She got out of bed and stood by the window. Still, deserted. I can do it, she thought. If I’m lucky I might be able to ensure that this investigation doesn’t get stuck in the mud like the worst case I’ve ever come across, the murder of our prime minister. But I’d be taking the law into my own hands, some zealous prosecutor might be able to convince a stupid judge that I was interfering in a criminal investigation.
Even worse was the wine she had drunk. It would be disastrous to be arrested for drink-driving. She worked out how many hours it was since she had dinner. The alcohol should be out of her system by now. But she wasn’t sure.
I shouldn’t do this, she thought. Even if the police on duty there are asleep. I can’t do it.
Then she dressed and left her room. The corridor was empty. She could hear noises from various rooms where after parties were still carrying on. She even thought she could hear a couple making love.
Reception was clear. She caught a glimpse of the back of a light-haired woman in the room behind the counter.
The cold hit her as she left the hotel. There was no wind; the sky was clear; it was much colder than the previous night.
Birgitta Roslin began to have second thoughts in the car. But the temptation was simply too great. She wanted to read more of that diary.
There was no other traffic on the road. At one point she braked hard when she thought she saw a moose by the piled-up snow at the side of the road, but it was only a tree stump.
When she came to the final hill before the descent into the village, she stopped and switched off the lights. She kept a torch in the glove compartment. She started walking carefully along the road. She kept stopping to listen. A slight breeze rustled through the invisible treetops. When she reached the crest of the hill, she saw that two searchlights were still shining, and there was a police car parked outside the house closest to the trees. She would be able to approach Brita and August’s house without being seen. She cupped her hand around the torch, went through the gate into the garden of the neighbouring house, then crept up to the front door from behind. Still no sign of life from the police car. She fumbled around until she found the key.
Once inside the house, Birgitta Roslin shuddered. She took a plastic carrier bag from her jacket pocket and cautiously opened the drawer.
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.