The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4)

by David Lagercrantz

  “What?’

  “The girls’ bedroom was quite small. However hard they tried to get away from each other, the beds were still close and, while the abuse went on, each one usually sat on her own mattress, facing the other. They hardly ever said anything, and usually avoided eye contact. On this day Lisbeth was staring through the window at Lundagatan – that’s probably why she talked about the sunlight and the children out there. But then she looked at her sister, and that’s when she saw it.”

  “She saw what?”

  “Camilla’s right hand, beating against her mattress. It could have been a sign of nervous or compulsive behaviour. That’s what Lisbeth thought at first. But then she noticed that the hand was beating in time to the blows from the bedroom, and at that she looked up at Camilla’s face. Her sister’s eyes were glowing with excitement, and the eeriest thing was: Camilla looked just like Zala himself and she was smiling. She was suppressing a smirk, and in that instant Lisbeth realized that Camilla was not only trying to ingratiate herself with her father. She was also right behind his violence. She was cheering him on.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “But that’s how it was. Do you know what Lisbeth did? She remained perfectly calm. She sat down next to Camilla and took her hand almost tenderly. Perhaps Camilla thought her sister was looking for some comfort or closeness. Stranger things have happened. Then Lisbeth rolled up her sister’s shirt sleeve and dug her fingernails into Camilla’s wrist – down to the bone – gouging open a terrible wound. Blood streamed onto the bed. Lisbeth dragged Camilla to the floor and swore she would kill both her and her father if the beatings and the rapes did not stop.”

  “Jesus!”

  “You can imagine the hatred between the sisters. Both Agneta and the social services were so worried that something even more serious would happen that they were kept apart. For a while they arranged a home elsewhere for Camilla. But sooner or later they would have clashed again. In the end, as you know, things did not turn out like that. I believe the sisters only saw each other once after Lisbeth was locked up – several years later, when a disaster was narrowly averted – but I know none of the details. I haven’t heard anything of Camilla for a long time now. The last people to have had contact with her are the foster family with whom she lived in Uppsala, people called Dahlgren. I can get you the number. But ever since Camilla was eighteen or nineteen and she packed a bag and left the country she hasn’t been heard from. That’s why I was astonished when you said that you had met her. Not even Lisbeth, with her famous ability to track people down, has been able to find her.”

  “So she has tried?”

  “Oh yes. As far as I know, the last time was when her father’s estate was to be apportioned.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Lisbeth mentioned it in passing. She didn’t want a single penny from that will – to her it was blood money – but she could tell that there was something strange about it. There were assets of four million kronor: the farm in Gosseberga, some securities and also a run-down industrial site in Norrtälje, a cottage somewhere, and various other bits and pieces. Not insignificant by any means, and yet …”

  “He should have been worth much more.”

  “Yes, Lisbeth was aware that he ran a vast criminal empire. Four million would have been small change in that context.”

  “So you’re saying that she may have wondered if Camilla inherited the lion’s share.”

  “I think that’s what she’s been trying to find out. The mere thought that her father’s fortune was going on to do harm after his death was torture to her. But she got nowhere.”

  “Camilla had obviously concealed her new identity well.”

  “I assume so.”

  “Do you have any reason to think Camilla might have taken over her father’s trafficking business?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. She may have struck out into something altogether different.”

  “Such as?”

  Palmgren closed his eyes and took a long sip of his brandy.

  “I can’t be sure of this, Mikael. But when you told me about Professor Balder, I had a thought. Do you have any idea why Lisbeth is so good with computers? Do you know how it all started?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. I wonder if the key to your story doesn’t lie there.”

  When Salander came in from the terrace and saw August huddled in a stiff and unnatural position by the round table, she realized that the boy reminded her of herself as a child.

  That is exactly how she had felt at Lundagatan, until one day it became clear to her that she had to grow up far too soon, to take revenge on her father. It was a burden no child should have to bear. But it had at least been the beginning of a real life, a more dignified life. No bastard should be allowed to do what Zalachenko had done with impunity. She went to August and said solemnly, as if giving an important order, “You’re going to go to bed now. When you wake up I want you to do the drawing that will nail your father’s killer. Do you get that?” The boy nodded and shuffled into his bedroom while Salander opened her laptop and started to look for information about Lasse Westman and his circle of friends.

