She did go up in the end, and even though she should have known better she walked into the room without knocking to find him hurriedly putting away some papers. If he had not been acting so suspiciously, she wouldn’t even have noticed them. But now she could see that it was a psychiatric medical file. That was strange. Perhaps a security check on some colleague? She tried to smile her usual smile.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“It’s lunchtime.”
“I’m not hungry.”
You’re always hungry for Christ’s sake, she wanted to shout.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, I can see there is.”
She could feel the anger pounding inside.
“I told you, nothing.”
“Are you ill or something?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can see you’re reading medical records, so obviously I’m interested,” she snapped back, and that was a mistake.
She realized it at once. He looked at her with eyes filled with anxiety, and that scared her. She muttered an apology, and as she left the room she noticed that her legs could hardly carry her.
What’s wrong? she thought. We used to be so happy.
* * *
—
Salander knew that Camilla was now in an apartment on Strandvägen in Stockholm. She knew that Camilla’s hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, and the former GRU agent and gangster Ivan Galinov were there with her, and she realized that she had to act. But how? Instead she carried on looking into the case of Blomkvist’s Sherpa. Perhaps it was a form of escapism. With her BAM Viewer she found sixty-seven distinctive markers in the DNA segment, so she went through them one by one and eventually identified a haplogroup, even a patrilineal one.
It was called DM174, and it too was highly unusual, which could be either a good or a bad thing, and she entered the group into the YFull search engine—the Moscow DNA-sequencing company Paulina had recommended—and waited.
“What a crap site, this is unbelievably slow.”
She was not hoping for anything much, and wondered why she was even bothering. She should forget the whole thing and concentrate on Camilla. But then she got an answer, and she whistled. There had been 212 hits, spread over 156 family names. That was much more than she had been expecting. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then went through all the material, going into more depth with unusual variants in the segment. One name kept cropping up. It felt absurdly wrong. But it came up over and over again: Robert Carson in Denver, Colorado.
He did indeed look a little Asian. But apart from that, he was American through and through, a marathon runner, downhill skier and geologist at the city’s university, forty-two years old, father of three, a politically active Democrat and fierce opponent of the National Rifle Association, ever since his oldest son had been caught up in a school shooting in Seattle.
Robert Carson was also a keen amateur genealogist. Two years earlier he had had his large Y chromosome analyzed, which revealed that he had the same EPAS1 mutation as the beggar.
“I have the supergene,” he had written in a piece on the rootsweb.com ancestry website, to which he added a picture of himself posing in high spirits by a stream in the Rocky Mountains, showing off his biceps, wearing overalls and a Colorado Avalanche ice-hockey team cap.
He recounted that his paternal grandfather, Dawa Dorje, had lived in southern Tibet, not far from Mount Everest, but that he had fled the country in 1951 during the Chinese occupation and settled with relatives in the Khumbu Valley, near the Tengboche Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Online there was a picture of his grandfather together with Sir Edmund Hillary at the inauguration of the hospital in the village of Kunde. He had had six children, among them Lobsang, “a madcap and good-looker and, believe it or not, a Rolling Stones nut,” Robert wrote. “I never got to meet him, but Mom has told me he was the strongest climber in the expedition and the most handsome and charismatic by a stretch. (Then again Mom was not exactly objective, and neither was I.)”
Lobsang Dorje had apparently taken part in a British expedition in September 1976, to climb Everest via the West Ridge. The group included an American woman, Christine Carson. She was an ornithologist and, during the approach march, studied the bird life—“a profusion of passerines,” she wrote. At the time, Christine was forty years old, unmarried and childless, and a professor at the University of Michigan. At Base Camp she was struck by severe nausea and headaches, and decided to go back down to Namche Bazaar for medical treatment. On September 9 she learned that six members of the expedition, among them Lobsang Dorje, had died not far from the summit.
When she returned home she discovered she was expecting Lobsang Dorje’s baby. It was a delicate situation. Lobsang had been only nineteen and engaged to a girl in the Khumbu Valley. But Christine gave birth to Robert in April 1977, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even though it was not possible to say for certain—there is always an element of randomness in genetic selection—Robert and the beggar were probably third or fourth cousins. They would have had a common ancestor some time during the nineteenth century, which was not all that close, but Salander guessed that Blomkvist would be able to fill in the gaps, especially since Carson appeared to be actively interested in these questions himself, and seemed a talkative and bright sort of person. Salander found pictures of him meeting his father’s family in the Khumbu Valley the previous year.
She wrote to Blomkvist:
<Your guy is a Sherpa. He’s probably been a porter or guide on high-altitude expeditions in Nepal, for example on Lhotse, Everest or Kangchenjunga. He has a relative in Denver. I’ve attached information about all this. Aren’t you going to check your article on troll factories?>
She deleted the last sentence. It was his own bloody business how he did his job. Then she pressed send and went out to look for Paulina.
* * *
—
Bublanski was strolling along Norr Mälarstrand with Inspector Modig. It was one of his newfangled ideas to hold meetings while walking. “It seems to make it easier to think,” he explained. But it was also an attempt to lose some weight and improve his fitness.
These days he was out of breath at the slightest exertion, and it was not at all easy for him to keep up with Modig. They had talked about everything imaginable and had now got on to the case that had prompted Blomkvist’s call. Modig described her visit to the electrical shop on Hornsgatan, and at that he heaved a sigh. Why did everyone have this thing about Forsell? People seemed to want to blame him for all the ills in society. Bublanski hoped to God that it did not have anything to do with Forsell’s Jewish wife.