The following year, in February, his father died. He resigned from his post and took over the family business, and in no time at all turned it into a major enterprise. He built hotels in Åre, Sälen, Vemdalen and Järvsö, and also in Geilo and Lillehammer in Norway. In 2015 he was able to sell the business to a German travel group for almost two hundred million kronor. He did, however, hold on to some minor interests in Åre and Abisko.
That same year he joined the Social Democrats and, without any real political experience, was elected to the town council in Östersund and soon became popular, gaining a reputation for getting things done and for his unconditional attachment to the local football team. He moved swiftly through various posts and before long found himself Minister of Defence. For a time it looked like a PR coup for the government.
He was spoken of as a hero and an adventurer because of two major achievements alongside his career: swimming the English Channel in the summer of 2002 and climbing Mount Everest six years later, in May 2008. But the tide soon turned, and that could probably be dated back to his uncompromising statement that Russia had been supporting the xenophobic Sweden Democrats during the election campaign.
He was subjected to attacks which became increasingly savage. But they were nothing compared to what was to follow. After the stock market crash in June, there was a flood of fake news about him, and it was not hard to sympathize with his Norwegian wife, Rebecka, who, in an interview in Dagens Nyheter, called the lies shameless and added that even their two children now needed bodyguards. The mood was rancorous and frenzied, and the bombardment was constantly being stepped up.
Recent press pictures showed Forsell no longer as a man who had inexhaustible reserves of energy. He looked gaunt, and the previous Friday he had apparently taken an unexpected week’s holiday. There was even talk of a breakdown. From whichever angle he viewed it, Blomkvist could not but feel sorry for Forsell. Which might be just the wrong attitude, now that he had to investigate whether he had any connection with the beggar and perhaps even with Mats Sabin, the military historian.
Was it still sensible to assume that Forsell was all decency and enthusiasm? According to the smear campaign, he was said to have hitched a ride on the rowing boat which accompanied his cross-Channel swim, and there were suggestions that he had never reached the summit of Everest, as he said he had. But Blomkvist found no evidence to support any of these accusations, beyond the fact that the expedition on Everest had been a monumental disaster, a Greek tragedy of sorts, where nothing could be established with any certainty.
Forsell himself was not the focus of the story. He had been far from the epicentre of the turmoil, in which the spectacularly wealthy American woman Klara Engelman had died together with her guide Viktor Grankin at twenty-seven thousand feet. Blomkvist did not research it in any greater depth, and concentrated instead on learning more about Forsell’s career as an officer.
The fact of his having been an intelligence agent should have been classified, but it had leaked out in connection with his deportation from Russia, and even though the most absurd rumours were being bandied about in the ongoing hate campaign, the army’s commander-in-chief, Lars Granath, several times described Forsell’s role in Moscow as having been “nothing but honourable.”
There was precious little else in the way of hard facts, and eventually Blomkvist let go of it and simply noted that Johannes and Rebecka had two sons, Samuel and Jonathan, who were eleven and nine years old. The family lived in Stocksund, outside Stockholm, but also owned a place in the country not far away, on the southeastern shore of Sandön island. Is that where they were right now?
Blomkvist had Forsell’s private number. “Call me if you have any questions,” he had said in his inimitably unstuffy way. But Blomkvist saw no reason to disturb him just now. He ought to forget about all this and have a nap. He was incredibly tired. But he wasn’t bloody well going to rest just because of that. He called Chief Inspector Bublanski and talked about Salander again, and reported what the beggar might have said about Mats Sabin, although he did add:
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
* * *
—
Paulina Müller came out of the bathroom in a white bathrobe and saw that Salander was still engrossed with her laptop. She rested a careful hand on her shoulder. Salander was no longer staring at the big house outside Moscow, the way she usually did. She was reading an article, and as usual Paulina could not keep up. She had never met a person who read so fast. The sentences flashed by on the screen. But she did catch the words “…Denisovan genome and that of certain South Asian…” and then she immediately became interested. At Geo she had done some pieces on the origins of Homo sapiens and the species’ kinship with the Neanderthals and the Denisovan hominids.
“I’ve written about that,” she said.
Salander did not answer, and that made Paulina furious. Salander took care of everything, and protected her, it was true, but she often felt alone and excluded. She could not bear Salander’s silence or her endless hours in front of the computer. Especially at night, that drove her mad, and the nights were bad enough as it was. That was when all the awful things Thomas had done raged inside her, and she dreamed of revenge and retribution. Those were the hours when she really needed Lisbeth.
But Salander was dealing with her own private hell. Sometimes her body was so tense that Paulina did not dare to press up close, and how was it possible for someone to sleep so little? Whenever Paulina woke up, Salander was lying next to her with her eyes open, listening for sounds in the corridor, or she was sitting at the desk looking at footage from surveillance cameras and satellite images. Paulina felt that she could no longer bear to be kept out of it all, not when they were living so closely together, and she wanted to scream: Who’s out to get you? What are you up to?
“What are you doing?” she said.
There was no answer this time either. But Salander did at least turn and give her a look, and it felt a little like an outstretched hand. There was a new, softer light in her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she said again.
“I’m trying to discover the identity of a man,” Salander said.
“A man?”
“A Sherpa, a little over fifty years old, dead now, probably from the Khumbu Valley in northeastern Nepal, and although he could also be from Sikkim or Darjeeling in India, the signs mostly point to Nepal, and the area around Namche Bazaar. His family originates from eastern Tibet. As a child he seems to have had a fat-deficient diet.” Coming from Lisbeth that was like an entire lecture, and Paulina’s face lit up as she sat down on a chair beside her.
“Anything else?”
“I have his DNA and an autopsy report. With the injuries he has, I’m pretty sure he was a porter or guide on high-altitude climbing expeditions. He must have been very good at it.”