“Because he wasn’t easy to forget.”
“Well, I forgot him.”
Sofie looked at him in surprise.
“How do you mean?”
“I must have seen him at least ten times, yet I never really registered it. Only now that he’s dead does he seem alive to me.”
“He’s dead?”
“The medical examiner called me yesterday.”
“Why you, of all people?”
“Because my mobile number was in the man’s pocket and she was probably hoping I could help identify him.”
“But you couldn’t?”
“Not at all.”
“He probably thought he had some story for you.”
“Presumably.”
Sofie finished her tea and they sat quietly for a little while.
“He accosted Catrin Lindås a week ago,” she said eventually.
“He did?”
“He went berserk when he caught sight of her. I saw it from some way off, on Swedenborgsgatan.”
“What did he want from her?”
“He’d probably seen her on TV.”
Catrin Lindås did appear on television every now and then. She was a leading writer and columnist, a conservative who often took part in debates about law and order, or on school discipline and teaching standards. She was good-looking in an elegant sort of way. She wore beautifully tailored suits and silk pussy-bow blouses, and never had a hair out of place. Blomkvist thought of her as serious and unimaginative. She had been critical of him in Svenska Dagbladet.
“What happened?”
“He grabbed hold of her arm and was shouting.”
“Shouting what?”
“I’ve no idea. But he was waving some sort of stick. It left Catrin in a complete state. I tried to calm her down and helped her remove a grubby mark on her jacket.”
“Oh dear, that must have been awful for her.”
He had not meant to sound sarcastic, but Sofie was onto him in an instant.
“You’ve never liked her, have you?”
“Nothing much wrong with her, I guess,” he said defensively. “She’s just a bit too right-wing and proper for me, that’s all.”
“Little Miss Perfect, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you meant it. Do you have any idea how much shit she gets online? She’s seen as some sort of upper-class bitch who’s been to boarding school at Lundsberg and looks down her nose at ordinary people. But have you any idea what she’s been through?”
“No, Sofie, I don’t.”
He could not understand why she had suddenly got so angry.
“In that case I’ll tell you. She grew up in miserable circumstances, in a cracked-out hippie commune in Göteborg. Her parents were doing LSD and heroin, and home was a total mess, with people sitting around stoned out of their minds. Her suits and her tidiness have been her way of surviving. She’s a fighter. A rebel, in a way.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Exactly so, and I know you think she’s a reactionary, but she does an enormous amount of good in her fight against the new age and spiritual crap she grew up with. She’s a lot more interesting than people realize.”
“Are you friends?”
“We are.”
“Thanks, Sofie. In that case I’ll try to see her in a different light in the future.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, laughing apologetically, but the way she mumbled made it clear that this mattered to her.
Then she asked him how he was getting on with his story. He told her that he wasn’t exactly progressing in leaps and bounds. He said that the Russian lead had dried up.
“But you’ve got good sources, haven’t you?”
“What my sources don’t know, I don’t know either.”
“Maybe you should head off to Saint Petersburg, find out more about that troll factory. What was its name again?”
“New Agency House?”
“Wasn’t it some sort of hub?”
“That looks like a dead end too.”
“Am I listening to an unusually pessimistic Blomkvist?”
He could hear it too, but he had no wish to go to Saint Petersburg. The place was already teeming with journalists, and no-one had been able to find out who was behind the factory, or to what extent the intelligence services and the government were involved. He was fed up with it. He was tired of the news in general, tired of all the depressing political developments around the world. He ordered another espresso and asked Sofie about her idea for an article.
She wanted to write about the anti-Semitism in the disinformation campaign. This was nothing new because the trolls had been unable to resist suggesting that the whole stock market crash was a Jewish conspiracy. It was the same ugly rubbish which had been churned out for centuries, written about and analyzed countless times before, but Sofie had a more specific angle. She wanted to portray how this had affected people in their everyday lives—schoolchildren, teachers, intellectuals—ordinary individuals who had hitherto given hardly a thought to the fact that they were Jewish. “Great, go for it,” Blomkvist said. He asked her a few questions and made one or two suggestions, and spoke generally about hate in the community among the populists and extremists. He told her about all the idiots who had left bile on his voicemail. After a while he became fed up with listening to himself and gave Sofie a hug. He apologized—without really knowing why—and said goodbye, and then went home and changed to go for a run.
CHAPTER 6
August 16
Kira was in bed in the large house in Rublyovka to the west of Moscow when she received the message that her chief hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, wanted to talk to her. He would have to wait, she replied. For good measure she threw a hairbrush at her housekeeper Katya, and pulled the duvet over her head. It had been a night from hell. The memory of the commotion at the restaurant, her sister’s determined stride and silhouette, would not leave her, and she kept touching her shoulder, still aching from the impact of her fall to the pavement: It was not the pain so much as a presence which she simply could not shake off.
Why could it not end? She had worked so hard and achieved so much. But the past kept coming back, again and again, and each time it seemed in a new guise. There had been nothing good about her childhood, yet there had been parts which in her way she had loved. Now even those were being torn from her, one by one.