She turned and glanced at the gas station, where a long-distance truck and trailer with the emblem of the International Road Transport Union had just pulled in. She remembered that she was on the main road from the ferry terminal at Kapellskar, through which a good deal of the freight traffic between Sweden and the Baltic countries passed.
She started the car and drove out onto the road towards the old brickworks. She parked in the middle of the yard and got out. It was below freezing outside, and she put on a black knitted cap and leather gloves.
The main building was on two floors. On the ground floor all the windows had been boarded up with plywood, and she could see that on the floor above many of them had been broken. The factory was a much bigger building than she had imagined, and it was incredibly dilapidated. She could see no evidence of repairs. There was no trace of a living soul, but she saw that someone had discarded a used condom in the yard, and that graffiti artists had attacked part of the facade.
Why had Zalachenko owned this building?
She walked around the factory and found the ramshackle north building to the rear. She saw that the doors to the main building were locked. In frustration she studied a door at one end of the building. All the other doors had padlocks attached with iron bolts and galvanized security strips, but the lock on the gable end seemed weaker and was in fact attached only with rough spikes. Damn it, it's my building. She looked around and found a narrow iron pipe in a pile of rubbish. She used it to lever open the fastening of the padlock.
She entered a stairwell with a doorway to the ground floor area. The boarded-up windows meant that it was pitch-black inside, except for a few shafts of light seeping in at the edges of the boards. She stood still for several minutes, until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She saw a sea of junk--wooden pallets, old machine parts, and lumber--in a workshop that was 150 feet long and about 65 feet wide, supported by massive pillars. The old brick ovens seemed to have been disassembled, and in their place were big pools of water and patches of mould on the floor. There was a stale, foul smell from all the debris. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
She turned back and went up the stairs. The top floor was dry and consisted of two similar rooms, each about sixty-five feet square, and at least twenty-five feet high. There were tall, inaccessible windows close to the ceiling which provided no view but let in plenty of light. The upper floor, like the workshop downstairs, was full of junk. There were dozens of three-foot-high packing cases stacked on top of one another. She gripped one of them but could not move it. The label on the crate read: MACHINE PARTS 0-A77, with an apparently corresponding label in Russian underneath. She noticed an open freight elevator halfway down one wall of the first room.
It was a machine warehouse of some sort, but that would hardly generate income so long as the machinery stood there rusting.
She went into the inner room and discovered that this was where the repair work must have been carried out. The room was again full of rubbish, boxes, and old office furniture arranged in some sort of labyrinthine order. A section of the floor was exposed where new floor planks had been laid. Salander guessed that the renovation work had been stopped abruptly. A crosscut saw and a circular saw, a nail gun, a crowbar, an iron rod, and tool boxes were still there. She frowned. Even if the work had been discontinued, the joiners should have picked up their tools. But this question too was answered when she held a screwdriver up to the light and saw that the writing on the handle was Russian. Zalachenko had imported the tools, and probably the workers as well.
She switched on the circular saw and a green light went on. There was power. She turned it off.
At the far end of the room were three doors to smaller rooms, perhaps the old offices. She tried the handle of the door on the north side of the building. Locked. She went back to the tools and got a crowbar. It took her a while to break open the door.
It was pitch-black inside the room and smelled musty. She ran her hand along the wall and found a switch that lit a bare bulb in the ceiling. Salander looked around in astonishment.
The furniture in the room consisted of three beds with soiled mattresses and another three mattresses on the floor. Filthy bed linen was strewn around. To the right was a two-ring electric stove and some pots next to a rusty water tap. In a corner stood a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper.
Somebody had lived here. Several people.
Then she saw that there was no handle on the inside of the door. She felt an ice-cold shiver run down her back.
There was a large linen cupboard at the far end of the room. She opened it and found two suitcases. Inside the one on top were some clothes. She rummaged through them and held up a dress with a Russian label. She found a handbag and emptied the contents on the floor. From among the cosmetics and other bits and pieces she retrieved a passport belonging to a young, dark-haired woman. It was a Russian passport, and she sounded out the name as Valentina.
Salander walked slowly from the room. She had a feeling of deja vu. She had done the same kind of crime scene examination in a basement in Hedeby two and a half years earlier. Women's clothes. A prison. She stood there for a long time, thinking. It bothered her that the passport and clothes had been left behind. It did not feel right.
Then she went back to the assortment of tools and rummaged about until she found a powerful flashlight. She checked that there was life in the batteries and went downstairs into the larger workshop. The water from the puddles on the floor seeped into her boots.
The nauseating stench of rotting matter grew stronger the farther into the workshop she went; it seemed to be worst when she was in the middle of the room. She stopped next to the foundation of one of the old brick furnaces, which was filled with water almost to the brim. She shone her flashlight onto the coal-black surface of the water but could not make anything out. The surface was partly covered by algae that had formed a green slime. Nearby she found a long steel rod, which she stuck into the pool and stirred around. The water was only about twenty inches deep. Almost immediately the rod bumped into something. She manipulated it this way and that for several seconds before a body rose to the surface, face first, a grinning mask of death and decomposition. Breathing through her mouth, Salander looked at the face in the beam of the flashlight and saw that it was a woman, possibly the woman from the passport photograph. She knew nothing about the speed of decay in cold, stagnant water, but the body seemed to have been in the pool for a long time.
