Millennium 03 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

by Stieg Larsson

  “What about drugs?”

  “According to the toxicology report, Björck had traces of a strong painkiller in his blood. That medication had been prescribed for him. He also had traces of alcohol, but the percentage was negligible. In other words, he was more or less sober.”

  “The pathologist wrote that there were graze wounds.”

  “A graze over three centimetres long on the outside of his left knee. A scratch, really. I’ve thought about it, but it could have come about in a dozen different ways … for instance, if he walked into the corner of a table or a bench, whatever.”

  Modig held up a photograph of Björck’s distorted face. The noose had cut so deeply into his flesh that the rope itself was hidden in the skin of his neck. The face was grotesquely swollen.

  “He hung there for something like twenty-four hours before the hook gave way. All the blood was either in his head – the noose having prevented it from running into his body – or in the lower extremities. When the hook came out and his body fell, his chest hit the coffee table, causing deep bruising there. But this injury happened long after the time of death.”

  “Hell of a way to die,” said Andersson.

  “I don’t know. The noose was so thin that it pinched deep and stopped the blood flow. He was probably unconscious within a few seconds and dead in one or two minutes.”

  Bublanski closed the preliminary report with distaste. He did not like this. He absolutely did not like the fact that Zalachenko and Björck had, so far as they could tell, both died on the same day. But no amount of speculating could change the fact that the crime scene investigation offered no grain of support to the theory that a third party had helped Björck on his way.

  “He was under a lot of pressure,” Bublanski said. “He knew that the whole Zalachenko affair was in danger of being exposed and that he risked a prison sentence for sex-trade crimes, plus being hung out to dry in the media. I wonder which scared him more. He was sick, had been suffering chronic pain for a long time … I don’t know. I wish he had left a letter.”

  “Many suicides don’t.”

  “I know. O.K. We’ll put Björck to one side for now. We have no choice.”

  Berger could not bring herself to sit at Morander’s desk right away, or to move his belongings aside. She arranged for Magnusson to talk to Morander’s family so that the widow could come herself when it was convenient, or send someone to sort out his things.

  Instead she had an area cleared off the central desk in the heart of the newsroom, and there she set up her laptop and took command. It was chaotic. But three hours after she had taken the helm of S.M.P. in such appalling circumstances, the front page went to press. Magnusson had put together a four-column article about Morander’s life and career. The page was designed around a black-bordered portrait, almost all of it above the fold, with his unfinished editorial to the left and a frieze of photographs along the bottom edge. The layout was not perfect, but it had a strong moral and emotional impact.

  Just before 6.00, as Berger was going through the headlines on page two and discussing the texts with the head of revisions, Borgsjö approached and touched her shoulder. She looked up.

  “Could I have a word?”

  They went together to the coffee machine in the canteen.

  “I just wanted to say that I’m really very pleased with the way you took control today. I think you surprised us all.”

  “I didn’t have much choice. But I may stumble a bit before I really get going.”

  “We understand that.”

  “We?”

  “I mean the staff and the board. The board especially. But after what happened today I’m more than ever persuaded that you were the ideal choice. You came here in the nick of time, and you took charge in a very difficult situation.”

  Berger almost blushed. But she had not done that since she was fourteen.

  “Could I give you a piece of advice?”

  “Of course.”

  “I heard that you had a disagreement about a headline with Anders Holm.”

  “We didn’t agree on the angle in the article about the government’s tax proposal. He inserted an opinion into the headline in the news section, which is supposed to be neutral. Opinions should be reserved for the editorial page. And while I’m on this topic … I’ll be writing editorials from time to time, but as I told you I’m not active in any political party, so we have to solve the problem of who’s going to be in charge of the editorial section.”

  “Magnusson can take over for the time being,” said Borgsjö.

  Erika shrugged. “It makes no difference to me who you appoint. But it should be somebody who clearly stands for the newspaper’s views. That’s where they should be aired … not in the news section.”

  “Quite right. What I wanted to say was that you’ll probably have to give Holm some concessions. He’s worked at S.M.P. a long time and he’s been news chief for fifteen years. He knows what he’s doing. He can be surly sometimes, but he’s irreplaceable.”

  “I know. Morander told me. But when it comes to policy he’s going to have to toe the line. I’m the one you hired to run the paper.”

  Borgsjö thought for a moment and said: “We’re going to have to solve these problems as they come up.”

  Giannini was both tired and irritated on Wednesday evening as she boarded the X2000 at Göteborg Central Station. She felt as if she had been living on the X2000 for a month. She bought a coffee in the restaurant car, went to her seat, and opened the folder of notes from her last conversation with Salander. Who was also the reason why she was feeling tired and irritated.

  She’s hiding something. That little fool is not telling me the truth. And Micke is hiding something too. God knows what they’re playing at.

