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

by Stieg Larsson

  “Simply stated, my assignment is to provide you with background as necessary, and as discreetly as possible. You must understand how improbably complicated this story has become. For one thing, a preliminary investigation is under way, for which you bear the primary responsibility. No-one – not in the government or in the Security Police or anywhere else – can interfere in how you run this investigation. Your job is to ascertain the truth and bring the guilty parties to court. One of the most crucial functions in a democratic state.”

  Ekström nodded.

  “It would be a national catastrophe if the whole truth about Zalachenko were to leak out.”

  “So what exactly is the purpose of your visit?”

  “First, to make you aware of the sensitive nature of the situation. I don’t think Sweden has been in such an exposed position since the end of the Second World War. One might say that, to a certain extent, the fate of Sweden rests in your hands.”

  “And who is your superior?”

  “I regret it, but I cannot reveal the name of anyone working on this case. But I can say that my instructions come from the very highest levels.”

  Good Lord. He’s acting on orders from the government. But he can’t say without unleashing a political firestorm.

  Nyström saw that Ekström had swallowed the bait.

  “What I am able to do, however, is to provide you with information. I have been given the authority to use my own judgement in giving you sight of material that is, some of it, the most highly classified in this country.”

  “I see.”

  “This means that if you have questions about something, whatever it may be, then you should turn to me. You must not talk to anyone else in the Security Police, only to me. My assignment is to be your guide in this labyrinth, and if clashes between various interests threaten to arise, then we will assist each other in finding solutions.”

  “I understand. In that case I should say how grateful I am that you and your colleagues are willing to facilitate matters for me.”

  “We want the legal process to take its course even though this is a difficult situation.”

  “Good. I assure you that I will exercise the utmost discretion. This isn’t the first time I’ve handled Top Secret information, after all.”

  “No, we are quite aware of that.”

  Ekström had a dozen questions that Nyström meticulously noted, and then answered as best he could. On this third visit Ekström would be given answers to several of the questions he had asked earlier. Among them, and most crucially: what was the truth surrounding Björck’s report from 1991?

  “That is a serious matter.” Nyström adopted a concerned expression. “Since this report surfaced, we have had an analysis group working almost round the clock to discover exactly what happened. We are now close to the point where we can draw conclusions. And they are most unpleasant.”

  “I can well imagine. That report alleges that the Security Police and the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian co-operated to place Lisbeth Salander in psychiatric care.”

  “If only that were the case,” Nyström said with a slight smile.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If that was all there was to it, the matter would be simple. Then a crime would have been committed and led to a prosecution. The difficulty is that this report does not correspond with other reports that we have in our archives.” Nyström took out a blue folder and opened it. “What I have here is the report that Gunnar Björck actually wrote in 1991. Here too are the original documents from the correspondence between him and Teleborian. The two versions do not agree.”

  “Please explain.”

  “The appalling thing is that Björck has hanged himself. Presumably because of the threat of revelations about his sexual deviations. Blomkvist’s magazine was intending to expose him. That drove him to such depths of despair that he took his own life.”

  “Well …”

  “The original report is an account of Lisbeth Salander’s attempt to murder her father, Alexander Zalachenko, with a petrol bomb. The first thirty pages of the report that Blomkvist discovered agree with the original. These pages, frankly, contain nothing remarkable. It’s not until page thirty-three, where Björck draws conclusions and makes recommendations, that the discrepancy arises.”

  “What discrepancy?”

  “In the original version Björck presents five well-argued recommendations. We don’t need to hide the fact that they concern playing down the Zalachenko affair in the media and so forth. Björck proposes that Zalachenko’s rehabilitation – he suffered very severe burns – be carried out abroad. And things similar. He also recommends that Salander should be offered the best conceivable psychiatric care.”

  “I see …”

  “The problem is that a number of sentences were altered in a very subtle way. On page thirty-four there is a paragraph in which Björck appears to suggest that Salander be branded psychotic, so that she will not be believed if anyone should start asking questions about Zalachenko.”

  “And this suggestion is not in the original report.”

  “Precisely. Gunnar Björck’s own report never suggested anything of the kind. Quite apart from anything else, that would have been against the law. He warmly recommended that she be given the care she quite clearly needed. In Blomkvist’s copy, this was made out to be a conspiracy.”

  “Could I read the original?”

  “Certainly you can. I have to take the report with me when I go. And before you read it, let me direct your attention to the appendix containing the subsequent correspondence between Björck and Teleborian. It is almost entirely fabricated. Here it’s not a matter of subtle alterations, but of gross falsifications.”

  “Falsifications?”

  “I think that’s the only appropriate description. The original shows that Peter Teleborian was assigned by the district court to do a forensic psychiatric examination of Lisbeth Salander. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Salander was twelve years old and had tried to kill her father – it would have been very strange if that shocking event had not resulted in a psychiatric report.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If you had been the prosecutor, I assume that you would have insisted on both social and psychiatric investigations.”

  “Of course.”

