The Man From Beijing (54 page)

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.