The Man From Beijing (2 page)

It took him forty minutes to get there. By then he had already made a wrong turn, a road leading southward to Näcksjö.

Hesjövallen was situated in a little valley by a lake whose name he couldn’t recall. Hesjön, maybe? The dense forests extended all the way to the hamlet, on both sides of the narrow road leading up towards Härjedalen.

Karsten stopped at the edge of the tiny village and got out of the car. There were breaks in the clouds now. The light would become more difficult to capture, perhaps not so expressive. He looked around. Everything was very still. The houses gave the impression of having been there since time immemorial. In the distance he could hear the faint noise of traffic on the main road.

He suddenly felt uneasy. He held his breath, as he always did when confronted with something he didn’t really understand.

Then it dawned on him – the chimneys, they were cold. There was no sign of smoke, which would have been an effective feature of the photographs he hoped to take. His gaze moved slowly from house to house. Somebody’s cleared the snow already, he thought. But not lit a single fire? He remembered the letter he’d received from the man who had told him about the village. He had referred to the chimneys and how the houses seemed, in a childish sort of way, to be sending smoke signals to one another.

He sighed. People don’t write the truth, but what they think you want to read. Now should I take pictures with cold chimneys or abandon the whole business? Nobody was forcing him to take photographs of Hesjövallen and its inhabitants. He already had plenty of pictures of the Sweden that was fading away: the derelict farms, the remote villages whose only hope of survival was that Danes and Germans would buy up the houses and turn them into summer cottages. He decided to leave and returned to his car. But he didn’t start the engine. He had come this far; the least he could do was to try to create some portrait of the local inhabitants – he wanted faces. As the years passed, Karsten Höglin had become increasingly fascinated by elderly people. He wanted to compile an album: pictures that would describe the beauty found only in the faces of very old women, their lives and hardships etched into their skin like the sediment in a cliff wall.

He got out of his car again, pulled his fur hat down over his ears, picked out a Leica M6 he’d been using for the past ten years, and made for the nearest of the group of houses. There were ten in all, most of them timber and painted red, some with added stoops. He could see only one modern house. If it could still be called modern, that is – a 1950s detached house. When he came to the gate, he paused and raised his camera. The nameplate indicated that the Andrén family lived there. He took a few shots, varying the aperture setting and exposure time, trying out several angles, though it was clear that there wasn’t enough light yet and he would get only an indistinct blur. But you never know. Photographers sometimes expose unexpected secrets.

Höglin was intuitive with his work. Not that he didn’t bother to measure light levels when required, but sometimes he’d pull off surprising results without paying attention to carefully calculated exposure times. Improvisation went with the territory.

The gate was stiff. He had to push hard in order to open it. There were no footprints in the newly fallen snow. Still not a sound, not even a dog. It’s deserted, he thought. This isn’t a village; it’s a
Flying Dutchman.

He knocked on the front door, waited, then knocked again. Nothing. He began to wonder what was going on. Something was amiss. He knocked again, harder and longer. Then he tried the door handle. Locked. Old people scare easily, he thought. They lock their doors and worry that all the things they read about in the papers are going to happen to them.

He banged on the door. Nothing. He concluded there must not be anybody at home.

He went back through the gate and moved on to the next house. It was starting to get lighter now. The house was painted yellow. The putty around the windows was coming off – it must be very draughty inside. Before knocking he tried the door handle. Locked again. He knocked hard, then began banging away even before anybody could possibly have had time to answer. Once again, empty.

If he went back to his car now, he would be at home in Piteå by early afternoon. That would please his wife. She was convinced that he was too old to be embarking on all these trips, despite the fact that he was only sixty-three. But he had been diagnosed with symptoms of imminent angina. The doctor had advised him to watch what he ate and try to get as much exercise as possible.

