The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  She quickly put on her coat and grabbed her wallet and mobile which had been lying on silent on her desk. Then she left the apartment and locked the door. Not quite quick enough. Footsteps could be heard in the entrance hall below. She was gripped by panic and rushed downstairs, knowing that she might run straight into their grasp. As luck would have it they were waiting for the lift. Hilda made it into the backyard, her only escape route that avoided the street entrance. She could climb over a yellow wall at the far end if she moved the garden table a little closer. The table screeched as she pushed it across the flagstones. She scrambled over the wall like a clumsy child and dropped into the neighbouring yard, and then made her way out onto Bohusgatan. There she turned towards Eriksdalsbadet and the waterfront. She walked quickly, even though her left foot throbbed from the fall and she was not entirely sober.

  Down near the outdoor gym by Årstaviken she reached for her mobile. There were a number of missed calls, and when she listened to the messages she realized that something was very wrong. The journalist Mikael Blomkvist had been trying to reach her and, even though he apologized profusely, his voice sounded agitated. In his second message he added that now that Holger Palmgren was dead, he was “particularly keen to have a word.”

  Holger Palmgren, she muttered to herself. Holger Palmgren. Why did that name sound familiar? She searched on her mobile and it came up immediately. Palmgren had been Lisbeth Salander’s guardian. Of course. Some story was obviously about to break and that was not good. If the media were chasing after information, she could be the weak link.

  As she walked faster she looked out towards the water and the trees, and all the people strolling or picnicking on the grass. Just beyond the outdoor gym, by the open space on the waterfront where the small boats were moored, she saw three surly-looking teenage boys sprawled on a blanket, drinking beer. She stopped and looked at her mobile again. Hilda was no expert in technology, but she did know that it could be used to track her. So she made a quick last call to her sister, which she immediately regretted—every one of their telephone conversations left an aftertaste of guilt and accusation. Then she walked over to the teenagers and chose one with long straggly hair and a frayed denim jacket. She held out her telephone.

  “Here you go,” she said. “An iPhone, brand-new. It’s yours. Just change the SIM card or whatever.”

  “What? Why are you giving me this?”

  “Because you seem like such a nice guy. Good luck, don’t buy any drugs,” she said and then she hurried away in the evening sun.

  Thirty minutes later she was standing at an ATM in Hornstull, damp from the heat, and withdrew three thousand kronor in cash before heading for Stockholm Central Station. She would go to Nyköping, to a small out-of-the-way hotel where she had gone into hiding years ago when all her colleagues at the university had accused her of being a slut.

  —

  Blomkvist passed an older woman in the doorway. She was wearing a hat and carrying a walking stick, and she was followed by a powerfully built man of his own age who must have been six and a half feet tall with small eyes and a round face. But he didn’t pay them much attention. He was just relieved to have managed to get into the building, and he ran up the stairs to Hilda von Kanterborg’s apartment. There did not seem to be anyone at home.

  He left and walked towards the Clarion Hotel in Skanstull, and there he tried to call her again. This time an arrogant voice answered. A son, perhaps?

  “Hey!”

  “Hello!” Blomkvist said. “Is Hilda there?”

  “There’s no fucking Hildas here. This is my mobile now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some crazy drunk woman gave it to me.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Stressed and bonkers.”

  “Where are you?”

  “None of your fucking business,” the boy said, and hung up.

  Blomkvist swore. For want of anything better to do, he went into the bar of the Clarion and ordered a Guinness.

  He sat down in an armchair next to the windows overlooking Ringvägen. He needed to think. A bald man at the reception desk behind him was in a heated argument over his bill. Two young women were sitting not far from his window table and whispering.

  Thoughts were chasing around in his head. Salander had mentioned lists of names and Leo Mannheimer. In view of Palmgren’s death and the documents found in his hallway, it was probably safe to assume that whatever this was all about had happened a long time ago.

  Talk to Hilda von…

  Could he have meant somebody other than Hilda von Kanterborg? It was possible but unlikely. Plus there had been Hilda’s erratic behaviour just now, giving her mobile away to a teenage boy. Blomkvist’s Guinness arrived. He looked over at the young women sitting in the bar who now seemed to be whispering about him. He took out his mobile and searched for Hilda von Kanterborg. He did not expect to find what he was looking for so swiftly on Google, or for anything to be available online. But he might be able to read between the lines. Leads could sometimes be found in perfectly anodyne or evasive answers to interview questions, or in someone’s choice of subjects or interests.

  He found nothing. Hilda had been a reasonably prolific author of scientific articles until she lost her position at Stockholm University. Then there was silence. Blomkvist found no trail of clues to follow and, in the old material, nothing remotely confidential or shady, or to do with adopted children, and still less boys with hyperacusis who had gone from being left-handed to being right-handed. Her articles did muster clear and sound arguments against the hidden racist agenda, which at the time was still in evidence in research into the significance of nature over nurture. But that was it.

