*
Medical Examiner Dr Fredrika Nyman got to her home in Trångsund outside Stockholm and found her daughters on the living-room sofa, absorbed in their phones. She was no more surprised by that than to see the lake still in its usual position through the window. The girls spent every spare moment on their phones, watching YouTube or whatever it was, and she wanted to snap at them to put them away and read a book instead, or play the piano, or not skip their basketball training again. Or at least to get out into the sunshine.
But she had no energy. It had been an awful day, and she had just been talking to an idiot of a policeman who, like most idiots, thought he was a genius. He had looked into the matter, he said, which meant that he had simply read the Wikipedia entry and was now an expert on Buddhism. That weirdo was probably sitting around somewhere, feeling enlightened. It was so disrespectful and stupid that she had not even bothered to answer, and now she found a place next to her daughters on the grey T.V. sofa and hoped that one of them would say hello. Neither did. But Josefin did at least reply when Fredrika asked what she was watching.
“A thing,” she said.
A thing.
Fredrika wanted to scream, but instead she got to her feet, went into the kitchen and wiped the counter and the table clean. She scrolled through Facebook on her phone to show that she could keep up with the girls, and then daydreamed of going far away. She searched a few things on Google and, without quite knowing how, ended up on a website for holidays to Greece.
She was looking at a photograph of an ancient man sitting at a beachside café when an idea came to her, and she thought immediately of Mikael Blomkvist. She was reluctant to call him again. The last thing she wanted was to be the boring woman who keeps hassling the famous journalist. But he was the only person she could think of who might be interested, so she dialled his number after all.
“Hello there,” he said. “How nice of you to call!”
He sounded so cheerful that she felt at once it was the best thing that had happened to her all day, which was not saying much.
“I was thinking—” she said.
“You know what,” he interrupted. “It dawned on me that I had actually seen your beggar, at least it must have been him.”
“Really?”
“It all fits, the down jacket, the patches on the cheeks, the truncated fingers. It can’t have been anyone else.”
“So where did you see him?”
“In Mariatorget. In fact, it’s astonishing that I’d forgotten him,” he went on. “I can hardly believe it. He used to sit totally still on a piece of cardboard by the statue on the square. I must have passed him ten or twenty times.”
His enthusiasm was contagious.
“That’s amazing. What was your impression of him?”
“Well … I’m not really sure,” he said. “I never paid him much attention. But I remember him as broken. And proud – the way you described him when he was dead. He’d sit bolt upright with his head high, a bit like a Sioux chieftain in the movies. I don’t know how he managed to stay like that for hours on end.”
“Did he seem under the influence of alcohol, or drugs?”
“I can’t really say. He could have been. But if he’d been out of it he’d hardly have been able to hold that position for so long. Why do you ask?”
“Because this morning I got the results of my drug screening. He had 2.5 micrograms of zopiclone per gram of femoral blood in his body, and that’s an awful lot.”
“What’s zopiclone?”
“A substance you find in some sleeping pills, in Imovane, for example. I’d say that he must have had at least twenty tablets, mixed with alcohol, and on top of that quite a lot of dextropropoxyphene, a painkilling opiate.”
“What do the police say?”
“Overdose or suicide.”
“On what grounds?”
She snorted.
“On the grounds that it’s easiest for them, I’d guess. The person in charge of the investigation seemed to be focusing on doing as little work as possible.”
“What’s his name?”
“The officer in charge? Hans Faste.”
“Oh, brilliant …” he said.
“Do you know him?”
Blomkvist knew Faste all too well. He had once convinced himself that Salander belonged to a lesbian satanic hard rock gang, and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever – other than some good old-fashioned misogyny – had her accused of murder. Bublanski used to say that Faste was punishment for the sins of the police force.
“I’m afraid so,” he said.
“He called the man ‘the weirdo’.”
“Sounds very much like Faste.”
“When he got the test results he said right away that the weirdo had got a bit too fond of his pills.”
“But you don’t seem convinced?”
“An overdose would be the most straightforward explanation, but I find it odd that it should be zopiclone. You can get hooked on it, of course, but addiction usually involves benzodiazepines, and when I pointed that out and said the man was probably a Buddhist, that really got your policeman going.”
“In what way?”
“He called back a few hours later having done some research. Which involved reading the Wikipedia entry on suicide. Apparently it says Buddhists who consider themselves especially enlightened have the right to take their own lives, and he seemed to find that funny. He said that the man had probably been sitting under a tree, feeling enlightened.”
“Jesus.”
“It made me furious. But I let it go. I didn’t feel like having a row, not today anyway. But then I got home and was feeling generally frustrated, and it occurred to me that it simply made no sense.”
“In what way?”
