At first she had stared at him as if she could not wait to tear his clothes off, and even though he had been thinking about Catrin on the way there, he might not have been able to defend himself. But it was not him she was so keen to get her hands on, it was his computer, and his mobile. She grabbed them from him and squatted in a strange crouched position behind some black screens she unfolded and set up on the floor. There she stayed, silent and immobile, with only her fingers working at a frenzied speed. In the end he could not stand it any longer. He lost his temper and yelled at her that he had nearly drowned. That he had saved a bloody minister. Either he had to get some sleep or at least be allowed to talk and find out what she was up to.
“Shut up,” she said.
“For Christ’s sake!”
He was furious. He felt like walking out and never seeing her again. But in the end he turned his back on it all, got undressed, lay down on one side of the double bed and fell asleep like a sulky child. Some time towards dawn she crept in beside him and whispered in his ear, as if in some demented attempt at seduction:
“You had a trojan, smart-arse,” and that ruined the rest of his night.
He was scared. He began to worry about his sources and insisted that she tell him what was going on, which reluctantly she did. Gradually the scale of the madness became clear to him, although not all of it, of course. As usual she was not very forthcoming and soon her eyelids began to droop. She put her head on the pillow and drifted off, leaving him alone and agitated in the bed, and he groaned, convinced that he would not be able to go back to sleep. But now he had woken up and Salander was back in the armchair, dressed in knickers and a black shirt which was far too long for her. She drifted in and out of sleep, while Blomkvist looked groggily at the muscles in her legs and the black rings under her eyes.
“There’s breakfast out there,” she said.
“Great.” He went to fetch the trays and put them one by one on the bed. He made coffee in the Nespresso machine by the window and sat cross-legged on the mattress, and she sat down opposite him. He looked at her as if she were both stranger and intimate friend and, more clearly than ever, he felt he understood her and yet did not understand her at all.
“Why did you hesitate?” he said.
* * *
—
She didn’t like his question. She didn’t like the look on his face. She wanted to get away from there or pull him down into the bed and shut him up, and she thought about Paulina and her husband and the iron in her hand, and about other far worse things from way back in her childhood. She was not at all sure she would answer him. Then she said:
“I remembered something.”
Blomkvist looked at her intently and she regretted at once that she had not kept her mouth shut.
“What did you remember?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“I remembered my family.”
“What about them?”
Leave it, she thought. Just leave it.
“I remembered…” she began, as if she could not help herself, or as if something inside her was determined to put this into words.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Mamma knew that Camilla was stealing from us and lying to the police to protect Zala. She knew that Camilla said terrible things about us to the social welfare authorities and made the situation at home even more of a living hell.”
“I know all this,” he said. “Holger told me.”
“But did you also know…”
“What?”
Should she just drop it? She spat it out:
“That in the end Mamma had enough and threatened to throw Camilla out?”
“I had no idea.”
“It’s the truth.”
“But Camilla was only a child.”
“She was twelve.”
“Still…”
“Maybe she was just exasperated and didn’t really mean it. But she was always on my side, I know that. She didn’t like Camilla.”
“That can happen in any family. One of the children becomes the favourite.”
“But in this case there were consequences. It blinded us.”
“To what?”
“To what was going on.”
“What was that?”
Stop, she thought. Stop.
She wanted to scream and run away. But she continued, as if driven by a force she could no longer control:
“We thought that Camilla had Zala. That it was two against two in our war, Mamma and me against Zala and Camilla. But that’s not how it was. Camilla was on her own.”
“You were all on your own.”
“It was worse for Camilla.”
“In what way?”
She looked away.
“Zala would sometimes come into our room at night,” she said. “At the time I was too young to understand why. But I didn’t give it much thought either. He was evil and did whatever he wanted. That’s just how it was, and at the time I only had one thing on my mind.”
“You wanted to stop your mother being abused.”
“I wanted to kill Zala, and of course I knew that Camilla had ganged up with him. I had no reason to worry about her.”
“I can see that.”
“But obviously I should have asked myself why Zala had changed.”
“In what way had he changed?”
“He was staying the night more and more often, and somehow that didn’t fit. He was used to luxury and having people running around after him. And now our apartment was suddenly good enough for him. That must have been because there was a new pawn in the game. On Tverskoy Boulevard the penny dropped. He was attracted to Camilla, like all other men.”
“So it was her he was coming for at night.”
“He always asked her to follow him to the living room, and listening to their voices it just sounded to me as if they were planning something against Mamma and me. But maybe I also heard something else, something I wasn’t able to get my head around at the time. They often went off in the car.”
“He abused her.”
“He ruined her.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that,” he said.
She wanted to scream.
“I was just answering your question. I realized that neither Mamma nor I lifted a finger to help her. That’s what made me hesitate.”