There was something moving on the surface of the water. Larvae of some sort.
She let the body sink back beneath the surface and poked around more with the rod. At the edge of the pool she came across something that might have been another body. She left it there and pulled out the rod, letting it fall to the floor as she stood thinking next to the pool.
Salander went back up the stairs. She used the crowbar to break open the middle door. The room was empty.
She went to the last door and slotted the crowbar in place, but before she began to force it, the door swung open a crack. It was not locked. She nudged it open with the crowbar and looked around.
The room was about a hundred feet square. It had windows at a normal height with a view of the yard in front of the brickworks. She could see the gas station on the hill. There was a bed, a table, and a sink with dishes. Then she saw a bag lying open on the floor. There were banknotes in it. Surprised, she took two steps forward before she noticed that the room was warm and saw an electric heater in the middle of the room. Then she saw that the red light was on on the coffee machine.
Someone was living here. She was not alone in the building.
She spun around and ran through the inner room, out the doors, and towards the exit in the outer workshop. She stopped five steps short of the stairwell when she saw that the exit had been closed and padlocked. She was locked in. Slowly she turned and looked around, but there was no-one.
"Hello, little sister," came a cheerful voice from somewhere to her right.<
br />
She turned to see Niedermann's vast form materialize from behind some packing crates.
In his hand was a large knife.
"I was hoping I'd have a chance to see you again," Niedermann said. "Everything happened so fast the last time."
Salander looked around.
"Don't bother," Niedermann said. "It's just you and me, and there's no way out except through the locked door behind you."
Salander turned her eyes to her half-brother.
"How's the hand?" she said.
Niedermann was smiling at her. He raised his right hand and showed her. His little finger was missing.
"It got infected. I had to chop it off."
Niedermann could not feel pain. Salander had sliced his hand open with a spade at Gosseberga only seconds before Zalachenko had shot her in the head.
"I should have aimed for your skull," Salander said in a neutral tone. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you'd left the country months ago."
He smiled at her again.
If Niedermann had tried to answer Salander's question as to what he was doing in the dilapidated brickworks, he probably would not have been able to explain. He could not explain it to himself.
He had left Gosseberga with a feeling of liberation. He was counting on the fact that Zalachenko was dead and that he would take over the business. He knew he was an excellent organizer.
He had changed cars in Alingsas, put the terror-stricken dental hygienist, Anita Kaspersson, in the trunk, and driven towards Boras. He had no plan. He improvised as he went. He had not reflected on Kaspersson's fate. It made no difference to him whether she lived or died, and he assumed that he would be forced to do away with a bothersome witness. Somewhere on the outskirts of Boras it came to him that he could use her in a different way. He turned south and found a desolate forest outside Seglora. He tied her up in a barn and left her there. He reckoned that she would be able to work her way loose within a few hours and then lead the police south in their hunt for him. And if she did not manage to free herself, and starved or froze to death in the barn, it did not matter; it was no concern of his.
Then he drove back to Boras and from there east towards Stockholm. He had driven straight to Svavelsjo, but he avoided the clubhouse itself. It was a drag that Lundin was in prison. He went instead to the home of the club's sergeant-at-arms, Hans-Ake Waltari. He said he was looking for a place to hide, which Waltari sorted out by sending him to Goransson, the club's treasurer. But he had stayed there only a few hours.
Niedermann had, theoretically, no money worries. He had left behind almost 200,000 kronor in Gosseberga, but he had access to considerably larger sums that had been deposited abroad. His problem was that he was short of actual cash. Goransson was responsible for Svavelsjo MC's finances, and it had not been difficult for Niedermann to persuade him to take him to the cabinet in the barn where the cash was kept. Niedermann was in luck. He had been able to help himself to 800,000 kronor.
He seemed to remember that there had been a woman in the house too, but he had forgotten what he had done with her.
Goransson had also provided a car that the police were not yet looking for. Niedermann went north. He had a vague plan to make it onto one of the ferries at Kapellskar that would take him to Tallinn.
When he got to Kapellskar he sat in the parking lot for half an hour, studying the area. It was crawling with policemen.
He drove on aimlessly. He needed a place where he could lie low for a while. When he passed Norrtalje he remembered the old brickworks. He had not even thought about the place in more than a year, since the time when repairs had been under way. The brothers Harry and Atho Ranta were using the brickworks as a depot for goods moving to and from the Baltic ports, but they had both been out of the country for several weeks, ever since that journalist Svensson had started snooping around the whore trade. The brickworks would be empty.
He had driven Goransson's Saab into a shed behind the factory and gone inside. He had had to break open a door on the ground floor, and one of the first things he did was to create an emergency exit through a loose plywood board at one end of the ground floor. He later replaced the broken padlock. Then he had made himself at home in a cosy room on the upper floor.