“I kept thinking about his corpse. I’ve never seen such evidence of hardship. Everything about him, every single sinew and muscle, speaks of a life which has been a terrible struggle. This may sound a bit like pop psychology, but I find it very hard to believe that a person like that suddenly stops fighting and stuffs himself full of pills. I don’t think we can rule out that somebody was responsible for his death.”
Blomkvist gave a start.
“You’ll have to tell them that, of course. They’ll need more people working on the investigation, not just Hans Faste.”
“And I will. But I wanted to tell you anyhow, as a sort of insurance in case the police don’t do their stuff.”
“I’m grateful for that,” he said and thought of Catrin Lindås, who Sofie had told him about.
He remembered her well-pressed suits and the mark on her jacket, and the hippie commune she had grown up in. He wondered if he should mention her name. Maybe there was something she could tell the police. But then he decided he ought to spare her Hans Faste’s attentions for the time being, and instead he said:
“And you still don’t know who he is?”
“No, no hits anywhere. No-one with those distinguishing features has been reported missing. But I wasn’t expecting that anyway. What I do have is a D.N.A. sequence analysis from the National Forensics Lab, which has just come in. But it’s still only shallow, autosomal. I’m going to ask for an analysis of his mitochondrial D.N.A. as well, and his Y chromosome, and then I hope that’ll get me further.”
“I’m sure there are going to be many others who remember him,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was someone you’d notice. It was just me being too self-absorbed this summer. The police ought to have a word with people around Mariatorget, lots of them will have seen him.”
“I’ll pass that on.”
Blomkvist was beginning to find this interesting.
“You know what? If he really was taking those tablets, he’s unlikely to have got them on prescription,” he said. “He didn’t look like someone who makes an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I know from experience that there’s a black market for drugs like that. The police are bound to have i
nformants in those circles.”
Nyman was silent for a second or two.
“Oh, damn it,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been an idiot.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“No, I have. But listen … I’m glad you remember him. It really does mean something to me.”
Blomkvist looked at his half-packed suitcase and found that he no longer wanted to go to Sandhamn after all.
Blomkvist had said something appreciative in return, but Fredrika had barely heard it. She ended the call and almost didn’t notice Amanda, who was standing next to her asking what was for dinner. Maybe she even apologised for having been so sulky earlier. Fredrika simply told them to order a takeaway.
“What?” they both said.
“Whatever you want. Pizza, Indian, Thai, chips, liquorice sweets …”
The girls looked at her as if she had gone off her rocker. She went into her study and closed the door, and e-mailed the forensics lab asking them to run a segmental hair analysis right away, something she should have done at the start.
Not only would that show how much zopiclone and dextropropoxyphene had been in the man’s bloodstream when he died, it would also give her the levels for every week going back several months. In other words, she would know if he had been taking the drugs over a period of time or on only one occasion. It could become an important piece in the jigsaw, and all of that made her forget her daughters, the back pain, the lack of sleep and the feeling that life might be meaningless in the end. That puzzled her. She spent her life investigating suspicious deaths, and nowadays it was rare for her to become so emotionally involved. But she had been fascinated by this character, and perhaps she even hoped that he had had a dramatic death. It was as if his ravaged body deserved more of a story, so much so that she spent many hours looking at images of the corpse, each time noticing new details. Every so often she said to herself:
What have you been through, my old friend?
What hellish trials have you had to suffer?
Blomkvist sat down by his computer and googled Catrin Lindås. She was thirty-seven years old, held a master’s degree in economics and political science from Stockholm University, and had now established herself as a conservative commentator and writer. She ran a successful podcast and wrote columns for Svenska Dagbladet, Axess, Fokus and also Journalisten.
She had lobbied for begging to be made illegal and often discussed the risks of welfare dependence and the shortcomings of the Swedish educational system. In addition to being a monarchist and an advocate for a robust national defence, she felt strongly about safeguarding the nuclear family, although she did not seem to have one of her own. She claimed to be a feminist, but feminists had often criticised her. She faced a barrage of hatred online from both the right and the left and had a disturbingly long comments thread on the Flashback Forum. “We must have standards,” she often said. “Standards and responsibilities allow us to grow.”
She hated woolliness, she frequently wrote, and superstition, and religious convictions, although she was more cautious on the last. Writing in Svenska Dagbladet about constructive journalism – stories which not only describe problematic situations but actually suggest a way out of them – she said that “Mikael Blomkvist claims to want to fight the populists, but then plays into their hands with his pessimistic view of society.”
It troubled her, she said, that young journalists looked upon him as an example to follow. She wrote that he had a tendency to see people as victims. And that his default setting was to take sides against the business establishment. He ought to make more of an effort to identify solutions, not only problems. That was more or less what he would have expected her to say.
He’d known worse, for sure, and she might have had a point or two. But in some ridiculous way, she still alarmed him. He could not help feeling as if one look from her would be enough to reveal that he had not done the washing-up or showered or done up his flies. Or that he drank yoghurt straight from the carton. There was something damning about that look, he thought, a cold streak in her, though it only enhanced her severe beauty.
