Then he forwarded it all to Salander. He was not optimistic. Perhaps it was no more than an excuse to get in touch. Whatever. He looked out to sea. The wind was getting up and the last bathers were packing away their things. He became absorbed in his thoughts.
What had got into Catrin? In just a few days they had become so close that he had thought … well, he wasn’t sure what he thought. That they really belonged together? That was plain silly, they were like night and day … he should leave it for now, and ring Erika instead. He ought to make up for the fact that he had put his article on hold. He picked up his mobile and rang … Catrin. That was just how it went, and at first the conversation continued more or less as it had ended, stiff and hesitant. Then she said:
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For pushing off.”
“No plant should ever have to die because of me.”
She gave a sad laugh.
“What are you going to do now?” he said.
“Not sure. Well, maybe I’ll force myself to sit down and try and write something.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“No,” she said.
“But you needed to get away, was that it?”
“I think so.”
“I watched you through the window when you were weeding. You looked worried.”
“Yes, perhaps I am.”
“Did something happen?”
“Not really.”
“But something did, right?”
“I was thinking about the beggar.”
“What about him?”
“That I hadn’t told you what he was shouting about Forsell.”
“You said it was the usual stuff.”
“But it may have been more than that.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because it started to come back to me more clearly when that doctor called.”
“So what was he saying?”
“Something along the lines of: ‘I took Forsell. I left Mamsabiv, terrible, terrible.’ Something like that.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. But when I checked Mamsabiv, Mansabin, all sorts of words like that, I got Mats Sabin, that was the closest I found.”
“The military historian?”
“Do you know him?”
“Years ago I was one of those people who read everything about the Second World War.”
“Do you also know that Sabin died four years ago, during a mountain hike in Abisko National Park? He froze to death by a lake. People think he had a stroke and couldn’t get to a shelter out of the cold.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Not that I think it’s got anything to do with Forsell …”
“But …” he said, to encourage her.
“But I couldn’t resist doing a search against the two of them together and I saw that Forsell and Sabin had a falling-out in the media. About Russia.”
“Explain?”
“After he retired, Sabin changed his opinion and went from being a hawk to having a more Russia-friendly outlook, and in several pieces – in Expressen, among others – he wrote that everyone in Sweden suffered from a terror of Russia, a paranoia, and that we should be taking a more sympathetic view. Forsell countered by writing that Sabin’s words simply replicated Russian propaganda and implied that he was a paid lackey. After that all hell broke loose. There was talk of libel suits and other legal action, but in the end Forsell climbed down and apologised.”
“Where does the beggar come into this?”
“No idea. Although … he did say ‘I left Mansabin’, or something similar, and that might fit. Sabin was alone and abandoned when he died.”
“It’s a lead,” he said.
“Probably nonsensical.”
“Can’t you come back so we can talk it through, and also touch on the meaning of life and everything else while we’re at it?”
“Next time, Mikael. Next time.”
He wanted to persuade her, he wanted to beg and plead. But he felt pathetic, so he just wished her a nice evening and hung up. He got up and took a beer from the fridge and wondered what to do with himself. The sensible thing would be to stop thinking about both Catrin and the beggar. None of that was going to get him anywhere. He should go back to his article about troll factories and the stock market crash or, better still, actually take a proper holiday.
But he was as he was: obstinate, and perhaps a little dumb too. He could not let go of things, and when he’d done the dishes and tidied up the kitchen corner, and stood for a few moments gazing at the ever-changing sea, he looked up Mats Sabin and found himself reading a lengthy obituary in Norrländska Socialdemokraten.
Sabin grew up in Luleå and became an officer in the coastal artillery – he was involved in the hunt for foreign submarines in the ’80s – but alongside that he also studied history and took leave for a while from the military in order to get a doctorate from Uppsala University. His thesis was on Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He became a lecturer at Försvarshögskolan, but, as Blomkvist knew, he also published popular histories about the Second World War. He was a long-time advocate of Swedish membership of N.A.T.O. He was certain that what he had been chasing in the Baltic were none other than Russian submarines. Yet in his final years he became a friend of Russia and defended their intervention in Ukraine and the Crimea. He had also applauded Russia as a force for peace in Syria.
It was never clear why he had altered his point of view, though he had been quoted as saying that “opinions are there to be changed as we grow older and wiser”. Mats Sabin was reputed to have been a good cross-country runner and a diver. Soon after his wife died, he walked the classic trail between Abisko and Nikkaluokta, and according to the obituary he was “in good shape”. It was the beginning of May and the forecast had been good, yet the weather turned to freezing towards the evening of the 3rd. The temperature dropped to minus eight degrees, and Sabin seemed to have suffered a stroke and collapsed not far from the Abiskojåkka river. He never reached any of the mountain huts dotted along the track. He was found dead on the morning of the 4th by a group of hikers from Sundbyberg. There was no suggestion of suspicious circumstances, nor any sign of violence. He was sixty-seven years old.
