He did the calculation in his head. It was 1868 when San first sat down in his little room at the mission station. Now it was 2006. One hundred and thirty-eight years ago. San had sat down in the candlelight and meticulously chronicled the story of himself and his two brothers, Guo Si and Wu. It had begun the day they left their squalid home and set off on the long trek to Canton. There they had been exposed to a wicked demon in the guise of Zi. From then onward death followed them wherever they went. In the end the only one left alive was San, with his stubborn determination to tell his story.
They died in a state of deepest humiliation, Ya Ru thought. The succession of emperors and mandarins followed Confucius’s advice to keep the population on such a tight rein that rebellion could never be possible. But just as the English maltreated the natives in their colonies, the brothers were tortured by Americans when they were building the railways. At the same time the English displayed icy contempt for the Chinese and attempted to make them all drug addicts by swamping the markets in China with opium. That is how I see those brutal Englishmen, as drug dealers standing on street corners selling their dope to people they hate and regard as inferior creatures. It’s not so long since Chinese were depicted in European and American cartoons as apes with tails. But the caricatures were true: we were born to be humiliated and turned into slaves. We were not human. We were animals. We had tails.
When Ya Ru used to wander around the streets of London, he would think about how many of the buildings surrounding him were built with enslaved people’s money, their toil and their suffering, their backs and their deaths.
What had San written? That they had built the railway through the American desert using their own ribs as sleepers under the rails. Similarly, the screams and pains of slaves were infused into the iron bridges that spanned the Thames, or in the thick stone walls of the enormous buildings in the fine old financial district of London.
Ya Ru’s train of thought was broken when he dozed off. On waking he went into the living room, where all the furniture and lamps were Chinese. On the table in front of the dark red sofa was a light blue silk bag. He opened it, having first placed a sheet of white paper on the table. Then he poured out a pile of finely ground glass. It was an ancient method of killing people, mixing the almost invisible grains of glass into a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. There was no escape for anybody who drank it. The thousands of microscopic grains of glass cut the victim’s intestines to shreds. In ancient times it was known as the invisible death because it was sudden and couldn’t be explained.
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.