“I would suggest we’re talking about a phone call, or an impetuous search on his computer,” Flod said.
“I agree. But we’re not finding anything helpful. Plus, his mobile seems to have vanished into thin air.”
“That sounds suspicious,” Flod said.
“Indeed. And there’s something else I think we should talk about. It’s better if you take over here, Jan,” Modig said.
—
Bublanski squirmed as if he would rather not. Then he took them through the story of Faria Kazi, which he himself had learned that morning.
“As you’ve heard, Salander didn’t want to talk to the Örebro police about her meeting with Palmgren,” he said. “She didn’t want to say much about the assault on Benito either. But there was one thing she did want to discuss, and that was the investigation into the death of Jamal Chowdhury, the refugee from Bangladesh. She thinks it was very badly handled, and I have to say I agree.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The haste with which it was determined to be a suicide. If this had been just another case of some poor wretch jumping in front of a tunnelbana train, I might understand it. But this was no ordinary incident. There was a fatwa against Chowdhury, and you cannot make light of that. There’s a small group in Stockholm which has been radicalized through the influence of extremist elements in Bangladesh, and which seems prepared to kill at the drop of a hat. Since Chowdhury first arrived in Sweden, we should have been suspicious if he’d so much as slipped on a banana skin. But then he falls in love with Faria Kazi—whose brothers want to marry her off to a rich Islamist in Dhaka. You can imagine how furious they must have been when Faria ran away, into the arms of Chowdhury, of all people. Not only is Chowdhury the man who destroys the family’s honour; he’s also a religious and political enemy. Then all of a sudden he goes and falls in front of a train, and what do our colleagues do? They write it off as a suicide, as easily as they’d investigate a domestic burglary in Vällingby, when in fact there’s a long list of strange circumstances surrounding the events. On top of that, what happens the day after Chowdhury’s death? Faria Kazi has a fit of rage and shoves her brother Ahmed out through a window in Sickla. I find it very hard to believe that has nothing to do with the incident in the tunnelbana.”
“OK, I get that, and it doesn’t sound too good. But in what way is it connected to Palmgren’s death?” Svensson said.
“Maybe it isn’t, but still—Faria Kazi ends up in the maximum security unit at Flodberga with Salander and, like her, is the target of serious threats. There are major concerns that her brothers will want their revenge, and today we’ve had confirmation from Säpo that they’ve been in touch with none other than Benito. The brothers call themselves believers, but they have more in common with Benito than with Muslims in general, and if it’s revenge they’re after, Benito is the ideal weapon.”
“I can imagine,” Holmberg said.
“It also seems that Benito has taken an interest in both Kazi and Salander.”
“How do we know that?”
“From the investigation carried out by the prison into how Benito got her stiletto into the unit. They went through absolutely everything, including the trash in the visitors’ section in H Block. A crumpled note was found in one of the wastepaper baskets there, with some very disturbing information in Benito’s handwriting. Not only the address of the school to which Olsen’s nine-year-old daughter was moved some months ago, but also about the particulars of Faria’s aunt, Fatima, the only one in the family she’s still close to. And, most noteworthy, details about people close to Salander: Mikael Blomkvist, a lawyer by the name of Jeremy MacMillan in Gibraltar—no, I still don’t know who that is—and Holger Palmgren.”
“Oh no, really?” Flod said.
“Unfortunately. It feels almost uncanny to see Palmgren’s name there and to know it was written before he died. Not only his name, but his address, door code and telephone number.”
“Not good,” Holmberg said.
“No. It’s not necessarily linked to his murder, or what we believe to be his murder. But it is striking, isn’t it?”
—
Blomkvist was walking along Hantverkargatan on Kungsholmen when his mobile rang. It was Sofie Melker at the office. She wanted to know how he was. “So-so,” he answered, and he thought that was the end of it. Melker was the eighth person that day to call and extend condolences. There was nothing wrong with that, but he would rather be left alone. He wanted to deal with the situation the way he normally dealt with death—through hard work.
He had been in Uppsala that morning and read the file for the investigation of the Rosvik finance director who had been involved in the accidental shooting of psychologist Carl Seger. Now he was on his way to meet Ellenor Hjort, the woman who had been engaged to Seger at the time.
“Thanks, Sofie,” he said. “Speak later. I’m going into a meeting now.”
“OK, we can deal with it later.”
“Deal with what?”
“Erika asked me to check something for you.”
“Oh yes. Did you find anything?”
“Depends.”
“What do you mean, ‘depends’?”
“There’s nothing untoward in Herman and Viveka Mannheimer’s personal files.”
“I’d have been surprised if there had been. I’m more interested in Leo’s file. He might have been adopted, or maybe there was something sensitive or out of the ordinary in his background.”
“In fact his documents look neat and tidy. They state clearly that he was born in Västerled parish, where his parents lived at the time of his birth. Column 20, headed ‘Adoptive parents or children etc.,’ is blank. There’s nothing redacted or declared confidential. Everything seems normal. Each parish he lived in while growing up is neatly listed. There’s nothing that stands out at all.”
“But didn’t you say ‘depends’?”