A whole afternoon had passed before he heard the sounds coming through the walls. At first he thought these were his familiar phantoms. He sat alert and listened for almost an hour before he got up and went out to the workshop to listen more closely. At first he heard nothing, but he stood there patiently until he heard more scraping noises.
He found the key next to the sink.
Niedermann had seldom been as amazed as when he opened the door and found the two Russian whores. They were skin and bones. They seemed to have had no food for several weeks and had been living on tea and water since the last packet of rice had run out.
One of the girls was so exhausted that she could not get up from the bed. The other was in better shape. She spoke only Russian, but he knew enough of the language to understand that she was thanking God and him for saving them. She fell on her knees and threw her arms around his legs. He pushed her away, then left the room and locked the door behind him.
He had not known what to do with the whores. He heated up some soup from the cans he found in the kitchen and gave it to them while he thought. The weaker woman on the bed seemed to be getting some of her strength back. He spent the evening questioning them. It was a while before he understood that the two women were not whores at all, but students who had paid the Ranta brothers to get them into Sweden. They had been promised visas and work permits. They had come from Kapellskar in February and were taken straight to the warehouse, and there they were locked up.
Niedermann's face had darkened with anger. Those bastard Ranta brothers were collecting an income that they had not told Zalachenko about. Then they had completely forgotten about the women, or maybe had knowingly left them to their fate when they fled Sweden in such a hurry.
The question was: what was he supposed to do with them? He had no reason to harm them, and yet he could not really let them go, considering that they would probably lead the police to the brickworks. It was that simple. He could not send them back to Russia, because that would mean he would have to drive them down to Kapellskar. That seemed too difficult. The dark-haired woman, whose name was Valentina, had offered him sex if he helped them. He was not the least bit interested in having sex with the girls, but the offer had turned her into a whore too. All women were whores. It was that simple.
After three days he had tired of their incessant pleading, nagging, and knocking on the wall. He could see no other way out. So he unlocked the door one last time and swiftly solved the problem. He asked Valentina to forgive him before he reached out and in one movement broke her neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Then he went over to the blond girl on the bed whose name he did not know. She lay there passively, did not put up any resistance. He carried the bodies downstairs and put them in one of the flooded pits. At last he could feel some sort of peace.
Niedermann had not intended to stay long at the brickworks. He thought he would have to lie low only until the initial police manhunt had died down. He shaved his head and let his beard grow to half an inch, and that altered his appearance. He found a pair of overalls belonging to one of the workers from NorrBygg which were almost big enough to fit him. He put on a Beckers Paints baseball cap and stuffed a folding ruler into a leg pocket. At dusk he drove to the gas station shop on the hill and bought supplies. He had all the cash he needed from Svavelsjo MC's piggy bank. He looked like any workman stopping on his way home, and nobody seemed to pay him any attention. He shopped once or twice a week at the same time of day. At the shop they were always perfectly friendly to him.
From the very first day he had spent a considerable amount of time fending off the creatures that inhabited the building. They lived in the walls and came out at night. He could hear them wandering around the workshop
.
He barricaded himself in his room. After several days he had had enough. He armed himself with a large knife which he had found in a kitchen drawer and went out to confront the monsters. It had to end.
All of a sudden he discovered that they were retreating. For the first time in his life he had been able to dominate his phantoms. They shrank back when he approached. He could see their deformed bodies and their tails slinking off behind the packing crates and cabinets. He howled at them. They fled.
Relieved, he went back to his room and sat up all night, waiting for them to return. They mounted a renewed attack at dawn and he faced them down once more. They fled.
He was teetering between panic and euphoria.
All his life he had been haunted by these creatures in the dark, and for the very first time he felt that he was in control of the situation. He did nothing. He slept. He ate. He thought. It was peaceful.
The days turned into weeks and spring turned to summer. From his transistor radio and the evening papers he could tell that the hunt for the killer Ronald Niedermann was winding down. He read with interest the reports of the murder of Zalachenko. What a laugh. A psycho put an end to Zalachenko. In July his interest was again aroused when he followed the reports of Salander's trial. He was appalled when she was acquitted and released. It did not feel right. She was free while he was forced to hide.
He bought the Millennium special issue at the gas station shop and read all about Salander and Zalachenko and Niedermann. A journalist named Blomkvist had described Niedermann as a pathological murderer and a psychopath. He frowned.
Fall came suddenly, and still he had not made a move. When it got colder he bought an electric heater at the shop. He did not know what kept him from leaving the brickworks.
Occasionally some young people drove into the yard and parked there, but no-one had disturbed him or tried to break into the building. In September a car drove up and a man in a blue Windbreaker tried the doors and snooped around the property. Niedermann had watched him from the window on the upper floor. The man kept writing in his notebook. He had stayed for twenty minutes before he looked around one last time and got in his car and drove away. Niedermann breathed a sigh of relief. He had no idea who the man was or what business had brought him there, but he appeared to be doing a survey of the property. It did not occur to Niedermann that Zalachenko's death had prompted an inventory of his estate.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Page 63