  “Even then Teleborian was a well-respected child psychiatrist who had also worked in forensic medicine. He was given the assignment, conducted a normal investigation, and came to the conclusion that the girl was mentally ill. I don’t have to use their technical terms.”

  “No, no …”

  “Teleborian wrote this in a report that he sent to Björck. The report was then given to the district court, which decided that Salander should be cared for at St Stefan’s. Blomkvist’s version is missing the entire investigation conducted by Teleborian. In its place is an exchange between Björck and Teleborian, which has Björck instructing Teleborian to falsify a mental examination.”

  “And you’re saying that it’s an invention, a forgery?”

  “No question about it.”

  “But who would be interested in creating such a thing?”

  Nyström put down the report and frowned. “Now you’re getting to the heart of the problem.”

  “And the answer is …?”

  “We don’t know. That’s the question our analytical group is working very hard to answer.”

  “Could it be that Blomkvist made some of it up?”

  Nyström laughed. “That was one of our first thoughts too. But we don’t think so. We incline to the view that the falsification was done a long time ago, presumably more or less simultaneously with the writing of the original report. And that leads to one or two disagreeable conclusions. Whoever did the falsification was extremely well informed. In addition, whoever did it had access to the very typewriter that Björck used.”

  “You mean …”

  “We don’t know where Björck wrote the report. It could have bee
n at his home or at his office or somewhere else altogether. We can imagine two alternatives. Either the person who did the falsification was someone in the psychiatric or forensic medicine departments, who for some reason wanted to involve Teleborian in a scandal. Or else the falsification was done for a completely different purpose by someone inside the Security Police.”

  “For what possible reason?”

  “This happened in 1991. There could have been a Russian agent inside S.I.S. who had picked up Zalachenko’s trail. Right now we’re examining a large number of old personnel files.”

  “But if the K.G.B. had found out … then it should have leaked years ago.”

  “You’re right. But don’t forget that this was during the period when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the K.G.B. was dissolved. We have no idea what went wrong. Maybe it was a planned operation that was shelved. The K.G.B. were masters of forgery and disinformation.”

  “But why would the K.G.B. want to plant such a forgery?”

  “We don’t know that either. But the most obvious purpose would have been to involve the Swedish government in a scandal.”

  Ekström pinched his lip. “So what you’re saying is that the medical assessment of Salander is correct?”

  “Oh yes. Salander is, to put it in colloquial terms, stark raving mad. No doubt about that. The decision to commit her to an institution was absolutely correct.”

  “Toilets?” Eriksson sounded as if she thought Cortez was pulling her leg.

  “Toilets,” Cortez repeated.

  “You want to run a story on toilets? In Millennium?”

  Eriksson could not help laughing. She had observed his ill-concealed enthusiasm when he sauntered into the Friday meeting, and she recognized all the signs of a reporter who had a story in the works.

  “Explain.”

  “It’s really quite simple,” Cortez said. “The biggest industry in Sweden by far is construction. It’s an industry that in practice cannot be outsourced overseas, even if Skanska Construction opens an office in London and stuff like that. No matter what, the houses have to be built in Sweden.”

  “But that’s nothing new.”

  “No, but what is new is that the construction industry is a couple of light-years ahead of all other Swedish industries when it comes to competition and efficiency. If Volvo built cars the same way, the latest model would cost about one, maybe even two million kronor. For most of industry, cutting prices is the constant challenge. For the construction industry it’s the opposite. The price per square metre keeps going up. The state subsidizes the cost with taxpayers’ money just so that the prices aren’t prohibitive.”

  “Is there a story in that?”

  “Wait. It’s complicated. Let’s say the price curve for hamburgers had been the same since the ’70s – so a Big Mac would cost about 150 kronor or more. I don’t want to guess what it would cost with fries and a Coke, but my salary at Millennium might not cover it. How many people around this table would go to McDonald’s and buy a burger for 100 kronor?”

  Nobody said a word.

  “Understandable. But when N.C.C. bangs together some sheet-metal cubes for exclusive rental at Gåshaga on Lidingö, they ask 10– 12,000 kronor a month for a three-cube apartment. How many of you are paying that much?”

  “I couldn’t afford it,” Nilsson said.

  “No, of course not. But you already live in a one-bedroom apartment by Danvikstull which your father bought for you twenty years ago, and if you were to sell it you’d probably get a million and a half for it. But what does a twenty-year-old do who wants to move out of the family home? They can’t afford to. So they sublet or sub-sublet or they live at home with their mothers until they retire.”

  “So where do the toilets come into the picture?” Malm said.

  “I’m getting to that. The question is, why are apartments so bloody expensive? Because the people commissioning the buildings don’t know how to set the price. To put it simply, a developer calls up Skanska Construction and says that they want a hundred apartments and asks what it will cost. And Skanska calculates it and comes back and says it’ll cost around 500 million kronor. Which means that the price per square metre will be X kronor and it would cost 10,000 a month if you wanted to move in. But unlike the McDonald’s example, you don’t really have a choice – you have to live somewhere. So you have to pay the going rate.”