Yet he could not stop thinking about her confrontation with the beggar – the ice queen and the man in tattered rags. In the end he found her number and called. She did not answer, and perhaps that was just as well. There was nothing there. There was no story, and he should be heading out to Sandhamn now, before it got too late. He took some shirts from the wardrobe and a jacket in case he decided to treat himself at Seglarhotellet. Then his mobile rang. It was Catrin Lindås, and she sounded every bit as severe as she looked.
“What is it?” she began, and he considered saying something nice about her column, to get her to relax. But it was more than he could bring himself to do, so he simply asked if he had got her at a bad moment.
“I’m busy,” she said.
“O.K., let’s speak later then.”
“We can speak later if you tell me what it’s about.”
I’m writing a bitchy column about you, he was tempted to say.
“My colleague Sofie Melker told me that recently you had an unpleasant altercation with a homeless man in Mariatorget.”
“I have many unpleasant altercations,” she said. “It goes with the job.”
My God, he thought.
“I’m just curious, I’d like to know what the man said.”
“Whatever it was, it was gibberish.”
He took another look at the pictures of Lindås on his screen.
“Are you still at work?” he said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I thought I could drop by for a moment, and we could talk about it. You’re on Mäster Mikaels Gata, aren’t you?”
Reflecting on it afterwards, he could not imagine what had prompted him to suggest such a thing, but he knew that if he was going to find out anything at all, it was not going to happen over the telephone. It was as if there were barbed wire along the line.
“O.K., but let’s make it quick,” she said. “In an hour.”
A tram could be heard rattling past the hotel on Namesti Republiky in Prague. Salander was drinking too much again, and was once more glued to her computer, behind the screens of her Faraday cage. Yes, there had been moments of relief and oblivion, but she had always got there with the help of alcohol and sex, and afterwards the rage and the frustration had returned.
Some sort of madness was overwhelming her, the past was spinning in her head like a centrifuge. This is no life, she often thought to herself. It’s not possible to go on like this. She had to take action. It was no good just waiting and listening out for footsteps in the corridors and streets, or running away. So she had tried to regain the initiative. But it wasn’t easy.
The handle Katya Flip, recommended by Plague, was said to be one hell of a kickass. To begin with it hadn’t felt like that. She kept on asking for more money and said that no-one messes with that branch of the mafia – especially not now that Ivan Galinov was involved.
There was endless talk about Galinov, and Kuznetsov too, and about some notorious acts of vengeance. Only after lengthy conversations on the dark web had Salander persuaded Flip to hide an I.M.S.I.-catcher in a rhododendron a hundred metres from Camilla’s house in Rublyovka, after which she had picked up tracking numbers – I.M.E.I. numbers – from the mobile traffic inside. That was something at least. But it gave no guarantees, nor any respite from the past, which was still throbbing and clamouring inside her. Often she would sit as now, eating room service junk food and emptying the minibar of whisky and vodka, and staring down at Camilla’s house via a satellite link she had hacked.
This alone was pure madness. She wouldn’t take any exercise or even go outside, and only when there was a knock at the door did she get up and open for Paulina, who was already chattering away about something. But Salander did not hear a word, not until Paulina burst out:
“What’s happened?”
“Nothi
ng.”
“You look—”
“—fucked up?” Salander said.
“Something along those lines. Is there anything I can do?”
Stay away, she thought. Stay away. But instead she went and lay on the bed, and wondered if Paulina would dare to join her.
Blomkvist shook Catrin Lindås’ hand. Her grip was firm, but she avoided his eyes. Her white blouse was buttoned to the neck, and she wore a skirt and a light-blue blazer with a tartan shawl and black high-heeled shoes. Her hair was up in a bun, and even though her clothes fitted closely and accentuated her figure, she looked as prim as a teacher at the English School. She was apparently the only person left in the office. On the bulletin board above her desk there was a picture of her on stage with Christine Lagarde, M.D. of the International Monetary Fund. They looked like mother and daughter.
“Impressive,” he said, pointing at the photograph.
She made no comment, just asked him to take a seat on the sofa and settled into an armchair opposite him, her legs crossed and her back straight. In some absurd way it felt as if a reluctant queen were granting an audience to one of her subjects.
“Good of you to see me,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.”
She eyed him suspiciously, and he felt like asking why she disliked him so much.
“I’m not researching a piece on you, if that’s any comfort,” he said.
“You can write what you like about me.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
He gave a smile. She did not return it.
“In fact I’m on holiday,” he continued.
“Aren’t you lucky.”
He felt an inexplicable urge to needle her.
“I’m curious to hear about that beggar. What did he say to you? He was found dead a few days ago with my telephone number in his pocket.”
“O.K. …”
You could at least react to the fact that the guy is dead, he thought.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 7