Nyman was silent for a second or two.
“Oh, damn it,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been an idiot.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“No, I have. But listen…I’m glad you remember him. It really does mean something to me.”
Blomkvist looked at his half-packed suitcase and found that he no longer wanted to go to Sandhamn after all.
* * *
—
Blomkvist had said something appreciative in return, but Fredrika had barely heard it. She ended the call and almost didn’t notice Amanda, who was standing next to her asking what was for dinner. Maybe she even apologized for having been so sulky earlier. Fredrika simply told them to order a takeaway.
“What?” they both said.
“Whatever you want. Pizza, Indian, Thai, chips, liquorice sweets…”
The girls looked at her as if she had gone off her rocker. She went into her study and closed the door, and e-mailed the forensics lab asking them to run a segmental hair analysis right away, something she should have done at the start.
Not only would that show how much eszopiclone and dextropropoxyphene had been in the man’s bloodstream when he died, it would also give her the levels for every week going back several months. In other words, she would know if he had been taking the drugs over a period of time or on only one occasion. It could become an important piece in the jigsaw, and all of that made her forget her daughters, the back pain, the lack of sleep and the feeling that life might be meaningless in the end. That puzzled her. She spent her life investigating suspicious deaths, and nowadays it was rare for her to become so emotionally involved. But she had been fascinated by this character, and perhaps she even hoped that he had had a dramatic death. It was as if his ravaged body deserved more of a story, so much so that she spent many hours looking at images of the corpse, each time noticing new details. Every so often she said to herself:
What have you been through, my old friend?
What hellish trials have you had to suffer?
* * *
—
Blomkvist sat down by his computer and googled Catrin Lindås. She was thirty-seven years old, held a master’s degree in economics and political science from Stockholm University, and had now established herself as a conservative commentator and writer. She ran a successful podcast and wrote columns for Svenska Dagbladet, Axess, Fokus and also Journalisten.
She had lobbied for begging to be made illegal and often discussed the risks of welfare dependence and the shortcomings of the Swedish educational system. In addition to being a monarchist and an advocate for a robust national defence, she felt strongly about safeguarding the nuclear family, although she did not seem to have one of her own. She claimed to be a feminist, but feminists had often criticized her. She faced a barrage of hatred online from both the Right and the Left and had a disturbingly long comments thread on the Flashback Forum. “We must have standards,” she often said. “Standards and responsibilities allow us to grow.”
She hated woolliness, she frequently wrote, and superstition, and religious convictions, although she was more cautious on the last. Writing in Svenska Dagbladet about constructive journalism—stories which not only describe problematic situations but actually suggest a way out of them—she said that “Mikael Blomkvist claims to want to fight the populists, but then plays into their hands with his pessimistic view of society.”
It troubled her, she said, that young journalists looked upon him as an example to follow. She wrote that he had a tendency to see people as victims. And that his default setting was to take sides against the business establishment. He ought to make more of an effort to identify solutions, not only problems. That was more or less what he would have expected her to say.
He’d known worse, for sure, and she might have had a point or two. But in some ridiculous way, she still alarmed him. He could not help feeling as if one look from her would be enough to reveal that he had not done the washing-up or showered or done up his fly. Or that he drank yoghurt straight from the carton. There was something damning about that look, he thought, a cold streak in her, though it only enhanced her severe beauty.
Yet he could not stop thinking about her confrontation with the beggar—the ice queen and the man in tattered rags. In the end he found her number and called. She did not answer, and perhaps that was just as well. There was nothing there. There was no story, and he should be heading out to Sandhamn now, before it got too late. He took some shirts from the wardrobe and a jacket in case he decided to treat himself at Seglarhotellet. Then his mobile rang. It was Catrin Lindås, and she sounded every bit as severe as she looked.
“What is it?” she began, and he considered saying something nice about her column, to get her to relax. But it was more than he could bring himself to do, so he simply asked if he had got her at a bad moment.
“I’m busy,” she said.
“OK, let’s speak later then.”
“We can speak later if you tell me what it’s about.”
I’m writing a bitchy column about you, he was tempted to say.
“My colleague Sofie Melker told me that recently you had an unpleasant altercation with a homeless man in Mariatorget.”
“I have many unpleasant altercations,” she said. “It goes with the job.”
My God, he thought.
“I’m just curious, I’d like to know what the man said.”
“Whatever it was, it was gibberish.”
He took another look at the pictures of Lindås on his screen.
“Are you still at work?” he said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I thought I could drop by for a moment, and we could talk about it. You’re on Mäster Mikaels Gata, aren’t you?”
Reflecting on it afterwards, he could not imagine what had prompted him to suggest such a thing, but he knew that if he was going to find out anything at all, it was not going to happen over the telephone. It was as if there were barbed wire along the line.
“OK, but let’s make it quick,” she said. “In an hour.”
* * *
—
A tram could be heard rattling past the hotel near Náměstí Republiky in Prague. Salander was drinking too much again, and was once more glued to her computer, behind the screens of her Faraday cage. Yes, there had been moments of relief and oblivion, but she had always got there with the help of alcohol and sex, and afterwards the rage and the frustration had returned.
Some sort of madness was overwhelming her, the past was spinning in her head like a centrifuge. This is no life, she often thought to herself. It’s not possible to go on like this. She had to take action. It was no good just waiting and listening out for footsteps in the corridors and streets, or running away. So she had tried to regain the initiative. But it wasn’t easy.