  He ordered another Guinness. Maybe there was someone he could call. He searched the articles for names of co-authors and colleagues, and then he looked up “von Kanterborg” in the directory. He found only one other living person in the country with that name: a woman, six years younger, by the name of Charlotte. She lived a few blocks away on Renstiernas gata and was listed as a hairdresser, with a salon on Götgatan. Blomkvist looked at photographs of Hilda and Charlotte von Kanterborg and saw the resemblance. They were probably sisters. Without giving it much thought, he dialled Charlotte’s number.

  “Lotta,” said the voice.

  “Hello, my name is Mikael Blomkvist and I’m a journalist at Millennium magazine,” he said, and he sensed at once that this worried her.

  He was used to that and he often regretted it, and joked that he should write more positive articles so that people would not get anxious when he called. But this time there seemed to be more to it.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you. I need to get hold of Hilda von Kanterborg,” he said.

  “What happened to her?”

  Not “Has anything happened to her?” but “What happened…”

  “When did you last hear from her?” he asked.

  “Only an hour ago.”

  “And where was she at the time?”

  “Can I ask why you’re calling? I mean…well, it’s not as though journalists come looking for her all the time these days.”

  She drew a deep breath.

  “I don’t mean to worry you,” Blomkvist said.

  “She sounded frightened. What’s going on?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “But a wonderful old man called Holger Palmgren has been murdered. I was there while he was fighting for his life, and the last thing he said was that I should talk to Hilda. I think she has some important information.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I want to help her. I want us to help each other.”

  “How can I know whether to believe that?”

  Blomkvist answered with surprising honesty:

  “In my job, it’s not that easy to promise anything. The truth—if I manage to find it, that is—can end up hurting
even those to whom I wish no harm. But most of us tend to feel better once we’ve opened up about what’s troubling us.”

  “She feels absolutely horrible,” Lotta said.

  “I understand.”

  “She’s been feeling horrible for the last twenty years, in fact. But this time it seems worse than ever.”

  “Why’s that, do you think?”

  “I…I have no idea.”

  He heard the hesitation in her voice and struck like a cobra.

  “Can I pop round for a moment? I see you live nearby.”

  That seemed to make the woman even more nervous, but he was almost certain she would say yes. So it surprised him when she answered with a sharp and uncompromising “No! I don’t want to get involved.”

  “Involved in what?”

  “Well…”

  Blomkvist could hear her breathing hard on the other end of the line. He understood that this was one of those moments when things hang in the balance. He had experienced it many times as a journalist. When people get to the point of debating whether to speak out or not, they tend to freeze in concentration as they try to weigh the consequences. He knew that this often ended with them talking. But there were no guarantees, so he tried not to sound too eager.

  “Is there something you want to say?”

  “When Hilda writes, she sometimes uses the pseudonym Leonard Bark,” Lotta said.

  “Oh, wow, is that her?”

  “So you’ve heard of Leonard Bark?”

  “I may be just an old hack, but I do try to keep reasonably up to date with the culture pages. I like his—or rather her—stuff. But why is this important?”

  “As Leonard Bark she wrote a feature article for Svenska Dagbladet under the title ‘Born Together—Raised Apart.’ This would have been about three years ago.”

  “OK.”

  “It was about a scientific investigation by some people at the University of Minnesota. Nothing out of the ordinary. But it was important to her, that was obvious from the way she talked about it.”

  “Right,” he said. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing really. Except that she was clearly upset by it.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “I don’t actually know anything more. I’ve never been bothered to dig into it, and Hilda never said a word about it, however much I pressed her. But you can draw the same conclusions from the article as I did.”

  “Thanks. I’ll follow it up.”

  “Promise not to write anything too nasty about her.”

  “I think there are bigger crooks than Hilda in this story,” he said.

  They said goodbye and Blomkvist paid for his drinks before leaving the hotel. He crossed over to Götgatan and then continued up towards Medborgarplatsen and St. Paulsgatan. He waved aside both acquaintances and strangers who wanted to talk to him; the last thing he felt like was socializing. He only wanted to read the article, but he waited until he was home before looking it up on his computer.

  He went through it three times, and afterwards read a number of other essays on the same topic and made a couple of calls. He kept going until 12:30 a.m. He then poured himself a glass of Barolo and speculated that he might be beginning to understand a little of what had happened, even if he had not yet worked out what part Salander had played in the story.

  He had to speak to her, he thought, whatever the prison management might say.

  PART II

  TROUBLING TONES

  JUNE 21

  A minor sixth chord consists of a keynote, a third, a fifth and a sixth from the melodic minor scale.

  In American jazz and pop music, the minor seventh is the most common minor chord. It is considered elegant and beautiful.

  The minor sixth is rarely used. The tone may be regarded as harsh and ominous.

  CHAPTER 13

  June 21

  Salander had left the maximum security unit for the last time. She was now standing in the guard box of Flodberga Prison, being scrutinized from head to toe by a crew-cut young man with angry red skin and small arrogant eyes.

  “A Mikael Blomkvist called, looking for you,” he said.

