“So Forsell was friendly with them?”
“He was friendly with everyone. Have you met him? Before everyone started to hate him, that is.”
“I interviewed him just when he’d been made Minister of Defence.”
“In that case you certainly won’t get what’s going on now. At that time, you see, everybody loved him. He was like a whirlwind. He stormed ahead, giving his thumbs-up sign, and he never stopped smiling. But you could be right, he may have had a particular relationship with Nima. He kept saying ‘Let me bow to the mountain legend,’ that sort of stuff, and would exclaim: ‘What a wife you have! What a beautiful woman,’ and of course that delighted Nima.”
“Did Nima then reciprocate in any way?”
“How do you mean?”
Mikael did not know how to put it, nor did he want to make any baseless accusations.
“Is it conceivable that Nima might have helped Forsell on the mountain, at the expense of Klara Engelman?”
Elin gave him a bewildered look.
“How on earth would that have worked?” she said. “Nima was with Viktor and Klara, wasn’t he, and Svante and Johannes went on ahead towards the summit on their own.”
“I know. But later? What happened then? It says everywhere that Klara was beyond rescue. But was she really?” he said, and then something unexpected happened.
Elin lost her temper.
“Too bloody right she was,” she said. “I get so fed up with this. A bunch of idiots who’ve never been anywhere near those altitudes, they think they know it all. But I can tell you…” She was almost lost for words. “Do you have the slightest idea what it’s like up there? You’re barely able to think, and it’s excruciatingly cold and tough, and if you’re really lucky you’ve just about got enough strength to look after yourself. To take one step at a time. No-one, not even a Nima Rita, can get a person down when they’re lying lifeless in the snow with their face frozen solid at twenty-seven thousand feet, and that’s how she was. We saw them ourselves on the way down, you know that, don’t you? She and Viktor with their arms around each other in the snow.”
“I do know.”
“And there was nothing to be done. Not a hope in hell of anybody being able to help her. She was dead.”
“I’m just double-checking the facts,” he said.
“Bullshit, I don’t believe that for one second. You were trying to imply something, weren’t you? You’re out to get Forsell, just like everyone else.”
I’m not, he wanted to shout, I’m not! But instead he took a deep breath.
“I apologize,” he said. “I just think…”
“What do you think?”
“That there’s something about this story that doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that later Klara was no longer lying with Viktor. I know that wasn’t discovered until the following year, and that any number of things could have happened in between, avalanches and terrible storms. But still—”
“Still what?”
“I don’t like what I’ve read of Svante Lindberg’s account either. I can’t help feeling that he hasn’t told the whole story.”
Elin calmed down and looked out at the garden.
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” she said.
“And why would you say so?”
“Because Svante was the big riddle at Base Camp.”
CHAPTER 22
August 27
Catrin Lindås was curled up with her cat on the sofa at home on Nytorget, looking at her mobile. She had made far too many attempts to contact Blomkvist, and was both furious and embarrassed about it. She had laid herself bare, and all she had got back was one cryptic text message:
<I think the beggar said ‘Mamsahib’ to you, as in Mamsahib Klara Engelman. Anything else you remember? Even one word could be helpful>
Mamsahib, she thought, and looked it up: “A respectful form of address for a white woman in colonial India, usually written Memsahib.” That may well have been what he said, but who cared anyway, and who was Klara Engelman?
She couldn’t be less interested, and she couldn’t give a damn about Blomkvist either for that matter. Surely he could have added a polite little note, like “Hi, how’s things?” But no, and certainly not an “I miss you,” as she herself had unaccountably written in a moment of weakness. He could get stuffed.
She went into the kitchen to find something to eat. But she realized she wasn’t hungry after all, so she slammed the refrigerator door shut and took an apple from a bowl on the dining table, which she didn’t eat either, maybe because at that very moment a bell went off in the recesses of her mind. Klara Engelman? It did sound familiar. Even glamorous in some way, and she googled it. Then the whole story came back to her.
She had read all about it in Vanity Fair some time ago, but now she could only find some images of Klara Engelman, a series of posed photographs from one of the Everest base camps, and also pictures of Viktor Grankin, the guide who died with her. Klara was good-looking in a slightly vulgar way, but she also seemed sad, or as if she were pretending to look happy, as if she needed to keep smiling to ward off depression, whereas Grankin seemed…well, what about him?
He was an engineer and also a professional climber, another article said, and a former consultant to adventure travel companies, but she thought he looked more like a soldier, special forces, especially when she saw him in another photograph from Everest, standing next to…“Johannes Forsell!” she exclaimed aloud, and even forgot to be angry with Blomkvist. She wrote back:
<What have you found out?>
* * *
—
A moment earlier, Elin Felke had been indignant and angry. Now she looked uncertain and thoughtful, as if she had gone from one extreme to the other in no time at all.
“Well, my God, what can I say about Svante? What incredible self-confidence. Crazy, really. He could persuade people to do just about anything. We all even began to drink his bloody blueberry soup in the camp. He should have been a salesman or something. But I suspect that in the end things didn’t turn out quite as he wanted on Everest.”
“How’s that?”
“Svante had also worked out that Viktor and Klara had something going, and that seemed to trouble him in some way. I can’t explain it, it just felt like that. Maybe he was jealous, what do I know, and I think Viktor noticed. I even think it was one of the reasons he became more and more nervous.”