“Let me put it this way: I thought it could be fun to take a look at my own personal file, since I was down at the City Archives anyway, so I asked for it and paid the eight kronor, which I’ve decided not to claim back from Millennium.”
“How very generous of you.”
“The thing is, I’m only three years older than Leo. But my file looks totally different,” she said.
“In what way?”
“It’s not as tidy. Reading it made me feel really old. There’s one column, column 19, where dates and other details have been recorded from whenever I moved and was transferred to another parish. I don’t know who writes those entries, civil servants I would guess. But they’re an absolute mess. Sometimes the notes are written by hand, sometimes they’re typed. Some of the information has been stamped in, and then it’s not always straight, as if they’d had difficulty lining it up properly. But in Leo’s file it’s all perfect, everything is consistent, filled in on the same kind of machine or computer.”
“As if someone had reconstituted it?”
“Well…” Sofie said. “If someone else had asked me or if I’d just happened to see his file, the thought would never have occurred to me. But you make us all a bit paranoid, you know, Mikael. With you, we smell a rat. So yes, with all that in mind, I wouldn’t rule out that the file was re-written after the fact. What’s all this about?”
“I don’t know yet. You didn’t say who you were, did you, Sofie?”
“I took advantage of my right to remain anonymous, as Erika suggested, and fortunately I’m not a celebrity like you.”
“Great. Take care now, and thanks!”
He ended the call and looked gloomily over Kungsholmstorg. It was a glorious day, which only made things worse. He carried on down to the address he had been given—Norr Mälarstrand 32—where Carl Seger’s former fiancée Ellenor Hjort lived with her fifteen-year-old daughter. These days she was a manager at Bukowskis’ auction rooms, fifty-two years old, divorced for three years and active in a number of non-profit organizations. She also coached her d
aughter’s basketball team. Clearly an active woman.
Blomkvist looked down towards Lake Mälaren, which was lying wind-still, and across to his own apartment on the other side of the water. It was oppressively hot, and he felt sticky and heavy as he keyed in the code and took the lift to the top floor. He rang the doorbell and did not have to wait long.
Ellenor Hjort looked surprisingly young. She had short hair, beautiful dark-brown eyes and a small scar just below the hairline. She was dressed in a black jacket and grey trousers, and her home was filled with books and paintings. As she served Blomkvist tea and biscuits she seemed nervous. The cups and saucers rattled as she set them down on a table between a light-blue sofa and matching armchairs. Blomkvist made himself comfortable in one of them, beneath a rather garish oil painting of Venice.
“I must say, I’m surprised you should bring up this story again after all these years,” she said.
“I do understand, and I’m sorry if I’m opening old wounds. But I would like to know a little bit more about Carl.”
“Why is he of interest all of a sudden?”
Blomkvist hesitated and decided to be honest:
“I wish I could say. Perhaps there’s more to his death than meets the eye. Something feels not quite right.”
“What do you mean, more specifically?”
“It’s still mostly a gut instinct. I went to Uppsala and read all the witness statements, and there’s actually nothing inconsistent or odd about them except, well, precisely that there is nothing odd about them. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the truth is generally a little unexpected, or even illogical, since we humans aren’t entirely rational. Whereas lies, as a rule, tend to be consistent and comprehensive and often sound like a cliché—especially if the liars aren’t very good.”
“So the investigation into Carl’s death is a cliché,” she said. “Is that it?”
“The whole thing hangs together a little too well,” Blomkvist said. “There aren’t enough inconsistencies, and too few details that really stand out.”
“Do you have anything to tell me that I don’t already know?” Ellenor Hjort sounded almost sarcastic.
“I could add that the man who was supposed to have fired the shot, Per Fält—”
Hjort interrupted and assured him that she had every respect for his profession and his powers of observation. But when it came to this investigation, there was nothing he could teach her.
“I’ve read through it a hundred times,” she said. “All the things you’re talking about I’ve felt like stabs in the back. Don’t you think I’ve shouted and screamed at Herman and at Alfred Ögren—‘What are you bastards hiding!?’ Of course I did!”
“And what answer did you get?”
“Indulgent smiles and kind words. ‘We understand it can’t be easy. We’re so very sorry…’ But after a while, when I wouldn’t give up, they threatened me. They told me to watch my step. They were powerful men and my insinuations were lies and slander, and they knew good lawyers and all that. I was too weak and too grief-stricken to keep arguing. Carl had been my life. I was devastated and I couldn’t study, or work or cope with the most day-to-day routines.”
“I understand.”
“But the strange thing was—and it’s also the reason that I’m sitting here with you today, in spite of it all—who do you think comforted me more than anyone else, more than my father and mother and my sisters and friends?”
“Leo?”
“Exactly, lovely little Leo. He was as inconsolable as I was. We sat in the house Carl and I shared on Grönviksvägen and wept and ranted against the world and those bloody bastards in the forest, and when I screamed and sobbed, ‘There’s only half of me now,’ he said the same thing. He was only a child. But we were united in our grief.”
“Why did Carl matter so much to him?”
“They saw each other every week in Carl’s consulting rooms. But there was more to it than that, of course. Leo looked upon Carl not just as a therapist, but also as a friend, maybe the only person in the whole world who understood him, and for his part Carl wanted to…” She trailed off.