Blomkvist tried to find out where Johannes Forsell – another keen outdoor sportsman – would have been at the time, but the internet yielded nothing here. This was May 2016, almost one and a half years before Forsell became Minister of Defence, and not even the press at his home in Östersund was monitoring his movements. But Blomkvist did manage to establish that Forsell had business interests in the area. It was not inconceivable that he might have been in Abisko at the time.
Yet it was all far too uncertain and speculative. Blomkvist got up and browsed his bookshelf in the bedroom. Most of the books there were detective novels, and he had read them all, so he tried to call Pernilla, his daughter, and Erika, without reaching either of them. Increasingly restless now, he set off to have dinner at Seglarhotellet by the harbour. When he came home late that evening, he felt completely deflated.
Paulina was asleep. Salander was staring at the ceiling. It was the usual state of affairs; either that, or both of them lying awake. Neither was getting enough rest, and they did not feel particularly well. But that evening they had managed to comfort each other quite satisfactorily with champagne and beer and sex, and had quickly fallen asleep, although that provided little solace when Salander woke with a start a while later, with the memories and questions from Lundagatan and her childhood sweeping over her like an icy wind. What was wrong with them all?
Even before Salander began to take an interest in science, she would say there was a genetic flaw in her family. For a long time she meant simply that many of them had extreme traits in one way or another, and were evil. But a year or so ago she resolved to get to the bottom of her hypothesis, and by accessing a sequence of computer se
rvers, she got hold of Zalachenko’s Y chromosome from the Laboratory of Forensic Genetics in Linköping.
She spent long nights learning how to analyse it, and read up on everything she could find on haplogroups. Small mutations have occurred in all lines of descent. The haplogroups show which mutational branch of humanity each individual belongs to and it had not surprised her in the least that her father’s group was extremely unusual. When she researched it she found an over-representation not only of high intelligence, but also of psychopathy, and that made her no happier, nor any wiser.
But it had taught her how to work with D.N.A. techniques. Now that it was past two in the morning and she was only reliving the past, shuddering at the memories and staring up at the smoke detector which blinked like an evil red eye in the ceiling, she wondered if she might not after all take a look at the material Blomkvist had sent her. It would at least shift her mind onto other things.
So she got up carefully from the bed, sat at the desk and opened the files. “Let’s see, now,” she muttered. “Let’s see … What’s this?” It was the result of a preliminary autosomal D.N.A. test, with a number of selected so-called S.T.R. markers – short tandem repeats – so she opened her BAM Viewer from the Broad Institute, which would help her analyse them. It was a while before she applied her full attention to the task – she was easily distracted by the satellite images of Camilla’s house – but there was something in the material which began slowly to fascinate her, perhaps the realisation that the man had no ancestors or kin in the Nordic region.
He came from somewhere a long way away. Having read through the autopsy report again, above all the carbon-13 analysis and the descriptions of the injuries and amputations, she was struck by a surprising thought and sat there for a long time, immobile and leaning forwards with a hand pressed against the bullet wound in her shoulder.
Swiftly she ran a series of searches. Could it really be true? She found it hard to believe, and was preparing to hack into the medical examiner’s server when she had the outlandish idea of trying first by conventional means. She sent off an e-mail and then helped herself to what was left in the minibar, a Coca-Cola and a miniature of brandy, and let the hours drift by until morning came, sometimes dozing off in her chair. At about the time Paulina opened her eyes and sounds could be heard outside in the corridor, she received a signal on her mobile and connected to the satellite images again. At first she only peered at them with tired eyes, but then she was suddenly wide awake.
Her screen showed her sister and three men – one of them unusually tall – leaving the house in Rublyovka and getting into a limousine. Salander followed them all the way to the international airport at Domodedovo, outside Moscow.
CHAPTER 11
25.viii
Fredrika Nyman tossed and turned through the small hours and finally looked at the alarm clock. She hoped it would be 5.30 at least. It was twenty past four and she swore out loud. She had had no more than five hours’ sleep, but she could tell – the way an insomniac knows – that she would sleep no more now, so she got up and made a pot of green tea. The morning newspapers had not yet arrived. She settled at the kitchen table with her mobile and listened to the birds. She missed the city. She missed having a man around, or anyone at all who was not a teenager.
“I didn’t sleep last night either, and I have a headache and my back hurts,” she would have said, and she said it anyway, but to nobody other than herself. And then she also had to respond: “Poor you, Fredrika.”
