Suddenly his hearing came back, as if someone had turned up a volume control. He got up quickly and looked at the neighbour in the dressing gown.
“You,” he said. “Stay here and make sure nobody goes inside the apartment. The police and an ambulance are on their way. I’ll go down and let them in.”
Blomkvist took the stairs three at a time. On the ground floor he glanced at the cellar stairs and stopped short. He took a step towards the cellar. Halfway down the stairs lay a revolver in plain sight. Blomkvist thought it looked like a Colt .45 Magnum—the kind of weapon used to murder Olof Palme.∗
He suppressed the impulse to pick up the weapon. Instead he went and opened the front door and stood in the night air. It was not until he heard the brief honk of a car horn that he remembered his sister was waiting for him. He walked across the street.
Annika opened her mouth to say something sarcastic about her brother’s tardiness. Then she saw the expression on his face.
“Did you see anyone while you were waiting?” Blomkvist asked. His voice sounded hoarse and unnatural.
“No. Who would that be? What happened?”
Blomkvist was silent for a few seconds while he looked left and right. Everything was quiet on the street. He reached into his jacket pocket and found a crumpled pack with one cigarette left. As he lit it he could hear sirens approaching in the distance. He looked at his watch. It was 11:17 p.m.
“Annika—this is going to be a long night,” he said without looking at her as the police car turned up the street.
• • •
The first to arrive were officers Magnusson and Ohlsson. They had been on Nynäsvägen responding to what turned out to be a false alarm. Magnusson and Ohlsson were followed by a staff car with the field superintendent, Oswald Mårtensson, who had been at Skanstull when the central switchboard had sent out a call for all cars in the area. They arrived at almost the same time from different directions and saw a man in jeans and a dark jacket standing in the middle of the street raising his hand for them to stop. At the same time a woman got out of a car parked a few yards away.
All three policemen froze. The central switchboard had reported that two people had been shot, and the man was holding something in his left hand. It took a couple of seconds to be sure that it was a mobile telephone. They got out of their cars at the same time and adjusted their belts. Mårtensson assumed command.
“Are you the one who called about a shooting?”
The man nodded. He seemed badly shaken. He was smoking a cigarette and his hand was trembling when he put it in his mouth.
“What’s your name?”
“Mikael Blomkvist. Two people were just shot in this building a very short time ago. Their names are Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. Three floors up. Their neighbours are standing outside the door.”
“Good Lord,” the woman said.
“And who are you?” Mårtensson asked Annika.
“Annika Giannini. I’m his sister,” she said, pointing at Blomkvist.
“Do you live here?”
“No,” Blomkvist said. “I was going to visit the couple who were shot. My sister gave me a ride from a dinner party.”
“You say that two people were shot. Did you see what happened?”
“No. I found them.”
“Let’s go up and have a look,” Mårtensson said.
“Wait,” Blomkvist said. “According to the neighbours the shots were fired only a minute or so before I arrived. I dialled 112 within a minute of getting here. Since then less than five minutes have passed. That means the person who killed them must still be in the area.”
“Do you have a description?”
“We haven’t seen anyone, but it’s possible that some of the neighbours saw something.”
Mårtensson motioned to Magnusson, who raised his radio and talked into it in a low voice. He turned to Blomkvist.
“Can you show us the way?” he said.
When they got inside the front door Blomkvist stopped and pointed to the cellar stairs. Mårtensson bent down and looked at the weapon. He went all the way down the stairs and tried the cellar door. It was locked.
“Ohlsson, stay here and keep an eye on this,” Mårtensson said.
Outside the apartment the crowd of neighbours had thinned out. Two had gone back to their own apartments, but the man in the dressing gown was still at his post. He seemed relieved when he saw the uniformed officers.
“I didn’t let anyone in,” he said.
“That’s good,” Blomkvist and Mårtensson said together.
“There seem to be bloody tracks on the stairs,” Officer Magnusson said.
Everyone looked at the footprints. Blomkvist looked at his Italian loafers.
“Those are probably from my shoes,” he said. “I was inside the apartment. There’s quite a bit of blood.”
Mårtensson gave Blomkvist a searching look. He used a pen to push open the apartment door and found more bloody footprints in the hall.
“To the right. Dag Svensson’s in the living room and Mia Johansson’s in the bedroom.”
Mårtensson did a quick inspection of the apartment and came out after only a few seconds. He radioed to ask for backup from the criminal duty officer. As he finished talking, the ambulance crew arrived. Mårtensson stopped them as they were going in.
“Two victims. As far as I can see, they’re beyond help. Can one of you look in without messing up the crime scene?”
It did not take long to confirm. A paramedic decided that the bodies would not be taken to hospital for resuscitation. They were beyond help. Blomkvist suddenly felt sick to his stomach and turned to Mårtensson.
“I’m going outside. I need some air.”
“Unfortunately I can’t let you go just yet.”
“I’ll just sit on the porch outside the door.”
“May I see your ID, please?”