“What?”
“To help Leo, and to get him to understand that he was an immensely gifted boy with extraordinary potential, and then of course…I’m not going to pretend this wasn’t a factor too: Leo became important for Carl’s research, for his doctoral thesis.”
“Leo had hyperacusis.”
Hjort looked at Blomkvist in surprise and said:
“Yes, that was part of it. Carl wanted to discover whether that contributed to the boy’s isolation, and whether Leo saw the world differently from the rest of us. But don’t think that Carl was being cynical. There was a bond between them which not even I understood.”
Blomkvist decided to take a chance.
“Leo was adopted, wasn’t he?” he said.
Ellenor Hjort emptied her cup of tea and glanced out at the balcony to her left.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because sometimes I got the impression that there was something sensitive about his background.”
Blomkvist decided to take another gamble:
“Did Leo have Gypsy heritage?”
Hjort looked up, her eyes fixed in concentration.
“Funny you should say that,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I remember…Carl invited Leo and me to lunch in Drottningholm.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much, but I remember it all the same. Carl and I were deeply in love. But sometimes it felt as if he was keeping secrets from me—not just professional ones from his therapy work—and that was probably one of the reasons I was so jealous. That lunch was one of those occasions.”
“One of which occasions?”
“Leo was upset that someone had called him a ‘gyppo,’ and instead of just coming right out and saying ‘What kind of idiot is calling you that?’ Carl held forth like a schoolteacher and explained that ‘gyppo’ was a racist term and a relic from dark times. Leo nodded as if he’d heard it all before. Even though he was a child, he already knew about the Romani community and about their oppression—forced sterilizations, lobotomizations and even ethnic cleansing in some parishes. It felt…somehow…surprising for a boy like him.”
“And so what happened?”
“Nothing happened, not a single damn thing,” she said. “Carl dismissed it when I asked afterwards. It might have been confidential because of a client-therapist relationship, but, given the broader context, I got the feeling he was hiding things from me. That episode still sometimes pricks me like a thorn.”
“Was it one of Alfred Ögren’s boys who called Leo a ‘gyppo’?”
“It was Ivar, the youngest, the afterthought. The only one who followed in his father’s footsteps. Do you know him?”
“A little,” he said. “He was nasty, wasn’t he?”
“Seriously nasty.”
“How come?”
“I suppose one always wonders. There certainly was rivalry from the early days onwards, not only between the boys but also between their fathers. As a means to outdo each other, Herman and Alfred pitted their sons against each other to see whose was the cleverer, or the more enterprising. Ivar always came first whenever brawn counted. Leo was best at everything that involved the intellect, and that must have caused a lot of envy. Ivar knew about Leo’s hyperacusis. But instead of being considerate about it, he would wake him during their summers in Falsterbo by turning up the stereo to insane levels. Once he bought a bag of balloons which he inflated and then burst one by one behind Leo’s back when he was least expecting it. When Carl heard about it, he took Ivar aside and slapped him. Alfred Ögren went ballistic.”
“So there was some aggression against Carl in the wider circle around the family?”
“For sure. But I will say that Leo’s parents always stood up for Carl. They knew how important
he was to their boy. That’s why ultimately I came to terms with—or tried to come to terms with—the idea that the shooting was an accident. Herman Mannheimer would never have killed his son’s best friend.”
“How did Carl first come into contact with the family?”
“Through his university. The timing was perfect. Previously, schools had done nothing whatsoever for exceptionally gifted children. Singling them out was seen as being at odds with the Swedish ideal of equality. Schools also lacked the ability to identify and understand them. Many intelligent pupils were so under-stimulated that they became disruptive and were put in classes which catered to special educational needs. It seems that there was a disproportionately large number of gifted children in psychiatric care. Carl hated that, and he fought for those boys and girls. Just a few years earlier he’d been called an elitist. Then he started getting recruited onto government committees. He got to know Herman Mannheimer through his supervisor, Hilda von Kanterborg.”
Blomkvist started.
“Who is Hilda von Kanterborg?”
“She was an associate professor on the faculty of psychology and academic supervisor to two or three doctoral students,” Hjort said. “She was young, not much older than Carl, and was expected to have a great future ahead of her. That’s why it’s so tragic that she…”
“Is she dead?”
“Not that I know. But she ended up with a bad reputation. I heard that she became an alcoholic.”
“Why the bad reputation?”
For a moment, Hjort seemed unfocused. Then she looked straight into Blomkvist’s eyes.
“It was after Carl died, so I have no inside knowledge. But my feeling is that it was pretty unfair.”
“In what way?”
“I’m sure Hilda was no worse than any male academic with a bit of swagger. I met her a few times with Carl, and she was incredibly charismatic; you just got drawn in by her eyes. Apparently she kept having all sorts of affairs, including with two or three of her students. That wasn’t good, but they were all consenting adults and she was popular and clever and nobody much minded, not at first. Hilda was just ravenous. Ravenous for life, for new friendships—and for men. She was neither calculating nor evil, she was simply all over the place.”
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye Page 15