The surface of the lake was smooth after the night’s squalls, and she could just glimpse the two resident swans a little way off. They were gliding along, close to each other. Sometimes she envied them, not because she wanted to be a swan, but because there were two of them. They could have bad nights together. Complain to each other in swan language … The lack of sleep was getting to her. She checked her e-mails and found one from somebody who called themselves “Wasp”:
Bloody insolent tone. And not even a sign-off. Why don’t you go sequence yourself, she thought. She could not stand that type of charmless, geeky researcher. Her husband had been the same, utterly hopeless now that she thought about it. Then she read the e-mail again and calmed down. It was rude and bossy, but it was exactly what she had been thinking, and she had in fact sent a blood sample to Uppsala Genomcenter a few days earlier and asked them for exactly that, for the whole genetic make-up to be sequenced.
She had pressed them hard and urged the bioinformaticians to flag any unusual mutations and variations. She was expecting an answer any time now, so she wrote to them rather than the pushy researcher, having decided to adopt the same sort of tone herself while she was at it:
she wrote.
She hoped they would also be favourably impressed by the hour of writing. It was not yet five in the morning and even the swans on the lake looked to be out of sorts. And not so bloody smug about being a couple, after all.
Kurt Widmark Electronics on Hornsgatan had not yet opened. But Inspector Sonja Modig saw an elderly, stooped gentleman inside and knocked on the door, and he shuffled over wearing a forced smile.
“You’re early. But do come on in anyway,” he said.
Modig introduced herself and explained why she had come, whereupon the man stiffened and looked irritated, and huffed and grumbled for a while. He was pale, had a slightly crooked face and a long comb-over across his bald pate. There was a hint of bitterness around his mouth.
“Things are bad enough as it is in my line of business,” he said. “Competition from online companies and department stores.”
Modig smiled and tried to appear sympathetic. She had spent the early part of the morning walking around at random, making enquiries, and a young man in the hairdressers next door had told her that the beggar Bublanski had been talking about had quite often stood at the window of the electrical shop, glaring at the television screens inside.
“When did you first see him?” she said.
“He came marching in here a few weeks ago and stood in front of one of my sets,” Kurt Widmark said.
“What was on?”
“The news, and a rather tough interview with Johannes Forsell about the stock market crash and total defence.”
“Why do you think the beggar would have been interested in that?”
“How the hell should I know? I was mostly trying to get him out of the shop. I wasn’t being unfriendly. I don’t care what people look like, but I did tell him that he was alarming my customers.”
“In what way?”
“He stood there muttering to himself, and he smelled pretty bad. He seemed to me to have a screw loose.”
“Did you hear what he was saying?”
“Oh yes, he asked me very clearly in English if Forsell was a famous man now. I was somewhat taken aback, but I told him yes, he certainly is. He’s the Minister of Defence – and he’s very rich.”
“Did it seem as though he knew of Forsell before he became famous?”
“I couldn’t say. But I do remember him saying ‘Problem, now he has problem?’ He put the question as if he wanted the answer to be yes.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him yes, absolutely, he has big problems. He’s been up to all sorts of hanky-panky and tricks with his shares, and he’s pulled off some palace coups behind the scenes.”
“But surely those are no more than idle rumours?”
“Well, the stories have been doing the rounds.”
“And what happened to the beggar then?” Modig said.
“He started shouting and kicking up a fuss, so I took him by the arm and tried to lead him outside. But he was strong and pointed at his face. ‘Look at me,’ he shouted. ‘See what happ
ened to me! And I took him. And I took him.’ Or something like that. He looked absolutely desperate, so I let him stay there for a while, and after the Forsell interview there was a piece about schools in Sweden, and that prim little upper-class witch came on and pontificated.”
Modig felt a growing irritation.
“Which ‘upper-class witch’ would that be?”
“The Lindås woman. Talk about snooty. But that beggar stared at her as if he’d seen an angel, and he mumbled, ‘Very, very beautiful woman. Is she critical to Forsell also?’ and I tried to say that the one thing had nothing to do with the other. But he didn’t seem to understand. He was beside himself. But soon after that he took himself off.”
“And then he came back?”
“He came back every day at the same time, shortly before closing, for about a week. He would stand outside, staring in through the window, and ask my customers about journalists, people he could call. In the end I got so annoyed that I rang the police, but of course no-one there could be bothered with it.”
“So you got no name, and no other information about the man?”
“He said he was called Sardar.”
“Sardar?”
“‘My name is Sardar’ is what he said when I tried to get him to clear off one evening.”
“Well, that’s something,” Modig said, and she thanked Widmark and left.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 10