The Man From Beijing (12 page)

The torch went out. She shook it, but couldn’t bring it back to life. Even so, she started to fill the bag with letters and the diaries. One of the bundles of letters slipped out of her hand, and she spent ages fumbling around on the cold floor until she found it.

Then she hurried away, back to her car. The receptionist stared at her in astonishment when she got back to the hotel.

She was tempted to start reading right away, but decided it would be best to get an hour or two of sleep. At nine o’clock she borrowed a magnifying glass from the front desk and sat down at the table, which she had moved to the window. The advertising crowd was saying its goodbyes before tumbling into cars and minibuses. She hung the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on her door handle, then turned her attention to the diary she had started reading. It was slow work – some words, and even some sentences, she couldn’t work out.

The author gave no name, only the initials
JA
. For some reason he never used the first person when referring to himself, but always the initials
JA.
She remembered the second letter she had found among her mother’s papers. Jan August Andrén. That must be him. A foreman on the railway construction moving slowly eastward through the Nevada desert, who described in great and meticulous detail his role in the venture. How he readily submitted to those above him in the hierarchy, who impressed him with the power they wielded. His illnesses, including a persistent fever that prevented him from working for a long time.

In places his handwriting would become shaky. JA described ‘a high temperature, and blood in the frequent and painful vomiting that afflicts me’. Birgitta Roslin could almost feel the fear of death that radiated from the pages of the diary. As JA didn’t date most of his entries, she was unable to judge how long he was ill. On one of the subsequent pages he wrote his last will and testament: ‘To my friend Herbert my best jackboots and other clothing, and to Mr Harrison my rifle and my revolver, and I beg him to inform my relatives in Sweden that I have passed on. Give money to the railway priest in order to enable him to arrange a decent burial with at least two hymns. I had not suspected that my life would be over so soon. May God help me.’

But JA didn’t die. Abruptly, with no evident transitional stage, he is fit and well again.

So JA appears to have been a foreman with the Central Pacific Company, which was building a railway from the Pacific Ocean to a point in the middle of the continent where it would meet up with the line from the East Coast. He sometimes complains that the workers ‘are exceeding lazy if he doesn’t keep a close watch over them. The ones who annoy him most are the Irish, because they drink heavily and are late starting work in the mornings. He calculates that he will be forced to dismiss one out of every four Irish labourers, which will create major problems. It is impossible to employ American Indians, as they refuse to work in the required way. Negroes are easier, but former slaves who have either been liberated or run away are unwilling to obey his orders. JA writes that ‘a workforce of decent Swedish peasants would have been much more preferable to all the unreliable Chinese labourers and drunken Irishmen.’

Birgitta Roslin was finding that interpreting the text was straining her eyes, and she frequently needed to lie down on her bed, close her eyes and rest. She turned to one of the three bundles of letters instead. Once again, it is JA. The same, barely legible handwriting. He writes to his parents and tells them how he’s getting on. There is a glaring difference between what JA notes down in his diary and what he writes in his letters home. If what’s in his diary is the truth, the letters are full of lies. He wrote in the diary that his monthly wage was eleven dollars. In one of the first letters he writes home, he says that his ‘bosses are so pleased with me that I’m now earning 25 dollars a month, which is about what an inspector of taxes earns back home’. He’s boasting, she thought.

Birgitta Roslin read more letters and discovered more lies, each one more astonishing than the last. He suddenly acquires a fiancée, a cook named Laura who comes from ‘a family well placed in high society in New York’. Judging from the date of the letter, this was when he was close to death and wrote his last will and testament. Perhaps Laura appeared in one of his delirious dreams.

The man Birgitta Roslin was trying to pin down was slippery, somebody who always managed to wriggle away. She started leafing through the letters and diaries all the more impatiently.

Between the diaries she found a document she assumed was a payslip. In April 1864 Jan August Andrén had been paid eleven dollars for his labours. Now she was certain that this was the same man who had written the letter she found among her mother’s papers.

She looked out of the window. A lone man was shovelling snow. Once upon a time a lone man named Jan August Andrén emigrated from Hesjövallen, she thought. He ended up in Nevada, working on the railway. He became a foreman and didn’t seem to have been too fond of those in his charge. The fiancée he invented might just have been one of the‘loose women who gravitate towards the railway construction sites’, as one entry detailed. Venereal disease was rife among the workforce. Whores who followed the railway were disruptive. It wasn’t just that VD-infected workers had to be fired: violent fights over women were a constant source of delay.

In one instance, JA describes how an Irishman named O’Connor had been sentenced to death for murdering a Scottish labourer. They had been drunk and ended up fighting over a woman. O’Connor was now dueto be hanged, and the judge who travelled to the camp in order to preside over the trial had agreed that the hanging didn’t need to take place in the nearest town, but could be carried out on a hill close to the point the railway track had reached. Jan August Andrén writes that‘I like the idea of everybody being able to see what drunkenness and violence can lead to’.

He describes the Irishman as young, with ‘barely more than down on his chin’.

The execution will take place early, just before the morning shift begins. Not even a hanging can result in a single sleeper car or even a single coach bolt being fitted behind schedule. The foreman has been instructed to make sure that everybody attends the execution. A strong wind is blowing. Jan August Andrén ties a bandanna over his nose and mouth as he goes around checking that his team has left its tents for the hill where the hanging will take place. The gallows is on a platform made of newly tarred sleepers. The moment O’Connor is dead the gallows will be dismantled and the sleepers carried back down to where the track is being laid. The condemned man arrives, surrounded by armed guards. There is also a priest present. Andrén describes the scene: ‘A growling dissent could be heard from the assembled men. For a moment one might suppose the grumbling was directed at the hangman, but then one realised that all present were relieved not to be the one about to have his neck broken. I could well imagine that many of them who hated the daily toil were now feeling blissful delight at the prospect of being able to carry iron rails, shovel gravel and lay sleepers today.’

