“Were you expecting someone?” she said, and that reassured him a little. He stroked her hair and asked her how she was feeling.
Catrin said she was fine, but he did not believe her. It was not the first time he had noticed this gloomy streak in her. But it had always vanished as quickly as it appeared, and when she told him that the medical examiner had called, he decided to leave her be and went to ring Nyman to hear about the hair test.
“So what conclusions do you draw?” he asked her.
“To be honest, I’ve been twisting and turning this every which way. And it still seems suspicious,” she said.
Blomkvist looked at Catrin, who was sitting with her arms across her stomach. He smiled and she gave a forced smile in return, and he looked out of the window. There were whitecaps as far out as he could see. His outboard motor was bobbing up and down on the waves. He would have to pull it up properly later.
“What does Faste say now?”
“He doesn’t know yet, but I’ve put it in my report.”
“You have to let him know.”
“I will. Your friend said that the beggar was talking about Forsell.”
“The man’s a kind of virus,” he said. “Every nutcase has him on the brain.”
“I had no idea.”
“A little like the Palme assassination back then, which seemed to creep into every little psychosis. I’m inundated with absurd conspiracy theories about Forsell.”
“How come?”
He looked at Catrin, who got up and went into the bathroom.
“I don’t think you ever know,” he said. “Certain public figures just seem to wind up people’s imaginations. But in this case it can only have been planted, in revenge for the fact that Forsell identified Russia’s involvement in the stock market crash at a very early stage, and generally took an uncompromising line against the Kremlin. There’s more than a suspicion that he’s been targeted by a disinformation campaign.”
“Isn’t he also a bit of a risk taker? An adventurer?”
“I think he’s OK, actually. I had a good look at his affairs,” he said. “Do you still not know where the beggar came from?”
“No more than what the carbon-13 analysis reveals, that he probably grew up in extreme poverty, but I’d already guessed that much. He seems to have eaten mostly vegetables and grains. Perhaps his parents were vegetarians.”
He looked towards the bathroom.
“Isn’t it all a bit odd?” he said.
“In what way?”
“That the man just pops up one day out of nowhere, and is then found dead with a cocktail of lethal poisons inside him?”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
A thought struck him.
“Do you know what? I have a friend on the homicide squad, a chief inspector who’s worked with Faste and thinks he’s a total idiot,” he said.
“A man of sound judgment, clearly.”
“I could have a word with him, see if he might be able to take a look at the case. That way we can maybe speed up the process.”
“That would be good.”
“Thanks for the call,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”
He hung up, happy to have a reason to call Bublanski. He and the chief inspector had known each other for a long time, even if their relationship had not always been entirely cordial. But in later years they had become friends and it was always comforting to talk to him. The mere fact that Bublanski always thought so carefully about everything helped Blomkvist to see things in perspective and to disconnect from the constant flow of news about the world which was his life, but which sometimes made him feel as if he were drowning in sensationalism and madness.
The last time he and Bublanski had met was at Holger Palmgren’s funeral and they had talked about Salander and her eulogy in the church, and what she had said about dragons. They had agreed to see each other again soon. But nothing had come of it, as so often happens, and now Blomkvist reached for his mobile to call him. Yet he hesitated, and instead knocked on the bathroom door.
“Are you all right in there?”
* * *
—
Catrin did not feel like answering, but she knew she had to say something, so she mumbled “just a moment” and got up from the toilet seat. She tried to make her eyes look a little less red by splashing water on her face, but it made little difference. Then she came out and sat on the bed, and did not feel entirely comfortable when Mikael came close to her and caressed her hair.
“How did you get on with the article?”
“It’s a disaster.”
“I know the feeling. But there’s something else, isn’t there?” he said.
“That beggar…” she began.
“What about him?”
“He made me hysterical.”
“I’ve gathered that.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“Not really, I guess,” he said. She hesitated for a while, but then she began to speak, her eyes fixed on her hands.
“When I was nine my parents told me I wasn’t going to go to school for a year. My mother persuaded the school that she and Pappa would teach me themselves, and I suppose they must have been given a stack of materials and learning assignments. Not that I ever saw them. Then we flew to India, to Goa, and it was probably quite cool to begin with. We slept on the beach or in hammocks, and I ran around with other kids and learned how to make jewellery and carve things out of wood. We played football and volleyball, and in the evenings we danced and lit fires. Pappa played the guitar and Mamma sang. For a while we ran a café in Arambol. I waited on tables and made a lentil soup with coconut milk which we called Catrin’s soup. But slowly it all fell apart. People came to the café naked, many of them with needle marks on their arms. Others were stoned, and some of them groped me or tried to frighten me by doing crazy things.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“One night I woke up and saw Mamma’s eyes glowing in the dark. She was shooting up. Pappa was standing a little way off, swaying and moaning in a barely conscious voice, and not long after that we began to have problems for real. Pappa’s demons, we talked about them all the time. ‘What’s the matter with Pappa?’ I’d ask. ‘It’s just his demons,’ Mamma always said. Pappa’s demons. Soon afterwards we moved, as if we were hoping to escape the demons too, and I remember we walked for hours and days and weeks, pulling a cart with rotting old wooden wheels, piled high with shawls and clothes and knickknacks which Mamma tried to sell. Then we must have got rid of everything because from one day to the next we had hardly any baggage at all. We went by train and hitchhiked instead. We went to Benares, and finally ended up in Kathmandu where we lived on Freak Street, the old hippie street, and that was when I realized we had a completely different line of business. Mamma and Pappa weren’t just doing heroin, they were selling it too. People came to our home and begged us ‘please, please,’ and sometimes we got chased by men in the street. Many were missing fingers, sometimes even an arm or a leg. They were dressed in rags, and had yellowy skin and blotches on their faces. I still see them in my dreams.”