“Hello there,” he said. “How nice of you to call!”
He sounded so cheerful that she felt at once it was the best thing that had happened to her all day, which was not saying much.
“I was thinking—” she said.
“You know what,” he interrupted. “It dawned on me that I had actually seen your beggar, at least it must have been him.”
“Really?”
“It all fits, the down jacket, the patches on the cheeks, the truncated fingers. It can’t have been anyone else.”
“So where did you see him?”
“In Mariatorget. In fact, it’s astonishing that I’d forgotten him,” he went on. “I can hardly believe it. He used to sit totally still on a piece of cardboard by the statue on the square. I must have passed him ten or twenty times.”
His enthusiasm was contagious.
“That’s amazing. What was your impression of him?”
“Well…I’m not really sure,” he said. “I never paid him much attention. But I remember him as broken. And proud—the way you described him when he was dead. He’d sit bolt upright with his head high, a bit like a Sioux chieftain in the movies. I don’t know how he managed to stay like that for hours on end.”
“Did he seem under the influence of alcohol, or drugs?”
“I can’t really say. He could have been. But if he’d been out of it he’d hardly have been able to hold that position for so long. Why do you ask?”
“Because this morning I got the results of my drug screening. He had 2.5 micrograms of eszopiclone per gram of femoral blood in his body, and that’s an awful lot.”
“What’s eszopiclone?”
“A substance you find in some sleeping pills, in Lunesta, for example. I’d say that he must have had at least twenty tablets, mixed with alcohol, and on top of that quite a lot of dextropropoxyphene, a painkilling opiate.”
“What do the police say?”
“Overdose or suicide.”
“On what grounds?”
She snorted.
“On the grounds that it’s easiest for them, I’d guess. The person in charge of the investigation seemed to be focusing on doing as little work as possible.”
“What’s his name?”
“The officer in charge? Hans Faste.”
“Oh, brilliant…” he said.
“Do you know him?”
* * *
—
Blomkvist knew Faste all too well. He had once convinced himself that Salander belonged to a lesbian satanic hard rock gang, and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever—other than some good old-fashioned misogyny—had her accused of murder. Bublanski used to say that Faste was punishment for the sins of the police force.
“I’m afraid so,” he said.
“He called the man ‘the weirdo.’ ”
“Sounds very much like Faste.”
“When he got the test results he said right away that the weirdo had got a bit too fond of his pills.”
“But you don’t seem convinced?”
“An overdose would be the most straightforward explanation, but I find it odd that it should be eszopiclone. You can get hooked on it, of course, but addiction usually involves benzodiazepines, and when I pointed that out and said the man was probably a Buddhist, that really got your policeman going.”
“In what way?”
“He called back a few hours later having done some research. Which involved reading the Wikipedia entry on suicide. Apparently it says Buddhists who consider themselves especially enlightened have the right to take their own lives, and he seemed to find that funny. He said that the man had probably been sitting under a tree, feeling enlightened.”
“Jesus.”
“It made me furious. But I let it go. I didn’t feel like having a row, not today anyway. But then I got home and was feeling generally frustrated, and it occurred to me that it simply made no sense.”
“In what way?”
“I kept thinking about his corpse. I’ve never seen such evidence of hardship. Everything about him, every single sinew and muscle, speaks of a life which has been a terrible struggle. This may sound a bit like pop psychology, but I find it very hard to believe that a person like that suddenly stops fighting and stuffs himself full of pills. I don’t think we can rule out that somebody was responsible for his death.”
Blomkvist gave a start.
“You’ll have to tell them that, of course. They’ll need more people working on the investigation, not just Hans Faste.”
“And I will. But I wanted to tell you anyhow, as a sort of insurance in case the police don’t do their stuff.”
“I’m grateful for that,” he said and thought of Catrin Lindås, who Sofie had told him about.
He remembered her well-pressed suits and the mark on her jacket, and the hippie commune she had grown up in. He wondered if he should mention her name. Maybe there was something she could tell the police. But then he decided he ought to spare her Hans Faste’s attentions for the time being, and instead he said:
“And you still don’t know who he is?”
“No, no hits anywhere. No-one with those distinguishing features has been reported missing. But I wasn’t expecting that anyway. What I do have is a DNA sequence analysis from the National Forensics Lab, which has just come in. But it’s still only shallow, autosomal. I’m going to ask for an analysis of his mitochondrial DNA as well, and his Y chromosome, and then I hope that’ll get me further.”
“I’m sure there are going to be many others who remember him,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was someone you’d notice. It was just me being too self-absorbed this summer. The police ought to have a word with people around Mariatorget, lots of them will have seen him.”
“I’ll pass that on.”
Blomkvist was beginning to find this interesting.
“You know what? If he really was taking those tablets, he’s unlikely to have got them on prescription,” he said. “He didn’t look like someone who makes an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I know from experience that there’s a black market for drugs like that. The police are bound to have informants in those circles.”