Andrén writes like an early crime reporter, Birgitta Roslin thought. But was he writing for himself, or possibly for some unknown reader in the future? Otherwise why use terms like ‘blissful delight’?

O’Connor trudges along in his chains as if in a trance, but suddenly comes to life at the foot of the gallows and starts shouting and fighting for his life. The unease among the assembled men increases in volume, and Andrén writes that it is ‘terrible to watch this young man fighting for the life he knows he will soon lose. He is led kicking and screaming to the rope, and continues bellowing until the trapdoor opens and his neck is broken.’ At that moment the growling ceases, and according to Andrén it becomes ‘totally silent, as if all those present have been struck dumb, and felt their own necks breaking’.

He expresses himself well, Roslin thought. A man with emotions, who can write.

The gallows is dismantled, the body and the sleepers carried off in different directions. There is a fight between several Chinese who want the rope used to hang O’Connor.

The telephone rang. It was Sundberg.

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No.’

‘Can you come down? I’m in reception.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Come down and I’ll tell you.’

Vivi Sundberg was waiting by the open fire.

‘Let’s sit down,’ she said, pointing to some chairs and a sofa around a table in the corner.

‘How did you know I was staying here?’

‘I made enquiries.’

Roslin began to suspect the worst. Sundberg was reserved, cool. She came straight to the point.

‘We are not entirely without eyes and ears, you know,’ she began. ‘Even if we are only provincial police officers. No doubt you know what I’m talking about.’

‘No.’

‘We are missing the contents of a chest of drawers in the house I was kind enough to let you into. I asked you not to touch anything. But you did. You must have gone back there at some time during the night. In the drawer you emptied were diaries and letters. I’ll wait here while you get them. Were there five or six diaries? How many bundles of letters? Bring them all down. When you do, I shall be kind enough to forget all about this. You can also be grateful that I went to the trouble of coming here.’

Birgitta Roslin could feel that she was blushing. She had been caught in flagrante, with her fingers in the jam jar. There was nothing she could do. The judge had been found out.

She stood up and went to her room. For a brief moment she was tempted to keep the diary she was reading just then, but she had no idea exactly how much Sundberg knew. Her seeming uncertainty about how many diaries there were was not necessarily significant – she could have been testing Roslin’s honesty. She carried everything she had taken down to reception. Vivi Sundberg had a paper bag into which she put all the diaries and letters.

‘Why did you do it?’ she asked.

‘I was curious. I can only apologise.’

‘Is there anything you haven’t told me?’

‘I have no hidden motives.’

Sundberg eyed her critically. Roslin could feel she was blushing again. Sundberg stood up. Despite being powerfully built and overweight, she moved daintily.

‘Let the police take care of this business,’ she said. ‘I won’t make a song and dance about you entering the house during the night. We’ll forget it. Go home now, and I’ll carry on working.’

‘I apologise.’

‘You have already.’

Sundberg left the hotel and got into the police car waiting outside. Birgitta Roslin watched it drive away in a cloud of snow. She went up to her room, fetched a jacket, and took a walk along the shore of the ice-covered lake. The wind came and went in chilly gusts. She bowed her head. She felt slightly ashamed.

She walked all the way round the lake and was warm and sweaty when she returned to the hotel. After a shower and a change of clothes, she thought about what had happened.

She had now seen her mother’s room and knew that it was her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed. It was time to go home.

She went down to reception and asked to keep the room for one more night. Then she drove into Hudiksvall, found a bookshop and bought a book about wines. She wondered whether to eat again at the Chinese restaurant she’d visited the previous day, but chose an Italian place instead. She lingered over her meal and read the newspapers without bothering to see what had been written about Hesjövallen.

She drove back to the hotel, read some pages of the book she had bought, went to bed early.

She was woken up by her phone ringing. It was pitch dark. When she answered nobody was there. There was no number on the display.

She suddenly felt uncomfortable. Who had called?

Before going back to sleep she checked to make sure the door was locked. Then she looked out of the window. There was no sign of anybody on the road to the hotel. She went back to bed, thinking that the next day she would do the only sensible thing.

She would go home.

9

She was in the breakfast room by seven o’clock. The windows looked out over the lake, and she could see that it had become windy. A man approached, pulling a sledge with two well-bundled children as passengers. She recalled the days when she had spent so much time and effort dragging her own children up slopes that they could sledge down. That had been one of the most remarkable periods of her life – playing with her children in the snow, and at the same time worrying about what judgement to pass in a complicated lawsuit. The children’s shouts and laughter contrasting with the frightening crime scenes.

She had once worked out that during the course of her career, she had sent three murderers and seven people guilty of manslaughter to prison. Not to mention several more sentenced for grievous bodily harm, who could count themselves lucky that their crimes had not resulted in murder.

The thought worried her. Measuring her activities and her best efforts in terms of people she had sent to prison – was that really the sum of her life’s work?

As she ate she avoided looking at the newspapers, which were naturally wallowing in the events at Hesjövallen. Instead she selected a business supplement and leafed through the stock market listings and discussons about the percentage of women represented on the boards of Swedish companies. There were not many people at breakfast. She refilled her coffee cup and wondered if it might be a good idea to take a different route home. A touch further west, perhaps, through the Värmland forests?

She was interrupted in her thoughts by somebody addressing her. A man sitting alone at a table several feet away.

‘Are you talking to me?’

‘I just wondered what Vivi Sundberg wanted.’

She didn’t recognise the man and didn’t really understand what he was asking about. Before she had a chance to reply, he stood up and walked over to her table. Pulled out a chair and sat down.