  “I don’t think Zalachenko himself was much use with computers,” Palmgren said. “He wasn’t of that generation. But perhaps his dirty business grew to such a scale that he had to use a computer program to keep his accounts, and to keep them away from his accomplices. One day he came to Lundagatan with an I.B.M. machine which he installed on the desk next to the window. Nobody in the family had seen a computer before. Zalachenko promised that if anyone so much as touched the machine he would flay them alive. For all I know that was telling, from a purely psychological point of view. It increased the temptation.”

  “Forbidden fruit.”

  “Lisbeth was around eleven at the time. It was before she tore into Camilla’s right arm, and before she went for her father with knives and petrol bombs. You could say it was just before she became the Lisbeth we know today. She lacked stimulation. She had no friends to speak of, partly because Camilla had made sure that nobody came anywhere near her at school, but partly because she really was different. I don’t know if she realized it herself yet. Her teachers and those around her didn’t. But she was an extremely gifted child. Her talent alone set her apart. School was deadly boring for her. Everything was obvious and easy. She needed only to take a quick look at things to understand them, and during lessons she sat there daydreaming. I do believe, however, that by then she had managed to find some things in her free time which interested her – advanced maths books, that sort of thing. But basically she was bored stiff. She spent a lot of time reading her Marvel comics, which were way below her intellectual level but possibly fulfilled another, therapeutic function.”

  “In what sense?”

  “To be honest I’m reluctant to try to play the shrink with Lisbeth. She would hate it if she could hear me. But those comics are full of superheroes fighting against supervillains, taking matters into their own hands to exact revenge and see to it that justice is done. For all I know, that may have been the perfect sort of reading material. Perhaps those stories, with their black-and-white view of the world, helped her to gain some clarity.”

  “You mean that she understood she had to grow up and become a superhero herself.”

  “In some way, maybe, in her own little world. At the time she didn’t know that Zalachenko had been a Soviet spy, and that his secrets had given him a unique position in Swedish society. She can have had no idea either that there was a special section within Säpo which protected him. But like Camilla she sensed that her father had some sort of immunity. One day a man in a grey overcoat appeared at the apartment and hinted that their father must come to no harm. Lisbeth realized early on that there was no point in reporting Zalachenko to the police or the social services. That would only result in yet another man in a grey overcoat turning up on their doorstep.

  “Powerlessness, Mikae
l, can be a devastating force, and before Lisbeth was old enough to do something about it she needed a place of strength, a refuge. She found that in the world of superheroes. I know better than most how important literature can be, whether it’s comic books or fine old novels, and I know that Lisbeth grew particularly attached to a young heroine called Janet van Dyne.”

  “Van Dyne?”

  “That’s right, a girl whose father was a rich scientist. The father is murdered – by aliens, if I remember right – and in order to take her revenge Janet van Dyne gets in touch with one of her father’s old colleagues, and in his laboratory acquires superpowers. She becomes the Wasp, someone you can’t push around, either literally or figuratively.”

  “I didn’t know that. So that’s where she gets her handle from?”

  “Not just the handle. I knew nothing about all that sort of stuff, obviously – I was an old dinosaur who got the Phantom mixed up with Mandrake the Magician – but the first time I saw a picture of the Wasp, it gave me a start. There was so much of Lisbeth in her. There still is, in a way. I think she picked up a lot of her style from that character. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I do know she thought a great deal about the transformation Janet van Dyne underwent when she became the Wasp. Somehow she understood that she herself had to undergo the same drastic metamorphosis: from child and victim to someone who could fight back against a highly trained and ruthless intelligence agent.

  “Thoughts like these occupied her day and night and so the Wasp became an important figure for her during her period of transition, a source of inspiration. And Camilla found out about it. That girl had an uncanny ability to nose out other people’s weaknesses – she used her tentacles to feel for their sensitive points and would then strike exactly there. So she came to make fun of the Wasp in whichever way she could. She even found out who her Marvel enemies were and began to call herself by their names, Thanos and all the others.”

  “Did you say Thanos?” Blomkvist said, suddenly alert.

  “I think that’s what he was called, a destroyer who once fell in love with Death itself. Death had appeared to him in the shape of a woman, and after that he wanted to prove himself worthy of her, or something like that. Camilla became a fan of his so as to provoke Lisbeth. She even called her gang of friends the Spider Society – in one of the comics that group are the sworn enemies of the Sisterhood of the Wasp.”

  “Really?” Blomkvist said, his mind racing.

  “Yes, I suppose it was childish, but that didn’t make it innocent. There was such hostility between the sisters even then that those names took on a nasty significance.”

  “Do you think that’s still relevant?”

  “The names, you mean?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Blomkvist was not sure what he meant, but he had a vague feeling that he had lit upon something important.

