still concentrating hard on every word he said. Now that he had finished his historical introduction, he knew they would be listening even more intently. Many no doubt had a premonition of what was about to come. Yan Ba was aware that he was giving one of the most important speeches in the history of the new China. One day his words would be repeated by the president.

There was a little clock placed discreetly next to the lamp on the lectern. Yan Ba began the second hour of his lecture by describing China’s present situation and the changes that were necessary. He described the widening gap between different groups of citizens that was now threatening future developments. It had been necessary to strengthen the coastal areas and the big industrial centres that were at the very heart of economic progress. After Mao’s death Deng had decided rightly that there was only one way to go: to emerge from isolation and open Chinese ports to the world. He quoted from Deng’s famous speech, which declared that ‘our doors are now opening and can never again be closed’. The future of China could only be fashioned by cooperation with the world around it. Deng’s understanding of how capitalism and market forces worked so ingeniously together had convinced him that the moment when the apple could be picked was soon; China could once more and with conviction assume its role as the Middle Kingdom, a great power in the making and, in some thirty or forty years’ time, the world’s leading nation both politically and economically. During the past twenty years China had developed economically in a way that was without precedent. Deng had once expressed it by saying that the leap forward from every citizen owning a pair of trousers to a situation in which every citizen could choose to acquire a second pair was a leap greater than that first one. Those who understood Deng’s way of expressing himself knew that he meant something very basic: not everybody could be in a position to acquire that second pair at the same moment. That hadn’t been possible in Mao’s time either: the poorest peasants living in the remotest areas in their squalid villages were the last in line, long after the urban dwellers had cast off their old clothes. Deng knew that progress could not take place everywhere simultaneously. That went against all economic laws. Progress was a sort of tightrope walk, attempting to ensure that neither wealth nor poverty grew so fast that the Communist Party and its inner circles, who were the tightrope walkers, fell off and hurtled down into the abyss. Deng was no longer with us, but the moment he had feared and warned us about, the point at which balance was in danger of being lost, was now upon us.

Yan Ba had reached the section of his lecture in which two words would dominate: one was ‘threat’ and the other ‘necessity’. The biggest threat came from the gap in living standards — while those who lived in the coastal cities could see their lot in life improving, the rural peasants found that nothing had changed, and they could barely make a living from their agriculture. The only course open to them was to migrate to urban areas in the hope of finding work. The authorities encouraged this, especially in the industries that made goods for the West, toys and clothes. But what would happen when these industrial cities, these seething building sites, could no longer cope with the influx? How would it be possible to prevent hundreds of millions of people, who had nothing to lose but their poverty, from rebelling? Mao had said it was always right to rebel. So why should it be wrong if those who were just as poor now as they were twenty years ago were to rise up in protest?

Yan Ba knew that many of those listening to his lecture had spent a long time thinking about this problem. He also knew that a few copies had been printed of a plan incorporating an extreme solution. Nobody spoke about it, but everybody who was familiar with the Chinese Communist Party’s way of thinking knew what it contained. The events that took place in Tiananmen Square in 1989 could be seen as a prologue proving the plan’s existence. The party would never allow chaos to break out. If it came to the worst, if no other solution could be found, the army would be called in. No matter how large the confrontation — ten or fifty million people — the party would retain its power over the citizens and the country.

‘The question is ultimately very simple,’ Yan Ba told them. ‘Is there any other solution?’ He provided the answer: yes, but it would require the highest level of strategic thought in order to bring it about. ‘But, ladies and gentlemen,’ Yan Ba continued, ‘these preparations have already begun, even if they appear to be concerned with something quite different.’

So far he had only spoken about China, history and the present. Now, as the third hour approached, he left China and discussed Africa.

‘Let us now travel,’ said Yan Ba, ‘to an entirely different continent, to Africa. In recent years, in order to secure sufficient supplies of raw materials, not least oil, to meet our needs, we have built up increasingly strong relationships with many African states. We have been generous with loans and gifts, but we do not interfere in the internal politics of these countries. We are neutral; we do business with everybody. As a result, it makes no difference to us if the land we are dealing with is Zimbabwe or Malawi, Sudan or Angola. Just as we reject any kind of foreign interference in our internal affairs and our legal system, we acknowledge that these countries are independent and that we cannot make any demands with regard to the way in which they are run. We are criticised for this approach, but this does not worry us because we know that behind such criticism is envy and fear, as the USA and Russia begin to realise that China is no longer the colossal nonentity they have imagined us to be for so long. People in the Western world refuse to understand that African nations prefer to cooperate with us. China has never oppressed them, nor colonised them. On the contrary, we supported them when they began to liberate themselves in the 1950s. Our friends in Africa turn to us when the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank rejects their applications for loans. We do not hesitate to help them. We do so with a clear conscience because we are also a poor country. We are still a part of the so-called Third World. As we have worked increasingly successfully with these countries, it has become clear that, in the long run, it may well be there that we find a part of the solution to the threat I talked about earlier this morning. For many of you, and perhaps also for me, my explanation for my thinking will be a historical paradox.

‘Let me suggest a parallel to illustrate what it was like in those countries fifty years ago. At that time Africa was made up almost exclusively of colonies suffering from the oppression of Western imperialism. We stood shoulder to shoulder with these people; we supported their liberation movements by supplying advice and weaponry. Not for nothing was Mao and his generation an example of how a well-organised guerrilla movement could overcome a superior enemy, how a thousand ants biting an elephant’s foot could bring it down. Our support contributed to the liberation of one country after another. We have seen how the tail of imperialism began to droop more and more. When our comrade Nelson Mandela was released from prison on the island where he had spent so many years, that was the final blow that defeated Western imperialism in the guise of colonialism. The liberation of Africa tilted the axis of the earth in the direction we believe indicates that freedom and justice will eventually be victorious. Now we can see that large areas of land, often very fertile, are lying in waste. Unlike ours, the Dark Continent is sparsely populated. And we have now realised that it offers us at least part of a solution to the circumstances that threaten our own stability.’

Yan Ba took a sip of water from the glass standing next to the microphone. Then he continued talking. He was coming to the point that he knew would lead to animated discussions not only among his listeners, but also within the Communist Party and the politburo.

‘We must be aware of what we are doing,’ said Yan Ba, ‘but we must also be aware of what we are not doing. What we are proposing both to you and the Africans is not another wave of colonisation. We are coming not as conquerors, but as friends. We have no intention of repeating the outrages that were inseparable from colonialism. We know what oppression means because so many of our forefathers lived in slave-like circumstances in the USA during the nineteenth century. We ourselves were subjected to the barbarity of European colonialism. The fact that on the surface, like reflections of the sun, there may appear to be similarities does not mean that we shall impose colonial regimes on the African continent for the second time. We shall simply solve a problem at the same time as we provide assistance to these people. In the deserted plains, in the fertile valleys through which the great African rivers flow, we shall farm the land by moving there millions of our peasants who, with no doubt at all, will begin to farm land lying fallow. We shall not be getting rid of people; we shall simply be filling a vacuum, and everybody will benefit from what comes to pass. There are lands in Africa, especially in the south and south-east, where enormous areas could be populated by the poor people from our own country. We would be making Africa fruitful and at the same time eliminating a threat that faces us. We know that we will meet with opposition, not only in the world at large where it will be alleged that China has shifted from being a supporter of liberation movements to becoming a coloniser itself. We will also come up against resistance within the Communist Party. The reason I am delivering this lecture is to clarify this opposition. There will be many divergent opinions among the leading lights of our country. You who are gathered here today have the good sense and insight to realise that a large part of the threat undermining our stability can be eliminated in the way I have described. New ways of thinking always arouse opposition. Nobody was more aware of that than Mao and Deng. They were brothers in the sense that they were never afraid of new ideas and were always on the lookout for ways to give the poor people of this world a better life, in the name of solidarity.’

Yan Ba continued for another hour and forty minutes to spell out what China’s policy would be in the near future. When he eventually finished he was so exhausted that his legs were shaking. But the applause was overwhelming. When silence returned and the lights went up, he checked his watch and found that the clapping had lasted for nineteen minutes. He had completed his task.

He left the podium the same way he had come and hurried to the car that was waiting for him outside one of the entrance doors. On the journey back to the university he tried to imagine the discussions that would follow. Or perhaps the delegates would have to disperse immediately? Each hastening back to his or her own territory to start preparing for the momentous developments in Chinese politics over the next few years?

Yan Ba didn’t know, and he felt a certain sense of loss, now that he had vacated the stage. He had done his job. Nobody would ever mention his name when future historians came to examine the revolutionary events that could be traced back to China in 2006. Legend would have it that a significant meeting took place at the Yellow Emperor, but exact details would remain unclear. Those attending the meeting had been given strict instructions — note-taking was not allowed.

When Yan Ba got back to his office he closed the door, fed his speech into the shredder and then took the rubbish to the boiler room in the university basement. A caretaker opened one of the fire doors. He threw in the shredded paper and watched it transform into ashes.

And that was that. He spent the rest of the day working on an article about the significance of DNA research. He left his office soon after six and headed home. He felt a little flutter of excitement as he approached his new Japanese car, which was part of the remuneration for the lecture he had delivered.

There was a lot of winter still to come. He longed for the spring.

That same evening Ya Ru stood by the window of his large office on the top floor of the skyscraper he owned. He was thinking about the speech he had heard that morning. But what intrigued him most was not the content of the lecture. He had been aware for some time of the strategies being developed in the innermost party circles to counteract the major challenges that were in store. What had surprised him was the presence of his sister Hong Qiu, that she had been invited to take part. Even though she was a highly placed adviser to members of the inner circle of the Communist Party, he had not expected to meet her there.

He didn’t like it. He was convinced that Hong Qiu was one of the old-style Communists who were bound to protest at what they would doubtless call a shameful neocolonisation of Africa. As he was one of the keenest supporters of the policy, he wasn’t looking forward to finding himself pitted against his sister. That could stir up trouble and threaten his position of power. If there was one thing the party leaders and those who governed the country disapproved of, it was conflicts between members of the same family in influential posts. Nobody had forgotten the bitter antagonism between Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing.

San’s diary lay open on Ya Ru’s desk. He still hadn’t filled in the empty white pages. But he knew that Liu Xin had returned from his mission and would soon be face-to-face with him, delivering his report.

A thermometer on the wall indicated that the temperature was falling.

Ya Ru smiled and dismissed thoughts about his sister and the cold weather. Instead he thought about how he would very soon be leaving the cold behind as a member of a delegation of politicians and businessmen, visiting four countries in southern and eastern Africa.

He had never been to Africa before. But now, when the Dark Continent would become increasingly significant for China’s development — perhaps even in the long run a Chinese satellite continent — it was important that he be present when fundamental business contacts were established.

The next weeks would be intensive, involving a lot of travelling and a lot of meetings. But he had resolved to leave the delegation for a few days before returning to Beijing. He would venture into the bush and hoped to see a leopard.

Beijing lay before him. One thing he knew about leopards was that they often sought out elevated viewpoints from which they had an overview of the countryside.

This is my hillock, he thought. My clifftop. From my vantage point up here, nothing escapes my notice.

27

In the morning of 7 March 2006, the businessman Shen Weixian had his death sentence confirmed by the People’s Supreme Court of Justice in Beijing. He had already been given a suspended death sentence the previous year. Despite the fact that he had spent the past twelve months expressing his regret for accepting bribes worth millions of yuan, the court was unable to change his sentence to life imprisonment. Popular objections to corrupt businessmen with good connections in the Communist Party had increased dramatically. The party had realised that it was now of vital importance to put the fear of death into people who amassed fortunes through bribery.

Shen Weixian was fifty-nine when he had his sentence confirmed. He had worked his way up from simple circumstances to become head of a large chain of abattoirs that specialised in pork products. He had been offered bribes to give preference to various suppliers and quite soon started to accept them. At first, in the early 1990s, he had been cautious and only taken small sums, careful not to adopt a lifestyle that was obviously beyond his apparent means. Towards the end of the 1990s, however, when nearly all his colleagues were accepting bribes, he became increasingly careless, demanding bigger and bigger sums as well as making no attempt to disguise his opulent lifestyle.

He would never have guessed that he would eventually become the scapegoat in order to scare the others. Until his final appearance in the dock he had been sure that his death sentence would be reduced to several years in jail and that he would be released early. When the judge passed the sentence, adding that the execution would be carried out within the next forty-eight hours, he was dumbfounded. Nobody in the courtroom dared look him in the eye. When the police led him away he started protesting, but it was too late. Nobody listened. He was moved immediately onto death row where prisoners were kept under round-the-clock observation before being led out, alone or with others, to a field, made to kneel down, their hands bound, and shot in the back of the head.

Under normal circumstances, prisoners sentenced to death for murder, rape, robbery or similar crimes were taken directly from court to the place of execution. Until the middle of the 1990s Chinese society had demonstrated its positive support for the death penalty by transporting the condemned prisoners on the back of an open truck. Executions would take place in front of a large crowd that would be given an opportunity to make a last-minute decision on whether a prisoner would in fact be shot, or spared. But the crowds that assembled on such occasions were never in the mood to show mercy. In recent years, such events had been arranged more discreetly. No film-makers or photographers who were not sanctioned by the state were allowed to document the executions. It was only after the sentence had been carried out that the newspapers reported the death. In order to avoid provoking what the political leaders regarded as hypocritical anger abroad, public announcements confirming executions were no longer made. Nobody but the Chinese authorities now knew the exact number carried out. Publicity was only allowed in the case of criminals like Shen Weixian, in order to send warnings to high-ranking officials and businessmen, and at the same time to calm public opinion, which was becoming increasingly critical of a society that made such corruption possible.

News of the confirmation of Shen Weixian’s death sentence spread very rapidly in Beijing political circles. Hong Qiu heard about it only a couple of hours after the judgement was made. She had met Shen Weixian briefly some years previously at a reception in the French embassy and had taken an instant dislike to him, suspecting intuitively that he was greedy and corrupt. However, Shen Weixian was a close friend of her brother, Ya Ru. Obviously Ya Ru would distance himself from Shen and deny that they had been more than casual acquaintances, but Hong Qiu knew the truth was different.

Hong Qiu had seen a lot of people die. She had been present at decapitations, hangings, firing-squad executions. Being executed for cheating the state was the most despicable death she could imagine. Who would want to be chucked onto the scrapheap of history with a shot in the back of the head? She shuddered at the thought. But she did not oppose the death penalty. Hong Qiu regarded it as a necessary weapon for the state to use in its defence, and that serious criminals should be deprived of the right to live in a society they had sought to undermine.

Nevertheless, she decided to visit Shen. She knew the governor, and so thought she stood a chance of seeing the prisoner.

The car pulled up at the prison gate. Before opening the car door, Hong Qiu checked the pavement through the tinted-glass windows. She saw several people she assumed were journalists or photographers. Then she stepped out of the car and hurried over to the door in the wall next to the tall gate. A warden opened it and let her in.

It was almost half an hour later when she was ushered by a warden deeper into the labyrinthine prison to the warden Ha Nin, whose office was on the top floor. She hadn’t seen him for many years and was surprised to see how much he had aged.

‘Ha Nin,’ she said, stretching out both arms. ‘It’s been so many years!’

He took her hands and squeezed them hard.

‘Hong Qiu. I can see one or two grey hairs on your head, just as you can on mine. Do you remember the last time we met?’

‘When Deng gave his speech on the necessity of rationalising our industries.’

‘Time passes quickly.’

‘It passes more quickly the older you are. I think death is approaching at great speed, so quickly that we perhaps won’t be able to realise what is happening.’

‘Like a grenade with the pin pulled? Death will explode in our faces?’

She withdrew her hands. ‘Like the flight of a bullet from the barrel of a rifle. I’ve come to speak to you about Shen Weixian.’

Ha Nin did not seem surprised. They sat down at a battered table. Ha Nin lit a cigarette. Hong Qiu came straight to the point. She wanted to see Shen, say goodbye, find out if there was anything she could do for him.

‘It’s very strange,’ said Ha Nin. ‘Shen knows your brother. He has begged Ya Ru to try and save his life. But Ya Ru refuses to talk to Shen and says that the death sentence is correct. Then you appear, Ya Ru’s sister.’

‘A man who deserves to die doesn’t necessarily deserve to have nobody do him a final favour or listen to his last words.’

‘I have received permission to let you visit him. If he wants you to.’

‘Does he?’

‘I don’t know. At this moment the prison doctor is in his cell, talking to him.’

Hong Qiu nodded, then turned away from Ha Nin as a signal that she didn’t want to discuss the matter further.

It was another half-hour before Ha Nin was called out to his anteroom. When he came back Hong Qiu was informed that Shen was prepared to receive her.

Shen was in the furthest cell, at the very end of the corridor. He normally had thick black hair, but it had been shaved off. He was wearing a blue prison uniform, the trousers too big, the jacket too small. Ha Nin stepped back and instructed one of the guards to unlock the door. When Hong Qiu stepped inside she could feel that the tiny room was steeped in angst and terror. Shen grasped her hand and sank down on his knees.

‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered.

She helped him to sit down on the bed, where there was a mattress and a blanket. She pulled up a stool and sat down opposite him.

‘You must be strong,’ she said. ‘That’s what people will remember. The fact that you died with dignity. You owe that to your family. But nobody can save you. Neither I nor anybody else.’

Shen stared wide-eyed at her. ‘I only did what everybody else was doing.’

‘Not everybody. But a lot of people. You must accept responsibility for what you did, and not degrade yourself further by lying.’

‘Why am I the one who has to die?’

‘It could have been somebody else. But you were the one. In the end everybody who is incorrigible will come to a similar end.’

Shen looked at his trembling fingers and shook his head.

‘Nobody wants to talk to me. It’s as if I’m not only going to die, but I’m completely alone in the world. Not even my family wants to come here and talk to me. I’m dead already.’

‘Ya Ru hasn’t come either.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘It’s really his fault that I’m here.’

‘I have no desire to help him.’

‘You misunderstand me. Ya Ru doesn’t need any help. He’s keeping his head down and denying that he ever had anything to do with you. Part of your fate is that everybody speaks ill of you. Ya Ru is no exception.’

‘Is that really true?’

‘I’m telling you the facts. There is just one thing I can do for you. I can help you to get revenge if you tell me about how you worked together with Ya Ru.’

‘But he’s your brother.’

‘The family bonds were cut through long ago. Ya Ru is dangerous for our country. Chinese society was built on the basis of individual honesty. Socialism cannot work and develop unless citizens are honest and behave decently. The likes of you and Ya Ru corrupt not only themselves, but the whole of society.’

At last Shen understood the point of Hong Qiu’s visit. It seemed to give him renewed strength and for the moment counteracted the fear that had taken possession of him. Hong Qiu knew that at any moment Shen would relapse and become so paralysed by the fear of death that he would no longer be able to answer her questions. And so she harried him, put him under pressure, as if he were once again undergoing a police interrogation.

‘You are locked up in a cell, waiting to die. Ya Ru is sitting in his office in the skyscraper he calls the Dragon’s Mountain. Is that fair?’

‘He could easily have been sitting here instead of me.’

‘Rumours about him abound. But Ya Ru is clever. Nobody can trace his footprints after he has passed by.’

Shen leaned towards her and lowered his voice. ‘Follow the money.’

‘Where will that lead?’

‘To the people who loaned him large sums so that he could build his castle. Where else could he have got all the millions he needed?’

‘From his business investments.’

‘In broken-down factories that make plastic ducks for Western children to play with in the bath? In backstreet sweatshops where they make shoes and T-shirts? He wouldn’t even be able to earn money like that from his brick kilns.’

Hong Qiu frowned. ‘Does Ya Ru have interests in factories making bricks? We have just heard that people are working there as slaves, burned as a punishment for not working hard enough.’

‘Ya Ru was warned of what was about to happen. He offloaded all his commitments before the big police raids took place. That’s his strength. He’s always tipped off in advance. He has spies everywhere.’

Shen suddenly clutched at his stomach, as if he were in acute pain. Hong Qiu could see the anguish in his face and just for a moment was close to feeling sympathy for him. He was only fifty-nine years old, had made a brilliant career for himself, and was now about to lose everything: his money, his comfortable life, the oasis he had built for his family in the midst of all the poverty. When Shen was arrested and charged, the newspapers had been full of shocking but also voluptuous details about how his two daughters used to fly regularly to Tokyo or Los Angeles to buy clothes. Hong Qiu could still recall a headline that had doubtless been thought up by the security services and the Ministry of the Interior: ‘THEY BUY CLOTHES WITH THE SAVINGS OF PIG FARMERS.’ That headline had cropped up over and over again. Letters to the editor had been published — no doubt written by the newspaper itself and checked by high-ranking civil servants with political responsibility for the outcome of Shen’s trial. The letters had suggested that Shen’s body be butchered and fed to the pigs. The only just way of punishing Shen was to turn him into pigswill.

‘I can’t save you,’ said Hong Qiu again. ‘But I can give you an opportunity to bring others down alongside you. I was given permission to speak to you for thirty minutes. That time is nearly up. You said that I should follow the money?’

‘He’s sometimes called Golden Hands.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Can it mean more than one thing? He is the golden intermediary. He makes black money white; he shifts money out of China; he puts money in accounts without the tax authorities having the slightest idea about what’s going on. He charges fifteen per cent on all the transactions he carries out. Not the least of his activities is laundering the money floating around in Beijing: the houses and arenas and other things that are currently being built for the Olympic Games two years from now.’

‘Is it possible to prove any of this?’

‘You need two hands,’ said Shen slowly. ‘One hand takes. But there has to be another hand that’s prepared to give. How often are they sentenced to death? The other hand, the one prepared to pay money in order to secure an advantage? Hardly ever. Why is one a bigger crook than the other? That’s why you should track down the sources of the money. Start with Chang and Lu, the building contractors. They are scared, and they’ll talk to protect themselves. They have the most amazing stories to tell.’

Shen fell silent. Hong Qiu thought about the struggle taking place behind the newspaper headlines between those who wanted to preserve the old residential district in central Beijing and those hoping to see it demolished to make way for the Olympic Games. She belonged to those who passionately defended the old residential area and had often dismissed angrily the accusation that she did so for sentimental reasons. By all means construct new buildings and renovate old ones, but short-term interests such as the Olympic Games should not be allowed to dictate the city’s appearance.

Hong Qiu could see that the questions she had been asking had managed to make Shen almost completely forget the execution that would soon be his fate. He started talking again.

‘Ya Ru is a vindictive person. They say that he never forgets an injustice to which he thinks he’s been subjected, no matter how minor it might have been. He also told me that he regards his family as a unique dynasty whose memory must be preserved at all costs. You had better look out and make sure he doesn’t regard you as a defector, betraying the family’s honour.’ Shen looked hard at Hong Qiu. ‘He will kill anybody who crosses him. I know that. Especially people who mock him. He has men he can always call upon when necessary. They crawl out from under stones and disappear again just as quickly. I heard recently that he sent one of his men to the USA. Rumour has it that there were dead bodies lying around when the man returned to Beijing. They say he’s been to Europe as well.’

‘The USA? Europe?’

‘That’s what rumour suggests.’

‘And does rumour tell the truth?’

‘Rumour always tells the truth. When lies and exaggerations have been filtered out, there is always a kernel of truth left behind. That’s what you need to look for.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Power not based on knowledge and a constant flow of information will eventually become impossible to defend.’

‘That didn’t help you.’

Shen didn’t reply. Hong Qiu thought about what he had said. It had surprised her.

