She deleted the last sentence. It was his own bloody business how he did his job. Then she pressed send and went out to look for Paulina.
* * *
—
Bublanski was strolling along Norr Mälarstrand with Inspector Modig. It was one of his newfangled ideas to hold meetings while walking. “It seems to make it easier to think,” he explained. But it was also an attempt to lose some weight and improve his fitness.
These days he was out of breath at the slightest exertion, and it was not at all easy for him to keep up with Modig. They had talked about everything imaginable and had now got on to the case that had prompted Blomkvist’s call. Modig described her visit to the electrical shop on Hornsgatan, and at that he heaved a sigh. Why did everyone have this thing about Forsell? People seemed to want to blame him for all the ills in society. Bublanski hoped to God that it did not have anything to do with Forsell’s Jewish wife.
“I see,” he said.
“Well, yes, it does seem pretty crazy.”
“Any other motives you can think of?”
“Envy, maybe.”
“What could anyone have envied in that poor man?”
“There’s envy even on the lowest rung of the ladder. I spoke to a woman from Romania, Mirela her name is,” Sonja said. “She told me that the man pulled in more money than all the other beggars in the neighbourhood. There was something about him that made people generous, and I know that caused some resentment among those who had been in the area for a while.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like something you’d kill for.”
“Maybe not. But the man seemed to have a relatively large amount of money at his disposal. He was a regular at the hot dog stand below Bysistorget and at McDonald’s on Hornsgatan, and of course also at the Systembolaget liquor store on Rosenlundsgatan, where he bought vodka and beer. And a few times it seems he was also spotted in the early hours further up towards Wollmar Yxkullsgatan in Södermalm, where he bought moonshine.”
“Did he now?”
Bublanski thought it over.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Modig said. “We ought to have a word with the people who sell that stuff.”
“Quite right,” he said, taking a deep breath so he could make it up the hill to Hantverkargatan, and his thoughts turned again to Forsell and his wife, Rebecka, a charming woman whom he had met at the Jewish Community Centre.
She was tall, certainly more than six feet, fine-limbed with light, elegant steps and large, dark eyes which shone with warmth and vitality. He could understand why this couple attracted so much animosity.
Of course people resented those who exude such boundless energy. They make the rest of us feel small and feeble in comparison.
CHAPTER 14
August 25
Blomkvist read Salander’s message and got up from his desk to look out across the water. It was five in the afternoon, and it was becoming increasingly windy out there. A yacht was racing along in the storm further out in the bay. A Sherpa, he thought, a Sherpa. There must be something to that, surely?
Not that he had really believed it was anything to do with the Minister of Defence. But still…one could not ignore the fact that Forsell had climbed Mount Everest in 2008. Blomkvist resolved to get to the bottom of the story. There was no shortage of material about the drama, and that, as he had already concluded, was chiefly down to Klara Engelman.
Engelman was glamour personified, God’s gift to gossip columnists, with her dyed-blond hair and surgically enhanced lips and breasts. She was married to a notorious tycoon, Stan Engelman, who owned hotels and other properties in New York, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Klara was not a society girl but rather a Hungarian former model who had travelled to the United States in her youth and won a Miss Bikini contest in Las Vegas. There she met Stan, a member of the judges’ panel—a detail the tabloids loved.
But in 2008 she was thirty-six years old and mother to the couple’s then twelve-year-old daughter, Juliette. She had a degree in Public Relations from St. Joseph’s College in New York and seemed to want to show that she could accomplish something on her own. Today, more than ten years after the tragedy, it was difficult to understand the indignation she aroused at Base Camp. Her blog for Vogue admittedly featured a number of ridiculously styled photographs of her wearing the latest fashions. But with the benefit of hindsight it was clear that the coverage she got was patronizing and sexist. The reporters made her out to be nothing more than a bimbo, and held her up as the very antithesis to the mountains and an affront to the local population. She was the vulgarity of the wealthy West contrasted with the purity of the mountain’s wide-open spaces.
Klara Engelman was on the same expedition as Johannes Forsell and his friend Svante Lindberg, who was now his parliamentary undersecretary. All three had paid seventy-five thousand dollars to be guided to the summit, and that of course added insult to injury. Everest was said to have become a haunt for the rich, who were there only to boost their egos. The leader of the expedition and owner of the guiding company was Viktor Grankin, a Russian, and in addition to him there were three guides, a Base Camp manager, a doctor and fourteen Sherpas—and the ten clients. This many people were needed to get them to the top.
Could the beggar have been one of those Sherpas? The thought had occurred to Blomkvist right away, and before he looked into the tragedy any further he tried to find out more about them. Was it possible that one of them had ended up in Sweden, or had a special relationship with Forsell? For many of them he drew a complete blank, but for a young Sherpa, Jangbu Chiri, there seemed to be a connection.
He and Forsell met again in Chamonix three years later, and had a beer together. It was perfectly possible that they could have become sworn enemies after that. But in the picture online, they were giving a thumbs-up and looked absurdly happy. As far as Blomkvist could discover, none of the Sherpas on the expedition had a bad word to say about Forsell. There were anonymous accusations—these had surfaced in the current disinformation campaign—that Forsell had contributed to Klara Engelman’s death by delaying or holding back the group on the mountain. But according to many eyewitness accounts, the opposite was the case: It was Engelman herself who slowed the expedition down, and by the time disaster struck, Forsell and Svante Lindberg had already left the others behind and gone on to the summit on their own.
No, Blomkvist did not believe it. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to. He was always—it was the way he did his job—on his guard against the pitfalls of wishful thinking in his journalistic research, and in this case he found it hard to imagine that the man whom the cyber trolls loved to hate should have been involved in poisoning a poor down-and-out in Stockholm. And yet…what the hell?