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

by Stieg Larsson

  “I didn’t report anyone.”

  “No. But it’s obvious that there has been gross dereliction of duty. You’re not the only person affected.”

  Salander shrugged. “This has nothing to do with me. But I promise to be in closer contact with you. These last two weeks have been an exception. I’ve been working.”

  Giannini did not look as though she believed her. “What are you working on?”

  “Consulting.”

  “I see,” she said. “The other thing is that the inventory of the estate is now ready.”

  “Inventory of what estate?”

  “Your father’s. The state’s legal representative contacted me since nobody seemed to know how to get in touch with you. You and your sister are the sole heirs.”

  Salander looked at Giannini blankly. Then she caught the waitress’s eye and pointed at her glass.

  “I don’t want any inheritance from my father. Do whatever the hell you want with it.”

  “Wrong. You can do what you want with the inheritance. My job is to see to it that you have the opportunity to do so.”

  “I don’t want a single öre from that pig.”

  “Then give the money to Greenpeace or something.”

  “I don’t give a shit about whales.”

  Giannini’s voice suddenly softened. “Lisbeth, if you’re going to be a legally responsible citizen, then you’re going to have to start behaving like one. I don’t give a damn what you do with your money. Just sign here that you received it, and then you can get drunk in peace.”

  Salander glanced at her and then looked down at the table. Annika assumed this was some kind of conciliatory gesture that perhaps corresponded to an apology in Salander’s limited register of expressions.

  “What kind of figures are we talking about?”

  “They’re not insignificant. Your father had about 300,000 kronor in shares. The property in Gosseberga would sell for around 1.5 million – there’s a little woodland included. And there are three other properties.”

  “What sort of properties?”

  “It seems that he invested a significant amount of money. There’s nothing of enormous value, but he owns a small building in Udderalla with six apartments, and they bring in some income. But the property is not in good shape. He didn’t bother with upkeep and the apartments have even been up before the rental board. You won’t get rich, but you’d get a good price if you sold it. He also owns a summer cabin in Småland that’s worth around 250,000 kronor. Plus he owns a dilapidated industrial site outside Norrtälje.”

  “Why in the world did he buy all this shit?”

  “I have no idea. But the estate could bring in over four million kronor after taxes etc., but…”

  “But what?”

  “The inheritance has to be divided equally between you and your sister. The problem is that nobody knows where your sister is.”

  Salander looked at Giannini in silence.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Where is your sister?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t seen her for ten years.”

  “Her file is classified, but I found out that she is listed as out of the country.”

  “I see,” Salander said, showing little interest.

  Giannini sighed in exasperation.

  “I would suggest that we liquidate all the assets and deposit half the proceeds in the bank until your sister can be found. I can initiate the negotiations if you give me the go-ahead.”

  Salander shrugged. “I don’t want anything to do with his money.”

  “I understand that. But the balance sheet still has to be sorted out. It’s part of your responsibility as a citizen.”

  “Sell the crap, then. Put half in the bank and send the rest to whoever you like.”

  Giannini stared at her. She had understood that Salander had money stashed away, but she had not realized that her client was so well off that she could ignore an inheritance that might amount to a million kronor or more. What is more, she had no idea where Salander had got her money, or how much was involved. On the other hand she was keen to finalize the bureaucratic procedure.

  “Lisbeth, please … could you read through the estate inventory and give me the green light so that we can get this matter resolved?”

  Salander grumbled for a moment, but finally she acquiesced and stuffed the folder into her shoulder bag. She promised to read through it and send instructions as to what she wanted Giannini to do. Then she went back to her beer. Giannini kept her company for an hour, drinking mostly mineral water.

  It was not until several days later, when Giannini telephoned to remind her about the estate inventory, that Salander took out the crumpled papers. She sat at the kitchen table, smoothed out the documents, and read through them.

  The inventory covered several pages. There was a detailed list of all kinds of junk – the china in the kitchen cupboards in Gosseberga, clothing, cameras and other personal effects. Zalachenko had not left behind much of real value, and not one of the objects had the slightest sentimental value for Salander. She decided that her attitude had not changed since she met with Giannini at the theatre bar. Sell the crap and give the money away. Or something. She was positive that she did not want a single öre of her father’s wealth, but she also was pretty sure that Zalachenko’s real assets were hidden where no tax inspector would look for them.

  Then she opened the title deeds for the property in Norrtälje.

  It was an industrial site of three buildings totalling twenty thousand square metres in the vicinity of Skederid, between Norrtälje and Rimbo.

  The estate assessor had apparently paid a cursory visit, and noted that it was an old brickworks that had been more or less empty and abandoned since it was shut down in the ’60s, apart from a period in the ’70s when it had been used to store timber. He noted that the buildings were in “extremely poor condition” and could not in all likelihood be renovated for any other activity. The term “poor condition” was also used to describe the “north building,” which had in fact been destroyed by fire and collapsed. Some repairs, he wrote, had been made to the “main building”.