She also thought about what the Swedish judge had said. Hong Qiu had recognised the man in the photograph Birgitta Roslin had shown her. Even if it was blurred, there was no doubt that it was Liu Xin, her brother’s bodyguard. Was there a connection between what Birgitta Roslin had told her and what Shen had just said? Could that be possible?

The warden reappeared in the corridor. Her time was up. Shen’s face suddenly turned white and he grabbed hold of her arm.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be alone when I die.’

Hong Qiu released herself from his hands. Shen started screaming. It was as if Hong Qiu was faced with a terrified child. The warden threw him down on the floor. Hong Qiu left the cell and hurried away as quickly as possible. Shen’s desperate cries followed her. They echoed in her ears until she was back in Ha Nin’s office. That was when she made up her mind. She would not leave Shen alone in his final moments.

Shortly before seven the next morning Hong Qiu turned up at the cordoned-off field used for executions. According to what she had heard, it was the place where the military trained before going on the attack in Tiananmen Square more than a decade earlier. But now there were nine people to be executed. Alongside crying and freezing cold relatives, Hong Qiu took up her position behind a barrier. Young soldiers with rifles in their hands were keeping watch. Hong Qiu observed the young man closest to her. He could hardly be more than nineteen years old.

She couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking. He was about the same age as her own son.

A covered truck rumbled into the field. The nine condemned prisoners were taken down from the back by impatient soldiers. Hong Qiu had always been surprised by how fast everything went on such occasions. There was no dignity in dying in this cold, wet field. She saw Shen fall over when he was pushed down from the back of the truck — he made no sound, but she could see tears rolling down his cheeks. One of the women was screaming. One of the soldiers barked an order at her, but she carried on screaming until an officer stepped forward and hit her hard in the face with a pistol butt. She fell silent and was dragged to her place in the row. All were forced to kneel down. Soldiers with rifles stood behind each of the prisoners. The gun barrels were barely a foot away from the backs of their heads. Then it all happened in a flash. An officer gave an order, shots were fired and the prisoners fell forward with their faces buried in the wet mud. When the officer walked along the row and gave each of them the coup de grâce, Hong Qiu looked away. Now she didn’t need to see any more. The next of kin of the dead would be billed for the cost of the two bullets. They would have to pay for the death of their relatives.

Over the next few days she thought about what Shen had told her. His words about Ya Ru’s vindictiveness echoed around her head. She knew that in the past he hadn’t hesitated to resort to violence. Brutally, almost sadistically. She sometimes thought her brother was a psychopath at heart. Thanks to Shen, who was now dead, she might get some insight into who he really was, this brother of hers.

Now the time was ripe. She would talk to one of the prosecutors who devoted themselves exclusively to accusations of corruption.

She didn’t hesitate. Shen had spoken the truth.

Three days later, late in the evening, Hong Qiu arrived at a military airfield outside Beijing. Two of Air China’s biggest passenger jets were standing there, bathed in light, waiting for the delegation of nearly four hundred people who were going to visit Zimbabwe.

Hong Qiu’s role was to conduct discussions about closer cooperation between the Zimbabwean and Chinese security services — the Chinese would pass on knowledge and techniques to their African colleagues.

As a privileged passenger, she was allocated a place at the front end of the aircraft, where the seats were bigger and more comfortable. Hong Qiu fell asleep soon after the meal was served and the lights had been dimmed.

She was woken up by somebody sitting down on the empty seat beside her. When she opened her eyes, she found herself looking into Ya Ru’s smiling face.

‘Surprised, my dear sister? You couldn’t find my name on the list of participants for the simple reason that not everybody on board is included on it. I knew you would be here, of course.’

‘I should have known you wouldn’t let an opportunity like this slip through your fingers.’

‘Africa is a part of the world. Now that the Western powers are increasingly deserting the continent, it’s time for China to step out of the wings, of course. I am anticipating huge successes for our fatherland.’

‘I see China drifting further and further away from its ideals.’

Ya Ru raised his hands defensively. ‘Not now, not in the middle of the night. Way down below us the world is fast asleep. Perhaps we are flying over Vietnam at this very moment, or perhaps we’ve gone further than that. But let’s not argue. Let’s get some sleep. The questions you want to ask me can wait. Or perhaps I should call them complaints?’

Ya Ru stood up and walked off down the aisle to the staircase leading up to the upper deck, which was directly behind the nose of the aircraft.

She closed her eyes again. It won’t be possible to avoid this, she thought. The moment is approaching when the huge gap between us can no longer be concealed, nor should it be. Just as the enormous split running straight through the Communist Party cannot and should not be concealed. Our private feud mirrors the battle the country faces.

She eventually succeeded in falling asleep. She would never be able to do battle with her brother without a good night’s sleep.

Over her head Ya Ru was sitting wide awake with a drink in his hand. He had realised in all seriousness that he hated his sister Hong Qiu. He would have to get rid of her. She no longer belonged to the family he worshipped. She interfered in too many things that were none of her business. Only the day before they left he had heard through his contacts that Hong Qiu had paid a visit to one of the prosecutors leading the investigation into corruption. He had no doubt that he had been the topic of discussion.

Moreover, his friend, the high-ranking police officer Chan Bing, had told him that Hong Qiu had been displaying an interest in a Swedish female judge who had been visiting Beijing. Ya Ru would talk to Chan Bing when he got back from Africa. He told himself that she would lose this battle before it had even begun in earnest.

Ya Ru was surprised to find that he didn’t even hesitate. But now nothing would be allowed to stand in his way. Not even his dear sister, currently below him in the same plane.

Ya Ru made himself comfortable on a chair that could be converted into a bed. Soon he was also asleep.

Underneath him was the Indian Ocean and in the distance the coast of Africa, still veiled in darkness.

28

Hong Qiu was sitting on the veranda outside the bungalow she would be staying in during the visit to Zimbabwe. The cold winter of Beijing seemed far away, replaced by the warm African night. She listened to the sounds emanating from the darkness, especially the high-pitched sawing of the cicadas. Despite the warmth of the evening she was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, as she had been warned of the profusion of mosquitoes carrying malaria. What she would most have liked to do was strip naked, move the bed out onto the veranda, and sleep directly under the night sky. She had never before experienced such heat as overwhelmed her when she stepped off the plane into the African dawn. It was a liberation. The cold restrains us with handcuffs, she thought. Heat is the key that liberates us.

Her bungalow was surrounded by trees and bushes in an artificial village made for prominent guests of the Zimbabwean government. It had been built during Ian Smith’s time, when the white minority proclaimed unilateral independence from England in order to retain a racist white regime in the former colony, then called Rhodesia. At that time there was only a large guest house with an accompanying restaurant and swimming pool. Ian Smith often used it as a weekend retreat where he and his ministers could discuss the major problems faced by the increasingly isolated state. After 1980, when the white regime had collapsed, the country had been liberated and Robert Mugabe put in power, the area had been extended to include several bungalows, a network of country walks and a long veranda with views of the Logo River, where you could watch herds of elephants come to the riverbank at sundown to drink.

Hong Qiu could just make out a guard patrolling the path that meandered through the trees. Never before had she experienced darkness as compact as this African night. Anybody could be hiding out there — a beast of prey, be it with two legs or four.

The idea that her brother could be watching, waiting, gave her pause. As she sat in the darkness, she felt for the first time an all-consuming fear of him. It was as if she had only now realised that he was capable of doing anything to satisfy his greed for power, for increased wealth, for revenge.

She shuddered at the thought. When an insect bumped into her face, she gave a start. A glass standing on the bamboo table fell onto the stone paving and smashed. The cicadas fell silent for a moment before beginning to play once more.

Hong Qiu moved her chair in order to avoid the risk of standing on the glass shards. On the table was her schedule. This first day had been spent watching and listening to an endless march of soldiers and military bands. Then the big delegation had been conveyed in a caravan of cars, escorted by motorcycles, to a lunch at which ministers had delivered long speeches and proposed toasts. According to the programme President Mugabe should have been present, but he never showed up. When the lengthy lunch was over, they had at last been able to move into their bungalows. The camp was a few dozen miles outside Harare, to the south-west. Through the car windows Hong Qiu could see the barren countryside and the grey villages, and it struck her that poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory greyness, the only form of expression available to poverty.

In the late afternoon there had been a meeting to plan the work to be done over the coming days, but Hong Qiu preferred to stay in her room and go through the material herself. Then she had gone for a long walk down to the river and watched the elephants moving slowly through the bush and the heads of the hippos popping out above the surface of the water. She had been almost alone down there, her only companions a chemist from Beijing University and one of the radical market economists who had trained during Deng’s time. She knew that the economist, whose name she had forgotten, was in close contact with Ya Ru. At first she wondered if her brother had sent a scout to keep an eye on her activities. But Hong Qiu dismissed the idea as a figment of her imagination — Ya Ru was more cunning than that.

Was the discussion she wanted to have with her brother going to be feasible? Was it not the case that the split dividing the Chinese Communist Party had already passed the point where it was possible to bridge the gap? It was not a matter of straightforward and solvable differences about which particular political strategy was most appropriate. It concerned fundamental disagreements, old ideals versus new ones that could only superficially be regarded as communist, based on the tradition that had created the republic fifty-seven years previously.

If men like her brother were allowed to call the shots, the final fixed bastions of Chinese society would be demolished. A wave of capitalist-inspired irresponsibility would sweep away all the remnants of institutions and ideals built up on the basis of solidarity. For Hong Qiu it was an undeniable truth that human beings were basically reasonable creatures, that solidarity was common sense and not primarily an emotion, and that, in spite of all setbacks, the world was progressing towards a point where reason would hold sway. But she was also convinced that nothing was certain in itself, that nothing in human society happened automatically. There were no natural laws to account for human behaviour.

Mao again. It was as if his face were beaming out there in the darkness. He knew what would happen, she thought. The future is never assured, once and for all. He repeated that wisdom, over and over again, but we didn’t listen. New groups would always emerge and seize privileges for themselves, new revolutions would constantly take place.

She sat on the veranda and let her thoughts come and go. Dozed off. She was woken by a noise. She listened. There it was again. Somebody was knocking on her door. She checked her watch. Midnight. Who would want to visit her this late? She wondered whether she should open the door. There was another knock. Somebody knows that I’m awake, she thought; somebody has seen me on the veranda. She went inside and peered through the peephole. An African was standing outside. He was wearing the hotel uniform. Curiosity got the better of her and she opened the door. The young man handed over a letter. She could see from her name on the envelope that it was Ya Ru’s handwriting. She gave the boy a few Zimbabwe dollars, unsure if it was too much or too little, and went back to the veranda. She read the short message.

She checked the text carefully, as if she expected to find a hidden message between the lines. She found none, nor could she fathom why he had sent her this message in the middle of the night.

She gazed out into the darkness and thought about the predators who have their prey in their sight, without the victims having the slightest idea of what is about to happen.

‘I can see you,’ she whispered. ‘No matter where you come from, I shall discover you in time. Never again will you be able to sit down beside me without my having seen you coming.’

Hong Qiu woke up early the next morning. She had slept fitfully, dreaming about shadows creeping up on her, menacing, faceless. Now she was on the veranda, watching the brief African dawn, the sun rising over the endless bush. A colourful kingfisher with its long beak landed on the veranda rail, then flew off immediately. The dew from the damp night glittered in the grass. From somewhere in the distance came African voices, somebody shouting, laughing. She was surrounded by strong aromas. She thought about the letter that had reached her in the middle of the night and urged herself to be alert. She somehow felt even more wary of Ya Ru in this foreign country.

At eight o’clock a specially selected group of delegates, headed by a trade minister and the mayors of Shanghai and Beijing, had gathered in a conference room off the hotel foyer. Mugabe’s face looked down from several walls with a smile that Hong Qiu couldn’t quite place: Was it friendly or scornful? In a loud voice the trade minister’s state secretary called the assembly to attention.

‘We shall now meet President Mugabe. The president will receive us in his palace. We shall enter in a single file, the usual distance between ministers and mayors and other delegates. We shall greet one another, listen to our national anthems, then sit down at a table in assigned seats. President Mugabe and our ministers will exchange greetings via interpreters, after which President Mugabe will deliver a short speech. We have not been given an advance copy. It could be anything from twenty minutes to three hours. Advance visits to the toilets are strongly advised. The speech will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Those of you who have been given prepared questions will raise your hands, introduce yourselves when called to speak and remain standing while President Mugabe answers. No follow-up questions are allowed, nor is anybody else in the delegation permitted to speak. After the meeting with the president, most of the delegation will visit a copper mine called Wandlana while the minister and selected delegates will continue their discussion with President Mugabe and an unknown number of his ministers.’

Hong Qiu looked at Ya Ru, who was leaning with half-closed eyes against a column at the back of the conference room. It was only when they left the room that they established eye contact. Ya Ru smiled at her before clambering into one of the cars intended for ministers, mayors and specially selected delegates. Hong Qiu sat down in one of the buses waiting outside the hotel.

Her apprehension was growing all the time. I must speak to somebody, she thought, somebody who will understand my fear. She looked around the bus. She had known many of the older delegates for a long time. Most of them shared her view of political developments in China. But they are tired, she thought. They are now so old that they no longer react when danger threatens.

She continued searching, but in vain. There was nobody there she felt she could confide in. After the meeting with President Mugabe she would work once more through the whole list of participants. Surely there must be someone whom she could trust.

The bus headed for Harare at high speed. Through the window Hong Qiu could see the red soil stirred up by the people walking by the side of the road.

The bus suddenly stopped. A man sitting on the other side of the aisle explained to her.

‘We can’t all arrive at the same time,’ he said. ‘The cars with the most important people must arrive first. Then we will arrive, the political and economic ballet to make up the pretty background.’

Hong Qiu smiled. She had forgotten the name of the man who had spoken, but she knew that during the Cultural Revolution he had been a hard-pressed professor of physics. When he returned from his many privations in the country, he had immediately been put in charge of what was to become China’s space research institute. Hong Qiu suspected that he shared her views about the direction China ought to be taking. He was one of the old school still managing to keep going, not one of the youngsters who have never understood what it means to live a life in which something is more important than they are.

They had stopped close to a little marketplace running along both sides of the road. Hong Qiu knew that Zimbabwe was close to economic collapse. That was one of the reasons that their large delegation was visiting the country. Although this would never be made public, it was in fact President Mugabe who had begged the Chinese government to make a contribution towards helping Zimbabwe out of the country’s severe economic depression. The sanctions imposed by the West meant that the basic infrastructure of the country was close to collapse. Only a few days before leaving Beijing, Hong Qiu had read in a newspaper that inflation in Zimbabwe was now approaching 5,000 per cent. People tramping along by the edge of the road were moving very slowly. It seemed to Hong Qiu that they were either hungry or tired.

Hong Qiu suddenly noticed a woman kneeling down. She had a child in a carrier on her back and a head ring made from folded cloth for supporting heavy loads. Two men by her side helped each other to lift up a heavy sack of cement and balance it on her head. Then they helped her to stand up. Hong Qiu watched her stagger away. Without a second thought she stood up, hurried down the aisle and spoke to the interpreter.

‘Please come with me.’

The interpreter, who was a young woman, opened her mouth to protest, but Hong Qiu prevented her from speaking. The driver had opened the front door to allow a flow of air into the bus, which had already started to become stuffy, as the air conditioning wasn’t working. Hong Qiu dragged along the interpreter to the other side of the road where the two men had settled down in the shade and were sharing a cigarette. The woman with the heavy burden on her head had already disappeared into the haze.

‘Find out how much the sack they put on the woman’s head weighs.’

‘About fifty kilos,’ the interpreter informed her after asking.

‘But that’s a horrific burden. Her back will be ruined before she’s thirty.’

The men merely laughed.

‘We’re proud of our women. They’re very strong.’

Hong Qiu could see in their eyes that they didn’t understand what the problem was. Women here suffer the same difficulties that our poor Chinese peasants have to put up with, she thought. Women always carry heavy burdens on their heads, but even worse are the burdens they have to bear inside their heads.

She returned to the bus with the interpreter. Shortly afterwards they set off — now they had an escort of motorcycles. Hong Qiu let the wind from the open window blow into her face.

She would not forget the woman with the sack of cement on her head.

The meeting with President Robert Mugabe lasted four hours. When he came into the room he looked more like a friendly schoolmaster than anything else. When he shook hands with her he was looking beyond her, a man in another world who just brushed against her in passing. After the meeting he would have no memory of her. She knew that this little man, who radiated strength despite being both old and frail, was described by some as a bloodthirsty tyrant who tormented his own people by destroying their homes and chasing them off their land whenever it suited him. But others regarded him as a hero who never gave up the fight against the remnants of colonial power he stubbornly insisted lay behind all of Zimbabwe’s problems.

What did she think herself? She knew too little about the politics to be able to form a definite opinion, but Robert Mugabe was a man who in many ways deserved her admiration and respect. Even if not everything he did was good, he was basically convinced that the roots of colonialism grew very deep and needed to be cut away not just once but many times. Not least of the reasons she respected him was she had read how he was constantly and brutally attacked in the Western media. Hong Qiu had lived long enough to know that loud protests from landowners and their newspapers were often intended to drown the cries of pain coming from those who were still suffering from torture inflicted by colonialism.

Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe were under siege. The West’s indignation had been extreme when, a few years previously, Mugabe had forcibly annexed land owned by the white farmers who still dominated the country and made hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans landless. The hatred of Mugabe increased for every white farmer who, in open confrontation with the landless blacks, was injured by rocks or bullets.

But Hong Qiu knew that as early as 1980, when Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, was liberated from Ian Smith’s fascist regime, Mugabe had offered the white farmers open discussions aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the vital question of landownership. His overtures had been greeted by silence on that first occasion and then many more times over the following fifteen years. Over and over again Mugabe had repeated his offer of negotiations but had received no response, only contemptuous silence. His patience had finally run out, and large numbers of farms were handed over to the landless. This was immediately condemned by the West and protests flowed in from all sides.

At that moment the image of Mugabe was changed from that of a freedom fighter to that of the classical African tyrant. He was depicted just as anti-Semites used to depict the Jews, and this man who had spearheaded the liberation of his country was ruthlessly defamed. Nobody mentioned that the former leaders of the Ian Smith regime, not least Smith himself, had been allowed to remain in Zimbabwe. Mugabe did not send them into the law courts and then to the gallows as the British used to do with rebellious black men in the colonies. But a refractory white man was not the same as a refractory black man.

She listened to Mugabe’s speech. He spoke slowly, his voice was mild, he never raised it even when talking about the sanctions that led to an increase in the infant mortality rate, widespread starvation, and more and more illegal immigration to South Africa alongside millions of others. Mugabe spoke about the opposition in Zimbabwe. ‘There have been incidents,’ Mugabe admitted. ‘But the foreign media never reports the attacks on those loyal to me and the party. We are always the ones who throw stones or make baton charges, but the others never throw firebombs, never maim or beat up their opponents.’

Mugabe spoke for a long time, but he spoke well. Hong Qiu reminded herself that this man was more than eighty years old. Like so many other African leaders he had spent a long time in jail during the drawn-out years when the colonial powers still believed they would be able to face down attacks on their supremacy. She knew that Zimbabwe was a corrupt country. It still had a long way to go. But it was too simple to place all the blame on Mugabe. The truth was more complicated.

She could see Ya Ru sitting at the other end of the table, closer to both the minister of trade and the lectern where Mugabe was speaking. He was doodling in his notepad. He used to do that even as a child, drawing matchstick men while he thought or listened, usually small devils jumping around, surrounded by burning bonfires. Nevertheless, Hong Qiu thought, he is most probably listening more intently than anybody else. He is sucking in every word to see what advantages he can gain in future business between the two countries, which is the real reason for our visit. What raw materials does Zimbabwe have that we need? How will we be able to get access to them at the cheapest price?

When the meeting was over and President Mugabe had left the big conference room, Ya Ru and Hong Qiu met each other by the doors. Her brother had been standing there, waiting for her. They each took a plate and filled it from the buffet table. Ya Ru drank wine, but Hong Qiu was content with a glass of water.

‘Why do you send me letters in the middle of the night?’

‘I had the irresistible feeling that it was important. I couldn’t wait.’

‘The man who knocked on my door knew that I was awake. How could he know that?’

Ya Ru raised an eyebrow in surprise.

‘There are different ways of knocking on a door, depending on whether the person behind it is awake or asleep.’

Ya Ru nodded. ‘My sister is very cunning.’

‘And don’t forget that I can see in the dark. I sat out on my veranda for a long time last night. Faces light up in the moonlight.’

‘But there wasn’t any moonlight last night?’

‘The stars produce a light that I’m able to intensify. Starlight can become moonlight.’

Ya Ru eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Are you challenging me to a trial of strength? Is that what you’re up to?’

‘Isn’t that what you’re doing?’

‘We must talk. In peace and quiet. Revolutionary things are taking place out here. We have closed in on Africa with a large but friendly armada. Now we are involved in the landings.’

‘Today I watched two men lift a sack containing over a hundred pounds of cement onto a woman’s head. My question to you is very simple. Why have we come here with an armada? Do we want to help that woman to alleviate her burden? Or do we want to join those lifting sacks onto her head?’

‘An important question that I’d be happy to discuss. But not now. The president is waiting.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Spend your evening on your veranda. If I haven’t knocked on your door by midnight, you can go to bed.’

Ya Ru put down his glass and left her with a smile. Hong Qiu noticed that the brief conversation had made her sweat. A voice announced that Hong Qiu’s bus would be leaving in thirty minutes. Hong Qiu filled her plate once more with tiny sandwiches. When she felt she had eaten enough, she made her way to the back of the palace where the bus was waiting. It was very hot, the sun reflecting off the white stone walls of the palace. She put on her sunglasses and a white hat she had brought in her bag. She was about to enter the bus when somebody spoke to her. She turned round.

‘Ma Li? What are you doing here?’

‘I came as a substitute for old Zu. He’s been struck down with thrombosis and couldn’t make it. I was called in to replace him. That’s why I’m not on the list of participants.’

‘I didn’t notice you on the way here this morning.’

‘Somebody pointed out to me rather sternly that I’d sat myself in one of the cars, which protocol forbade me to do. Now I’m where I ought to be.’

Hong Qiu reached out and grasped hold of Ma Li’s wrists. She was exactly what Hong Qiu had been hoping for. Somebody she could talk to. Ma Li had been a friend ever since her student days, after the Cultural Revolution. Hong Qiu recalled an occasion early one morning, in one of the university’s day rooms, when she had found Ma Li asleep on a chair. When she woke up, they started talking.

It seemed to be preordained that they should be friends. Hong Qiu could still remember one of the first conversations they’d had. Ma Li had said that it was now time to stop ‘bombarding headquarters’. That had been one of the things Mao had urged the cultural revolutionaries to do. Not even the very top officials in the Communist Party should be spared the necessary criticism. Ma Li maintained that, instead, it was now necessary for her to ‘bombard the vacuum inside my head, all the lack of knowledge that I have to fight against’.

Ma Li trained to become an economic analyst and was employed by the Ministry of Trade as one of a group of experts whose job it was to keep a constant check on currency variations throughout the world. Hong Qiu had become an adviser to the minister responsible for homeland security, for coordinating the top military leaders’ views on the country’s internal and external defence, especially protection for the political leaders. Hong Qiu had been at Ma Li’s wedding, but after the birth of Ma Li’s two children their meetings had been irregular.

But now they had met once again, on a bus behind Robert Mugabe’s palace. They spoke non-stop during the journey back to the camp. Hong Qiu noticed that Ma Li was at least as pleased as she was at their reunion. When they reached the hotel, they decided to take a walk to the big veranda with the magnificent views over the river. Neither of them had any important engagements until the following day, when Ma Li was due to visit an experimental farm and Hong Qiu was supposed to attend a discussion with a group of Zimbabwean military leaders at Victoria Falls.