One last try. He went round to the back of the house and tried a door that seemed to lead to a utility room behind the kitchen. That was also locked. He went to the nearest window, stood on tiptoe and looked in. He could see through a gap in the curtains into a room with a television set. He continued to the next window. It was the same room, and he could still see the TV. A tapestry hanging on the wall informed him that
JESUS IS YOUR BEST FRIEND
. He was about to move on to the next window when something on the floor attracted his attention. At first he thought it was a ball of wool just lying there. Then he saw that it was a woolly sock, and that the sock was on a foot. He stepped back from the window. His heart was pounding. Was that really a foot? He went back to the first window, but he couldn’t see as far into the room from there. He went on to the second window. Now he was certain. It really was a foot. A motionless foot. He couldn’t be sure if it was a man’s or a woman’s. The owner of the foot might be sitting in a chair. It was hard to make out – but if so why hadn’t the person stirred?

He knocked on the window as hard as he dared, but there was no response. He took out his mobile phone and dialled the emergency number. No signal. He ran to the third house and banged on the door. Nothing. He felt like he was in the middle of a nightmare. He picked up a foot scraper, smashed the door lock and forced his way in. He had to find a telephone. There was an old woman lying on the kitchen floor. Her head was almost totally severed from her neck. Beside her lay the carcass of a dog, cut in two.

Höglin screamed and turned to flee. As he ran through the hall he saw the body of a man sprawled on the floor of the living room, between the table and a red sofa with a white throw. The old man was naked. His back was covered in blood.

Höglin raced out of the house. He couldn’t get away fast enough. He dropped his camera when he reached the road but didn’t stop to pick it up. He was convinced that somebody or something he couldn’t see was about to stab him in the back. He turned his car and sped away.

He stopped when he reached the main road, then dialled the emergency number, his hands shaking uncontrollably. As he raised the phone to his ear, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. It was as if somebody had caught up with him and stabbed him.

He could hear someone speaking to him on the phone, but he was incapable of answering. The pain was so intense that all he could manage was a faint hiss.

‘I can’t hear you,’ said a woman’s voice.

He tried again. Once more nothing but a faint hiss. He was dying.

‘Can you speak a bit louder?’ asked the woman. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

He made a supreme effort and produced a few words.

‘I’m dying,’ he gasped. ‘For God’s sake, I’m dying. Help me.’

‘Where are you?’

But the woman received no reply. Karsten Höglin was on his way into the endless darkness. In a desperate attempt to escape from the excruciating pain, like a drowning man trying in vain to rise to the surface, he stepped on the accelerator. The car shot over to the wrong side of the road. A truck on the way to Hudiksvall carrying office furniture had no chance to avoid a head-on collision. The truck driver jumped down from his cab to check on the driver of the car he had crashed into. Höglin was prostrate over the steering wheel.

The truck driver, from Bosnia, spoke little Swedish.

‘How is you?’ he asked.

‘The village,’ mumbled Karsten Höglin. ‘Hesjövallen.’

Those were his final words. By the time the police and the ambulance arrived, Karsten Höglin had succumbed to a massive heart attack.

It was not at all clear what had happened. Nobody could possibly have guessed the reason for the sudden heart attack suffered by the man behind the wheel of the dark blue Volvo. It wasn’t until Karsten Höglin’s body had been taken away and tow trucks were trying to extricate the badly damaged furniture van that a police officer bothered to listen to the Bosnian driver. The officer’s name was Erik Huddén, and he didn’t like talking to people who spoke bad Swedish unless he was forced to. It was as if their stories were less important if they were unable to articulate them properly. Naturally, the officer began with a breathalyser. But the driver was sober, and his driver’s licence seemed to be in order.

‘He tried saying something,’ said the truck driver.

‘What?’ Huddén asked dismissively.

‘Something about Herö. A place, perhaps?’

Huddén was a local, and shook his head impatiently.

‘There’s nowhere around here called Herö.’

‘Maybe I hear wrong? Maybe it was something with an
s
? Maybe Hersjö?’

‘Hesjövallen?’

