Blomkvist sat in silence on the bed, trying to absorb what he had heard. Then he put a hand on her shoulder. She pushed it away and looked out of the window.
“Do you know what I think?” he said.
She did not reply.
“I think you’re just not the sort of the person who shoots people like that.”
“That’s crap.”
“I don’t think you are, Lisbeth. I never have.”
She took a croissant from the tray, and more to herself than to him she muttered:
“But I should have killed her. Now she’s coming after all of us.”
CHAPTER 20
August 27
Bublanski had a bottle of Grant’s twelve-year-old scotch with him. It had been standing around at home for years, and doing this was clearly against his principles. But since the witness had asked him for whisky, he was not going to make an issue of it. Ever since yesterday, he had been focusing exclusively on Nima Rita’s death, so he had spared no effort to get hold of the last witness known to have seen the Sherpa alive. In the end he had tracked him down here in Haninge, to a small apartment in a yellow block on Klockarleden.
Bublanski had seen worse hangouts, but this was not the coziest he had seen either. The place smelled bad, and was littered with bottles and ashtrays and the remains of food. But the witness himself exuded a sort of bohemian elegance. He wore a more or less clean white shirt and a Parisian beret.
“Herr Järvinen,” Bublanski said.
“Chief Inspector.”
“Will this do?”
He held up the bottle and got a little smile in return, and then the two of them sat down on some blue wooden stools in the kitchen.
“You met the man we now know to be called Nima Rita on the night of the fourteenth of August, isn’t that right?” he said.
“Correct…yes…a total nutjob. I was feeling lousy and waiting for a man who usually sells drink at Norra Bantorget, and then this tramp shows up, reeling, and I should have kept my trap shut. You could see from a mile away that he was crazy. But I’m a talkative sort and so I asked him, politely and tactfully, how he was and he started yelling at me.”
“In which language?”
“English and Swedish.”
“So he could speak Swedish?”
“Well, not really. But he knew some words. I couldn’t make out a thing. He was shouting about having been up among the clouds, fighting with the gods and talking to the dead.”
“Was he talking about Mount Everest, do you think?”
“He might have been. I wasn’t listening all that carefully. I was feeling bloody awful, you see, and didn’t have the stomach for his gibberish.”
“So you recall nothing specific that he said?”
“He’d rescued lots of people. ‘I saved many lives,’ he said, and then he showed me the stumps on his hands. He was missing some fingers.”
“Did he say anything about Defence Minister Forsell?”
Heikki Järvinen looked at him in surprise and poured some whisky into a glass, then knocked it back with a shaky hand.
“Funny you should say that.”
“Why funny?”
“Because come to think of it he did mention Forsell in some way. But that’s perhaps no surprise. Everybody’s talking about him.”
“What did he actually say?”
“That he knew him, I think. And knew all sorts of other important people. He was giving me a headache and I couldn’t take it. I made a pretty stupid remark.”
“Like what?”
“Well…nothing racist or anything like that. But it probably wasn’t such a great idea. I said he looked like a bloody Chinaman or something, and he went berserk and thumped me. It took me so much by surprise that I didn’t stand a chance. He beat the shit out of me, to be honest. Can you imagine?”
“I can see that it wasn’t very nice.”
“I bled like a pig,” Järvinen went on, still in a state. “There’s a cut here, it hasn’t gone away. Look.”
He pointed to his lip and there was indeed a scar there. But then there were cuts and bruises all over him, so Bublanski was not especially impressed.
“Then what happened?”
“He stormed off, and had a real stroke of luck, or perhaps I shouldn’t say luck seeing as he died the next day. But that’s what it felt like at the time. He ran into someone selling booze down on Vasagatan.”
Bublanski leaned across the kitchen table.
“Someone selling booze?”
“A man stopped him on the pavement down by the hotel, you know the one I mean. At least it looked as if he was giving him a bottle. But it was quite a long way off and I may be wrong.”
“What can you tell me about the man?”
“The seller?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing much. He was thin, dark-haired, tall. He was wearing a black jacket and jeans. And a cap. But I didn’t see his face.”
“Did he look like a drunk himself?”
“He didn’t walk like one.”
“Meaning what?”
“He was too light on his feet, and quick.”
“Like someone who exercised regularly?”
“Could be.”
Bublanski observed Järvinen in silence for a while and felt that here was a man in free fall who, in spite of everything, was trying hard to keep up some sort of appearance. The fighting spirit was still there.
“Did you see where he went?”
“In the direction of Central Station. For a while I thought I’d follow him. But I had zero chance of catching up.”
“So maybe he wasn’t really there to sell alcohol? Maybe all he wanted to do was give a bottle to Nima Rita.”
“So you’re saying—?”
“I’m not saying anything. But Nima Rita was poisoned, and considering the way he lived it’s not inconceivable that the poison he drank came in the form of a bottle of alcohol, so you can see why I’m interested in this man.”
Järvinen had another slug of whisky and said:
“Well, in that case, there’s one more thing I should mention. He did say that they’d tried to poison him before.”