The heat was oppressive as they walked down to the river. They could see flashes of lightning in the distance and hear faint rumbles of thunder. There was no sign of animal life. It seemed that the whole place had suddenly been deserted. When Ma Li took hold of Hong Qiu’s arm, she gave a start.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Ma Li, pointing.

Hong Qiu looked but couldn’t see any sign of movement in the thick bushes that lined the riverbank.

‘Behind that tree where the bark has been peeled off by elephants, next to the rock sticking up out of the ground like a spear.’

Now Hong Qiu saw it. The lion’s tail was swinging slowly, whipping against the red earth. Its eyes and mane were occasionally visible through the leaves.

‘You’ve got very good eyes,’ said Hong Qiu.

‘I’ve learned to notice things. Otherwise your surroundings can be dangerous. Even in a city, or a conference room, there can be traps to stumble into, if you’re not careful.’

In silence, almost reverentially, they watched the lion venture down to the river and begin lapping up the water. Out in the middle of the river, a few hippos’ heads bobbed up and down. A kingfisher just as colourful as the one on Hong Qiu’s veranda alighted on the rail, with a dragonfly in its beak.

‘Peace and quiet,’ said Ma Li. ‘I long for it more and more, the older I become. Perhaps it’s the first sign of getting old? Nobody wants to die surrounded by the noise from machines and radios. The progress we make costs us a lot in the way of silence. Can a person really live without the kind of quiet we are experiencing right now?’

‘You’re right,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘But what about the invisible threats to our lives? What do we do about them?’

‘I suppose you are thinking about pollution? Poisons? Plagues that are constantly mutating and changing their appearance?’

‘According to the World Health Organisation, Beijing is currently the dirtiest city in the world. Recent measurements recorded up to one hundred and forty-two micrograms of dirt particles per cubic metre of air. The equivalent figure in New York is twenty-seven, in Paris twenty-two. As we know only too well, the devil is always in the details.’

‘Just think of all the people who discover that for the first time in their lives it’s possible for them to buy a moped. How can you persuade them not to?’

‘By strengthening the party’s control over developments. What is produced by goods, and what is produced by thoughts.’

Ma Li stroked Hong Qiu’s cheek gently.

‘I’m so pleased every time I realise that I’m not alone. I’m not ashamed to maintain that baoxian yundong is what can rescue our country from disintegration and decay.’

‘A campaign to preserve the Communist Party’s right to lead,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘I agree with you. But at the same time we both know that the danger threatens to come from within. Once upon a time it was Mao’s wife who was the mole for the new upper class, despite the fact that she waved her red flag more ardently than anybody else. Today there are others hiding within the party who want nothing more than to undermine it and replace the stability we enjoy with a sort of capitalist freedom that nobody will be able to control.’

‘The stability has been lost already,’ said Ma Li. ‘As I’m an analyst who knows the way in which money flows in our country, I know much that neither you nor anybody else is aware of. But, of course, I’m not allowed to say anything.’

‘We are alone. The lion isn’t listening.’

Ma Li eyed her up and down. Hong Qiu knew exactly what she was thinking — can I trust her or can’t I?

‘Don’t say anything if you are in doubt,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘If you make the wrong choice when it comes to people you can rely on, you are both defenceless and helpless. That is insight we were given by Confucius.’

‘I trust you,’ said Ma Li. ‘Nevertheless, you can’t get away from the fact that one’s natural instincts for self-preservation always encourage caution.’

Hong Qiu pointed to the riverbank.

‘The lion has gone now. We didn’t notice when he left.’

Ma Li nodded.

‘This year the government has increased military expenditure by almost fifteen per cent,’ Hong Qiu continued. ‘In view of the fact that China doesn’t have any real enemies close at hand, naturally enough the Pentagon and the Kremlin wonder what is going on. Their analysts can see without too much of an effort that the state and the armed forces are preparing to cope with an inner rebellion. In addition, we are spending almost ten billion yuan on our Internet surveillance systems. These are figures impossible to conceal. But there’s another statistic that very few people know about. How many riots and mass protests do you think took place in our country during the past year?’

Ma Li thought for a moment before answering. ‘Five thousand, perhaps?’

Hong Qiu shook her head. ‘Nearly ninety thousand. Work out how many that is every day. It’s a figure that casts a shadow over everything the politburo undertakes. What Deng did fifteen years ago, when he liberalised the economy, was enough to tamp down most of the unrest in the country. But not any more, it isn’t. Especially when the cities are no longer able to find space and work for the hundreds of millions of peasants who are waiting impatiently for their turn to enjoy the good life we all dream about.’

‘What will happen?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. It makes sense to be worried and on the alert. There’s a power struggle going on in the party that’s more serious than it ever was in Mao’s day. Nobody can foresee what the outcome will be. The military is afraid of chaos that can’t be brought under control. You and I know that the only thing we can do, the one thing we have to do, is restore the basic principles that used to apply.’

‘Baoxian yundong.’

‘The only way. Our only way. It’s not possible to take a short cut to the future.’

A herd of elephants was making its way slowly down towards the river to drink. When a party of Western tourists came onto the veranda, the pair returned to the hotel foyer. Hong Qiu had intended to suggest that they eat together, but Ma Li forestalled her by saying that she had an engagement that evening.

‘We’re going to be here for two weeks,’ said Ma Li. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to talk about everything that’s happened.’

‘Everything that’s happened and is going to happen,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘All the things we don’t yet have an answer to.’

Hong Qiu watched Ma Li walk off on the other side of the big swimming pool. I’ll talk to her tomorrow, she thought. Just when I badly needed to talk to somebody, one of my oldest friends turned up out of the blue.

She dined alone that evening. A large party from the Chinese delegation had gathered around two long tables, but Hong Qiu preferred to be on her own.

Moths danced around the lamp over her head.

When she had finished eating she sat for a while at the bar by the swimming pool and drank a cup of tea. Some of the Chinese delegation got drunk and tried to make advances on the beautiful young waitresses moving from table to table. Hong Qiu was annoyed and left. In another China that would never have been allowed, she thought angrily. The security guards would have intervened by now. Anybody who got drunk and started throwing his weight around would never again have been allowed to represent China. They might even have been imprisoned. But these days, nobody pays any attention.

She sat down on her veranda and thought about the arrogance that followed in the wake of the licentious belief that a less regulated capitalist market system would be good for the country’s development. It had been Deng’s aim to make the Chinese wheels roll more quickly. But today the situation was different. We live with the risk of overheating, not only in our industries but also in our own brains, she thought. We don’t see the price we’re paying, in the form of polluted rivers, air that suffocates us, and millions of people desperate to flee from the rural areas.

Once, we came to the country that used to be called Rhodesia to support a liberation struggle. Now, almost thirty years after liberation was achieved, we come back as poorly disguised colonisers. My own brother is one of those selling out all our old ideals. He has none of the honest belief in the power and prosperity of the people that once liberated our own country.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the night. All thoughts of Ma Li and their conversation slowly ebbed away from her weary head.

She had almost fallen asleep when she heard a noise that pierced the song of the cicadas. It was a twig snapping.

She opened her eyes and sat up straight. The cicadas were silent. She knew that there was somebody in the vicinity.

She ran into her bungalow and locked the glass door. She switched off the light.

Her heart was pounding. She was scared.

Somebody was out there in the darkness. He had inadvertently stepped on a twig and snapped it under his foot.

She threw herself onto the bed, afraid that someone would force his way in.

But nobody emerged from the darkness. After waiting for almost an hour, she closed the curtains, sat down at the desk and wrote a letter that had been formulating itself in her head during the course of the day.

29

It took Hong Qiu several hours to write her summary of what had happened recently, with her brother and the strange information from the Swedish judge, Birgitta Roslin, as the starting point. She did it to protect herself. She established once and for all that her brother was corrupt and one of the people well on the way to taking over China. In addition, he and his bodyguard Liu Xan might be involved in several brutal murders far outside the country’s borders. She didn’t switch on the air conditioning so that she would be better able to hear any sounds from outside. The night insects were buzzing around the lamp in the stiflingly hot room, and heavy drops of sweat kept dripping onto the desk. She had every reason to feel worried. She had lived long enough to be able to distinguish between real and imagined dangers.

Ya Ru was her brother, but above all else he was a man who didn’t hesitate to use any means in order to attain his goals. She was not opposed to development heading off in new directions. Just as the world around them was changing, so must China’s leaders think up new strategies to solve present and future problems. What Hong Qiu and many others of like mind questioned was that leaders were not combining socialistic foundations with development toward an economy in which free markets played a major role. Was the alternative impossible? A powerful country like China didn’t need to sell its soul in the hunt for oil and raw materials and new markets in which to place its industrial products. Was not the big challenge to demonstrate to the world that brutal imperialism and colonialism were not an inevitable consequence when one’s country developed?

Hong Qiu had seen greed take possession of young people who, by means of contacts, relatives and not least ruthlessness, had managed to create huge fortunes. They felt untouchable, and that made them even more brutal and cynical. She wanted to offer resistance to them and to Ya Ru. The future was not a foregone conclusion; everything was still possible.

When she had finished writing, read through the letter, and made some corrections and clarifications, she sealed the envelope, wrote Ma Li’s name on it, then lay down on top of the bed to sleep. There was no sound from the darkness outside. Although she was very tired, it was some time before she fell asleep.

She got up at seven o’clock and watched the sunrise from her veranda. Ma Li was already in the breakfast room when she arrived. Hong Qiu joined her, ordered tea from the waitress and looked around the room. Members of the Chinese delegation were sitting at most of the tables. Ma Li announced that she intended to go down to the river to watch the animals.

‘Come to my room an hour from now,’ said Hong Qiu in a low voice. ‘I’m in number twenty-two.’

Ma Li nodded and asked no questions. Just like me, she’s lived a life that has taught us that secrets are a constant presence, Hong Qiu thought.

She finished her breakfast, then retired to her room to wait for Ma Li. The trip to the experimental farm wasn’t scheduled until half past nine.

After exactly an hour Ma Li knocked on her door. Hong Qiu gave her the letter she’d written during the night.

‘If anything happens to me,’ she said, ‘this letter will be important. If I die in my bed of old age, you can burn it.’

Ma Li looked hard at her. ‘Should I be worried about you?’

‘No. But the letter’s important even so. For the sake of others. And for our country.’

Hong Qiu could see that Ma Li was surprised. But she asked no more questions, merely put the letter in her bag.

‘What’s on the agenda today for you?’ Ma Li wondered.

‘A discussion with members of Mugabe’s security service. We’re going to assist them.’

‘Weapons?’

‘Partly But first and foremost helping to train their staff, teach them close combat, and also the art of keeping watch on people.’

‘Something we’re expert at.’

‘Do I detect hidden criticism in what you just said?’

‘Of course not,’ said Ma Li in surprise.

‘You know I’ve always maintained the importance of our country protecting itself from the enemy within just as much as from the one without. Many countries in the West would like nothing better than to see Zimbabwe collapse into bloody chaos. England has never accepted totally that the country liberated itself in 1980. Mugabe is surrounded by enemies. It would be stupid of him not to demand that his security service should operate at the very top end of its ability.’

And he’s not stupid, I suppose?’

‘Robert Mugabe is bright enough to realise that he must resist all attempts from the former colonial power to kick the legs from beneath the ruling party. If Zimbabwe falls, there are many other countries that could go down the same road.’

Hong Qiu accompanied Ma Li to the door and watched her disappear along the paved path meandering through the luxuriant greenery.

Right next to Hong Qiu’s bungalow was a jacaranda tree. She gazed at its light blue blossoms, and tried to think of something to compare the colour with, but in vain. She picked up a flower that had fallen to the ground. She placed it between the pages of her diary in order to press and preserve it. She took her diary with her wherever she went, but seldom got round to writing in it.

She was just about to settle down on the veranda and study a report on the political opposition in Zimbabwe when there was a knock on the door. Standing outside was one of the Chinese tour guides, a middle-aged man by the name of Shu Fu. Hong Qiu had noticed earlier he seemed scared stiff that something would go wrong with the arrangements. He seemed to be highly unsuitable as a guide on a big venture like this one, especially because his English was far from satisfactory.

‘Mrs Hong,’ said Shu Fu. ‘There’s been a change of plan. The minister of trade wants to visit a neighbouring country, Mozambique, and he wants you to be one of the party that accompanies him.’

‘Why?’

Hong Qiu’s surprise was genuine. She had never been in close contact with the minister of trade, Ke, and indeed had barely done more than shake hands with him before leaving for Harare.

‘The trade minister has just asked me to inform you that you will be travelling with him. There will be a small delegation.’

‘When shall we be leaving? And where to?’

Shu Fu wiped the sweat from his brow, then flung out his arms. He pointed to his watch. ‘I am unable to tell you any more details. The cars will be leaving for the airport in forty-five minutes. No delay will be tolerated. Everyone involved is requested to take light baggage only and to be prepared for an overnight stay. But it’s possible that you will return as soon as this evening.’

‘Where are we going? What’s the point?’

‘Minister of Trade Ke will explain that.’

‘But surely you can tell me the name of the town we’re headed for?’

‘To the city of Beira on the Indian Ocean. According to the information I have the flight will be less than an hour.’

Hong Qiu had no opportunity to ask any more questions. Shu Fu hurried back to the path.

Hong Qiu stood motionless in the doorway. There is only one explanation, she thought. Ya Ru wants me to be there. He is obviously one of those going with Ke. And he wants me there as well.

She remembered something she had heard during the flight to Africa. President Kaunda of Zambia had demanded that the national airline Zambia Airways should invest in one of the world’s biggest passenger jets at that time, a Boeing 747. There was no market to justify such a large aircraft flying regularly between Lusaka and London. But it soon transpired that President Kaunda’s real aim was to use the 747 on his regular journeys to and from other countries. Not because he wanted to travel in luxury but to have enough space for the opposition, or those in his government and among the top military leaders that he didn’t trust. He crammed his aircraft full of those who were prepared to plot against him or even to engineer a coup d’état while he was out of the country.

Was Ya Ru trying something similar? Did he want to have his sister close by so that he could keep tabs on her?

Hong Qiu thought about the twig that had snapped in the darkness outside her bungalow. It could hardly have been Ya Ru standing out there in the shadows. More likely somebody he had sent to spy on her.

As Hong Qiu didn’t want to oppose Ke, she packed the smaller of her two suitcases and prepared for the journey. A few minutes before departure she went to the front desk. There was no sign of either Ke or Ya Ru. On the other hand, she thought she had caught sight of Ya Ru’s bodyguard Liu Xan, though she wasn’t sure. Shu Fu escorted her to one of the waiting limousines. Also in her car were two men she knew worked in the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing.

The airport was only a few miles outside Harare. The three cars in the convoy drove very fast with a motorcycle escort. Hong Qiu noticed that there were police officers at every street corner, holding up other traffic. They drove straight in through the airport gates and without further ado boarded a waiting Zimbabwe air force jet. Hong Qiu boarded through the rear entrance and noted that there was a screen separating the front half of the cabin. She assumed that this was Mugabe’s private aeroplane, which he had lent the Chinese delegation. After only a few minutes of waiting, the plane took off. Sitting next to Hong Qiu was one of Ke’s female secretaries.

‘Where are we going?’ Hong Qiu asked when they had reached cruising altitude and the pilot announced the journey would be fifty minutes.

‘To the Zambezi Valley,’ said the woman by her side.

Her tone made it obvious to Hong Qiu that there was no point in asking any more questions. She would eventually find out what was involved in this sudden trip.

Or was it really so sudden? It occurred to her that not even this was something she could be sure of. Perhaps it was all part of a plan that she knew nothing about?

When the aircraft prepared for descent, it swung out over the sea. Hong Qiu could see the blue-green water glittering down below and little fishing boats with simple triangular sails bobbing up and down on the waves. Beira was glistening white in the sunlight. Encircling the concrete centre of the city were endless shanty towns, possibly slums.

The heat hit her as she stepped out of the plane. She saw Ke walking towards the first of the waiting cars, which was not a black limousine but a white Land Cruiser with Mozambican flags on the hood. She watched Ya Ru get into the same car. He didn’t turn round to look for her. But he knows I’m here, Hong Qiu thought.

They headed north-west. Together with Hong Qiu in the car were the same two men from the Ministry of Agriculture. They were poring over small topographic maps, carefully checking them against the countryside they could see through the car windows. Hong Qiu still felt as uncomfortable as she had when Shu Fu first appeared outside her door and announced a change of plan. It was as if she had been forced into something that her experience and intuition warned her about, all alarm bells ringing. Ya Ru wants to have me here, she thought. But what arguments did he present to Ke that resulted in my sitting and bumping along in a Japanese car whipping up thick clouds of red soil? In China the soil is yellow; here it’s red, but it blows around just as easily and gets into your eyes and every pore.

The only plausible reason for her being present on this visit was that she was one of many in the Communist Party who were sceptical about current policies, not least those of Ke. But was she here as a hostage, or in the hope of seeing her change her mind about the policies she found so distasteful? High-ranking Ministry of Agriculture officials and a minister of trade on an uncomfortable car ride in the heart of Mozambique had to mean that the aim of the journey was of major significance.

The countryside flashing past outside the car windows was monotonous — low trees and bushes, occasionally intersected by small rivers and streams, and here and there clumps of huts and small well-tended fields. Hong Qiu was surprised that such fruitful ground was so sparsely populated. In her imagination the African continent was like China or India, a part of the poverty-stricken Third World where endless masses of people fell over one another in their efforts to survive. But what I’ve always imagined is a myth, she thought. The big African cities are not much different from what we see in Shanghai or Beijing. The culmination of catastrophic development that impoverishes both people and nature. But I knew nothing at all about African rural areas until now as I actually see them and travel through them.

They continued in a north-westerly direction. In some places the roads were so bad that the cars had to slow to a walking pace. The rain had penetrated the hard-packed red earth, loosened up the road surface and turned it into deep ruts.

They eventually came to place called Sachombe. It was an extensive village with huts, a few shops and some semi-derelict concrete buildings from the colonial period when the Portuguese administrators and their local assimilados had ruled over the country’s various provinces. Hong Qiu recalled reading about how Portugal’s dictator Salazar had described the gigantic land masses of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, which he ruled with an iron fist. In his linguistic world these distant countries were called ‘Portugal’s overseas territories’. That was where he had sent all his poor, often illiterate, peasants, partly to solve a domestic problem and at the same time to build up a colonial power structure concentrated on the coastal areas even as late as the 1950s. Are we about to do something similar? Hong Qiu wondered. We are repeating the injustice, but we have dressed ourselves in different costumes.

When they left their cars and wiped the dust and sweat from their faces, Hong Qiu discovered that the whole area was cordoned off by military vehicles and armed soldiers. Behind the barriers she could see curious natives observing the strange foreign guests. The poor are always there, she thought — the ones whose interests we say we are looking after.

Two large tents had been erected on the flat stretch of sand in front of the white buildings. Even before the convoy came to a halt a large number of black limousines had assembled, and there were also two helicopters from the Mozambique air force. I don’t know what’s in store, Hong Qiu thought, but whatever it is, it’s something important. What can have made Minister of Trade Ke suddenly agree to visit a country that isn’t even on our programme? A small part of the delegation was due to spend a day in Malawi and Tanzania, but there was no mention of Mozambique.

A brass band came marching up. At the same time a number of men emerged from one of the tents. Hong Qiu immediately recognised the short man leading the way. He had grey hair, wore glasses and was powerfully built. The man who was now greeting Minister of Trade Ke was none other than Mozambique’s newly elected president Guebuza. Ke introduced his delegation to the president and his attendants. When Hong Qiu shook his hand, she found herself looking into a pair of friendly yet piercing eyes. Guebuza is no doubt a man who never forgets a face, she thought. After the introductions, the band played the two national anthems. Hong Qiu stood stiffly to attention.

As she listened to the Mozambique national anthem she looked around for Ya Ru but could see no sign of him. She hadn’t seen him since they arrived in Sachombe. She continued scrutinising the group of Chinese present and established that several others had vanished after the landing in Beira. She shook her head. There was no point in her worrying about what Ya Ru was up to. More important just now was that she should try to understand what was about to happen here, in the valley through which the Zambezi River flowed.

They were led into one of the tents by young black men and women. A group of older women danced alongside them to the persistent rhythm of drums. Hong Qiu was placed in the back row. The floor of the tent was covered in carpets, and every memberof the delegation had a soft armchair. When everybody was comfortably seated, President Guebuza walked up to the lectern. Hong Qiu put on her earphones. The Portuguese was translated into perfect Chinese. Hong Qiu guessed that the interpreter came from the leading school in Beijing that exclusively trained interpreters to accompany the president, the government and the most important business delegations in their negotiations. Hong Qiu had once heard that there wasn’t a single language, no matter how small and insignificant, that didn’t have qualified interpreters in China. That made her proud. There was no limit to what her fellow citizens could achieve — the people who, until a generation ago, had been condemned to ignorance and misery.

Hong Qiu turned to look at the entrance to the tent, which was flapping gently in the breeze. She caught a glimpse of Shu Fu standing outside, a few soldiers, but no sign of Ya Ru.

The president spoke very briefly. He welcomed the Chinese delegation and said a few introductory words. Hong Qiu listened intently in order to understand what was going on around her.

She gave a start when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Ya Ru had slipped into the tent unnoticed and was kneeling behind her. He slid aside one of her earphones and whispered into her ear.

‘Listen carefully now, my dear sister, and you will understand something of the major events that are going to change our country and our world. This is what the future will look like.’

‘Where have you been?’

She blushed when she realised how idiotic the question must sound. It felt like when he was a child and was late coming home. Hong Qiu had often taken on the role of Mum when their parents were away at one of their frequent political meetings.

‘I go my own way. But I want you to listen now and learn something. About how old ideals are exchanged for new ones, without losing their content.’

Ya Ru placed the earphone back over her ear and hurried out through the door of the tent. She caught sight of his bodyguard Liu Xan and wondered once again if it really was he who had killed all those people Birgitta Roslin had spoken about. She made up her mind that as soon as she got back to Beijing she would speak to one of her friends in the police force. Liu Xan never did anything without having been ordered to do so by Ya Ru. She would confront Ya Ru eventually, but first she must find out more about what actually happened.

The president handed the podium over to the chairman of the committee that had made the preparations for this meeting on the Mozambique side. He was strikingly young, with a bald head and frameless glasses. Hong Qiu thought they said his name was Mapito, or possibly Mapiro. He spoke enthusiastically, as if what he was saying really inspired him.

And Hong Qiu understood. The circumstances slowly became clear, what the meeting was all about, the secrecy surrounding it. Deep in the Mozambique bush a gigantic project was getting under way, involving two of the poorest countries in the world — but one of them a great power, the other a small country in Africa. Hong Qiu listened to what was being said, the soft Chinese voice translating after each pause, and she understood why Ya Ru had wanted her to be present. Hong Qiu was a vigorous opponent of everything that could lead to China being transformed into an imperial power — and hence, as Mao used to say, a paper tiger that would be crushed sooner or later by united popular resistance. Perhaps Ya Ru had a faint hope that Hong Qiu would be convinced that what was now going on would bring advantages to both countries? But more important was that the group Hong Qiu belonged to did not frighten those in power. Neither Ke nor Ya Ru were scared of Hong Qiu and those who shared her views.

When Mapito paused to take a sip of water, Hong Qiu thought that this was precisely what she feared most of all: China had reverted to a class society. Even worse than what Mao had warned against; it would become a country divided between powerful elites and an underclass locked into its poverty. And worse still, it would allow itself to treat the rest of the world as imperialists always had done.