The driver nodded. ‘Yes, he said that.’

‘And what did he mean?’

‘I don’t know. He died.’

Huddén put his notebook away. He hadn’t written down what the driver said. Half an hour later, when the tow trucks had driven off and another police car had taken the Bosnian driver to the station for more questioning, Huddén got into his car, ready to return to Hudiksvall. He was accompanied by his colleague, Leif Ytterström, who was driving.

‘Let’s go via Hesjövallen,’ said Huddén out of the blue.

‘Why? Has there been an emergency call?’

‘I just want to check up on something.’

Erik Huddén was the older of the two officers. He was known for being both uncommunicative and stubborn. Ytterström turned off onto the road to Sörforsa. When they came to Hesjövallen Huddén asked him to drive slowly through the village. He still hadn’t explained to his colleague why they had made this detour.

‘It looks deserted,’ said Ytterström as they slowly passed house after house.

‘Hang on. Go back,’ said Huddén. ‘Slowly.’

Then he told Ytterström to stop. Something lying in the snow by one of the houses had attracted his attention. He got out of the car and went to investigate. He suddenly stopped dead and drew his gun. Ytterström leaped out of the car and drew his own gun.

‘What’s going on?’

Huddén didn’t reply. He moved cautiously forward. Then he paused again and bent over as if he had suddenly been afflicted by chest pains. When he came back to the car Erik Huddén was white in the face.

‘There’s a dead man lying there,’ he said. ‘He’s been beaten to death. And there’s something missing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘One of his legs.’

They stood staring at each other without speaking. Then Huddén got into the car and picked up the radio and asked for Vivi Sundberg, who he knew was on duty that day. She responded immediately.

‘Erik here. I’m out at Hesjövallen.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s a man lying dead in the snow.’

‘Say that again.’

‘A dead man. In the snow. It looks as if he’s been beaten to death. One of his legs is missing.’

They knew each other well. Sundberg knew that Erik Huddén would never exaggerate, no matter how incredible what he said seemed to be.

‘We’ll be there,’ said Sundberg.

‘Get the forensic guys from Gävle.’

‘Who’s with you?’

‘Ytterström.’

She thought for a moment.

‘Is there any plausible explanation for what’s happened?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

He knew she would understand. He had been a police officer for so long that there was no real limit to the suffering and violence he was forced to face up to.

It was thirty-five minutes before they heard sirens approaching in the distance. Huddén had tried to persuade Ytterström to accompany him to the nearest house so that they could talk to the neighbours, but his colleague refused to move until reinforcements arrived. As Huddén was reluctant to enter the house alone, they stayed by the car. They said nothing while they waited.

Vivi Sundberg got out of the first car to pull up beside them. She was a powerfully built woman in her fifties. Those who knew her were well aware that, despite her cumbersome body, she was very mobile and possessed considerable stamina. Only a few months earlier she had chased and caught two burglars in their twenties. They had laughed at her as they started to run off. They were no longer laughing when she arrested the pair of them after a chase of a few hundred yards.

Vivi Sundberg had red hair. Four times a year she visited her daughter’s hairdressing salon and had the redness reinforced.

She was born on a farm just outside of Harmånger and had looked after her parents until they grew old and eventually died. Then she began educating herself, and after a few years applied to the police college. She was amazed to be accepted. Nobody could explain why she had got in, given the size of her body; but nobody asked any questions, and she said nothing.

Vivi Sundberg was a diligent, hard-working police officer. She was persistent, and outstanding when it came to analysing and following up on the slightest lead.

She ran a hand through her hair and looked hard at Erik Huddén.

‘Well, are you going to show me?’

They walked over to the dead body. Sundberg pulled a face and squatted down. ‘Has the doctor arrived?’

‘She’s on her way.’

‘She?’

‘Hugo has a sub. He’s going to be operated on. A tumour.’

Vivi Sundberg momentarily lost interest in the body lying in the snow. ‘Is he ill?’