  She also decided that since her brother and her client had not so far communicated with each other, the conspiracy – if it was one – had to be a tacit agreement that had developed naturally. She did not understand what it was about, but it had to be something that her brother considered important enough to conceal.

  She was afraid that it was a moral issue, and that was one of his weaknesses. He was Salander’s friend. She knew her brother. She knew that he was loyal to the point of foolhardiness once he had made someone a friend, even if the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also knew that he could accept any number of idiocies from his friends, but that there was a boundary and it could not be infringed. Where exactly this boundary was seemed to vary from one person to another, but she knew he had broken completely with people who had previously been close friends because they had done something that he regarded as beyond the pale. And he was inflexible. The break was for ever.

  Giannini understood what went on in her brother’s head. But she had no idea what Salander was up to. Sometimes she thought that there was nothing going on in there at all.

  She had gathered that Salander could be moody and withdrawn. Until she met her in person, Giannini had supposed it must be some phase, and that it was a question of gaining her trust. But after a month of conversations – ignoring the fact that the first two weeks had been wasted time because Salander was hardly able to speak – their communication was still distinctly one-sided.

  Salander seemed at times to be in a deep depression and had not the slightest interest in dealing with her situation or her future. She simply did not grasp or did not care that the only way Giannini could provide her with an effective defence would be if she had access to all the facts. There was no way in the world she was going to be able to work in the dark.

  Salander was sulky and often just silent. When she did say something, she took a long time to think and she chose her words carefully. Often she did not reply at all, and sometimes she would answer a question that Giannini had asked several days earlier. During the police interviews, Salander had sat in utter silence, staring straight ahead. With rare exceptions, she had refused to say a single word to the police. The exceptions were on those occasions wh
en Inspector Erlander had asked her what she knew about Niedermann. Then she looked up at him and answered every question in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. As soon as he changed the subject, she lost interest.

  On principle, she knew, Salander never talked to the authorities. In this case, that was an advantage. Despite the fact that she kept urging her client to answer questions from the police, deep inside she was pleased with Salander’s silence. The reason was simple. It was a consistent silence. It contained no lies that could entangle her, no contradictory reasoning that would look bad in court.

  But she was astonished at how imperturbable Salander was. When they were alone she had asked her why she so provocatively refused to talk to the police.

  “They’ll twist what I say and use it against me.”

  “But if you don’t explain yourself, you risk being convicted anyway.”

  “Then that’s how it’ll have to be. I didn’t make all this mess. And if they want to convict me, it’s not my problem.”

  Salander had in the end described to her lawyer almost everything that had happened at Stallarholmen. All except for one thing. She would not explain how Magge Lundin had ended up with a bullet in his foot. No matter how much she asked and nagged, Salander would just stare at her and smile her crooked smile.

  She had also told Giannini what happened in Gosseberga. But she had not said anything about why she had run her father to ground. Did she go there expressly to murder him – as the prosecutor claimed – or was it to make him listen to reason?

  When Giannini raised the subject of her former guardian, Nils Bjurman, Salander said only that she was not the one who shot him. And that particular murder was no longer one of the charges against her. And when Giannini reached the very crux of the whole chain of events, the role of Dr Teleborian in the psychiatric clinic in 1991, Salander lapsed into such inexhaustible silence that it seemed she might never utter a word again.

  This is getting us nowhere, Giannini decided. If she won’t trust me, we’re going to lose the case.

  Salander sat on the edge of her bed, looking out of the window. She could see the building on the other side of the car park. She had sat undisturbed and motionless for an hour, ever since Giannini had stormed out and slammed the door behind her. She had a headache again, but it was mild and it was distant. Yet she felt uncomfortable.

  She was irritated with Giannini. From a practical point of view she could see why her lawyer kept going on and on about details from her past. Rationally she understood it. Giannini needed to have all the facts. But she did not have the remotest wish to talk about her feelings or her actions. Her life was her own business. It was not her fault that her father had been a pathological sadist and murderer. It was not her fault that her brother was a murderer. And thank God nobody yet knew that he was her brother, which would otherwise no doubt also be held against her in the psychiatric evaluation that sooner or later would inevitably be conducted. She was not the one who had killed Svensson and Johansson. She was not responsible for appointing a guardian who turned out to be a pig and a rapist.

  And yet it was her life that was going to be turned inside out. She would be forced to explain herself and to beg for forgiveness because she had defended herself.

  She just wanted to be left in peace. And when it came down to it, she was the one who would have to live with herself. She did not expect anyone to be her friend. Annika Bloody Giannini was most likely on her side, but it was the professional friendship of a professional person who was her lawyer. Kalle Bastard Blomkvist was out there somewhere – Giannini was for some reason reluctant to talk about her brother, and Salander never asked. She did not expect that he would be quite so interested now that the Svensson murder was solved and he had got his story.

  She wondered what Armansky thought of her after all that had happened.