Mapito continued speaking.

‘Later today we shall travel by helicopter along the Zambezi River, as far up as Bandar, and then downstream to Luabo, where the huge delta linking the river to the sea begins. We shall fly over fertile areas that are sparsely populated. According to the calculations we have made, over the next five years we will be able to accommodate four million Chinese peasants who can farm the areas currently lying fallow. Not one single person will be obliged to move. Nobody will lose his livelihood. On the contrary, our fellow citizens will benefit from big changes. Everybody will have access to roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, all the things that have previously been available to very few in rural areas and a privilege for those living in towns.’

Hong Qiu had already heard rumours about Chinese authorities, working on the enforced removal of peasants because of the construction of huge dams, promising those affected that one day they would be able to live the life of landed gentry in Africa. She could see the large-scale migration in her mind’s eye. The fine-sounding words conjured up an idyllic image of the poor Chinese peasants — illiterate and ignorant — immediately settling down in this alien milieu. There would be no problems, thanks to the friendship and will to cooperate; no conflicts would arise between the newcomers and those already living on the banks of the river. But nobody would be able to convince her that what she was now listening to was not the first stage of China’s transformation into a predatory nation that would not hesitate to grab for itself all the oil and other raw materials needed to maintain the breakneck speed of its economic development. The Soviet Union had supplied weapons — often old, outdated ones — during the drawn-out liberation war that led to the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonisers from Mozambique in 1974. In return, the Soviets had asserted the right to overfish in Mozambique’s teeming fishing grounds. Was China now about to follow in this tradition based on the one and only commandment: always put your own advantage before everything else?

So as not to draw attention to herself, she applauded with everybody else when the speaker sat down. Then Minister of Trade Ke began to address the delegation. There were no dangers, he assured his audience: everything and everyone was uncompromisingly conjoined in equal and mutual advantage.

Ke’s speech was brief. Then the guests were ushered into the other tent, where a buffet table had been prepared. Hong Qiu was handed an ice-cold glass of wine. She looked around for Ya Ru, but could see no trace of him.

An hour later the helicopters took off and headed north-west. Hong Qiu gazed down on the mighty river. The few places where people lived, where the land had been cleared and cultivated, were in sharp contrast to the huge areas that were totally untouched. Hong Qiu wondered if she had been wrong after all. Perhaps China really was doing something to help Mozambique that wasn’t based on the expectation that China would put in far, far less than what it would take out?

The sound of the engines made it impossible for her to marshal her thoughts. The question remained unanswered.

Before climbing into the helicopter she had been handed a little map. She recognised it. The two men from the Ministry of Agriculture had been studying it during the car journey from Beira.

They reached the most-northerly point, then turned eastward. When they reached Luabo the helicopters made a short diversion over the sea before returning and landing at a place Hong Qiu identified, with the aid of the map, as Chinde. There new cars were waiting to take them along new roads made from the same tightly packed red earth that was everywhere.

They drove straight into the bush and stopped when they came to a small tributary of the Zambezi. The cars pulled up to a space that had been cleared of bushes and undergrowth. Some tents had been pitched in a semicircle facing the river. When Hong Qiu left the car, Ya Ru was waiting to greet her.

‘Welcome to Kaya Kwanga. That means “My Home” in one of the local languages. We’ll be spending the night here.’

He pointed to the tent closest to the river. A young black woman took her suitcase.

‘What are we doing here?’ Hong Qiu asked.

‘Enjoying the silence of Africa after a long day’s work.’

‘Is this where I’m going to see the leopard?’

‘No. Most of the wildlife here is snakes and lizards. Plus the hunter ants that everybody is so scared of. But no leopards.’

‘What happens now?’

‘Nothing. The work is over and done with. You’ll discover that not everything is as primitive as it seems. There’s even a shower in your tent. And a comfortable bed. Later this evening we’ll have a communal meal. Anyone who wants to sit around the campfire afterwards is welcome to do so; those who want to sleep can do that, too.’

‘You and I must talk things through,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘It’s essential.’

Ya Ru smiled. ‘After dinner. We can sit outside my tent.’

He didn’t need to point out which one it was. Hong Qiu had already gathered that it was the one next to hers.

Hong Qiu sat by the door of her tent and watched the sun setting rapidly over the bush. A fire was already burning in the open area in the middle of the semicircle of tents. She could see Ya Ru there. He was wearing a white dinner jacket. It reminded her of a picture she had seen long ago in a Chinese magazine in connection with a major article describing the colonial history of Africa and Asia. Two white men wearing dinner jackets had been sitting deep in the African bush, eating at a table with a white tablecloth, using expensive crockery and drinking chilled white wine. The African waiters were standing motionless, but at the ready, behind their chairs.

Hong Qiu was the last of all those present to take her place at the set table by the fire.

She thought about the letter she had written the previous evening. And about Ma Li — and suddenly she was not even sure that she could still rely upon her.

Nothing, she thought, is certain any longer. Nothing at all.

30

After dinner, enveloped by the shadows of the night, they were entertained by a troupe of dancers. Hong Qiu, who had not even tasted the wine served with the meal as she wanted to keep a clear head, watched the dancers with a mixture of admiration and the remains of an old longing. Once upon a time, when she was very young, she had dreamed of a future as an artiste in a Chinese circus, or perhaps at the classical Peking Opera.

Hong Qiu observed Ya Ru sitting in his camp chair, a glass of wine balanced on his knee, his eyes half closed, and she thought about how little she knew of his childhood dreams. He had always existed in a little world of his own. She had been able to get close to him, but not so close that they had ever talked about dreams.

A Chinese interpreter introduced the dances. That wasn’t necessary, Hong Qiu thought. She could have worked out for herself that the traditional dances had roots in everyday life or in symbolic meetings with devils or demons or benign spirits. Popular rites come from the same source, no matter what country you come from or what colour your skin is. The climate has a role to play — those used to the cold generally danced fully dressed. But when in a trance, searching for lines to the spiritual world or the underworld, with what has been or what is to come, Chinese and Africans behave in more or less the same way.

Hong Qiu continued to look around. President Guebuza and his retinue had left. The only ones remaining in the camp where they would spend the night were the Chinese delegation, the waiters and waitresses, the cooks and a large number of security guards skulking in the shadows. Many of those sitting and watching the frantic dances seemed to be deep in thought about other matters. A great leap forward is being planned in the African night, Hong Qiu thought. But I refuse to accept that this is the path we ought to be following. There’s no way that this can happen: four million, perhaps more, of our poorest peasants migrating to the African wilderness — without our demanding substantial recompense from the country that receives them.

A woman suddenly started singing. The Chinese interpreter informed her listeners that it was a lullaby. Hong Qiu listened and was convinced that the melody could also calm a Chinese child. She recalled stories about cradles she had heard many years ago. In poor countries women always carried their children in bundles tied to their backs because they needed to have their hands free for working, especially in the fields — in Africa with hoes, in China while wading knee-deep in water for planting rice. Somebody had compared this to cradles rocked with the foot, which were common in other countries, and even in certain parts of China. The rhythm of the foot rocking the cradle was the same as the hip movements of the women walking. And the children slept, no matter what.

Hong Qiu closed her eyes and listened. The woman finished on a note that lingered before seeming to fall like a feather to the ground. The performance was over, and the guests applauded. Some members of the audience moved their chairs closer together and conducted conversations in low voices. Others stood up, went back to their tents, or hovered around the edge of the light from the fire as if waiting for something to happen but not sure what.

Ya Ru came and sat down on a chair by Hong Qiu that had been left vacant.

‘A remarkable evening,’ he said. ‘Absolute freedom and calm. I don’t think I’ve ever been as far away from the big city as this.’

‘What about your office?’ said Hong Qiu. ‘High up above ordinary people, all the cars and all the noise.’

‘That’s not the same. Here I am on the ground. The earth is holding on to me. I’d like to own a house in this country, a bungalow on a beach, so that I could go for a swim in the evening and then straight to bed.’

‘No doubt you could ask for that. A plot of land, a fence and somebody to build the house exactly as you want it?’

‘Perhaps. But not yet.’

Hong Qiu noticed that they were on their own now. The chairs around them were empty. Hong Qiu wondered if Ya Ru had made it clear that he wished to have a private talk with his sister.

‘Did you see the woman dancing like a sorceress on a high?’

Hong Qiu thought for a moment. The woman had exuded strength, but had nevertheless moved rhythmically. ‘Her dancing was very powerful.’

‘Somebody told me she’s seriously ill. She’ll soon be dead.’

‘From what?’

‘Some blood disease. Not Aids, maybe they said cancer. They also said that she dances in order to generate strength. Dancing is her fight for life. She is postponing death.’

‘But she’ll die even so.’

‘Like the stone, not the feather.’

Mao again, Hong Qiu thought. Perhaps he’s there in Ya Ru’s thoughts about the future more often than I realise. He knows that he is one of those who have become a part of a new elite, far removed from the people he’s supposed to take care of.

‘What’s all this going to cost?’ she asked.

‘This camp? The whole visit? What do you mean?’

‘Moving four million people from China to an African valley with a wide river. And then perhaps ten or twenty or even a hundred million of our poorest peasants to other countries on this continent.’

‘In the short term, an awful lot of money. In the long term, nothing at all.’

‘I take it,’ said Hong Qui, ‘that everything’s been prepared already. The selection processes, transport and the armada of ships needed, simple houses that the settlers can erect themselves, food, equipment, shops, schools, hospitals. Are the contracts between the two countries already drawn up and signed? What does Mozambique get out of this? What do we get out of it apart from the chance to offload a chunk of our poor onto another poor country? What happens if it turns out that this enormous migration goes wrong? What’s behind all this, apart from the desire to get rid of a problem that’s growing out of control in China — and what are you going to do with all the other millions of peasants who are threatening to rebel against the current government?’

‘I want you to see with your own eyes. To use your common sense and grasp how important it is for the Zambezi Valley to be populated. Our brothers will produce a surplus here that can be exported.’

‘You’re making it sound like we’re doing the world a favour by dumping our people here. I think we’re treading the same path that imperialists have always trodden. Put the screws on the colonies, and transfer the profits to us. New markets for our products, a way of giving capitalism more staying power. Ya Ru, that’s the truth behind all your fancy words. I know we’re building a new Ministry of Finance for Mozambique. We call it a gift, but I see it as a bribe. I’ve also heard that the Chinese foremen beat the natives when they didn’t work hard enough. Naturally, it was all hushed up. But I feel ashamed when I hear things like that. And I’m frightened. I don’t believe you, Ya Ru.’

‘You’re starting to get old, Hong Qiu. Like all old people you’re frightened of anything new. You suspect conspiracies against old ideals wherever you turn. You think that you’re standing up for the right way when in fact you’ve started to become the thing you are more afraid of than anything else. A conservative, a reactionary.’

Hong Qiu leaned forward quickly and slapped his face. Ya Ru jerked back and stared at her in surprise.

‘Now you’ve gone too far. I will not allow you to insult me. We can discuss things, disagree. But I’m not having you hit me.’

Ya Ru stood up without another word and disappeared into the darkness. Nobody else seemed to have noticed what happened. Hong Qiu already regretted her reaction. She ought to have had enough patience and verbal skills to continue to try and convince Ya Ru that he was wrong.

Ya Ru did not return. Hong Qiu went to her tent. Kerosene lamps illuminated the area outside as well as inside. Her mosquito net was already in place, and her bed prepared for the night.

Hong Qiu sat outside the tent. It was a sultry evening. Ya Ru’s tent was empty. She knew he would get revenge for the slap she had given him. But that didn’t scare her. She could understand and accept that he was angry at his sister hitting him. When she next saw him she would apologise immediately.

Her tent was so far away from the fire that the sounds of nature were much clearer than the mumble of voices and conversations. The light breeze carried with it the smell of salt, wet sand and something else she couldn’t pin down.

Hong Qiu slept fitfully and was awake for much of the night. The sounds of darkness were foreign to her, penetrated her dreams and dragged her to the surface. When the sun rose over the horizon she was already up and dressed.

Ya Ru suddenly appeared in front of her. He smiled.

‘We are both early birds,’ he said. ‘Neither of us has the patience to sleep any longer than is absolutely necessary.’

‘I’m sorry I hit you.’

Ya Ru shrugged and pointed at a green-painted jeep on the road next to the tent.

‘That’s for you,’ he said. ‘A driver will take you to a place only half a dozen miles from here. When you get there you’ll see the remarkable drama that takes place at every watering hole as dawn breaks. For a short while beasts of prey and their potential victims observe a truce while they are drinking.’

A black man was standing beside the jeep.

‘His name’s Arturo,’ said Ya Ru. ‘He’s a trusted driver who also speaks English.’

‘Many thanks for your consideration,’ said Hong Qiu. ‘But we need to talk.’

Ya Ru brushed aside her last comment. ‘We can do that later. The African dawn doesn’t last long. There’s coffee and some breakfast in a basket.’

Hong Qiu realised that Ya Ru was trying to make peace. What had happened the day before must not come between them. She went over to the jeep, greeted the driver, who was a thin, middle-aged man, and sat down in the back of the open vehicle. The road winding its way into the bush was almost non-existent, just a faint track in the dry earth. She fended off thorny branches from the low trees that lined the track.

When they came to the watering hole, Arturo parked near the edge of a steep drop down to the river below and handed Hong Qiu a pair of binoculars. Several hyenas and buffalo were drinking, and Arturo pointed out a herd of elephants. The grey, lumbering animals were approaching the watering hole almost as if they were walking straight out of the sun.

Hong Qiu had the feeling that this was what the world must have looked like at the beginning of time. Animals had come and gone here for countless generations.

Arturo served her a cup of coffee without speaking. The elephants were coming closer now, dust whirling round their enormous bodies.

Then the silence was broken.

Arturo was the first to die. The bullet hit him in the forehead and split his head in two. Hong Qiu had no time to gather what was happening before she was also hit by a bullet that smashed her jaw, was deflected downward and broke her spine. The loud bangs made the animals raise their heads for a moment and listen. Then they resumed drinking.

Ya Ru and Liu Xan approached the jeep, used their combined strength to overturn it and sent it tumbling down the steep slope. Liu Xan drenched it with a drum of petrol, stepped to one side, then threw a burning box of matches at the vehicle, which burst into flames with a roar. The animals ran away from the watering hole at high speed.

Ya Ru was waiting in the back seat of their own jeep. His bodyguard settled down behind the wheel and prepared to start the engine. Ya Ru hit him hard on the back of the head with a steel rod. He kept on hitting until Liu Xan no longer moved, then pushed the bodyguard’s corpse into the fire, which was still burning with full force.

Ya Ru drove the jeep into the thick vegetation and waited. After half an hour he returned to the camp and raised the alarm concerning an accident that had happened at the watering hole. The jeep had tumbled over the edge of the cliff and rolled down into the watering hole, where it had caught fire. His sister and the driver had both been killed. When Liu Xan tried to rescue them, he had also been engulfed by the flames.

Everybody who saw Ya Ru that day commented on how upset he was. But at the same time people were impressed by his self-control. He had insisted that the accident should not be allowed to interfere with their important work. Minister of Trade Ke gave his condolences to Ya Ru, and the negotiations continued as planned.

The bodies were taken away in black plastic bags and cremated in Harare. Nothing was written in the newspapers about the incident, neither in Mozambique nor in Zimbabwe. Arturo’s family, who lived in the town of Xai-Xai in the south of Mozambique, was awarded a pension after his death. It gave all six of his children the possibility of studying, and his wife Emilda was able to buy a new house and a car.

When Ya Ru travelled back to Beijing with the rest of the delegation, he had with him two urns containing ashes. On one of the first evenings home, he went out onto his huge terrace high above the city and let the ashes drift away into the darkness.

He was already beginning to miss his sister and the conversations they used to have. But he also knew that what he had done had been absolutely essential.

Ma Li lamented what had happened in a state of silent dismay. But deep down, she never did believe the story about the car accident.

31

On the table was a white orchid. Ya Ru stroked a finger over the soft petals.

It was an early morning, a month after returning from Africa. In front of him on the table were the plans for a house he had decided to build on the edge of the beach outside the town of Quelimane in Mozambique. As a bonus to the big deals agreed to by the two countries, for an advantageous price Ya Ru had been able to buy a large area of unspoiled beach. In the long term he intended to build an exclusive tourist resort for wealthy Chinese, increasingly large numbers of whom would be venturing out into the world.

Ya Ru had been standing on a high sand dune, gazing out over the Indian Ocean. It was the day after the deaths of Hong Qiu and Liu Xan. With him were the governor of Zambezi Province and a South African architect who had been specially called in. Suddenly the governor had pointed towards the reef furthest from the shore. A whale was basking there and blowing. The governor explained that it was not unusual to see whales along this stretch of coast.

‘What about icebergs?’ wondered Ya Ru. ‘Has a lump of ice from the Antarctic ever drifted as far north as this?’

‘There is a legend,’ said the governor. ‘Many generations ago, just before the first white men — the Portuguese sailors — landed on our shores, it’s said that an iceberg was spotted off this coast. The men who paddled out in their canoes to investigate were frightened by the cold given off by the ice. Later, when the white men came ashore from their big sailing ships, people said that the iceberg had been a harbinger of what was soon to happen. The white men were the same colour as the iceberg, their thoughts and actions just as cold. Nobody knows if it’s true or not.’

‘I want to build here,’ said Ya Ru. ‘Yellow icebergs will never drift past this beach.’

After a day of frantic measuring, a large plot of land was marked out and transferred to one of Ya Ru’s many companies. The price for the land and the beach was barely more than symbolic. For a similar sum Ya Ru also bought the approval of the governor and the most important officials, who would ensure that he received the ratification documents and all the necessary building permission without undue delay. The instructions he gave the South African architect had already produced a set of plans and a watercolour sketch of what his palatial house would look like, with two swimming pools filled with water pumped up from the sea, surrounded by palm trees and an artificial waterfall. The house would have eleven rooms plus a bedroom with a roof that could slide open to reveal the starry sky. The governor had promised that special electrical and telecommunication cables would be laid for Ya Ru’s remote property.

Now, as he sat contemplating what would become his African home, he decided that one of the rooms would be arranged as a tribute to Hong Qiu. Ya Ru wanted to honour her memory. He would furnish this room with a bed made for a guest who would never arrive. Irrespective of what had happened, she would remain a member of the family.

The telephone rang. Ya Ru frowned. Who would want to speak to him this early in the morning? He picked up the receiver.

‘Two men from the security services are here.’

‘What do they want?’

‘They are high-ranking officials from the Special Intelligence Section. They say it’s urgent.’

‘Let them in ten minutes from now.’

Ya Ru replaced the receiver. He held his breath. The SIS only dealt with matters involving men at the very top of the government or, like Ya Ru, men who lived between the political and economic power brokers — the modern bridge-builders picked out by Deng to be of crucial importance for the country’s development.

What did they want? Ya Ru went to the window and looked out over the city in the morning haze. Could it have anything to do with Hong Qiu’s death? He thought of all the known and unknown enemies he had. Was one of them trying to exploit Hong Qiu’s death in order to destroy his good name and reputation? Or was there something he had overlooked, despite everything? He knew that Hong Qiu had been in touch with a prosecutor, but he belonged to quite a different authority.

Hong Qiu could naturally have spoken to other people he didn’t know about.

He couldn’t think of any explanation. All he could do was listen to what the men had to say.

After ten minutes had passed he put the plans into a drawer and sat down at his desk. The two men Mrs Shen showed in were in their sixties. That increased Ya Ru’s uneasiness. The officers sent out were usually younger. The fact that these two men were older indicated that they were very experienced and the matter they wanted to discuss was serious.

Ya Ru stood up, bowed and invited them to sit down. He didn’t ask their names, as he knew that Mrs Shen would have checked their identity papers very carefully.

They sat down in armchairs around a low table in front of the window. Ya Ru offered them tea, but the men declined.

It was the elder of the two men who did the talking. Ya Ru detected an unmistakable Shanghai accent.

‘We have received information,’ said the man. ‘We can’t say where the information came from, but it is so detailed that we can’t ignore it. Our instructions have become stricter when it comes to dealing with crimes against the state and the constitution.’

‘I have been involved in tightening up on action against corruption,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I don’t understand why you are here.’

‘We have received information suggesting that your construction companies are seeking advantages using forbidden methods.’

‘Forbidden methods?’

‘Forbidden exchange of favours.’

‘In other words, bribery and corruption? Taking bribes?’

‘The information we have received is very detailed. We are worried.’

‘So you have come here at this early hour of the morning to tell me that you are investigating irregularities in my companies?’

‘We would prefer to say that we are informing you of the suspicions.’

‘To warn me?’

‘If you like.’

Ya Ru understood. He was a man with powerful friends, even in the anti-corruption authority. And so he had been given a head start. To eradicate the trail, get rid of proof, or demand explanations if he was not personally aware of what was going on.

He thought of the shot in the back of the head that had recently killed Shen Weixian. It was as if the two grey men sitting opposite him were emitting a cold chill, just as, according to legend, the African iceberg had.

Ya Ru wondered again if he had been careless. Perhaps on one occasion or another he had felt too secure and allowed himself to be carried away by his arrogance. If so, that had been a mistake. Such mistakes are always punished.

‘I need to know more,’ he said. ‘This is too vague, too general.’

‘Our instructions don’t allow us to say more.’

‘The accusations, even if they are anonymous, must come from somewhere.’

‘We can’t answer that either.’

Ya Ru wondered for a moment if it might be possible to pay the two men to give him more information. But he did not dare take the risk. One or perhaps both of them might be carrying concealed microphones recording the conversation. There was of course also a chance that they were honest and didn’t have a price — unlike so many government officials.

‘These vague accusations are totally without foundation,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I’m grateful to have heard about the rumours that are evidently surrounding me and my companies. But anonymity is often a source of falsehood, envy and insidious lies. I make sure that my enterprises are beyond reproach, i have the confidence of the government and the party and have no hesitation in maintaining that I am sufficiently in control to know that my managing directors follow my directives. Obviously I’m not able to claim that there are no minor irregularities; my employees number more than thirty thousand.’

Ya Ru stood up as a signal that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. The two men bowed and left the room. When they had gone, he rang through to Mrs Shen.

‘Get hold of one of my security chiefs and tell him to find out who these two are,’ he said. ‘Find out who their bosses are. Then summon my nine managing directors to a meeting three days from now. Everybody must attend, no excuses accepted. Anybody who doesn’t turn up will be fired on the spot. This has to be sorted out.’

Ya Ru was furious. What he did was no worse than what anybody else did. A man like Shen Weixian frequently went too far and in addition had been rude to the state officials who cleared the way for him. He had been an appropriate scapegoat, and nobody would miss him now that he was gone.

Ya Ru spent several hours of intensive activity working out a plan for what to do next and puzzling over which of his managing directors could have secretly opened up the poison cupboard and given away information about his dodgy deals and secret agreements.

Three days later his managing directors assembled in a hotel in Beijing. Ya Ru had chosen the location with care. It was there that he used to call a meeting once a year and fire one of his directors in order to demonstrate that nobody was safe. The group of men gathered in the conference room shortly after ten in the morning looked distinctly pale. None of them had been informed precisely what the meeting was about. Ya Ru kept them waiting for more than an hour before putting in an appearance. His strategy was very simple. First he confiscated their mobile phones, so that they were unable to contact one another or be in touch with the outside world, then he sent them out of the room. Each of them had to sit in a small room with one of the guards summoned by Mrs Shen at his side. Then Ya Ru interviewed them one at a time and told them without beating about the bush what he had heard a couple of days previously. What did they have to say? Any explanations? Was there something Ya Ru ought to know? He observed their faces closely and tried to detect if any of them seemed to have prepared what to say in advance. If there was such a person, Ya Ru could be sure that he had found the source of the leak.

