“It sounded like it.”
“In that case, I apologize.”
“Thank you.”
“You haven’t had an easy time of it yourself, from what I’ve heard,” he tried.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“Well, then. Thank you for coming by,” she said.
“Christ,” he muttered. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with me?” she repeated and got to her feet. For a few seconds they glared at each other.
He had the ridiculous feeling that they were duelling, or that they were two boxers in a ring, and without quite understanding how it happened they were suddenly very close to each other. He felt her breath and saw her eyes glow and her chest heave. When she inclined her head to one side he kissed her, and for a moment he thought he had done something unforgivably stupid. But she kissed him back, and for a few seconds they looked at each other in astonishment, as if neither could grasp what had happened.
Then she put a hand around his neck and pulled him to her, and within moments it got completely out of hand. They found themselves on the sofa and on the floor, and in the middle of all the madness Blomkvist realized that he had wanted her ever since he first saw her picture online.
CHAPTER 9
August 24
Fredrika Nyman was sitting in the laboratory at the Forensic Board thinking about her daughters, and wondering what had gone wrong.
“I don’t get it,” she said to her colleague Mattias Holmström.
“What don’t you get?”
“How I can be so angry at Josefin and Amanda. It’s as if I’m about to explode.”
“What is it that’s making you so angry?”
“They’re so arrogant. They don’t even say hello.”
“Jesus, Fredrika, they’re teenagers. It’s normal. Don’t you remember how you were at that age?”
Nyman did remember. She had been a model child, good at school and good at the flute, volleyball and choral singing. And at being polite and mannerly. She had been one big smile and had said “Yes, Mamma” and “Of course, Pappa” like a happy little trouper. She must have been unbearable in her own way. But heavens…to not even answer when you’re spoken to?
She couldn’t understand it, nor could she help being in a bad mood all the time, losing her temper and yelling at the girls in the evenings. She was simply too tired. She had to get some sleep, and some peace, and of course the obvious thing would be to prescribe herself some sleeping pills. And why not a controlled substance while she was at it? Since she had been such an exemplary teenager, surely she could go off the rails a bit now and, well, why not mix some red wine with the painkillers too? She laughed to herself and when a few perfunctory words to Mattias elicited a warm smile, she felt like screaming at him too.
Then she began to think about the beggar again. His case was the only one at work that really engaged her, and she decided to ignore the fact that the police could not be bothered with it. She had asked for a carbon-14 dating test on the teeth as a matter of high priority. This would show how old the man had been within a tolerance of two years, and a carbon-13 test would reveal his eating habits in childhood, when his teeth were being formed, and indicate their strontium and oxygen content.
Fredrika had also compared the autosomal DNA results with the internationalgenome.org database, and this indicated that the man came in all probability from the southern parts of Central Asia. She was still waiting for the segmental hair analysis to come back. In the worst case, testing a hair sample can take months, and she had been leaning as hard as possible on the forensics lab. She decided to call her medical secretary yet again.
“Gunilla,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep on at you.”
“Don’t worry, you’re the one who nags me least of all. It’s only lately that you’ve upped your game.”
“The results of the hair analysis, have they come in yet?”
“For the unidentified man?”
“The very one.”
“I’ll check with central office.”
Nyman drummed her fingers on the table and looked at the clock on the wall. It was 10:20 in the morning and she was already longing for lunch.
“Well I never, that’s a surprise,” Gunilla said after a short pause. “They’ve speeded up. It’s already come in. I’ll bring it over to you.”
“Just tell me what it says.”
“It says…wait a moment now.”
Nyman was surprised by her impatience.
“It seems he had long hair. We have all three segments, and they are…all negative. No trace of opiates. Or benzos.”
“So he was no narcoholic.”
“Just an honest-to-goodness alcoholic. No, wait…here…he’s taken aripiprazole in the past, that’s a neuroleptic, isn’t it?”
“Correct, for the treatment of schizophrenia.”
“That’s all I can see.”
Nyman hung up and sat thinking for a while. So the man had not taken any other psychotropic drugs, except for aripiprazole, and that was some time ago. What could that mean? She bit her lip and glared at Mattias, who wore the same silly smile as before. But it was fairly straightforward, wasn’t it? Either the man had suddenly—maybe by chance—got hold of a large number of sleeping pills and swallowed them. Or else somebody had wanted to kill him, and had ground them up and put them in his moonshine. Not that she knew what a mixture of alcohol and eszopiclone might taste like. Presumably not very nice. But she guessed that her man was not all that fussy. On the other hand, why would anybody want to kill him? There was no way of knowing, of course, not yet at least. But assuming that scenario, she could already rule out manslaughter. This was no act committed on the spur of the moment. It takes a measure of sophistication to mix pills into a bottle and then to spike it with opiates. With dextropropoxyphene.
With dextropropoxyphene.
Something about that made her suspicious. The dextropropoxyphene made the cocktail just a little too good. As if it had been made up by a pharmacist, or someone who had consulted a doctor. She felt a certain excitement again, and wondered what to do next. She could ring Hans Faste and be treated to yet another lecture on the habits of weirdos. But instead she finished off her report and called Mikael Blomkvist. Since she had already begun to talk out of turn, she might as well continue.
* * *