‘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.