But all the directors displayed the same degree of surprise and indignation. At the end of the day, he was forced to conclude that he hadn’t found a guilty person. He let them go without firing anybody. But all of them received strict instructions to look into the security of their own set-ups.

It was only some days later, when Mrs Shen reported on what his investigators had discovered about the men from the security services, that he realised he had been following a false trail. Once again he’d been studying the plans for his house in Africa when she came in. He asked her to sit down and adjusted the desk lamp so that his face was in shadow. He liked listening to her voice. No matter what she told him, be it a financial report or a summary of new directives from some government authority, he always had the feeling that she was telling him a story. There was something in her voice that reminded him of the childhood he had long since forgotten about, or been robbed of — he couldn’t make up his mind which.

‘Somehow or other it seems to be connected with your dead sister Hong Qiu. She was in close contact with some of the top men at the State Security Bureau. Her name keeps cropping up whenever we try to link the men who came to visit us the other morning and others hovering in the background. We think the information can only have been circulating for a short time before she died so tragically. Nevertheless, somebody at the very highest level seems to have given the go-ahead.’

Ya Ru noticed that Mrs Shen broke off. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Nothing is sure. Has somebody at the very top authorised this investigation into my activities?’

‘I can’t say if it’s true or not, but rumour has it that those in authority are not satisfied with the outcome of the sentence passed on Shen Weixian.’

A shiver ran down Ya Ru’s spine. He understood the implications before Mrs Shen had time to say any more.

‘Another scapegoat? Do they want to condemn another rich man in order to demonstrate that this is now a campaign and not merely an indication that patience is running out?’

Mrs Shen nodded. Ya Ru shrank further back into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’

‘No.’

‘You may go.’

Mrs Shen left the room. Ya Ru didn’t move. He forced himself to think, although what he wanted to do most of all was run away.

When he had made the difficult decision to kill Hong Qiu, and that the murder would take place in Africa, he had been sure that she was still his loyal sister. Of course, they had different views, they often argued. In this very room, on his birthday, she had accused him of taking bribes.

That was when he had realised that sooner or later Hong Qiu would become too big a danger to him. He now saw that he ought to have acted sooner. Hong Qiu had already abandoned him.

Ya Ru shook his head slowly. He now understood something that had never occurred to him before. Hong Qiu had been prepared to do the same thing to him as he had done to her. She hadn’t intended to use a weapon herself — Hong Qiu preferred to proceed via the laws of the land. But if Ya Ru had been condemned to death, she would have been one of those declaring it the right thing to do.

Ya Ru thought of his friend Lai Changxing, who some years previously had been forced to flee the country when the police raided all his companies early one morning. The only reason he managed to save himself and his family had been that he owned a private plane that was always ready to take off at a moment’s notice. He had fled to Canada, which did not have an extradition treaty with China. He was the son of a peasant who had made an amazing career for himself when Deng created a free market. He had started by digging wells but later became a smuggler and invested all he earned in companies that within a few years generated an enormous fortune. Ya Ru had once visited him in the Red Manor he had built in his home district of Xiamen. He had also taken upon himself major social responsibilities by constructing old people’s homes and schools. Even in those days Ya Ru had been put off by Lai Changxing’s arrogant ostentation and had warned his friend that he could be heading for a fall. They had sat one evening discussing the envy many people felt with regard to the new capitalists, the Second Dynasty, as Lai Changxing called them ironically — but only when talking in private with people he trusted.

Ya Ru had not been surprised when the gigantic house of cards collapsed and Lai had to flee the country. After he’d left, several of those involved with his businesses were executed. Others — hundreds of them — had been imprisoned. But at the same time, he was revered as a generous man in his poor home district. He would give fortunes to taxi drivers in the form of tips or give generous gifts to impoverished families whose names he didn’t even know, for no obvious reason. Ya Ru also knew that Lai was now writing his memoir — which worried many high-ranking officials and politicians in China. Lai was in possession of many truths, and as he now lived in Canada, nobody could censure him.

But Ya Ru had no intention of fleeing his country.

There was another thought beginning to gnaw away at his mind. Ma Li, Hong Qiu’s friend, had also been on the visit to Africa. Ya Ru knew that the two women had had long conversations. Moreover, Hong Qiu had always been a letter writer.

Perhaps Ma Li was in possession of an incriminating letter from Hong Qiu? Something she had passed on to people who had in turn informed the security services?

Three days later, when one of the winter’s severe sandstorms was raging over Beijing, Ya Ru visited Ma Li’s office not far from Ritan Gongyuan, the Sun God’s Park. Ma Li worked in a government department devoted to financial analyses and wasn’t sufficiently senior to cause him any serious problems. Mrs Shen and her assistants had investigated Ma Li and found no links with the inner circles of government and the party. Ma Li had two children. Her current husband was an insignificant bureaucrat. As her first husband had died in the war with the Vietnamese in the 1970s, nobody had objected to her remarrying and having another child. Both of the children now led lives of their own: the eldest, a daughter, was an educational adviser in a teacher training college, and the son worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Shanghai. Neither of them had contacts that caused Ya Ru any worries. But he had been careful to note that Ma Li had two grandchildren to whom she devoted a large amount of her time.

Mrs Shen fixed an appointment with Ma Li. She hadn’t mentioned what the meeting was about, only that it was urgent and probably connected with the trip to Africa. That ought to worry her a bit, Ya Ru thought as he sat in the back seat of his car observing the city they were driving through. As he had plenty of time, he had asked the driver to make a diversion past some of the construction sites he had business interests in. His main priority was the Olympic Games. One of Ya Ru’s big contracts was for the demolition of a residential area that had to be cleared in order to make way for roads to the new sports stadia. Ya Ru expected to earn billions, even after he had subtracted the massive payments made to civil servants and politicians.

The car pulled up outside an unremarkable building where Ma Li worked. She was standing on the steps, waiting for him.

‘Ma Li,’ said Ya Ru. ‘Seeing you now makes me think that our trip to Africa, which ended in such tragedy, was a very long time ago.’

‘I think about my dear friend Hong Qiu every day,’ said Ma Li. ‘But I allow Africa to drift away into the past. I shall never go back there.’

‘As you know, we sign new contracts with many countries on the African continent every day. We are building bridges that will last for a long time to come.’

As they talked they walked along a deserted corridor to Ma Li’s office, whose windows looked out onto a little garden surrounded by a high wall. In the middle of the garden was a fountain that had been turned off for the winter.

Ma Li switched off her telephone and served tea. Ya Ru could hear somebody laughing in the distance.

‘Searching for truth is like watching a snail chasing a snail,’ Ya Ru said pensively. ‘It moves slowly, but it is persistent.’

Ya Ru looked her straight in the eye, but Ma Li did not avert her gaze.

‘There are rumours circulating,’ Ya Ru continued, ‘that I don’t like at all. Rumours about my companies, about my character. I wonder where they are coming from. I have to ask who would want to do me damage. Not the usual crowd that is jealous of me, but somebody else, with motives I don’t understand.’

‘Why should I want to damage your reputation?’

‘That’s not what I mean. My question is quite different. Who knows, who has got hold of this information, who is spreading the rumours?’

‘Our lives are totally different. I’m a civil servant; you do big business deals that we read about in the newspapers. Compared with my life as an insignificant nobody, you lead a life that I can barely imagine.’

‘But you knew Hong Qiu,’ said Ya Ru, ‘my sister, who was very close to me. After not having seen each other for ages, you and she meet in Africa. You have long talks, she makes a hurried visit to you early one morning. When I get back to China, rumours start spreading.’

Ma Li turned pale. ‘Are you accusing me of slandering you in public?’

‘You must understand, and I’m sure you do, that in my situation I wouldn’t say anything like that without first having done some thorough research. I have ruled out one possibility after another. In the end I have only one explanation. One person.’

‘Me?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘You mean Hong Qiu? Your own sister?’

‘It’s no secret that we disagreed about fundamental questions regarding the future of China: political developments, the economy, our views on history.’

‘But were you enemies?’

‘Enmity can develop over a very long time, almost invisibly, the way land slowly rises out of the sea. All of a sudden you find you have an enemy you knew nothing about.’

‘I find it hard to believe that Hong Qiu would use anonymous complaints as a weapon. She wasn’t that kind of person.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m asking you the question. What did you actually talk about?’

Ma Li didn’t answer. Ya Ru continued without giving her any time to think.

‘Perhaps there’s a letter,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps she gave you a letter that morning. Am I right? A letter? Or some kind of document? I have to know what she said to you and what she gave you.’

‘It was as if she sensed that she was going to die,’ said Ma Li. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about it, but I can’t understand the strength of the worry she must have felt. She just asked me to make sure that her body was cremated after she died. She wanted her ashes spread over Longtanhu Gongyuan, the little lake in the park. She also asked me to look after her belongings, her books, to give away her clothes and empty her house.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No.’

‘Was this something she said, or did she write it down?’

‘It was a letter. I memorised it. Then I burned it.’

‘So it was only a short letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why did you burn it? You could almost call it a will.’

‘She said nobody would question what I said.’

Ya Ru continued to observe her face while he thought over her words. ‘She didn’t give you another letter as well?’

‘What could that have been?’

‘Maybe a letter you didn’t burn. But that you passed on to somebody else?’

‘I received one letter. It was addressed to me. I burned it. That’s all.’

‘It would not be good if you haven’t told me the truth.’

‘Why on earth should I lie?’

Ya Ru flung out his arms. ‘Why do people lie? Why do we have that ability? Because in certain circumstances it can be advantageous for us. Lies and truth are weapons, Ma Li, that skilful operators can make good use of, just as other people are very handy with a sword.’

He was still looking her in the eye, but she didn’t look away. ‘Nothing else? There’s nothing else you want to tell me?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘You realise, of course, that sooner or later I’ll find out all I need to know?’

‘Yes.’

Ya Ru nodded thoughtfully. ‘You are a good person, Ma Li. So am I. But I can be bitter and twisted if anybody is dishonest with me.’

‘There’s nothing I haven’t told you.’

‘Good. You have two grandchildren, Ma Li. You love them more than anything else in the world.’

He saw that she gave a start.

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Not at all. I’m merely giving you an opportunity to tell me the truth.’

‘I’ve told you everything. Hong Qiu told me about the fears she had regarding developments in China. But no threats, no rumours.’

‘Then I believe you.’

‘You scare me, Ya Ru. Do I really deserve that?’

‘I haven’t scared you. Hong Qiu did that, with her secret letter. Talk to her soul about that. Ask her to set you free from the worries you have.’

Ya Ru stood up. Ma Li accompanied him out into the street. He shook her hand, then stepped into his car. Ma Li went back to her office and threw up in the washbasin.

Then she sat down at her desk and memorised word for word the letter she had received from Hong Qiu, which was lying hidden in one of her desk drawers.

She was angry when she died, Ma Li thought. No matter how it happened. Nobody has yet been able to give me a satisfactory explanation of how the car accident took place.

Before leaving her office that evening she tore the letter into tiny pieces and flushed it down the lavatory.

Ya Ru spent the evening in one of his nightclubs in the entertainment district of Beijing, Sanlitun. In a back room he relaxed on a bed and allowed Li Wu, one of the hostesses at the club, to massage the back of his head and neck. They were the same age and had once been lovers. She still belonged to the small group of people that Ya Ru trusted. He was very careful about what he did and didn’t say to her. But he knew that she was loyal.

She was always naked when she massaged him. The distant sound of music from the nightclub filtered in through the walls. The lights inside the room were dim, the wallpaper red.

Ya Ru again ran through the conversation he’d had with Ma Li. It all started with Hong Qiu, he thought. It was a grave error on my part, trusting her family loyalty for so long.

Li Wu continued massaging his back. Suddenly he took hold of her hand and sat up.

‘Did I hurt you?’

‘I need to be alone, Li Wu. I’ll shout when I need you again.’

She left the room as Ya Ru wrapped himself up in a sheet. He wondered if he’d been thinking along the wrong lines. Perhaps the key question wasn’t what was in the letter that Hong Qiu had handed over to Ma Li.

What if Hong Qiu had been talking to somebody? he wondered. Somebody she assumed I would never worry about?

He recalled what Chan Bing had said about the Swedish judge Hong Qiu had displayed an interest in. What was there to prevent Hong Qiu from talking to her? Passing on confidential information?

Ya Ru lay down on the bed again. The back of his neck felt less painful now, after being stroked by Li Wu’s sensitive fingers.

The next morning he called Chan Bing. He came straight to the point.

‘You mentioned something about a Swedish judge my sister had been in contact with. What was that about?’

‘Her name was Birgitta Roslin. She’d been mugged, a routine incident. We brought her in to identify her attacker. She didn’t recognise anybody, but she had evidently been talking to Hong Qiu about a number of murders in Sweden that she suspected had been carried out by a man from China.’

This was worse than he’d thought, and potentially more damaging than any accusations of corruption. He politely brought the conversation to a close.

He was already steeling himself for a task he would have to carry out himself, now that Liu Xan was no longer around.

One more thing to finish off. Hong Qiu was not yet defeated, once and for all.

32

It was raining in the morning at the beginning of May when Birgitta Roslin accompanied her family to Copenhagen, where they were due to catch a flight for Madeira. After a lot of soul-searching and many discussions with Staffan, she had decided not to go with them on their holiday. The long sick leave she had taken earlier in the year had made it impossible for her to ask for more time off. She simply couldn’t make the trip.

The rain was bucketing down when they arrived in Copenhagen. Staffan, who travelled free on Swedish railways, had wanted to take the train to Kastrup where their children were waiting, but she was just as insistent on taking him to the airport by car. She waved goodbye to all of them in the departure terminal, then settled down in a cafe and watched the crowds of people lugging their baggage and dreaming of journeys to distant lands.

A few days earlier she had called Karin Wiman and said she would be going to Copenhagen. Although it was several months since they had returned from Beijing, they still hadn’t had an opportunity to meet. Birgitta had been snowed under with work after being declared fit again. Hans Mattsson had welcomed her return with open arms, placed a vase of flowers on her desk and immediately followed it with a large number of cases. At that precise moment, at the end of March, a debate had been raging in the local newspapers in southern Sweden about the scandalously long waiting times in district courts. According to Birgitta Roslin’s colleagues, Hans Mattsson, who could hardly be called bellicose by nature, had not been sufficiently outspoken in making clear the hopeless situation the courts had been placed in by the National Judiciary Administration and more especially the government, which were intent on saving money. While her colleagues had groaned and fumed about their workload, Birgitta had felt extremely pleased to be back in the thick of it. She had often stayed behind in her office so late that Hans Mattsson, in his gentle way, had warned her not to overstretch herself and fall ill again.

And so she and Karin Wiman had only spoken on the telephone. They had arranged to meet twice, but on both occasions something had come up to prevent it. Now, however, on this rainy day in Copenhagen, Birgitta was free. She didn’t need to appear in court that day and would spend the night at Karin’s place. She had the pictures from China in her bag and was looking forward with childlike eagerness to seeing the photographs Karin had taken.

They had agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant in one of the streets off Strøget. Birgitta had intended to wander around the shops looking for a dress she could wear in court, but the heavy rain made that an unattractive activity. She stayed at Kastrup until it was time to meet, then took a taxi into town, as she was unsure of the way. Karin waved cheerfully to her as she entered the packed restaurant.

‘They got away all right, I hope?’

‘It’s only after they’ve left that it hits you. The horrific possibilities when your whole family is on the same plane.’

Karin shook her head.

‘Nothing will happen,’ she said. ‘If you really want to travel safely, a plane is your best bet.’

They had lunch, looked at the photographs and recalled memories from their trip. While Karin was talking, Birgitta found herself thinking for the first time in ages about the mugging. Hong Qiu suddenly appearing at her breakfast table. The stolen bag that had been found. The whole strange and frightening business she had become involved in.

‘Are you listening?’ Karin asked.

‘Of course I’m listening. Why do you ask?’

‘You don’t seem to be.’

‘I keep thinking of my family up there in the sky.’

They ordered coffee to round off the meal. Karin suggested they should each drink a brandy in protest against the cold spring weather.

‘Of course, we’ll have a brandy.’

They took a taxi to Karin’s house. When they got there, it stopped raining, and the clouds were beginning to break.

‘I need to stretch my legs,’ said Birgitta. ‘I spend far too much time sitting in my office or in court.’

They strolled along the beach, which was deserted apart from a few elderly people walking their dogs.

They paused and watched a yacht scudding northward through the sound.

‘Don’t you think it’s high time you told me now?’ Karin asked.

‘Told you what?’

‘What really happened in Beijing. I know what you said wasn’t true. Or at least, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as they say in court.’

‘I was attacked. And my bag was stolen.’

‘I know that. But the circumstances, Birgitta. I don’t believe what you said. There was something missing. Even if we haven’t met very often in recent years, I know you. I would never try to tell you an untruth. Or to fool you, as my father used to say. I know you would see through me.’

This came as a relief to Birgitta.

‘I don’t understand it myself,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why I concealed half the story. Perhaps because you were too busy with your First Dynasty. Perhaps because I didn’t even really understand what had happened.’

They kept walking and took off their jackets when the sun started to warm up. Birgitta told her about the photograph taken by the surveillance camera in the little hotel in Hudiksvall and her attempt to track down the man on the film. She explained it in precise detail, as if she were in the witness box under the watchful eye of a judge.

‘You didn’t say anything about that,’ said Karin when Birgitta came to the crucial point. They had turned and started to walk back.

‘When you left I was scared,’ said Birgitta. ‘I thought I might rot away in some underground dungeon. And afterwards the police would simply say that I’d disappeared.’

‘I take that as a lack of confidence in me. I should be angry with you.’

Birgitta stopped and turned to confront Karin.

‘We don’t know each other all that well,’ she said. ‘Maybe we think we do. Or wish we did. When we were young our relationship was quite different from what it is now. We’re friends. But we’re not that close. Perhaps we never have been.’

Karin nodded. They continued walking along the beach, where the sand was driest, higher up than the seaweed.

‘You always want things to stay the same, for everything to be just as it used to be,’ said Karin. ‘But as you get older you have to be careful to avoid sentimentality. If friendships are going to last, they have to keep being re-examined and renewed. Maybe old love never goes rusty. But old friendships do.’

‘The fact that we’re talking about it is a step in the right direction. It’s like scraping away the rust with a steel brush.’

‘What happened next? How did it all end?’

‘I went home. The police, or some branch of the secret service, had searched my room. I have no idea what they hoped to find.’

‘But you must have wondered. A mugging?’

‘It’s all about the photograph from the hotel in Hudiksvall, of course. Somebody wanted to prevent me from looking for that man. But I think Hong Qiu was telling the truth. China doesn’t want foreign visitors to go back home and talk about so-called unfortunate incidents. Not now, when the country is preparing for the Olympic Games.’

‘A whole country with more than a billion inhabitants waiting in the wings to make its brilliant entry onto the world stage. A remarkable thought.’

‘Hundreds of millions of people, our beloved poor peasants, probably don’t realise what these Olympics mean. Or else they realise that nothing will get better for them simply because the young people of the world are gathering in Beijing to play games.’

‘I have a vague memory of her — that woman called Hong Qiu. She was very beautiful. There was something evasive about her, as if she were on edge.’

‘Could be. I remember her differently. She helped me.’

‘Was she the servant of several masters?’

‘That’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I don’t know. But you’re probably right.’

They walked out onto a jetty. Several of the mooring berths were empty. A woman was squatting in an old wooden boat, bailing out. She nodded to them with a smile and said something in a dialect Karin couldn’t understand.

Afterwards they drank coffee in Karin’s living room. Karin talked about her current work, studying several Chinese poets and their work from liberation in 1949 to the present day.

‘I can’t devote my whole life to empires that died long ago. The poems make a pleasant change.’

Birgitta came close to mentioning her own secret and impassioned pop lyrics, but said nothing.

‘Many of them were courageous,’ said Karin. ‘Mao and the rest at the top of the political tree were rarely tolerant of criticism. But Mao tolerated the poets. I suppose you could say that was because he wrote poetry himself. But I think he knew that artists could show the big political stage in a new light. When other political leaders wanted to clamp down on artists who wrote the wrong words or painted with dodgy brushstrokes, Mao always put his foot down and stopped them. To the bitter end. What happened to artists during the Cultural Revolution was of course his responsibility, but not his intention. Even if the last revolution he set in motion had cultural overtones, it was basically political. When Mao realised that some of the young rebels were going too far, he slammed on the brakes. Even if he couldn’t express it in so many words, I think he regretted the havoc caused during those years. But he knew better than anybody else that if you want to make an omelette, you have to break an egg. Isn’t that what people used to say?’

‘Or that the revolution wasn’t a tea party.’

They both burst out laughing.

‘What do you think about China now?’ asked Birgitta. ‘What exactly is going on there?’

‘I’m convinced there’s a tremendous tug of war. Within the party, within the country. The Communist Party is trying to show the rest of the world, people like you and me, that it’s possible to combine economic development with a state that isn’t democratic. Even if all the liberal thinkers in the West deny it, a one-party dictatorship is reconcilable with economic development. That causes unrest in our part of the world. That’s why so much is spoken and written about human rights in China. The lack of freedom and transparency, the human rights so central to Western values, become the target of Western attacks on China. For me it’s hypocritical, since our part of the world is full of countries — not least the United States and Russia — in which human rights are violated every day. Besides, the Chinese know that we want to do business with them, at any price. They saw through us in the nineteenth century when we decided to brand them all as opium addicts and award ourselves the right to do business with them on our terms. The Chinese have learned lessons, and they won’t repeat our mistakes. That’s the way I see things, and obviously, I’m aware that my conclusions aren’t perfect. What’s happening is much bigger than anything I can take in. We can’t apply our way of looking at things to China. But no matter what we think about it, we have to respect what’s going on. Nowadays only an idiot would think that what’s happening there won’t affect our own future. If I had small children today I’d employ a Chinese nanny to make sure they become acquainted with the Chinese language.’

‘That’s exactly what my son says.’

‘He has vision.’

‘I was overwhelmed by the visit to China,’ said Birgitta. ‘The country is so enormous, I wandered around with the constant feeling that I could just disappear at any moment. And nobody would ask questions about one individual when there are so incredibly many others. I wish I’d had more time to talk to Hong Qiu.’

That evening they had dinner and once more immersed themselves in memories of the past. Birgitta felt increasingly strongly that she didn’t want to lose contact with Karin again. There was nobody else with whom she had shared her youth, nobody who could understand what she was talking about.

They sat up until late, and before going to bed promised themselves that in the future they would meet more often.

‘Commit some minor traffic offence in Helsingborg,’ Birgitta suggested. ‘Don’t admit anything when the police interview you at the scene. Then you’ll eventually end up in the dock. When I’ve sentenced you we can go and have dinner somewhere.’

‘I find it hard to imagine you in court.’

‘So do I. But that’s where I spend most of my days.’

The next day Karin went with Birgitta to the main railway station.

‘Well, I’d better be getting back to my Chinese poets,’ said Karin. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll spend this afternoon reading up on a couple of forthcoming trials. I envy you your poets. But I’d prefer not to think about it.’

They were just about to go their different ways when Karin took hold of Birgitta’s arm.

‘I haven’t asked you at all about the events in Hudiksvall. What’s happening?’

‘The police are convinced that, no matter what, the man who committed suicide did it.’

‘On his own? All those dead bodies?’