  She wondered how Holger Palmgren viewed the situation.

  According to Giannini, both of them had said they would be in her corner, but that was words. They could not do anything to solve her private problems.

  She wondered what Miriam Wu felt about her.

  She wondered what she thought of herself, come to that, and came to the realization that most of all she felt indifference towards her entire life.

  She was interrupted when the Securitas guard put the key in the door to let in Dr Jonasson.

  “Good evening, Fröken Salander. And how are you feeling today?”

  “O.K.,” she said.

  He checked her chart and saw that she was free of her fever. She had got used to his visits, which came a couple of times a week. Of all the people who touched her and poked at her, he was the only one in whom she felt a measure of trust. She never felt that he was giving her strange looks. He visited her room, chatted a while, and examined her to check on her progress. He did not ask any questions about Niedermann or Zalachenko, or whether she was off her rocker or why the police kept her locked up. He seemed to be interested only in how her muscles were working, how the healing in her brain was progressing, and how she felt in general.

  Besides, he had – literally – rootled around in her brain. Someone who rummaged around in your brain had to be treated with respect. To her surprise she found the visits of Dr Jonasson pleasant, despite the fact that he poked at her and fussed over her fever chart.

  “Do you mind if I check?”

  He made his usual examination, looking at her pupils, listening to her breathing, taking her pulse, her blood pressure, and checking how she swallowed.

  “How am I doing?”

  “You’re on the road to recovery. But you have to work harder on the exercises. And you’re picking at the scab on your head. You need to stop that.” He paused. “May I ask a personal question?”

  She looked at him. He waited until she nodded.

  “That dragon tattoo … Why did you get it?”

  “You didn’t see it before?”

  He smiled all of a sudden.

  “I mean I’ve glanced at it, but when you were uncovered I was pretty busy stopping the bleeding and extracting bullets and so on.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Out of curiosity, nothing more.”

  Salander thought for a while. Then she looked at him.

  “I got it for reasons that I don’t want to discuss.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  He looked surprised. “Sure. Why not?”

  She turned her back and pulled the hospital gown off her shoulder. She sat so that the light from the window fell on her back. He looked at her dragon. It was beautiful and well done, a work of art.

  After a while she turned her head.

  “Satisfied?”

  “It’s beautiful. But it must have hurt like hell.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It hurt.”

  *

  Jonasson left Salander’s room somewhat confused. He was satisfied with the progress of her physical rehabilitation. But he could not work out this strange girl. He did not need a master’s degree in psychology to know that she was not doing very well emotionally. The tone she used with him was polite, but riddled with suspicion. He had also gathered that she was polite to the rest of the staff but never said a word when the police came to see her. She was locked up inside her shell and kept her distance from those around her.

  The police had locked her in her hospital room, and a prosecutor intended to charge her with attempted murder and grievous bodily harm. He was amazed that such a small, thin girl had the physical strength for this sort of violent criminality, especially when the violence was directed at full-grown men.

  He had asked about her dragon tattoo, hoping to find a personal topic he could discuss with her. He was not particularly interested in why she had decorated herself in such a way, but he supposed that since she had chosen such a striking tattoo, it must have a special meaning for her. He thought simply that it might be a way to start a conversation.

  His visits
to her were outside his schedule, since Dr Endrin was assigned to her case. But Jonasson was head of the trauma unit, and he was proud of what had been achieved that night when Salander was brought into A. & E. He had made the right decision, electing to remove the bullet. As far as he could see she had no complications in the form of memory lapses, diminished bodily function, or other handicaps from the injury. If she continued to heal at the same pace, she would leave hospital with a scar on her scalp, but with no other visible damage. Scars on her soul were another matter.

  Returning to his office he discovered a man in a dark suit leaning against the wall outside his door. He had a thick head of hair and a well-groomed beard.

  “Dr Jonasson?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Peter Teleborian. I’m the head physician at St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic in Uppsala.”

  “Yes, I recognize you.”

  “Good. I’d like to have a word in private with you if you have a moment.”

  Jonasson unlocked the door and ushered the visitor in. “How can I help you?”

  “It’s about one of your patients, Lisbeth Salander. I need to visit her.”

  “You’ll have to get permission from the prosecutor. She’s under arrest and all visitors are prohibited. And any applications for visits must also be referred in advance to Salander’s lawyer.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. I thought we might be able to cut through all the red tape in this case. I’m a physician, so you could let me have the opportunity to visit her on medical grounds.”

  “Yes, there might be a case for that, but I can’t see what your objective is.”

  “For several years I was Lisbeth Salander’s psychiatrist when she was institutionalized at St Stefan’s. I followed up with her until she turned eighteen, when the district court released her back into society, albeit under guardianship. I should perhaps mention that I opposed that action. Since then she has been allowed to drift aimlessly, and the consequences are there for all to see today.”