The Man From Beijing Read Free

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