‘Maybe. But they still haven’t managed to find a motive.’

‘Lunacy?’

‘I didn’t think that at the time, and I still don’t think so.’

‘Are you in touch with the police?’

‘Not at all. I just read what’s written in the newspapers.’

Birgitta watched Karin hurrying off through the big central hall, then caught a train to Kastrup, tracked down her car in the car park and drove home.

Growing older involves a kind of retreat, she thought. You don’t just keep rushing forward. Like the conversations Karin and I had. We’re trying to find our real selves, who we are, both now and then.

She was back in Helsingborg by about twelve o’clock. She went straight to her office where she read a memorandum from the National Judiciary Administration before turning her attention to the two cases she needed to prepare.

She suddenly felt happiness bubbling up inside her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Nothing is too late, she thought. Now I’ve seen the Great Wall of China. There are other walls and especially islands I want to visit before my life is over and the coffin lid nailed down. Something inside me says that Staffan and I will manage to handle the situation we find ourselves in.

It was eleven o’clock before she was at home and began to get ready for bed. There was a ring at the front door. She frowned, but went to answer: there was nobody. She stepped out and looked up and down the street. A car drove past, but apart from that it was deserted. The gate was closed. Kids, she thought. They ring the bell, then run away.

She went back in and fell asleep before midnight. She woke up soon after two without knowing what had disturbed her. She didn’t remember having had a dream and listened into the darkness without hearing anything. She was just about to roll over and go back to sleep when she sat up. Switched on the bedside light and listened. Got up and opened the door onto the landing. She still couldn’t hear anything. She put on her dressing gown and went downstairs. All the doors and windows were locked. She stood by a window overlooking the street and pulled the curtain to one side. She thought she might have glimpsed a shadow hurrying away down the pavement, but blamed her overactive imagination. She had never been afraid of the dark. Perhaps she had woken up because she was hungry. After a sandwich and a glass of water she went back to bed and soon fell asleep again.

The next morning when she was about to pick up her briefcase, she had the feeling someone had been in her study. It was the same kind of feeling as she’d had in connection with her suitcase in the hotel room in Beijing. When she had gone to bed the previous evening, she had put all the documents into the briefcase. Now some of the edges of those documents were protruding from the top.

Although she was in a rush, she checked the basement. Nothing was missing; nothing had been touched. My imagination’s running away with me, she thought. I had enough of a persecution complex in Beijing — I don’t need any more of the same here in Helsingborg.

Birgitta Roslin locked her front door and walked down the hill to the town and the district court. When she arrived she went to her office, switched off the telephone, leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed, and thought over the case she had to deal with about a Vietnamese gang accused of smuggling cigarettes. In the back of her mind she ran through the most important parts of the case against the two Tran bothers, which had resulted in their being arrested, three separate times, before finally being charged. Now they faced being tried and sentenced. Two more Vietnamese men, Dang and Phan, had been arrested during the investigation.

Birgitta Roslin was pleased to have prosecuting counsel Palm in her court. He was a middle-aged man who took his professional duties seriously. On the basis of the material she had access to, Palm had insisted on a thorough police investigation, which didn’t always happen.

As the clock struck ten she entered the courtroom and sat at her desk. The lay assessors and recording clerks were already in their places. The public gallery was packed. There were both police officers and security guards on duty. Everybody had been required to pass through metal detectors. She opened proceedings, noted down names, checked that all involved were present, then let the prosecutor take over. Palm spoke slowly and clearly and occasionally addressed his remarks to the public gallery. There was a large group of Vietnamese present, most of them very young. Birgitta Roslin also recognised journalists and a sketch artist working for several national newspapers. Birgitta had a drawing of herself, done by the same artist, that she had cut out of the paper. She had put it in a desk drawer, as she didn’t want her visitors to think she was vain.

It was a hard day. Although the police investigation had made it obvious how the crimes had been committed, the four young men started blaming one another. Two of them spoke Swedish, but the Tran brothers needed an interpreter. Roslin was forced to point out on several occasions that the translation was not clear enough — indeed, she wondered if the girl really understood what the brothers were saying. She also needed to instruct some of the people in the public gallery to be quiet and threatened to remove them if they didn’t calm down.

While she was having lunch, Hans Mattsson called in to ask how things were going.

‘They’re lying,’ Birgitta said. ‘But the case against them is solid. The only question is whether the interpreter is up to it.’

‘She has a good reputation,’ said Hans Mattsson in surprise. ‘She’s supposed to be the best one available in Sweden.’

‘Perhaps she’s having an off day.’

‘Are you?’

‘No. But it’s taking time. I doubt we’ll be finished by tomorrow.’

During the afternoon proceedings Birgitta continued to observe the people in the public gallery. She noticed a middle-aged Vietnamese woman sitting alone in a corner of the courtroom, half hidden from those sitting in front of her. Every time Birgitta glanced over, the woman seemed to be looking at her, whereas the rest of the Vietnamese were mainly watching their accused friends or family members.

Birgitta remembered when she had sat in the Chinese courtroom a few months earlier. Maybe I have a colleague from Vietnam observing me, she thought ironically. But surely somebody would have mentioned it. Besides, that woman doesn’t have an interpreter sitting next to her.

When she concluded the day’s proceedings, she was uncertain how much more time was necessary to wrap up the case. She sat in her office and made an assessment of what still needed to be done. One more day might be enough, if nothing unexpected happened.

She slept deeply that night, without being disturbed by strange noises.

When the trial resumed the following day, the woman was in the same seat again. Something about her made Birgitta feel insecure. During a brief adjournment she summoned an usher and asked him to check if the woman kept to herself even outside the courtroom. Just before the court reconvened, he called in to report that she did indeed — she hadn’t spoken to anybody at all.

‘Please keep an eye on her,’ said Birgitta Roslin.

‘I could remove her if you like.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘That she worries you.’

‘No, I’m just asking you to keep an eye on her. No more than that.’

Although she was doubtful until the last minute, she did manage to conclude proceedings late that afternoon. She announced that sentences would be passed on 20 June and declared the case closed. The last thing she saw before going back to her office, having thanked her various assistants, was the Vietnamese woman, who had turned to watch Birgitta leave the courtroom.

Hans Mattsson came by. He had been listening to the closing arguments by the prosecuting and defending counsels on the internal speaker system.

‘Palm has had a few good days.’

‘The only question is how to hand down the sentences. There’s no doubt the brothers are the ringleaders. The other two are also guilty, of course, but they seem to be afraid of the brothers. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that they might have shouldered more guilt than they deserve.’

‘Just let me know if you want to discuss anything.’

Birgitta gathered her notes and prepared to go home. Staffan had left a message on her mobile phone to say that all was well. She was about to leave when her office phone rang. She hesitated. Then she picked up the receiver. It was the usher.

‘I just wanted to say that you have a visitor.’

‘Who?’

‘The woman you asked me to keep an eye on.’

‘Is she still around? What does she want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If she’s related to any of the accused Vietnamese, I’m not allowed to talk to her.’

‘I don’t think she’s a relative.’

Birgitta was beginning to get impatient. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that she’s not from Vietnam. She speaks excellent English. She’s Chinese. And she wants to speak to you. She says it’s very important.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Waiting outside. I can see her from here. She’s just plucked a leaf from a birch tree.’

‘Does she have a name?’

‘I’m sure she does. But she hasn’t told me what it is.’

‘I’m coming. Tell her to wait.’

Birgitta walked over to the window. She could see the woman, standing on the pavement.

A few minutes later she left the courthouse.

33

The woman, whose name was Ho, could have been Hong Qiu’s younger sister. Birgitta was struck by the resemblance, not only the sleeked-back hair but also the dignified posture.

Ho introduced herself in excellent English, just as Hong Qiu had done.

‘I have a message for you,’ said Ho. ‘If I’m not disturbing you.’

‘I’ve just finished work for the day.’

‘I didn’t understand a single word of what was said in court,’ said Ho, ‘but I could see the respect that was shown to you.’

‘A few months ago I attended a trial in China. The judge on that occasion was also a woman. And she was also treated with great respect.’

Birgitta asked if Ho would like to go to a cafe or restaurant, but Ho simply pointed to a nearby park where there were several benches.

They sat down. Not far away a group of elderly drunks was arguing noisily. Birgitta had seen them many times before. She had a vague memory of having found one of them guilty of some misdemeanour, but she couldn’t remember what. Drunks in parks and the lonely men who rake dead leaves in churchyards are the very hub of Swedish society she often said to herself. Take them away, and what’s left? She noticed that one of the drunks was a dark-skinned man. The new Sweden was asserting its identity even here. Birgitta smiled.

‘Spring has sprung,’ she said.

‘I’m here to tell you that Hong Qiu is dead.’

Birgitta hadn’t known what to expect — but it wasn’t that. She felt a wrench deep down inside her. Not of sorrow, but of immediate fear.

‘What happened?’

‘She died in a car accident while on a trip to Africa. Her brother was there as well. But he survived. He may not have been in the same car. I don’t know all the details.’

Birgitta stared at Ho in silence, chewing over the words, trying to understand. The colourful spring was suddenly surrounded by shadows.

‘When did it happen?’

‘Several months ago.’

‘In Africa?’

‘My dear friend Hong Qiu was part of a big delegation to Zimbabwe. Our minister of trade, Ke, was the leader of the visit, which was considered very important. The accident happened on an excursion to Mozambique.’

Two of the drunks suddenly started screaming and pushing each other.

‘Let’s go,’ said Birgitta, rising to her feet.

She took Ho to a nearby cafe where they were almost the only customers. Birgitta asked the girl behind the counter to turn down the music. Ho drank a bottle of mineral water, Birgitta a cup of coffee.

‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘In detail, slowly, as much as you know. During the few days I met Hong Qiu she became a sort of friend. But who are you? Who has sent you all the way from Beijing? And above all, why?’

Ho shook her head.

‘I’ve come from London. Hong Qiu had a lot of friends who are now mourning her loss. Ma Li, who was with Hong Qiu in Africa, gave me the sad news. And she asked me to contact you as well.’

‘Ma Li?’

‘One of Hong Qiu’s other friends.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ said Birgitta. ‘I still find it hard to believe that what you say is true.’

‘All of us do. But it is. Ma Li wrote to me and described what happened.’

Birgitta waited. She had the impression that the silence also contained a message. Ho was creating a space around them, closing them in.

‘The information is not consistent,’ said Ho. ‘The official story of Hong Qiu’s death seems to have been sanitised.’

‘Who told Ma Li about it?’

‘Ya Ru, Hong Qiu’s brother. According to him Hong Qiu had chosen to go on a trip deep into the bush, to see wild animals. The driver was going too fast, the car overturned, and Hong Qiu died instantly. The car burst into flames; petrol had leaked out.’

Birgitta shook her head. And shuddered at the same time. She simply couldn’t imagine Hong Qiu dead, a victim of a banal car accident.

‘A few days before Hong Qiu died she’d had a long conversation with Ma Li,’ Ho continued. ‘I don’t know what about; Ma Li is not the type to betray the confidence of a friend. But Hong Qiu had given her clear instructions. If anything happened to her, you should be told.’

‘Why? I barely knew her.’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘But surely Ma Li must have explained?’

‘Hong Qiu wanted you to know where I could be found in London, if you needed any help.’

Birgitta could feel her fear growing. I’m attacked in a street in Beijing; Hong Qiu has an accident in Africa. The two events are somehow connected.

The message scared her. If you ever need help you should know that there is a woman in London called Ho.

‘But I don’t understand what you’re saying. Have you come here to give me a warning? What might happen?’

‘Ma Li didn’t give any details.’

‘But whatever was in the letter was sufficient to make you come here. You knew where I lived, you knew how to get in touch with me. What did Ma Li write?’

‘Hong Qiu had told her about a Swedish judge called Mrs Roslin who had been a close friend of hers for many years. She described the regrettable mugging, and the meticulous police investigation.’

‘Did she really say that?’

‘I’m quoting from the letter. Word for word. Hong Qiu also told her about a photograph you had shown her.’

Birgitta gave a start.

‘Really? A photograph? Did she say anything else?’

‘That it was of a Chinese man you thought had something to do with incidents that had taken place in Sweden.’

‘What did she say about the man?’

‘She was worried. She had discovered something.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

Birgitta said nothing. She tried to work out what was implied by the message from Hong Qiu. It could only be a warning cry out of silence. Had Hong Qiu suspected that something might happen to her? Or did she know that Birgitta was in danger? Had Hong Qiu discovered the identity of the man in the photograph? In which case, why didn’t she say so?

Birgitta could feel her discomfort growing. Ho sat in silence, watching her, waiting.

‘There’s one question I must have an answer to. Who are you?’

‘I’ve been living in London since the beginning of the 1990s. I first went there as a secretary in the Chinese embassy. Then I was appointed head of the English-Chinese chamber of commerce. Now I’m an independent consultant to Chinese companies that want to establish themselves in England. But not only there. I’m also involved in a big exhibition complex that’s going to be built near a Swedish city called Kalmar. My work takes me all over Europe.’

‘How did you get to know Hong Qiu?’

The reply surprised Birgitta.

‘We’re relatives. Cousins. Hong Qiu was ten years older than me, but we’ve known each other since we were young.’

Birgitta thought about Hong Qiu evidently having said that she and Birgitta had been friends for many years. There was a message in that. Birgitta could only interpret it as meaning that their brief acquaintance had formed deep links. Significant trust was already possible. Or perhaps, rather, necessary?

‘What did it say in the letter? About me?’

‘Hong Qiu wanted you to be informed as soon as possible.’

‘What else?’

‘As I’ve already said. You should know where I live, in case something happens.’

‘What might happen?’

‘I don’t know.’

Something in Ho’s tone of voice put Birgitta on her guard. So far Ho had been telling the truth. But now she was being evasive. Ho knows more than she’s saying, Birgitta thought.

‘China is a big country,’ said Birgitta. ‘For a Westerner it’s easy to confuse its size with the impression that it’s secretive. The lack of knowledge is transformed into mystery. I’m sure that’s what I’m doing. That’s how I experienced Hong Qiu. No matter what she said to me, I could never understand what she meant.’

‘China is no more secretive than any other country. It’s a Western myth that our country is incomprehensible. The Europeans have never accepted that they simply don’t understand the way we think. Nor that we made so many crucial discoveries and inventions before you acquired the same knowledge. Gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, everything is originally Chinese. You weren’t even first to learn the art of measuring time. Thousands of years before you started making mechanical clocks we had water clocks and hourglasses. You can never forgive us for that.’

‘When did you last see Hong Qiu?’

‘Four years ago. She came to London. We spent a few evenings together. It was in summer. She wanted to go for long walks on Hampstead Heath and interrogate me on how the English regarded developments in China. Her questions were demanding, and she was impatient if my answers were unclear. She also wanted to go to cricket matches.’

‘Why?’

‘She never said. Hong Qiu had a number of surprising interests.’

‘I’m not all that interested in sports, but cricket seems to me totally incomprehensible — it’s impossible to work out how one of the teams wins or loses.’

‘I think her enthusiasm was due to the fact that she wanted to understand how Englishmen work by studying their national sport. Hong Qiu was a very obstinate person.’

Ho checked her watch. ‘I have to go back to London from Copenhagen later today.’

Birgitta wondered whether she ought to ask the question that had been forming in the back of her mind.

‘You weren’t by chance in my house the night before last? In my study?’

‘I was staying in a hotel. Why should I have wanted to creep into your house like a thief?’ she said, bemused.

‘It was just a thought. I was woken up by a noise.’

‘Had somebody been there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is anything missing?’

‘I thought somebody had disturbed my papers.’

‘No,’ said Ho. ‘I haven’t been there.’

‘And you are here on your own?’

‘Nobody knows I’m in Sweden. Not even my husband and children. They think I’m in Brussels. I often go there.’

Ho took out a business card and put it on the table in front of Birgitta. On it was her full name, Ho Mei Wan, her address and various telephone numbers.

‘Where exactly in London do you live?’

‘In Chinatown. In summer it can be very noisy in the streets all night long. But I like living there even so. It’s a little China in the middle of London.’

Birgitta tucked the business card into her purse. She accompanied Ho to the railway station to make sure she caught the right train.

‘My husband’s a conductor on the railway,’ Birgitta said. ‘What does your husband do?’

‘He’s a waiter,’ said Ho. ‘That’s why we live in Chinatown. He works in a restaurant on the ground floor.’

Birgitta watched the Copenhagen train disappear into a tunnel. She went home, prepared a meal and felt how tired she was. She decided to watch the news, but fell asleep soon after lying down on the sofa. She was woken up by the telephone ringing. It was Staffan calling from Funchal. It was a bad connection. He had to shout in order to make himself heard over all the crackling. She gathered that all was well and they were enjoying themselves. Then they were cut off. She waited for him to call again, but nothing happened. She lay down on the sofa again. She had difficulty taking in the fact that Hong Qiu was dead. But even when Ho told her what had happened, she had the feeling that something didn’t add up.

She began to regret not having asked Ho more questions. But she had simply been too tired after the complicated trial and hadn’t felt up to it. And now it was too late. Ho was on her way home to her English Chinatown.

Birgitta lit a candle for Hong Qiu and searched through maps in the bookcase before finding one of London. Ho’s husband’s restaurant was adjacent to Leicester Square. Birgitta had once sat with Staffan in the little park there, watching people come and go. It was late autumn, and they had made the journey on the spur of the moment. Looking back, they had often talked about that trip as a one-off but very precious memory.

She went to bed early, as she had to be in court the following day. The case, concerning a woman who had beaten up her mother, was not as complicated as the one involving the four Vietnamese, but she couldn’t afford to be tired when she took her place on the bench. Her self-respect wouldn’t allow that. To make sure that she didn’t spend the night awake, she took half a sleeping pill before switching off the lights.

The case turned out to be simpler than she had expected. The accused woman suddenly changed her plea and admitted all the charges against her. And the defence did not produce any surprises that would have extended proceedings. As early as a quarter to four Birgitta Roslin was able to sum up and announce that the sentence would be made public on 1 June.

When she returned to her office, she called the police in Hudiksvall, off the top of her head. She thought she recognised the voice of the young woman who answered. She sounded less nervous and overworked than last winter.

‘I’m looking for Vivi Sundberg. Is she in today?’

‘I saw her walk past only a few minutes ago. Who’s calling?’

‘The judge in Helsingborg. That’ll be sufficient.’

Vivi Sundberg came to the phone almost immediately. ‘Birgitta Roslin. Long time no hear.’

‘I just thought I’d check in.’

‘Some new Chinamen? New theories?’

Birgitta could hear the irony in Vivi’s voice and was very tempted to reply that she had lots of new Chinamen to pull out of her hat. But she merely said that she was curious to know how things were going.

‘We still think the man who unfortunately managed to take his own life is the murderer,’ Vivi said. ‘But even though he’s dead, the investigation is continuing. We can’t sentence a dead man, but we can give those who are still alive an explanation of what happened and, not least, why.’

‘Will you succeed?’

‘It’s too early to say

Any new leads?’

‘I can’t comment on that.’

‘No other suspects? No other possible explanations?’

‘I can’t comment on that either. We are still embroiled in a large-scale investigation with lots of complicated details.’

‘But you still think it was the man you arrested? And that he really had a motive for killing nineteen people?’

‘That’s what it looks like. What I can tell you is that we’ve had help from every kind of expert you can think of — criminologists, profile makers, psychologists, and the most experienced detectives and technicians in the country. Needless to say, Professor Persson is extremely doubtful. But when isn’t he? There’s still a long way to go, though.’

‘What about the boy?’ Birgitta asked. ‘The victim who died, but didn’t fit the pattern. How do you explain that?’

‘We don’t have an explanation per se. But of course we do have a picture of how it all happened.’

‘There’s one thing I’ve been wondering about,’ said Birgitta. ‘Did any of the dead seem to be more important than the other victims?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Anybody who was exposed to especially brutal treatment? Or maybe the one who was killed first? Or last?’

‘Those are questions I can’t comment on.’

‘Just tell me if my questions come as a surprise.’

‘No.’

‘Have you found an explanation for the red ribbon?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been in China,’ said Birgitta. ‘I saw the Great Wall of China. I was mugged and spent an entire day with some very intense police officers.’

‘Really?’ said Vivi. ‘Were you hurt?’

‘No, only scared. But I got back the bag they stole from me.’

‘So perhaps you were lucky after all?’

‘Yes,’ said Birgitta. ‘I was lucky. Thanks for your time.’

Birgitta remained at her desk after replacing the receiver. She had no doubt that the specialists who had been brought in would have had something to say if they’d felt the investigation was going nowhere.

That evening she went for a long walk, and spent a few hours leafing through wine brochures. She made a note of several from Italy that she wanted to order, then watched an old film on TV that she had seen with Staffan when they first started going out together. Jane Fonda played a prostitute, the colours were pale and faded, the plot peculiar, and she couldn’t help but smile at the strange clothes, especially the vulgar platform shoes that had been highly fashionable at the time.

She had almost dozed off when the telephone rang. The clock on the bedside table said a quarter to midnight. The ringing stopped. If it had been Staffan or one of the children they would have called her mobile phone. She switched off the light. Then the telephone rang again. She jumped up and answered using the phone on her desk.

‘Birgitta Roslin? My apologies for calling at this late hour. Do you recognise my voice?’

She did recognise it, but couldn’t put a face to it. It was a man, an elderly man.

‘No, not really.’

‘Sture Hermansson.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘Know is perhaps too strong a word. But you visited my little Hotel Eden in Hudiksvall a few months ago.’

‘Now I remember.’

‘I want to apologise for calling so late.’

‘You already have. I take it you have a special reason for calling?’

‘He’s come back.’

Hermansson lowered his voice when he spoke these last words. The penny dropped, and she realised what he was talking about.

‘The Chinaman?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘He arrived not long ago. He hadn’t booked in advance. I’ve just given him his key. He’s in the same room as last time. Number twelve.’

‘Are you sure it’s the same man?’

‘You have the film. But he seems to be the same person. He uses the same name, at least.’

Birgitta tried to think what to do. Her heart was pounding.

Her train of thought was broken by Hermansson.

‘One more thing.’

‘What?’

‘He asked about you.’

Birgitta held her breath. The fear inside her hit home with full force.

‘That’s not possible.’

‘My English is not good. To be honest, it took me some time before I realised who he was asking after. But I’m sure it was you.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That you lived in Helsingborg. He seemed surprised. I think he assumed you were from Hudiksvall.’

‘What else did you say?’

‘I gave him your address, because you’d left it with me and asked me to get in touch if anything happened.’

You half-witted imbecile, Birgitta thought. She was suddenly panic-stricken.

‘Do me a favour,’ she said. ‘Call me when he goes out. Even if it’s the middle of the night. Call.’

‘I take it you want me to tell him I’ve been in touch with you?’

‘It would be good if you didn’t mention that.’

‘OK, I won’t. I won’t say a thing.’

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

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

34

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

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

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

The telephone rang. It was Staffan from Funchal.

‘We’re taking a side trip,’ he said.

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

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

‘Where are you going?’

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

‘When are you leaving?’

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

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

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

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

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

A woman replied in broken Swedish. ‘Eden.’

‘Can I speak to Sture Hermansson, please?’

‘You can’t,’ yelled the woman.

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

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

‘Hello?’

‘Can I speak to Sture Hermansson, please?’

‘Who’s asking?’

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

‘Yes. But you can’t speak to Sture.’

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

‘He’s dead.’

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

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

‘Who am I speaking to?’

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

‘Has he been murdered?’

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

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

‘Why not?’

‘Because he had guests.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ll do that. But not right now.’

