Then he forwarded it all to Salander. He was not optimistic. Perhaps it was no more than an excuse to get in touch. Whatever. He looked out to sea. The wind was getting up and the last bathers were packing away their things. He became absorbed in his thoughts.
What had got into Catrin? In just a few days they had become so close that he had thought…well, he wasn’t sure what he thought. That they really belonged together? That was plain silly, they were like night and day…he should leave it for now, and ring Erika instead. He ought to make up for the fact that he had put his article on hold. He picked up his mobile and rang…Catrin. That was just how it went, and at first the conversation continued more or less as it had ended, stiff and hesitant. Then she said:
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For leaving.”
“No plant should ever have to die because of me.”
She gave a sad laugh.
“What are you going to do now?” he said.
“Not sure. Well, maybe I’ll force myself to sit down and try and write something.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“No,” she said.
“But you needed to get away, was that it?”
“I think so.”
“I watched you through the window when you were weeding. You looked worried.”
“Yes, perhaps I am.”
“Did something happen?”
“Not really.”
“But something did, right?”
“I was thinking about the beggar.”
“What about him?”
“That I hadn’t told you what he was shouting about Forsell.”
“You said it was the usual stuff.”
“But it may have been more than that.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because it started to come back to me more clearly when that doctor called.”
“So what was he saying?”
“Something along the lines of: ‘I took Forsell. I left Mamsabiv, terrible, terrible.’ Something like that.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. But when I checked Mamsabiv, Mansabin, all sorts of words like that, I got Mats Sabin, that was the closest I found.”
“The military historian?”
“Do you know him?”
“Years ago I was one of those people who read everything about the Second World War.”
“Do you also know that Sabin died four years ago, during a mountain hike in Abisko National Park? He froze to death by a lake. People think he had a stroke and couldn’t get to a shelter out of the cold.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Not that I think it’s got anything to do with Forsell…”
“But…” he said to encourage her.
“But I couldn’t resist doing a search against the two of them together and I saw that Forsell and Sabin had a falling-out in the media. About Russia.”
“Explain?”
“After he retired, Sabin changed his opinion and went from being a hawk to having a more Russia-friendly outlook, and in several pieces—in Expressen, among others—he wrote that everyone in Sweden suffered from a terror of Russia, a paranoia, and that we should be taking a more sympathetic view. Forsell countered by writing that Sabin’s words simply replicated Russian propaganda and implied that he was a paid lackey. After that all hell broke loose. There was talk of libel suits and other legal action, but in the end Forsell backed down and apologized.”
“Where does the beggar come into this?”
“No idea. Although…he did say ‘I left Mansabin,’ or something similar, and that might fit. Sabin was alone and abandoned when he died.”
“It’s a lead,” he said.
“Probably nonsensical.”
“Can’t you come back so we can talk it through, and also touch on the meaning of life and everything else while we’re at it?”
“Next time, Mikael. Next time.”
He wanted to persuade her, he wanted to beg and plead. But he felt pathetic, so he just wished her a nice evening and hung up. He got up and took a beer from the fridge and wondered what to do with himself. The sensible thing would be to stop thinking about both Catrin and the beggar. None of that was going to get him anywhere. He should go back to his article about troll factories and the stock market crash or, better still, actually take a proper holiday.
But he was as he was: obstinate, and perhaps a little dumb too. He could not let go of things, and when he’d done the dishes and tidied up the kitchen corner, and stood for a few moments gazing at the ever-changing sea, he looked up Mats Sabin and found himself reading a lengthy obituary in Norrländska Socialdemokraten.
Sabin grew up in Luleå and became an officer in the coastal artillery—he was involved in the hunt for foreign submarines in the ’80s—but alongside that he also studied history and took leave for a while from the military in order to get a doctorate from Uppsala University. His thesis was on Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He became a lecturer at Försvarshögskolan, but, as Blomkvist knew, he also published popular histories about the Second World War. He was a long-time advocate of Swedish membership of NATO. He was certain that what he had been chasing in the Baltic were none other than Russian submarines. Yet in his final years he became a friend of Russia and defended their intervention in Ukraine and the Crimea. He had also applauded Russia as a force for peace in Syria.
It was never clear why he had altered his point of view, though he had been quoted as saying that “opinions are there to be changed as we grow older and wiser.” Mats Sabin was reputed to have been a good cross-country runner and a diver. Soon after his wife died, he walked the classic trail between Abisko and Nikkaluokta, and according to the obituary he was “in good shape.” It was the beginning of May and the forecast had been good, yet the weather turned to freezing towards the evening of the third. The temperature dropped to minus eight degrees, and Sabin seemed to have suffered a stroke and collapsed not far from the Abiskojåkka River. He never reached any of the mountain huts dotted along the track. He was found dead on the morning of the fourth by a group of hikers from Sundbyberg. There was no suggestion of suspicious circumstances, nor any sign of violence. He was sixty-seven years old.
Blomkvist tried to find out where Johannes Forsell—another keen outdoor sportsman—would have been at the time, but the internet yielded nothing here. This was May 2016, almost one and a half years before Forsell became Minister of Defence, and not even the press at his home in Östersund was monitoring his movements. But Blomkvist did manage to establish that Forsell had business interests in the area. It was not inconceivable that he might have been in Abisko at the time.