  “Henry, dear … please get to the point.”

  “But that is the point. Why should it cost 10,000 a month to live in those crappy dumps in Hammarbyhamnen? Because the construction companies don’t give a damn about keeping prices down. The customer’s going to have to pay, come what may. One of the big costs is building materials. The trade in building materials goes through wholesalers who set their own prices. Since there isn’t any real competition there, a bathtub retails at 5,000 kronor in Sweden. The same bathtub from the same manufacturer retails at 2,000 kronor in Germany. There is no added cost that can satisfactorily explain the price difference.”

  There was impatient muttering around the table.

  “You can read about a lot of this in a report from the government’s Construction Cost Delegation, which was active in the late ’90s. Since then not much has happened. No-one is talking to the construction companies about the unreasonable prices. The buyers cheerfully pay what they are told it costs, and in the end the price burden falls on the renters or the taxpayers.”

  “Henry, the toilets?”

  “The little that has changed since the Construction Cost Delegation’s report has happened at the local level, and primarily outside Stockholm. There are buyers who got fed up with the high construction prices. One example is Karlskrona Homes, which builds houses less expensively than anyone else by buying the materials themselves. And Svensk Handel has also got into the game. They think that the price of construction materials is absurd, so they’ve been trying to make it easier for companies to buy less expensive products that are equally good. And that led to a little clash at the Construction Fair in Älvsjö last year. Svensk Handel had brought in a man from Thailand who was selling toilets for 500 kronor apiece.”

  “And what happened?”

  “His nearest competitor was a Swedish wholesale outfit called Vitavara Inc., which sells genuine Swedish toilets for 1700 kronor apiece. And shrewd municipal buyers started to scratch their heads and wonder why they were shelling out 1700 kronor when they could get a similar toilet from Thailand for 500.”

  “Better quality maybe,” Karim said.

  “No. The exact same.”

  “Thailand,” Malm said. “That sounds like child labour and stuff like that. Which could explain the low price.”

  “Not so,” Cortez said. “Child labour exists mostly in the textile and souvenir industries in Thailand. And the paedophile industry, of course. The United Nations keeps an eye on child labour, and I’ve checked out this company. They’re a reputable manufacturer. It’s a big, modern, respectable operation producing appliances and plumbing goods.”

  “Alright … but we’re talking about low-wage countries, and that means that you risk writing an article proposing that Swedish industry should be outbid by Thai industry. Fire the Swedish workers and close the factories here, and import everything from Thailand. You won’t win any points with the Trades Union Federation.”

  A smile spread over Cortez’s face. He leaned back and looked ridiculously pleased with himself.

  “No again,” he said. “Guess where Vitavara Inc. makes its toilets to sell at 1700 kronor apiece?”

  Silence fell over the room.

  “Vietnam,” Cortez said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Eriksson said.

  “They’ve been making toilets there for at least ten years. Swedish workers were already out of that race in the ’90s.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “But here comes my point. If you imported directly from the factory in Vietnam, the price would be in the order of 390 kronor. Guess h
ow you can explain the price difference between Thailand and Vietnam?”

  “Don’t tell me that—”

  “Oh, yes. Vitavara Inc. subcontracts the work to an outfit called Fong Soo Industries. They’re on the U.N. list of companies that use child labour, at least they were in an investigation from 2001. But the majority of the workers are convicts.”

  Eriksson burst out laughing. “This is great. This is really great. I’m sure you’re going to be a journalist when you grow up. How fast can you have the story ready?”

  “Two weeks. I have a lot of international trade stuff to check out. And then we need a bad guy for the story, so I’m going to see who owns Vitavara Inc.”

  “Then we could run it in the June issue?”

  “No problem.”

  Inspector Bublanski listened to Prosecutor Ekström without expression. The meeting had lasted forty minutes, and Bublanski was feeling an intense desire to reach out and grab the copy of The Law of the Swedish Kingdom that lay on the edge of Ekström’s desk and ram it into the prosecutor’s face. He wondered what would happen if he acted on his impulse. There would certainly be headlines in the evening papers and it would probably result in an assault charge. He pushed the thought away. The whole point of the socialized human being was to not give in to that sort of impulse, regardless of how belligerently an opponent might behave. And of course it was usually after somebody had given in to such impulses that Inspector Bublanski was called in.

  “I take it that we’re in agreement,” Ekström said.

  “No, we are not in agreement,” Bublanski said, getting to his feet. “But you’re the leader of the preliminary investigation.”

  He muttered to himself as he turned down the corridor to his office, summoning Andersson and Modig as he went. They were the only colleagues available to him that afternoon as Holmberg had regrettably opted to take a two-week holiday.

  “My office,” Bublanski said. “Bring some coffee.”

  After they had settled in, Bublanski looked at the notes from his meeting with Ekström.

  “As the situation stands, our preliminary investigation leader has dropped all charges against Lisbeth Salander relating to the murders for which she was being sought. She is no longer part of the preliminary investigation so far as we’re concerned.”