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

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

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

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

She called Karin Wiman. No response there either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘Are you a police officer?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s happened?’

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

‘Are you sure about this?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s why I went to see you.’

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

‘If I can.’

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

‘Why would I have done that?’

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

‘Are you sure? Or do you actually understand Swedish very well?’

‘If that were the case, surely I’d have spoken to you in Swedish.’

‘You must realise that I’m very unsure. You might find it advantageous to pretend that you don’t understand my language. I even wonder if you’re wearing a yellow raincoat to make it easier for somebody to see you.’

‘Why should I?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all at the moment. Most important of course is that Hong Qiu wanted to warn me. But why should I turn to you for help? What can you do?’

‘Let me start with your last question,’ said Ho. ‘Chinatown is a world of its own. Even though thousands of English people and tourists wander around our streets — Gerrard Street, Lisle Street, Wardour Street, all the alleys — we only allow you to see the surface. Concealed behind your Chinatown is my Chinatown. It’s possible to hide away there, change identity, survive for months and even years without being discovered. Even if most of the people living here are Chinese who have become naturalised English citizens, the bottom line is that we all feel that we are in our own world. I can help you by giving you entry into my Chinatown, a place you would otherwise never be allowed into.’

‘What exactly should I be scared of?’

‘Ma Li wasn’t at all clear when she wrote to me. But you mustn’t forget that Ma Li was also scared. She didn’t say as much, but I could sense it.’

‘Everybody’s scared. Are you scared?’

‘Not yet. But I can be.’

Her mobile phone rang. She checked the display and stood up. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked. ‘Which hotel? I have to go back to work.’

‘Sanderson.’

‘I know where that is. What room?’

‘One thirty-five.’

‘Can we meet tomorrow?’

‘Why do we have to wait that long?’

‘I can’t get away from work before then. I have a meeting this evening that I can’t skip.’

‘Is that really true?’

Ho took hold of Birgitta Roslin’s hand. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A Chinese delegation is going to talk business with the bosses of several big British companies. I have to be there.’

‘Right now you’re the only one I can turn to.’

‘Call me tomorrow morning. I’ll try to get time off.’

Ho went out into the rain, her yellow coat fluttering as she walked. Birgitta Roslin stayed for quite some time, feeling incredibly weary, before walking back to her hotel, which of course was not the Sanderson. She still didn’t trust Ho, just as these days she mistrusted anyone vaguely Asian in appearance.

She ate in the hotel’s restaurant that evening. It had stopped raining by the time she finished dinner. She decided to go out to the park and sit for a while on the same bench that she and Staffan had sat on once upon a time.

She watched people coming and going. A young couple sat briefly on her bench, kissing and cuddling, followed by a man carrying yesterday’s paper, rescued from a rubbish bin.

She made another attempt to call Staffan on his sailing boat off Madeira, even though she knew it was a waste of time.

She noted how many fewer and fewer people were strolling through the park, and eventually stood up to return to her hotel.

Then she saw him. He came along one of the paths diagonally behind where she had been sitting. He was dressed in black and could only have been the man whose photo was taken by Sture Hermansson’s surveillance camera. He was walking straight towards her, carrying something shiny in his hand.

She screamed and took a step back. As he came closer, she fell over backwards and hit her head against the iron edge of the bench.

The last thing she saw was his face; it was as if her eyes had taken one more picture of him. Then she faded away into an all-embracing and silent darkness.

35

Ya Ru loved the shadows. He could make himself invisible there, just like the beasts of prey he both admired and feared. But others had the same ability. It had often occurred to him that young entrepreneurs were in the process of taking over the economy, and hence before long would be demanding a seat at the table where political decisions were made. Everybody starts in the shadows, where they can watch and observe without being seen.

But the shadow he was hiding behind on this particular evening in rainy London had a different aim. He watched Birgitta Roslin, sitting on a bench in a little park in Leicester Square. From where he was standing he could see only her back. But he didn’t dare risk discovery. He had already noticed that she was on her guard like a restless animal. Ya Ru didn’t underestimate her. If Hong Qiu had trusted Birgitta Roslin, he needed to take her extremely seriously.

He had been following her all day, ever since she turned up outside the building where Ho lived. He had been amused to realise he owned the restaurant where Ho’s husband Wa worked. They didn’t know that, of course — Ya Ru seldom owned anything under his own name. The Ming Restaurant belonged to Chinese Food, Inc., a limited company registered in Liechtenstein, where Ya Ru had placed his European restaurant portfolio. He kept a careful eye on the accounts and quarterly reports produced by young, gifted Chinese employees he had recruited from the top English universities. Ya Ru hated everything English. He would never forget what history told him. He was delighted to rob the country of talented young businessmen who had taken advantage of the best universities.

Ya Ru had never eaten a meal at the Ming Restaurant. He didn’t intend to do so on this occasion either. As soon as he had fulfilled his mission he would return to Beijing.

There had been a time in his life when he’d regarded airports with almost religious emotions. They were the modern equivalent of harbours. In those days Ya Ru had never travelled anywhere without a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo. The man’s fearless desire to investigate the unknown had been an inspiration. Nowadays he thought more and more that travelling was a pain, even if he did have a private jet and was usually spared the agony of hanging around in disconsolate and soul-destroying airports. The feeling that one’s mind was revitalised by all these sudden changes of location, the intoxicating delight of passing through time zones, was negated by all the pointless time spent waiting for departures or baggage. The neon-lit shopping malls at airports, the moving walkways, the echoing corridors, the ever-smaller glass cages in which smokers were crammed together, were not places where new thoughts or new philosophical ideas could be developed. He thought back to the time when people travelled by train or by transatlantic liners. In those days intellectual discussions and learned arguments had been taken for granted, as much a part of the accepted environment as luxury and idleness.

That was why he had fitted his private jet, the big Gulfstream he now owned, with antique bookshelves, in which he kept the most significant works of Chinese and foreign literature.

He felt like a distant relative — with no blood relationship, only a mystical one — of Captain Nemo, who travelled in his underwater vessel like a lone emperor without an empire but with a large library and a devastating hatred of the people who had ruined his life. It was believed that Nemo modelled himself after a vanished Indian prince who had opposed the British Empire. Ya Ru could feel an affinity to this, but what he really sympathised with was the gloomy and embittered figure of Nemo himself, the inspired engineer and widely read philosopher. He named the Gulfstream Nautilus II. An enlargement of one of the original etchings in the book, depicting Nemo with his reluctant visitors in the extensive library of the Nautilus, was displayed on the wall next to the entrance to the flight deck.

But now everything was about the shadows. He concealed himself efficiently and observed the woman he would have to kill. Another thing he had in common with Nemo was his belief in revenge. The necessity of revenge left its mark through history like a leitmotif.

It would all soon be over. Now that he was in Chinatown in London, with raindrops falling on the collar of his jacket, it struck him that there was something remarkable about the end of this story taking place in England. It was from here that the Wang brothers had commenced their journey back to China, the country that only one of them would ever see again.

Ya Ru didn’t mind waiting when he was in control of the time involved, unlike at airports. This attitude often surprised his friends, who regarded life as all too short, created by a god that could seem like a miserable old mandarin who didn’t want the joy of existence to last too long. Ya Ru had argued that, on the contrary, the gods responsible for creating life knew exactly what they were doing. If humans were allowed to live too long, their knowledge would increase to such an extent that they would be able to see through the mandarins and join forces to exterminate them. A short life span prevents many revolutions, Ya Ru maintained. And his friends usually agreed, though they didn’t always understand his thinking.

Ya Ru always looked to animals when he wanted to understand his own behaviour and that of others. He was the leopard, and he was also the stallion that fought off all challengers in order to become the sole emperor.

If Deng was the colourless cat that hunted mice better than any other, Mao was the owl, the wise bird, but also the ice-cold raptor that knew exactly when to swoop down in silence and seize its prey.

His line of thought was broken by Birgitta Roslin standing up. During the day he had spent following her, one thing had become abundantly clear: she was scared. She was always looking around, never still. Worries were flowing constantly through her head. He would be able to make use of that observation, even if he hadn’t yet decided how.

But now she stood up. Ya Ru hung back in the shadows.

Then something happened he was totally unprepared for. She gave a start, screamed, then stumbled backwards and hit her head on a bench. A Chinese man stopped and bent down to investigate what had happened. Several other people came hurrying over. Ya Ru stepped out of the shadows and approached the group standing around the prostrate woman. Two police officers came running. Ya Ru pushed his way forward to get a better view. Birgitta Roslin sat up. She had evidently lost consciousness for a few seconds. He heard the police officers asking if she needed an ambulance, but she said no.

It was the first time Ya Ru had heard her voice. He memorised it — a deep, expressive voice.

‘I must have stumbled,’ he heard her saying. ‘I thought somebody was coming towards me. I was frightened.’

‘Were you attacked?’

‘No. It was just my imagination.’

The man who had frightened her was still there. Ya Ru noticed that there was a certain similarity between Liu Xan and this man, who by sheer coincidence had entered into a story he had nothing to do with.

Ya Ru smiled to himself. She is indeed scared and on her guard.

The police officers escorted Birgitta Roslin back to her hotel. Ya Ru remained in the background. But now he knew where she was staying. After checking once more that she was steady on her feet, the police officers walked off while she went in through the hotel doors. Ya Ru saw her being given her key by a receptionist who took it from one of the highest shelves. He waited a few more minutes before entering the hotel lobby. The receptionist was Chinese. Ya Ru bowed and held out a sheet of paper.

‘The lady who just came in, she dropped this in the street outside.’

The receptionist took the paper and put it into the empty mail slot. It was for room 614, on the very top floor of the hotel.

The sheet of paper was white, and blank. Ya Ru suspected that Birgitta would ask the receptionist who had handed it in. A Chinese man, she would be told. And she would become even more on edge. There was no risk to himself.

Ya Ru pretended to be reading a brochure advertising the hotel while thinking about how he could find out how long Birgitta Roslin was staying. The opportunity came when the Chinese receptionist disappeared into a back room and was replaced by a young Englishwoman. Ya Ru went up to the counter.

‘Mrs Birgitta Roslin,’ he said. ‘From Sweden. I’m supposed to pick her up and drive her to the airport. It’s not clear if she’s expecting to be picked up tomorrow or the day after.’

Without more ado the receptionist tapped away at the computer keyboard.

‘Mrs Roslin is booked in for three days,’ she said. ‘Shall I call her so that you can sort out when she needs to be collected?’

‘No, I’ll sort it out with the office. We don’t like to disturb our clients unnecessarily.’

Ya Ru left the hotel. It had started drizzling again. He turned up his collar and walked towards Gower Street to find a taxi. Now he didn’t need to worry about how much time he had at his disposal. A very long time has passed since all this began, he thought. A few more days until it reaches its inevitable conclusion are of no significance.

He hailed a taxi and gave the address in Whitehall where his company in Liechtenstein owned a flat he stayed at on his visits to England. He had often felt that he was betraying the memory of his forefathers by staying in London when he could just as well go to Paris or Berlin. As he sat in the taxi he made up his mind to sell the Whitehall flat and look for a new place in Paris.

It was time to bring that part of his life to a close as well.

He lay down on the bed and listened to the silence. He had insulated all the walls when he first bought the flat. Now he couldn’t even hear the distant hum of traffic. The only sound was the sighing of the air conditioner. It gave him the feeling of being on board a ship. He felt very much at peace.

‘How long ago was it?’ he said aloud into the room. ‘How long ago was it when this story that is now coming to a close first started?’

He did the calculation in his head. It was 1868 when San first sat down in his little room at the mission station. Now it was 2006. One hundred and thirty-eight years ago. San had sat down in the candlelight and meticulously chronicled the story of himself and his two brothers, Guo Si and Wu. It had begun the day they left their squalid home and set off on the long trek to Canton. There they had been exposed to a wicked demon in the guise of Zi. From then onward death followed them wherever they went. In the end the only one left alive was San, with his stubborn determination to tell his story.

They died in a state of deepest humiliation, Ya Ru thought. The succession of emperors and mandarins followed Confucius’s advice to keep the population on such a tight rein that rebellion could never be possible. But just as the English maltreated the natives in their colonies, the brothers were tortured by Americans when they were building the railways. At the same time the English displayed icy contempt for the Chinese and attempted to make them all drug addicts by swamping the markets in China with opium. That is how I see those brutal Englishmen, as drug dealers standing on street corners selling their dope to people they hate and regard as inferior creatures. It’s not so long since Chinese were depicted in European and American cartoons as apes with tails. But the caricatures were true: we were born to be humiliated and turned into slaves. We were not human. We were animals. We had tails.

When Ya Ru used to wander around the streets of London, he would think about how many of the buildings surrounding him were built with enslaved people’s money, their toil and their suffering, their backs and their deaths.

What had San written? That they had built the railway through the American desert using their own ribs as sleepers under the rails. Similarly, the screams and pains of slaves were infused into the iron bridges that spanned the Thames, or in the thick stone walls of the enormous buildings in the fine old financial district of London.

Ya Ru’s train of thought was broken when he dozed off. On waking he went into the living room, where all the furniture and lamps were Chinese. On the table in front of the dark red sofa was a light blue silk bag. He opened it, having first placed a sheet of white paper on the table. Then he poured out a pile of finely ground glass. It was an ancient method of killing people, mixing the almost invisible grains of glass into a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. There was no escape for anybody who drank it. The thousands of microscopic grains of glass cut the victim’s intestines to shreds. In ancient times it was known as the invisible death because it was sudden and couldn’t be explained.

The pulverised glass would bring San’s story to an end. Ya Ru carefully tipped the glass back into the silk bag and tied it with a knot. Then he switched off all the lamps except for one with a red shade inset with dragons in gold brocade. He sat down in an easy chair that had once belonged to a rich landowner in Shandong Province. He was breathing slowly and sank into the peaceful state in which he thought most clearly.

It took him an hour to decide how he would conclude this last chapter by killing Birgitta Roslin, who in all probability had given his sister Hong Qiu information that could harm him. Information that she could well have passed on to others without his knowing. When he had made up his mind, he pressed a button on the table. A few minutes later he heard old Lang starting to prepare dinner in the kitchen.

She used to clean Ya Ru’s office in Beijing. Night after night he had observed Lang’s silent movements. She was a better cleaner than any of the others who between them kept his skyscraper clean.

When he heard that, in addition to her cleaning work, she also prepared traditional dinners for weddings and funerals, he asked her to cook him a dinner the following evening. He then appointed her his cook and paid her a wage she would otherwise never have been able to dream of. She had a son who had emigrated to London, and Ya Ru arranged for her to fly to Europe in order to look after him during his many visits.

That evening Lang served a series of small dishes. Without Ya Ru having said anything, she had divined what he wanted. She placed his tea on a small kerosene-flamed heater in the living room.

‘Breakfast tomorrow?’ she asked before leaving.

‘No, I’ll see to that myself. But dinner — fish.’

Ya Ru went to bed early. He hadn’t had many uninterrupted hours of sleep since leaving Beijing. First the flight to Europe, then the complicated connections to the town in the north of Sweden, then the visit to Helsingborg, where he had broken into Birgitta’s study and found the word ‘London’ underlined on a scrap of paper next to her telephone. He had flown to Stockholm in his private jet and then on to Copenhagen, followed by London. He had assumed that Roslin would be going to visit Ho.

He made a few notes in his diary, switched off the lamp and soon fell asleep.

The next day London was enveloped in thick cloud. Ya Ru got up as usual at five o’clock and listened to the Chinese news on his shortwave radio. Then he checked the world stock markets on a computer, spoke to two of his managing directors about various ongoing projects, and made himself a simple breakfast of fruit.

At seven he left the flat with the silk bag in his pocket. There was one potential shortcoming in his plan. He didn’t know what time Birgitta Roslin usually ate breakfast. If she was already in the dining room when he got there, he would have to wait until the following day.

He walked up towards Trafalgar Square, paused for a couple of minutes to listen to a lone cellist playing on the pavement with an upturned hat at his feet. He donated a few coins and continued north. He turned off Tottenham Court Road and came to the hotel. There was a man at the reception desk he hadn’t seen before. He went up to the counter and took one of the hotel’s business cards. As he did so he noticed that the sheet of paper had disappeared from Birgitta Roslin’s mail slot.

The door to the dining room was standing open. He saw Birgitta Roslin right away. She was sitting at a table by the window, evidently just beginning her breakfast, and was being served coffee by a waiter.

Ya Ru held his breath and thought for a second. He decided not to wait after all. This was his moment. He took off his overcoat and approached the head waiter. He explained that he wasn’t a guest but would like to have breakfast. The head waiter was from South Korea. He led Ya Ru to a table diagonally behind the one where Birgitta Roslin was leaning over her plate.

Ya Ru looked around the restaurant. There was an emergency exit in the wall closest to his table. As he went to collect a newspaper, he tried the door and discovered it was unlocked. He returned to his table, ordered tea and waited. Many of the tables were still empty, but Ya Ru had noted that most of the keys were not behind the desk at reception. The hotel was almost full.

He took out his mobile phone and the business card he had picked up. Then he dialled the number and waited. When the receptionist answered, he said he had an important message for one of the guests, Birgitta Roslin.

‘I’ll put you through to her room.’

‘She’ll be in the dining room,’ said Ya Ru. ‘She always has breakfast at this time. I’d be grateful if you could find her. She usually sits at a window table. She’ll be wearing a blue dress; her hair is dark and cut short.’

‘I’ll ask her to come and take the call.’

Ya Ru held the phone in his hand with the line open until he saw the receptionist enter the dining room. Then he hung up, slipped it into his pocket and at the same time took out the silk bag of ground glass. As Birgitta Roslin stood up and accompanied the receptionist out through the door, Ya Ru walked over to her table. He picked up her newspaper and looked around, as if making sure that the guest sitting there really had left. He waited while a waiter topped up cups of coffee at a neighbouring table, all the time keeping a close eye on the door to reception. When the waiter had moved on, Ya Ru opened the bag and tipped the contents into the half-empty cup of coffee. Birgitta Roslin came back into the dining room. Ya Ru had already turned round and was about to return to his own table.

At that moment the windowpane shattered, and the sound of a rifle shot combined with the noise of falling glass. Ya Ru had no time to realise that something had gone wrong, catastrophically wrong. The bullet hit him in his right temple and killed him instantly. All his important bodily functions had already ceased when his body fell onto a table and knocked over a vase of flowers.

Birgitta Roslin stood there motionless, just like all the other guests in the dining room, the waiters and waitresses and a head waiter clutching a dish of hard-boiled eggs. The silence was broken by somebody screaming.

Birgitta stared at the dead body lying on the white tablecloth. It still hadn’t dawned on her that it had anything to do with her. A vague thought that London was being subjected to a terrorist attack flew through her head.

Then she felt a hand grabbing hold of her arm. She tried to pull herself free as she turned round.

It was Ho standing behind her.

‘Don’t say a word,’ said Ho. ‘Just follow me. We can’t stay here.’

Ho ushered Birgitta out into the lobby.

‘Give me your key. I’ll pack your bag while you pay your bill.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Don’t ask any questions. Just do as I say.’

Ho was gripping her arm so tightly that it hurt. Chaos had broken out in the hotel. People were screaming and yelling, running back and forth.

‘Insist on paying,’ said Ho. ‘We have to get out of here.’

Birgitta understood. Not what had happened, but what Ho said. She stood at the desk and bellowed at one of the bewildered receptionists that she wanted to settle her bill. Ho disappeared into one of the lifts and returned ten minutes later with Birgitta’s suitcase. By then the hotel lobby was teeming with police officers and paramedics.

Birgitta had paid her bill.

‘Now we’re going to walk calmly out of the door,’ said Ho. ‘If anybody tries to stop you, just say that you have a plane to catch.’

They elbowed their way out into the street without anybody hindering them. Birgitta paused and looked back. Ho dragged at her arm once again.

‘Don’t turn round. Just walk normally. We’ll talk later.’

They came to where Ho lived and went up to her flat on the second floor. There was a man there, in his twenties. He was very pale and talked excitedly to Ho. Birgitta could see that Ho was trying to calm him down. She took him into an adjacent room where the agitated conversation continued. When they returned, the man was carrying a bundle that looked like it might contain a pool cue. He left the flat. Ho stood by the window, looking down into the street. Birgitta slumped onto a chair. She had only just realised that the man who died had fallen onto the table next to the one where she’d been sitting.

She looked at Ho, who had now left the window. She was very pale. Birgitta could see that she was trembling.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘You were the one who was supposed to die,’ said Ho. ‘He was going to kill you. I must tell it exactly as it is.’

Birgitta shook her head.

‘You have to be clear,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I don’t know what I’ll do.’

‘The man who died was Ya Ru. Hong Qiu’s brother.’

‘What happened?’

‘He tried to kill you. We managed to stop him at the very last moment.’

‘We?’

‘You could have died because you gave me false information about the hotel you were staying at. Why did you do that? Did you think you couldn’t trust me? Are you so confused that you can’t distinguish between friends and people who are anything but?’

Birgitta raised her hand. ‘You’re going too fast. I can’t keep up. Hong Qiu’s brother? Why would he want to kill me?’

‘Because you knew too much about what happened in your country. All those people who died. Ya Ru was presumably behind it all — that’s what Hong Qiu thought, at least.’

‘But why?’

‘I can’t say. I don’t know.’

Birgitta was thinking. When Ho was about to speak again, Birgitta raised her hand to stop her.

‘You said “we,” ’ said Birgitta after a while. ‘The man who just left your flat was carrying something. Was it a rifle?’

‘Yes. I had decided that San should keep an eye on you. But there was nobody with your name at the hotel you told me you were staying at. It was San who realised that this hotel was closest. We saw you through the window. When Ya Ru came up to your table after you’d been called away, I realised that he was going to kill you. San took out his rifle and shot him. It all happened so quickly that nobody in the street caught on. Most people probably thought it was a motorbike backfiring. San had the rifle hidden in a raincoat.’

‘San?’

‘Hong Qiu’s son. She sent him to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Hong Qiu wasn’t only afraid for her own life and yours. She was just as afraid for her son. San was convinced that Ya Ru had killed his mother. So he didn’t need much encouragement to get his revenge.’

Birgitta felt sick. She was slowly beginning to realise what it was all about. It was as she had suspected earlier but rejected because it seemed so preposterous. Something in the past had triggered the deaths of all those people in Hesjövallen.

She reached out and grabbed hold of Ho. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Is it all over now?’

‘I think so. You can go home. Ya Ru is dead. Neither you nor I know what will happen next. But at least you won’t be a part of the story any more.’

‘How am I going to be able to live without knowing how it all ends?’

‘I’ll try to help you.’

‘What will happen to San?’

‘No doubt the police will find witnesses who will say that a Chinese man shot another Chinese man. But nobody will be able to finger San.’

‘He saved my life.’

‘He probably saved his own life by killing Ya Ru.’

‘But who is this man that everybody’s afraid of?’

Ho shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can answer that. In many ways he’s a representative of the new China that neither Hong Qiu nor I nor Ma Li, nor even San for that matter, want to have anything to do with. There are major struggles going on in our country about what’s going to happen next. What the future is going to look like. Nobody knows; nothing is assured. You can only do what you think is right.’

‘Such as killing Ya Ru?’

‘That was necessary.’

Birgitta went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. When she put the glass down, she knew that she had to go home now. Everything that was still unclear would have to wait. All she wanted to do was to go home, to get away from London and everything that had happened.

Ho accompanied her in a taxi to Heathrow. After a wait of four hours she succeeded in finding a seat on a flight to Copenhagen. Ho wanted to wait until the plane had left, but Birgitta asked her to leave.

