* * *
—
They sat there glued to their mobiles. Someone was reporting live on national television that Blomkvist and Salander had been carried out of the building, injured but conscious, and Lindås felt the tears welling up in her eyes. Her hands shook and she stared emptily ahead. She felt a hand on her shoulder.
“It looks as if they’re going to make it,” Kowalski said.
“Let’s hope so,” she said, wondering if she had not better leave at once.
But then she realized that she would not be able to help at all at this stage. She might as well finish what she had started, and there was still one question which needed to be answered.
“I should imagine that people will sympathize with your predicament, Johannes, at least those who want to understand,” she said.
“There aren’t usually too many of those,” Rebecka said.
“Nothing I can do about that now,” Forsell said. “Can we drop you off somewhere, Catrin?”
“I’ll be all right, thanks,” she said. “But there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. You said you didn’t visit Nima Rita all that often at the South Wing. But you went there a few times, didn’t you, and surely you must have noticed that he wasn’t doing well?”
“I did.”
“So why didn’t you ask for something to be done? Why didn’t you see to it that he was moved to a better place?”
“I insisted on all sorts of things. I even yelled at the people there. But not enough, I suppose, and perhaps I gave up too easily. I ran away from it. Maybe it was more than I could handle.”
“In what way?”
“We all have things we can’t deal with,” he said. “In the end you just look away and pretend they’re not happening.”
“Was it that bad?”
“To begin with, I was there quite often. Then I waited for almost a year. It just turned out that way, and I remember feeling nervous and uncomfortable when I went back. He came shuffling towards me, wearing grey clothes. He looked like a prisoner who had been crushed. I got to my feet and put my arms around him, but his body was stiff and lifeless. I tried to talk. I asked him endless questions. His answers were monosyllabic. He seemed to have given up, and I had a violent reaction. I felt this tremendous rage.”
“Towards the clinic?”
“Towards him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s how it was, quite simply, guilt can do that to you. It ends up breeding a load of anger. Nima was like…the flip side of me. He was the price I had paid for having such a happy life.”
“Can you explain that?” Lindås said.
“Don’t you understand? I owed him a debt I could never repay. I couldn’t even thank him without going back to the very thing that had torn him apart. I was alive because Klara had been sacrificed. Because he had been sacrificed, and in the end his wife too, and I couldn’t bear it. I never went back to the South Wing. I looked away.”
CHAPTER 36
September 9
Berger shook her head again. No, she said, she had no idea how it had all happened, but she made it clear that she did not like their choice of words. She’s not some Little Miss Perfect or tone-deaf moralist. She’s actually damned good. She writes with passion and power, and you should be proud instead of complaining, so get out of here and do some work.
“Now,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” they mumbled. “We just thought—”
“What did you think?”
“Oh, forget it.”
The two young reporters, Sten Åström and Freddie Welander, slunk out of her office and she sent them on their way with a few more angry words. But sometimes she wondered too, there was no denying it. How the hell had it come about? It was the unexpected consequence of a romance, a night at a hotel, that much she knew, but still…Catrin Lindås.
She was the last person on earth Berger would have expected to find writing for Millennium. But Lindås had delivered a staggering disclosure, her story borne along by a raw fervour, and before it had even been published, Defence Minister Forsell had resigned and his undersecretary, Svante Lindberg, had been arrested, there being reasonable grounds to suspect him of murder, blackmail and aggravated espionage. Yet none of the information that had already trickled out into the media and caused banner headlines, day after day, hour by hour, had robbed the magazine of its kudos or dampened eager expectations for the latest edition.
“In view of the revelations to be published in the next issue of Millennium, I will be resigning my position in the government,” Forsell had vouchsafed in his press release.
It was nothing short of fantastic, and the fact that some of her own staff were unable to rejoice at their success, but felt it necessary to bad-mouth the person who had delivered the scoop, only went to show how envious journalists can be. They also complained about having to cooperate with the German magazine Geo, in which a Paulina Müller, a writer none of them had ever heard of, had written an article about the scientific work which had helped to identify the Sherpa Nima Rita.
Blomkvist himself had not written a single line, although he had of course done the groundwork. He had spent most of the time lying in a daze of morphine, coping with the pain and a series of operations. The doctors had been reassuring: He would probably be able to walk normally again within half a year, and that was a great relief. Yet he remained taciturn and downhearted and only occasionally, as when they were discussing her divorce, did he sound like his old self again. He had laughed when she told him that she was having a romance with a man called Mikael.
“How convenient,” he had said. But he did not want to talk about himself or his ordeal.
He was bottling up his suffering and she worried about him. With any luck he would open up a little today. He was going to be allowed home, and she thought she would visit him that evening. But first she was going to look through his story about troll factories, which he had not wanted to publish and had only reluctantly sent her. She put on her spectacles and started reading. OK, not a bad beginning, all things considered, she thought. He did know how to write an introduction, but then…she could understand why he had not been happy with it.
It sagged. He was being too complicated. He was trying to say too much at once, and she went to get herself some coffee before crossing out a sentence here and there. But then…what on earth was this? Towards the end of the article there was a clumsy addition which said that a man called Vladimir Kuznetsov not only owned troll factories in Russia, but was ultimately responsible for them. He was also the man behind the hate campaign which had preceded the murders of LGBTQ people in Chechnya, and that was not previously known.