  Salander ignored this information. She did not even look up. It was 9:30 in the morning and she just wanted to get out of there. She was irritated by the paperwork she still had to deal with and scribbled illegibly on the forms required to take receipt of her laptop and her mobile. Olsen had not needed much persuading to see to it that they were both fully charged. After that, they let her go.

  She passed through the gates, walked the length of the wall and along the railway line, and sat by the main road on a bench with peeling red paint to wait for bus number 113 to Örebro. It was a hot morning, and the air was still. Flies were buzzing around her. Even though she turned her face to the sun and seemed to be enjoying the weather, she did not feel any particular joy at being out of prison.

  But she was happy to have her laptop back. Sitting on the bench, her black jeans sticking to her legs, she opened it up and logged on. She checked that Giannini had sent her, as promised, the file on the police investigation into the death of Jamal Chowdhury. There it was in her inbox. Salander would be able to deal with it on the journey home.

  Giannini had a theory, a suspicion based partly on the strange fact that Faria had refused to say a word during police questioning, and partly on a short C.C.T.V. sequence from the tunnelbana station at Hornstull. Giannini appeared to have discussed it with an imam in Botkyrka called Hassan Ferdousi, and he believed she might be on the right track. The thought now was that Salander, with her skills, should take a look as well, so she set about locating it in the file Giannini had sent her. Before examining the sequence, she looked out at the road and the yellowing fields and thought of Holger Palmgren. She had spent most of the night thinking about him. Talk to Hilda von…

  Hilda von Kanterborg was the only “Hilda von” known to Salander; dear old Hilda with her sweeping gestures, who had often sat in their kitchen at home on Lundagatan when Salander was a child, and who was one of her mother’s few friends when everything around her was falling apart. Hilda had been a rock, at least so Salander had believed. That was the reason Salander had looked her up one day, some ten years ago now. They spent a whole evening together drinking cheap rosé because Salander had wanted to find out more about her mother. Hilda told her quite a lot, and Salander told her one or two things as well; she shared confidences with Hilda which she had kept even from Palmgren. It had been a long evening and they had raised their glasses to Agneta, and to all women whose lives had been destroyed by shits and bastards.

  But Hilda had not breathed a word about the Registry. Had she kept the most important thing to herself? Salander refused to believe it at first. She was usually good at detecting what might be hidden beneath the surface. But she might have been fooled by Hilda’s whole damaged façade. She thought back to the files she had downloaded on Olsen’s computer and remembered a pair of initials in those documents: H.K. Was it conceivable that they referred to Hilda von Kanterborg? Salander ran a search and discovered that Hilda had been a more influential psychologist than she had realized at the time. A flash of anger flared in her. But she decided to withhold judgment for the time being.

  The number 113 to Örebro was approaching in a cloud of dust and spewing gravel. She paid the driver and sat down at the back, where she had a careful look at the C.C.T.V. sequence showing the ticket barrier at Hornstull station just after midnight on October 24 nearly two years ago. Gradually she focused in on one detail, an irregularity in the movement of the suspect’s hand. Could it be relevant? She was not sure.

  She knew that movement recognition as a technology was still in its infancy. She had no doubt that all human gestures carry a mathematical fingerprint. It is still difficult to read, however. Every little movement is made up of thousands of pieces of information and is in itself not wholly conclusive. Every time we scratch our heads there is a difference. Our gestu
res are always similar, but never exactly the same. One needs sensors, signal processors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, motion-plotting algorithms, Fourier analyses and frequency and distance gauges to be able to describe and compare movements with precision. There were some programmes available for download from the Internet. But that was not an option. It would take too long. She had another idea.

  She thought of her friends in Hacker Republic and the deep neural network which Plague and Trinity had been working on for so long. Could that be optimized and used? It was not out of the question. It would require her to find a more comprehensive index of hand movements for the algorithms to study and learn from, but it would not be impossible.

  She worked hard on the train from Örebro back to Stockholm and in the end had a wild thought. The prison service would not think much of it, especially not on her first day of freedom. But that was irrelevant. She got off the train at Central Station and took a taxi home to Fiskargatan, where she continued to work.

  —

  Dan Brody laid his guitar—a newly purchased Ramirez—on the coffee table and went into the kitchen to make himself a double espresso, which he drank so quickly it burned his tongue. It was 9:10 a.m. He had not noticed the time go by. He had lost himself in “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” and was now late for work. Not that it mattered much to anyone, but he did not want to give the impression that he did not take his work seriously. So he went into his bedroom and picked out a white shirt, dark suit and black Church’s shoes. Then he hurried down to the street to discover that it was already oppressively hot. Summer, to his dismay, was in full swing.

  His suit felt wrong for the time of year—severe and inappropriate in the sunshine—and after only a few feet his back and armpits were damp with sweat. It only added to his sense of alienation. He looked at the gardeners working in Humlegården—the noise of the lawnmowers pained him. He continued at high speed towards Stureplan, and even though he still felt uncomfortable he noted with some satisfaction that other suited men also had sweaty, miserable faces. The heat had come suddenly, after a long period of rain. There was an ambulance standing further down on Birger Jarlsgatan and he thought about his mother.