Blomkvist took out his wallet and put it in Mårtensson’s hand. Then he turned without a word and went outside, where Annika was still waiting with Officer Ohlsson. She sat down next to him.
“Micke, what happened?”
“Two people I liked a lot have been murdered. Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. It was his manuscript I wanted you to read.”
Annika realized that this was no time to ply him with questions. Instead she put her arm around her brother’s shoulders and hugged him. More police cars arrived. A handful of curious nighttime onlookers had stopped on the pavement across the street. Blomkvist watched them while the police started to set up a cordon. A murder investigation was beginning.
It was past 3:00 a.m. by the time Blomkvist and his sister were allowed to leave the police station. They had spent an hour in Annika’s car outside the apartment building in Enskede, waiting for a duty prosecutor to arrive to initiate the pre-investigative stage. Then, since Blomkvist was a good friend of the two victims and since he was the one who had found them, they were asked to follow along to Kungsholmen to assist the investigation.
There they’d had to wait a long time before they were interviewed by an Inspector Nyberg at the station. She had light blond hair and looked like a teenager.
I’m getting old, Blomkvist thought.
By 2:30 he had drunk so many cups of police canteen coffee that he was sober and feeling unwell. He had to interrupt the interview and run to the toilet, where he was violently sick. He still had the image of Johansson’s face swimming in his head. He drank three cups of water and rinsed his face over and over before returning to the interview. He tried to pull himself together to answer all of Inspector Nyberg’s questions.
“Did Dag Svensson or Mia Johansson have enemies?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“Had they received any threats?”
“Not that I know of.”
“How would you describe their relationship?”
“They gave every appearance of loving each other. Dag told me that they were thinking of having a baby after Mia got her
doctorate.”
“Did they use drugs?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so, and if they did it would be nothing more than a joint at a party when they had something to celebrate.”
“Why were you visiting them so late at night?”
Blomkvist explained that they were doing last-minute work on a book, without identifying the subject.
“Wasn’t it unusual to call on people so late at night?”
“That was the first time it had ever happened.”
“How did you know them?”
“Through work.”
The questions were relentless as they tried to establish the time frame.
The shots had been heard all over the building. They had been fired less than five seconds apart. The seventy-year-old man in the dressing gown, a retired major from the coastal artillery, as it turned out, was their nearest neighbour. He was watching TV. After the second shot, he went out to the stairwell. He had a hip problem and so getting up from the sofa was a slow process. He estimated that it had taken him thirty seconds to reach the landing. Neither he nor any other neighbour had seen anybody on the stairs.
According to the neighbours, Blomkvist had arrived at the apartment less than two minutes after the second shot was fired.
Calculating that he and Annika had had a view of the street for half a minute while she found the right building, parked, and exchanged a few words before he crossed the street and went up the stairs, Blomkvist figured there was a window of thirty to forty seconds. During which time the killer had left the apartment, gone down three flights of stairs—dropping the weapon on the way—left the building, and disappeared before Annika turned into the street. They had just missed him.
For a dizzying moment Blomkvist realized that Inspector Nyberg was toying with the possibility that he himself could have been the killer, that he had only run down one flight and pretended to arrive on the scene after the neighbours had gathered. But he had an alibi in the form of his sister. His whole evening, including the telephone conversation with Svensson, could be vouched for by a dozen members of the Giannini family.
Eventually Annika put her foot down. Blomkvist had given all reasonable and conceivable help. He was visibly tired and he was not feeling well. She told the inspector that she was not only Blomkvist’s sister but also his lawyer. It was time to bring all this to a close and let him go home.
When they got out to the street they stood for a time next to Annika’s car. “Go home and get some sleep,” she said.
Blomkvist shook his head.
“I have to go to Erika’s,” he said. “She knew them too. I can’t just call and tell her, and I don’t want her to wake up and hear it on the news.”
Annika hesitated, but she knew that her brother was right.
“So, off to Saltsjöbaden,” she said.
“Can you take me?”
“What are little sisters for?”
“If you give me a lift out to Nacka I can take a taxi from there or wait for a bus.”
“Nonsense. Jump in and I’ll drive you.”
∗Olof Palme was the prime minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986. He was assassinated in 1986, shot twice in a street ambush in central Stockholm. His murder remains unsolved.
CHAPTER 12
Maundy Thursday, March 24
Annika Giannini was exhausted too, and Blomkvist managed to persuade her to save herself the hour-long detour round the Lännersta Sound and drop him off in Nacka. He kissed her on the cheek, thanked her for all her help, and waited until she had turned the car and driven off before he called a taxi.
It was two years since Blomkvist had been to Saltsjöbaden. He had only been to Berger’s house a few times. He supposed that was a sign of immaturity.
Exactly how her marriage with Greger Beckman functioned, he had no idea. He had known Berger since the early eighties. He planned to go on having a relationship with her until he was too old to get out of his wheelchair. They had broken it off in the late eighties when both he and Berger had met and married other people. The hiatus had lasted little more than a year.