  “I don’t know,” Palmgren said. “They’re grown women now, but we mustn’t forget that those were decisive times in their lives, when everything changed. Looking back, it’s perfectly possible that small details could turn out to be of fateful significance. It wasn’t just that Lisbeth lost a mother and was then locked up. Camilla’s existence too was smashed to pieces. She lost her home, and the father she admired suffered severe burns. As you know, after the petrol bomb Zalachenko was never himself again. Camilla was put in a foster home miles from the world whose undisputed leading light she had been. It must have been bitterly hurtful for her too. I don’t for one second doubt that she’s hated Lisbeth with a murderous fury ever since.”

  “It certainly looks like it,” Blomkvist said.

  Palmgren took another sip of brandy. “The sisters were already effectively in a state of out-and-out war, and somehow I think they both knew that everything was about to blow up to change their lives for ever. I think they were even preparing for it.”

  “But in different ways.”

  “Oh yes. Lisbeth had a brilliant mind, and infernal plans and strategies were constantly ticking away in her head. But she was alone. Camilla was not so bright, not in the conventional sense – she never had a head for studies, and was incapable of understanding abstract reasoning – but she knew how to manipulate people to do her bidding, so, unlike Lisbeth, she was never alone. If Camilla ever discovered that Lisbeth was good at something which could be a threat to her, she never tried to acquire the same skill, for the simple reason she knew she couldn’t compete with her sister.”

  “So what did she do instead?”

  “Instead she would track down somebody – or better still more than one person – who could do whatever it was, and strike back with their help. She always had minions. But forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Yes, tell me what happened with Zalachenko’s computer?”

  “Lisbeth was short of stimulation, as I said. And she would lie awake at night, worrying about her mother. Agneta bled badly after the rapes, but wouldn’t go to a doctor. She probably felt ashamed. Periodically she sank into deep depressions and no longer had the strength to go to work or look after the girls. Camilla despised her even more. ‘Mamma is weak,’ she’d say. As I told you, in her world, to be weak was worse than anything else. Lisbeth, on the other hand, saw a person she loved – the only person she had ever loved – fall victim to a dreadful injustice. She was a child in so many ways, but she was also becoming convinced that she was the only person in the world who could save her mother from being beaten to death. So she got up in the middle of one night – carefully, of course, so as not to wake Camilla – and saw the computer on the desk by the window overlooking Lundagatan.

  “At that time she didn’t even know how to switch on a computer. But she worked it out. The computer seemed to be whispering to her: ‘Unlock my secrets.’ She didn’t get far, not at first. A password was needed. Since her father was known as Zala, she tried that, and Zala666 and similar combinations, and everything else she could think of. But nothing worked. I believe this went on for two or three nights, and if she slept at all then it was at school or at home in the afternoon.

  “Then one night she remembered something her father had written in German on a piece of paper in the kitchen – Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. At the time it meant nothing to her. But she realized that the phrase was important to her father, so she tried it. But that didn’t work either. There were too many letters. So she tried Nietzsche, the author of the quote, and there she was, suddenly she was in. A whole world opened up to her. Later she would describe it as a moment which changed her for ever. She thrived once she overcame that barrier. She explored what was intended to stay hidden.”

  “And Zalachenko never knew of this?”

  “It seems not, and she understood nothing at first. It was all in Russian. There were various lists, and some numbers – accounts of the revenues from his trafficking operations. To this day I have no idea how much she worked out then and how much she found out later. She came to understand that her mother was not the only one made to suffer by her father. He was destroying other women’s lives too, and that made her wild with rage. That is what turned her into the Lisbeth we know today, the one who hates men who …”

  “… hate women.”

  “Precisely. But it also made her stronger. She saw that there was no turning back – she had to stop her father. She went on with her searches on other computers, including at school, where she would sneak into the staffroom, and sometimes she pretended to be sleeping over with the friends she didn’t have while in fact she stayed overnight at school and sat at the computers until morning. She started to learn everything about hacking and programming, and I imagine that it was the same as when other child prodigies discover their niche – she was in thrall. She felt that she was born for this. Many of her contacts in the digital world began to take an interest in her even then, the way the older generation has always engaged with younger talents, whether to encourage or crush th
em. Many people out there were irritated by her unorthodox ways, her completely new approach. But others were impressed, and she made friends, including Plague – you know about him. She got her first real friends by way of the computer and above all, for the first time in her life, she felt free. She could fly through cyberspace, just like the Wasp. There was nothing to tie her down.”

  “Did Camilla realize how accomplished she’d become?”