  What gave Salander a jolt was the site’s history. Zalachenko had acquired the property for a song on 12 March, 1984, but the signatory on the purchase documents was Agneta Sofia Salander.

  So Salander’s mother had in fact been the owner of the property. Yet in 1987 her ownership had ceased. Zalachenko had bought her out for 2,000 kronor. After that the property had stood unused for fifteen years. The inventory showed that on 17 September, 2003, K.A.B. Import A.B. had hired the builders NorrBygg Inc. to do renovations which included repairs to the floor and roof, as well as improvements to the water and electrical systems. Repair work had gone on for two months, until the end of November, and then discontinued. NorrBygg had sent an invoice which had been paid.

  Of all the assets in her father’s estate, this was the only surprising entry. Salander was puzzled. Ownership of the industrial site made sense if her father had wanted to give the impression that K.A.B. Import was carrying on legitimate activities or owned certain assets. It also made sense that he had used her mother as a front in the purchase and had then for a pittance bought back the property.

  But why in heaven’s name would he spend almost 440,000 kronor to renovate a ramshackle building, which according to the assessor was still not being used for anything in 2005?

  She could not understand it, but was not going to waste time wondering. She closed the folder and called Giannini.

  “I’ve read the inventory. What I said still holds. Sell the shit and do whatever you like with the money. I want nothing from him.”

  “Very well. I’ll see to it that half the revenue is deposited in an account for your sister, and I’ll suggest some suitable recipients for the rest.”

  “Right,” Salander said and hung up without further discussion.

  She sat in her window seat, lit a cigarette,
and looked out towards Saltsjön.

  Salander spent the next week helping Armansky with an urgent matter. She had to help track down and identify a person suspected of being hired to kidnap a child in a custody battle resulting from a Swedish woman divorcing her Lebanese husband. Salander’s job amounted to checking the email of the person who was presumed to have hired the kidnapper. Milton Security’s role was discontinued when the parties reached a legal solution.

  On December 18, the Sunday before Christmas, Salander woke at 6.00 and remembered that she had to buy a Christmas present for Palmgren. For a moment she wondered whether there was anyone else she should buy presents for – Giannini perhaps. She got up and took a shower in no particular hurry, and ate a breakfast of toast with cheese and marmalade and a coffee.

  She had nothing special planned for the day and spent a while clearing papers and magazines from her desk. Then her gaze fell on the folder with the estate inventory. She opened it and reread the page about the title registration for the site in Norrtälje. She sighed. O.K. I have to find out what the hell he had going on there.

  She put on warm clothes and boots. It was 8.30 when she drove her burgundy Honda out of the garage beneath Fiskargatan 9. It was icy cold but beautiful, sunshine and a pastel-blue sky. She took the road via Slussen and Klarabergsleden and wound her way on to the E18 going north, heading for Norrtälje. She was in no hurry. At 10.00 she turned into an O.K. petrol station and shop a few miles outside Skederid to ask the way to the old brickworks. No sooner had she parked than she realized that she did not even need to ask.

  She was on a hillside with a good view across the valley on the other side of the road. To the left towards Norrtälje she could see a paint warehouse, some sort of builder’s yard, and another yard with bulldozers. To the right, at the edge of the industrial area, about four hundred metres from the road was a dismal brick building with a crumbling chimney-stack. The factory stood like a last outpost of the industrial area, somewhat isolated beyond a road and a narrow stream. She surveyed the building thoughtfully and asked herself what on earth had possessed her to drive all the way up to Norrtälje.

  She turned and glanced at the O.K. 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 Kapellskär, through which a good deal of the freight traffic between Sweden and the Baltic countries passed.

  She started the car and drove out on to 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 about 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 on 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 timber in a workshop that was forty-five metres long and about twenty metres 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 twenty by twenty metres square, and at least eight metres high. There were tall, inaccessible windows close to the ceiling which provided no view but let in plenty of light. The upper floor, just like the workshop downstairs, was full of junk. There were dozens of one-metre-high packing cases stacked on top of one another. She gripped one of them but could not move it. The text on the crate read: Machine parts 0-A77, with an apparently corresponding text in Russian underneath. She noticed an open goods lift halfway down one wall of the first room.

  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. Tools, 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 collected 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 bedlinen was strewn around. To the right was a two-ring electric hob 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 spelled out the name as Valentina.

  Salander walked slowly from the room. She had a feeling of déjà 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 torch. 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 further into the workshop she went, and seemed to be worst when she was in the middle of the room. She stopped next to the foundations of one of the old brick furnaces, which was filled with water almost to the brim. She shone her torch on to the coal-black surface of the water but could not make anything out. The su
rface 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 fifty centimetres 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 torch 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 thirty metres square. It had windows at a normal height with a view of the yard in front of the brickworks. She could see the O.K. petrol 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. In surprise she took two steps forward before she noticed that it 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.