In Blomkvist’s case the consequence of his infidelity was a divorce. For Berger it led to Beckman’s conceding that their long-term sexual passion was evidently so strong that it would be unreasonable to believe that mere convention could keep them apart. Nor did he propose to lose Berger the way that Blomkvist had lost his wife.
When Berger admitted having an affair, Beckman knocked on Blomkvist’s door. Blomkvist had been dreading his visit, but instead of punching him in the face, Beckman had suggested they go out for a drink. They hit three bars in Södermalm before they were sufficiently tipsy to have a serious conversation, which took place on a park bench in Mariatorget around sunrise.
At first Blomkvist was sceptical, but Beckman eventually convinced him that if he tried to sabotage his marriage to Berger, he could expect to see Beckman come back sober with a baseball bat, but if it was simply physical desire and the soul’s inability to rein itself in, that was OK as far as he was concerned.
So Blomkvist and Berger had taken up again, with Beckman’s blessing and without trying to hide anything from him. All Berger had to do was pick up the telephone and tell him she was spending the night with Blomkvist when the spirit moved her, which it did with some regularity.
Beckman had never uttered a word of criticism against Blomkvist. On the contrary, he seemed to regard his relationship with his wife as beneficial; and his love for her was deepened because he knew he could never take her for granted.
Blomkvist, on the other hand, had never felt entirely at ease in Beckman’s company—a dreary reminder that even liberated relationships had a price. Accordingly, he had been to Saltsjöbaden only on the few occasions when Berger had hosted parties where his absence would have been remarked on.
Now he stood at the door of their substantial villa. Despite his uneasiness about bringing bad news, he resolutely put his finger on the doorbell and held it there for about forty seconds until he heard footsteps. Beckman opened the door with a towel wrapped around his waist and his face full of bleary anger that changed to astonishment when he saw his wife’s lover.
“Hi, Greger,” Blomkvist said.
“Good morning, Blomkvist. What the hell time is it?”
Beckman was blond and thin. He had a lot of hair on his chest and hardly any on his head. He had a week’s growth of beard and a prominent scar over his right eyebrow, the result of a sailing accident some years before.
“Just after 5:00,” Blomkvist said. “Could you wake Erika? I have to talk to her.”
Beckman took it that since Blomkvist had all of a sudden overcome his reluctance to visit Saltsjöbaden—and at that hour—something out of the ordinary must have happened. Besides, the man looked as if he badly needed a drink, or at least a bed so that he could sleep off whatever it was. Beckman held the door open and let him in.
“What happened?”
Before Blomkvist could reply, Berger appeared at the top of the stairs, tying the sash of a white terry-cloth bathrobe. She stopped halfway down when she saw Blomkvist in the hall.
“What?”
“Dag and Mia,” Blomkvist said.
His face instantly revealed the news he had come to give her.
“No.” She put a hand to her mouth.
“They were murdered last night. I just came from the police station.”
“Murdered?” Berger and Beckman said at the same time.
“Somebody got into their apartment in Enskede and shot them. I was the one who found them.”
Berger sat down on the stairs.
“I didn’t want you to have to hear it on the morning news,” Blomkvist said.
It was 6:59 a.m. on Maundy Thursday as Blomkvist and Berger let themselves into the Millennium offices. Berger had woken Malm and Eriksson with the news that Svensson and Johansson had been killed the night before. They lived much closer and had already arrived
for the meeting. The coffeemaker was going in the kitchenette.
“What the hell is happening?” Malm wanted to know.
Eriksson shushed him and turned up the volume on the 7:00 a.m. news.
Two people, a man and a woman, were shot dead late last night in an apartment in Enskede. The police say that it was a double homicide. Neither of the deceased was previously known to the police. The motive for the murders is still unknown. Our reporter Hanna Olofsson is at the scene.
“It was just before midnight when the police received a report of shots fired in an apartment building on Björneborgsvägen here in Enskede. No suspect has yet been arrested. The police have cordoned off the apartment and a crime scene investigation is under way.”
“That was pretty succinct,” Eriksson said and turned the volume down. Then she started to cry. Berger put an arm around her shoulders. “Jesus Christ,” Malm said to no-one in particular. “Sit down, everyone,” Berger said in a firm voice. “Mikael …” Blomkvist told them what he knew of what had happened. He spoke in a dull monotone and sounded like the radio reporter when he described how he had found Svensson and Johansson.
“Jesus Christ,” Malm said again. “This is crazy.”
Eriksson was once more overwhelmed by emotion. She began weeping again and made no attempt to hide her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I feel the same way,” said Malm.
Blomkvist wondered why he could not cry. He felt only a huge emptiness, almost as if he were anesthetized.
“What we know this morning doesn’t amount to very much,” Berger said. “We have to discuss two things: first, we’re three weeks from going to press with Dag’s material; should we still publish it? Can we publish it? That’s one thing. The other is a question that Mikael and I discussed on the way here.”
“We don’t know the motive for the murders,” Blomkvist said. “It could be something to do with Dag and Mia’s private life, or it could be a purely senseless act, but we can’t rule out that it may have had something to do with what they were working on.”
A long silence settled around the table.
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