When she got back to Helsingborg she opened a bottle of wine and emptied it during the course of the night. She slept most of the next day. She was woken up by Staffan’s call to say that their boat trip was over. She couldn’t stop herself from bursting into tears.

‘What’s the matter? Has something happened?’

‘No, nothing. I’m tired.’

‘Should we pack up and come home?’

‘No. It’s nothing. If you want to help, just believe me when I say it’s nothing. Tell me about your sailing adventure.’

They spoke for a long time. She insisted on his telling her in detail about their trip, about their plans for that evening and for the next day. When they finished talking, she had calmed herself down.

The following day she declared herself fit again and went back to work. She also made a telephone call to Ho.

‘Soon I’ll have lots to tell you,’ said Ho.

‘I promise to listen. How’s San?’

‘He’s agitated, scared, and he misses his mother. But he’s strong.’

After hanging up Birgitta remained seated at the kitchen table.

She closed her eyes.

The image of the man lying in a heap over the table in the hotel dining room was slowly fading away, and soon hardly any of it remained.

36

A few days before midsummer, Birgitta Roslin conducted her last trial before the holidays. She and Staffan had rented a cottage on the island of Bornholm. They would stay there for three weeks, and the children would come to visit, one after the other. The trial, which she estimated would take two days, concerned three women and a man who had been robbing people in car parks and roadside camping sites. Two of the women came from Romania; the man and the third woman were Swedish. What struck Roslin most was the brutality displayed, especially by the youngest of the women on two occasions, when they had attacked people in caravans at overnight camping sites. She had hit one of the victims, an elderly man from Germany, so hard on the head with a hammer that it split his skull. The man had survived, but if the hammer had landed an inch either way he could well have died. On the other occasion she had stabbed a woman with a screwdriver that missed her heart by a fraction of an inch.

The prosecutor, Palm, had described the gang as ‘entrepreneurs active in various branches of criminal activity’. Besides spending nights touring car parks between Helsingborg and Varberg, they had also spent days stealing from shops, especially fashion boutiques and salesrooms specialising in electronic equipment. Using specially prepared suitcases whose linings had been ripped out and replaced by metal foil, so that the alarm didn’t go off when they left the shops, they had stolen goods worth almost a million kronor before they were caught. But they made the mistake of returning to the same fashion boutique near Halmstad and were recognised by the staff. They all confessed, and the stolen goods were recovered. To the surprise of the police, which Birgitta shared, they did not argue and blame one another when it came to sorting out who did what.

It was rainy and chilly the morning she walked to the courthouse. It was also mainly in the mornings that she was still troubled by the events that culminated at the London hotel.

She had spoken to Ho twice on the telephone. Both times she was disappointed because she thought Ho had been evasive, not telling her what happened after the shooting drama. But Ho had insisted that Birgitta must be patient.

‘The truth is never simple,’Ho said. ‘It’s only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries.’

But she had been told one piece of information by Ho, something that frightened her almost more than anything else. The police had discovered in the dead Ya Ru’s hand a small silk bag containing the remains of extremely fine powder made from broken glass. The British detectives had been unable to work out what it was, but Ho told Birgitta it was an old, sophisticated Chinese method of killing people.

She had been as close to death as that. Sometimes, but always when she was alone, she was stricken by violent sobbing attacks. She hadn’t even mentioned this to Staffan. She had kept it to herself ever since getting back home from London. Staffan had no idea of how she really felt.

A week after Ya Ru’s death, she received a call from somebody she would have preferred not to talk to: Lars Emanuelsson.

‘Time passes,’ he said. ‘Any news?’

For a brief moment she was afraid that Lars Emanuelsson had somehow found out that Birgitta Roslin was the intended victim in the London hotel.

‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose the police in Hudiksvall have changed their minds, have they?’

‘About the dead man being the murderer? An insignificant, unimportant, presumably mentally defective man who commits the most brutal mass murder in Swedish criminal history? It might just be true, of course. But I know that many people wonder. Such as me. And you.’

‘I don’t think about it. I’ve put it behind me.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite true.’

‘You can think whatever you like. What do you want? I’m busy.’

‘How are things with your contacts in Hudiksvall? Are you still talking to Vivi Sundberg?’

‘No. Will you please go away now?’

‘Obviously I want you to get in touch with me when you do have something to report. My experience tells me that there are still an awful lot of surprises concealed behind those terrible goings-on in that little village up north.’

‘I’m hanging up now.’

She wondered how much longer Lars Emanuelsson would continue pestering her. But perhaps she would miss his persistence when it finally stopped.

That morning shortly before midsummer she came to her office, gathered together all the documents relating to the case, spoke to one of the court secretaries about a date in the autumn for sentencing, then headed for the courtroom. The moment she entered it she noticed Ho sitting in the back row of the public gallery, in the same seat as the last time she’d been in Helsingborg.

She raised a hand in greeting and could see that Ho smiled back at her. She scribbled a couple of lines on a scrap of paper, explaining to Ho that there would be an adjournment for lunch at noon. She beckoned to one of the ushers and pointed out Ho. He took her the note; Ho read it and nodded to Birgitta.

Then Birgitta turned her attention to the sorry-looking rabble in the dock. When it was time to pause for lunch, they had reached a stage in the proceedings that indicated there would be no problem in concluding matters the following day.

She met Ho in the street, where she was waiting under a tree in full blossom.

‘I take it something’s happened and that’s why you’re here?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘I can meet you this evening. Where are you staying?’

‘In Copenhagen. With friends.’

‘Am I wrong in thinking you’ve got something important to tell me?’

‘Everything is clearer now. That’s why I’m here. And I’ve brought something for you.’

‘What?’

Ho shook her head. ‘We can talk about that this evening. What have they done? The gang on trial?’

‘Robbery. Violent assault. But not murder.’

‘I’ve been observing them. They’re all frightened of you.’

‘I don’t think so. But they know that I’m the one who’s going to decide their sentences. Given all the trouble they’ve caused, that probably feels pretty scary.’

Birgitta suggested they should have lunch, but Ho declined, saying she had other things to do. Afterwards Birgitta wondered what Ho could have to do in a town like Helsingborg that was totally unknown to her.

The trial continued slowly but relentlessly, and when Birgitta closed proceedings for the day they had progressed as far as she had hoped.

Ho was waiting outside the courthouse. As Staffan was on a train to Gothenburg, Birgitta suggested that Ho should come home with her. She could see that Ho was hesitant.

‘I’m on my own. My husband’s away. My children live in other towns. So you needn’t be afraid of meeting anybody.’

‘But I’m not alone. I have San with me.’

‘Where is he?’

Ho pointed to the other side of the street. San was leaning against a wall.

‘Call him over here,’ said Birgitta. ‘Then all three of us can go to my house.’

San seemed to be less disturbed now than he had been in the chaotic circumstances of their first meeting. Birgitta could see that he took after his mother: he had Hong Qiu’s face, and something of her smile.

‘How old are you?’ she asked him.

‘Twenty-two.’

His English was just as perfect as Hong Qiu’s and Ho’s.

They sat in the living room. San wanted coffee, while Ho drank tea. Set up on the table was the board game Birgitta had bought while in Beijing. In addition to her handbag, Ho was holding a paper bag. She produced from it several pages of handwritten Chinese. And she also took out a notepad with an English translation.

‘Ya Ru had a flat in London. One of my friends knew Lang, who was his housekeeper. She prepared his meals and surrounded him with the silence he craved. She let us into the flat, and we found a diary, which is where these extracts come from. I’ve translated part of what he wrote, which explains why most of this business took place. Not everything, but all the aspects we can understand. There were some motives that only Ya Ru could explain.’

‘He was a powerful man, according to what you’ve told me. That must mean that his death has attracted a lot of attention in China?’

San, who had said little so far, was the one who responded.

‘Nothing. No attention at all, just silence — the kind of silence Shakespeare writes about. “The rest is silence.” Ya Ru was so powerful that others who were just as powerful have succeeded in hushing up what happened. It’s as if Ya Ru never existed. We think that a lot of people were pleased or relieved when he died, even among those regarded as his friends. Ya Ru was dangerous. He collected knowledge that he used to destroy his enemies, or those he regarded as dangerous competitors. Now all his companies are being wound down, silence is being bought, everything is stiffening up and turning into a concrete wall separating him and his fate from both official history and those of us who are still alive.’

Birgitta leafed through the papers lying on her table. ‘Shall I read them now?’

‘No. Later, when you’re alone.’

‘And I don’t need to be afraid?’

‘No.’

‘Will I understand what happened to Hong Qiu?’

‘He killed her. Not with his own hands; somebody else did it for him. And was killed in turn by Ya Ru. One death covered up for the other. Nobody could believe that Ya Ru had killed his sister — apart from the most astute observers, who knew how Ya Ru thought about himself and others. But what’s remarkable and incomprehensible is how he could kill his sister and yet at the same time value his family, his forefathers, above all else. There’s something contradictory there, a riddle we’ll never be able to solve. Ya Ru was powerful. He was feared for his intelligence and his ruthlessness. But perhaps he was also ill.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was possessed by a hatred that corroded his personality. Perhaps he really was out of his mind.’

‘There’s one thing that has puzzled me. What were they actually doing in Africa?’

‘There’s a plan that involves China sending millions of its poor peasants to various African countries. Political and economic structures are currently being put in place that make some of these poor African countries dependent on China. For Ya Ru this was a cynical repetition of the colonialism practised earlier by the Western world. For him this was a farsighted solution. But for Hong Qiu, and for me and Ma Li and lots of others, this is an attack on the very foundations of the China we have helped to build up.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Birgitta. ‘China is a dictatorship. Freedom is limited at every turn; justice is weak. What exactly are you trying to defend?’

‘China is a poor country. The economic development everybody talks about has only benefited a limited part of the population. If this way of leading China into the future continues, with a gap between the rich and the poor growing wider all the time, it will end up in catastrophe. China will be thrust back once more into hopeless chaos. Or fascist structures will become dominant. We are defending the hundreds of millions of peasants who, when all’s said and done, are the ones whose labour is producing the wealth on which developments are based. Developments they are benefiting from less and less.’

‘But I still don’t understand. Ya Ru on one side, Hong Qiu on the other? Suddenly discussion is cut short, and he kills his own sister?’

‘The battle of wills currently taking place in China is about life and death. The poor versus the rich, those without power versus those with it all. It’s about people who are growing more and more angry as they see everything they have fought for being destroyed, and those who see opportunities to make their own fortunes and achieve positions of power they could previously never dream of. That is when people die.’

Birgitta turned to look at San. ‘Tell me about your mother.’

‘Didn’t you know her?’

‘I met her, but I can’t say that I knew her.’

‘It wasn’t easy to be her child. She was strong, determined, often considerate; but she could also be angry and spiteful. I freely admit that I was scared of her. But I loved her, because she tried to see herself as a part of something bigger. To her it was just as natural to help a drunken man onto his feet when he falls over in the street as it was to conduct intensive discussions about politics. For me she was more of a person to look up to than somebody who was simply my mother. Nothing was easy. But I miss her and know that I now have to live with that sense of loss.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to be a doctor. But I’m taking a year off. To mourn. To try to understand what it involves, living without her.’

‘Who is your father?’

‘He died a long time ago. He wrote poetry. All I know about him is that he died shortly after I was born. My mother never said much about him, only that he was a good man and a revolutionary. The only part of him left in my life is a photograph of him holding a puppy in his arms.’

They spoke at length that night about China. Birgitta admitted that as a young woman she had wanted to be a Red Guard in Sweden. But the whole time she was waiting impatiently for the moment when she could read the papers Ho had brought with her.

At about ten she called a taxi to take Ho and San to the railway station.

‘When you’ve finished reading,’ said Ho, ‘get in touch.’

‘Is there an end to this story?’

Ho thought for a moment before answering.

‘There’s always an end,’ she said. ‘Even in this case. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.’

Birgitta watched the taxi drive away, then sat down with the translation of Ya Ru’s diary. Staffan wasn’t due back home until the following day. She hoped she’d have finished reading by then. It was no more than twenty pages, but Ho’s handwriting was hard to decipher because the letters were so small.

What exactly was it, this diary she was reading? Afterwards, when she looked back on that evening alone in the house, with traces of Ho’s perfume still in the room, she knew she should have been able to work out for herself most of what had happened. Or, rather, she should have understood, but refused to accept what she really did understand.

Naturally, all the time she was wondering about what Ho had left out. She could have asked, but knew that she wouldn’t get an answer. There were traces of secrets that she would never understand, locks she would never be able to open. There were references to people in the past, another diary that seemed to have been written as a sort of counter to the one JA had written, the man who became a foreman on the building sites of the American cross-continental railway.

Over and over again Ya Ru returned in his diary to his frustration at Hong Qiu’s failure to understand that the path China was now following was the only right possibility, and that people like Ya Ru must be the controlling influences. Birgitta began to realise that Ya Ru had many psychopathic traits that, reading between the lines, he even seemed to be aware of himself.

Nowhere could she find any redeeming features in his character. No expression of doubt, of a guilty conscience with regard to the death of Hong Qiu, who after all was his own sister. She wondered if Ho had edited the text in order to depict Ya Ru as a brutal man. She even wondered if Ho had invented the whole diary herself. But she couldn’t really believe that. San had committed murder. Just as in the Icelandic sagas, he had taken bloody revenge for the death of his mother.

By the time she had read through Ho’s translation twice, it was almost midnight. There were many obscurities in what Ho had written, many details that still weren’t explained. The red ribbon — what was its significance? Only Liu Xan could have explained that, if he had still been alive. There were threads that would continue to hang loose, perhaps forever.

But what still needed to be done? What could or must she do on the basis of the insight she now had? She would spend part of her holiday thinking about it. When Staffan was fishing, for instance — an activity she found deadly boring. And early in the mornings, when he was reading his historical novels or biographies of jazz musicians and she went for walks on her own. There would be time for her to formulate the letter she would send to the police in Hudiksvall. Once she’d done that she’d be able to put away the box containing memories of her parents. It would all be over as far as she was concerned. Hesjövallen would fade slowly out of her consciousness, be transformed into a pale memory. Even though she would never forget what had happened, of course.

They went to Bornholm, had changeable weather, and enjoyed living in the cottage they had rented. The children came and went, days passed by in an atmosphere generally characterised by drowsy well-being. To their surprise Anna turned up, having completed her long Asian journey, and astonished them even more by announcing that she would be embarking on a political science degree at Lund in the autumn.

On several occasions Birgitta decided that the time had come to tell Staffan what had happened, both in Beijing and then later in London. But she didn’t — there was no point in telling him if he would never be able to get over that she’d kept it from him. It would hurt him and be interpreted as a lack of confidence and understanding. It wasn’t worth the risk, so she continued to say nothing.

She did not say anything to Karin Wiman either about her visit to London and the happenings there.

It all stayed bottled up inside her, a scar that nobody else could see.

On Monday, 7 August, both she and Staffan went back to work. The previous evening they had sat down at long last and discussed their life together. It was as if both of them, without having mentioned it in advance, realised that they couldn’t start another working year without at least beginning to talk about the decline of their marriage. What Birgitta regarded as the major breakthrough was that her husband raised the question of their almost non-existent sex life of his own accord, without her having put the idea into his head. He regretted the situation and was horrified not to have the desire or the ability. In response to her direct question he said that no one else attracted him. It was simply a matter of a lack of desire, which worried him but was something he usually preferred not to think about.

‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked. ‘We can’t live another year without touching each other. I simply couldn’t take it.’

‘I’ll try to get help. I don’t find it any easier than you do. But I also find it difficult to talk about.’

‘You’re talking about it now.’

‘Because I realise that I have to.’

‘I hardly know what you’re thinking any more. I sometimes look at you in the morning and think that you’re a stranger.’

‘You express yourself better than I ever could. But I sometimes feel exactly the same thing. Perhaps not as strongly.’

‘Have you really accepted that we could live the rest of our lives like this?’

‘No. But I’ve avoided thinking about it. I promise to call a therapist.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

He shook his head. ‘Not the first time. Later, if necessary.’

‘Do you understand what this means to me?’

‘I hope so.’

‘It’s not going to be easy. But with luck we’ll be able to get past this. It’s been a bit like wandering through a desert.’

He started his day on 7 August by climbing aboard a train to Stockholm at 8.12 in the morning. She didn’t arrive in her office until about 10. As Hans Mattsson was still on holiday she had responsibility for all the district court’s activities and began with a meeting for the legal and secretarial staff. Once she was convinced that everything was under control, she withdrew to her office and wrote the long letter to Vivi Sundberg that she had spent the summer composing in her head.

She had obviously asked herself what she wanted or at least hoped to achieve. The truth, naturally; the hope that all the happenings in Hesjövallen would be explained, including the murder of the old hotel owner. But was she also looking for some kind of redress for the distrust shown her by the police in Hudiksvall? How much was personal vanity, and how much was a genuine attempt to persuade the investigation team that the man who had committed suicide, despite his confession, had nothing to do with it?

In a way it also had to do with her mother. In searching for the truth Birgitta wanted to pay tribute to her mother’s foster-parents who had met such a grisly end.

It took her two hours to write the letter. She reread it several times before putting it in an envelope and addressing it to the police in Hudiksvall, attention Vivi Sundberg. Then she put it in the tray for outgoing post in the reception area downstairs and opened the windows in her office wide in the hope of blowing out all thought of the victims in those isolated houses up in Hesjövallen.

She spent the rest of the day reading a consultative document from the Department of Justice regarding what seemed to be a never-ending process of reorganisation affecting all aspects of the Swedish judiciary.

But she also made time to dig out one of her unfinished pop songs and attempted to write a couple more lines.

The idea had come to her during the summer. It would be called ‘A Walk on the Beach’. But she found it hard going, today especially. She crumpled up her failed attempts and tossed them into the bin before locking the unfinished text in one of her desk drawers. Nevertheless, she was determined not to give up.

At six o’clock she switched off her computer and left her office.

On the way out, she noticed that the post outbox was now empty.

37

Liu Xan hid among the trees on the edge of the forest: he had arrived at last. He had not forgotten that Ya Ru had told him this was the most important mission he would ever be given. It was his task to bring matters to a conclusion, all the shocking events that had started more than one hundred years ago.

As he stood there Liu Xan thought about Ya Ru, who had given him the job he was about to perform, given him the necessary equipment and exhorted him to be efficient. Ya Ru had explained everything that had happened in the past. The journey had continued for many years, back and forth over oceans and continents, travels filled with fear and death, unbearable persecution — and now came the necessary ending, the revenge.

Those who had made the journey had passed on a long time ago. One lay dead at the bottom of the sea; others lay in unmarked graves. During all these years a constant lament had risen up from those resting places. He had now been given the task of putting an end to that painful dirge.

Liu Xan had snow under his feet, and was surrounded by freezing cold air. It was 12 January 2006. Earlier in the day he had noticed a thermometer saying it was minus nine degrees Celsius. He kept shuffling his feet in an attempt to keep them warm. It was still early in the evening In several of the houses he could see from where he was standing that the lights were on or in some windows the bluish glow from television screens. He strained his ears but couldn’t hear a single sound. Not even dogs. Liu Xan thought that people in this part of the world kept dogs to guard them during the night. He had seen tracks in the snow, but gathered that they were being kept indoors.

He had wondered if the dogs inside the houses would cause him problems, but he’d dismissed the thought. Nobody suspected what was going to happen; no dogs would be able to stop him.

He took off a glove and checked the time. A quarter to nine. There was still time before the lights went out. He put the glove back on and thought about Ya Ru and all his stories about the dead people who had travelled so far. Every member of Ya Ru’s family had been involved in part of the journey By a strange coincidence the one who was destined to put an end to it was Liu Xan, who was not a relation. It filled him with deep thoughts. Ya Ru trusted him as if he were his brother.

He heard a car in the distance, but it was not approaching. It was on the main road. In this country, he thought, during the silent winter nights, sound travels a very long way — as if over water.

He continued shuffling his feet. How would he react when it was all over? Despite everything, was there a tiny part of his consciousness, his conscience, that he was not familiar with? Everything had gone according to plan in Nevada. But you could never know, especially as this task was so much bigger.

His thoughts wandered. He suddenly remembered his own father, who had been a low-ranking party official, and how he had been taunted and mistreated during the Cultural Revolution. His father had told him how he and the other ‘capitalist swine’ had had their faces painted white by the Red Guards. Because evil was always white in colour.

Now he tried to think of the people in the silent houses that way. They all had white faces; they were the demons of evil.

The lights gradually went out. Two of the houses were now in darkness. He waited. The dead had been waiting for more than a century, he only needed to cope with a few hours.

He took off his right glove and felt with his fingers the sword hanging at his side. The steel was cold; the sharp edge could easily cut through his skin. It was a Japanese sword he had come across by chance on a visit to Shanghai. Somebody had told him about an old collector who still had a few of these much prized swords left after the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. He had found his way to the unremarkable little shop and not hesitated once he had held the sword in his hand. He had bought it on the spot and taken it to a blacksmith who had repaired the handle and sharpened the blade until it cut like a razor.

He gave a start. The door of one of the houses opened. He drew back further into the trees. A man came out onto the steps with a dog. A lamp over the door illuminated the snow-covered garden. Liu Xan gripped the sword tightly, screwed up his eyes and carefully observed the dog’s movements. What would happen if it picked up his scent? That would ruin all his plans. If he was forced to kill the dog he wouldn’t hesitate. But what would the man do, the man standing in the doorway smoking?

The dog suddenly stopped and sniffed the air. For a brief moment Liu Xan thought it had detected him. But then it started running around the garden once more.

The man shouted to the dog, which ran inside immediately. The door closed. Shortly afterwards the light went out.

He continued waiting. At midnight, when the only light came from a television screen, he noticed that it had started snowing. Flakes fell onto his outstretched hand like feathers. Like cherry blossoms, he thought. But snow doesn’t smell; it doesn’t breathe like flowers breathe.

Twenty minutes later the television was switched off. It was still snowing. He took out from his anorak pocket a small pair of binoculars fitted with a night-vision device and slowly scanned all the houses in the village. He couldn’t see any lights. He put the binoculars away and took a deep breath. In his mind’s eye he envisaged the picture that Ya Ru had described to him so many times.

A ship. People on the deck like ants, eagerly waving with handkerchiefs and hats. But he couldn’t see any faces.

No faces, only arms and hands, waving.

He waited a bit longer. Then he walked slowly over the road. He was carrying a little torch in one hand and his sword in the other.

He approached the house on the very edge of the village, heading west. He stopped to listen one last time.

Then he went inside.

Vivi,

This narrative is in a diary written by a man called Ya Ru. He had been given an oral report by the person who first went to Nevada, where he killed several people, and then continued to Hesjövallen. I want you to read it so that you can understand all the other things I’ve written in this letter.

None of these people are still alive. But the truth of what happened in Hesjövallen was bigger, far different from what we all thought. I’m not sure that everything I’ve written can be proved. It’s probably not possible. Just as, for instance, I can’t explain why the red ribbon ended up in the snow at Hesjövallen. We know who took it there, but that’s all.

Lars-Erik Valfridsson, who hanged himself in a police cell, was not guilty. At least his relatives ought to be told that. We can only speculate about why he took the blame on himself.

I understand that this letter will wreak havoc with your investigation. But what we are all searching for, of course, is clarity. I hope that what I have written can contribute to that.

I have tried to include everything I know about the case in this letter. The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances built on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely.

I’m back at work again now. I’m in Helsingborg and will expect you to be in touch, as there are a lot of questions, many of them difficult.

With best wishes,

Birgitta Roslin

7 August 2006