Could the beggar have been one of those Sherpas? The thought had occurred to Blomkvist right away, and before he looked into the tragedy any further he tried to find out more about them. Was it possible that one of them had ended up in Sweden, or had a special relationship with Forsell? For many of them he drew a complete blank, but for a young Sherpa, Jangbu Chiri, there seemed to be a connection.
He and Forsell met again in Chamonix three years later, and had a beer together. It was perfectly possible that they could have become sworn enemies after that. But in the picture online, they were giving a thumbs-up and looked absurdly happy. As far as Blomkvist could discover, none of the Sherpas on the expedition had a bad word to say about Forsell. There were anonymous accusations – these had surfaced in the current disinformation campaign – that Forsell had contributed to Klara Engelman’s death by delaying or holding back the group on the mountain. But according to many eyewitness accounts, the opposite was the case: it was Engelman herself who slowed the expedition down, and by the time disaster struck, Forsell and Svante Lindberg had already left the others behind and gone on to the summit on their own.
No, Blomkvist did not believe it. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to. He was always – it was the way he did his job – on his guard against the pitfalls of wishful thinking in his journalistic research, and in this case he found it hard to imagine that the man whom the cyber trolls loved to hate should have been involved in poisoning a poor down-and-out in Stockholm. And yet … what the hell?
He read Lisbeth’s message again, and then documents she had attached about the presumed relative in Colorado, Robert Carson. Although his opinion may have been influenced by the research, Carson struck him as a cheerful and energetic man, not unlike Forsell himself, and without really giving it much thought he dialled the number Salander had supplied.
“Bob speaking,” a voice answered.
Blomkvist introduced himself, and was then unsure how to explain what the call was about. He began with flattery.
“I read on the net that you have a supergene.”
Carson laughed. “Impressive, don’t you think?”
“Very. I hope I’m not disturbing.”
“Not at all, I’m reading a boring paper, so I’d much rather talk about my D.N.A. Is it a science publication you work for?”
“Not exactly. I’m investigating a suspicious death.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It’s a homeless man, between fifty-four and fifty-six years old, with several fingers and toes amputated. He was found dead in Stockholm just over a week ago. He had the same variant in his EPAS1 gene as you do. In all likelihood, you and he are third or fourth cousins.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but incredible that you’ve made the connection. What’s his name?”
“That’s just the thing. We don’t know. All we’ve been able to establish is that you and he are related.”
“So how can I help?”
“I don’t honestly know. But my colleague thinks the man may have been a skilled porter on high-altitude expeditions, and that he was involved in some major incident. That would explain how he got his injuries. Are there any Sherpas in your family who fit that description?”
“My God, I should think there are any number of them if we look at the extended family. I think it’s fair to say that we’re pretty extreme.”
“Do you have anything more specific?”
“Give me some time to think about it, then I’ll probably find something. I’ve written up a whole family tree that includes biographical data. Do you have any more details you could send me?”
Blomkvist thought for a moment. Then he said:
“If you promise to treat them confidentially, I can send over the autopsy report and the D.N.A. analysis.”
“I give you my word.”
“I’ll get them to you right away. I’d be very grateful if you could take an urgent look at them.”
Carson was silent for a while.
“Do you know,” he said, “it would be an honour. It feels good to have had a relative in Sweden, although I’m sorry that he had such a hard time.”
“That does seem to have been the case. A friend of mine met him.”
“What happened?”
“He was very agitated and gabbled something about Johannes Forsell, our current Minister of Defence. He was on an Everest expedition in May 2008.”
“May 2008, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t that when Klara Engelman died?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s funny.”
“In what way?”
“I did actually have a relative who was on that expedition, a bit of a legend in fact. But he died three, maybe four years ago.”
“Then he could hardly have turned up in Stockholm.”
“No.”
“I can send over lists of the Sherpas I know were on the mountain then – that might give you some clues.”
“That would be helpful.”
“Not that I actually think this has anything to do with Everest,” Blomkvist said, more to himself than to Carson. “There’s quite some distance separating this man from the Minister of Defence.”
“You want me to tackle this with an open mind?”
“I guess so. I was fascinated to read your life story.”
“Thanks,” Carson said. “Send the stuff over and I’ll be in touch.”
Blomkvist hung up and thought for a while, and then wrote a thank you to Salander, telling her about Forsell and Everest, and Mats Sabin, and everything else. She might as well have the whole picture.
Lisbeth saw the e-mail at ten in the evening, but she did not read it. She had other things on her mind. Besides, she was in the middle of a row.
“Can’t you stop staring at your bloody laptop?” Paulina snapped.
Salander stopped staring at her bloody laptop and looked up at Paulina instead. She was standing right by the desk with her long, curly hair loose, and her slanting, expressive eyes full of tears and anger.
“Thomas is going to kill me.”
“But you said you could go to your parents in Munich.”
“He’ll follow me there and soon have them wrapped around his little finger. They love him, don’t ask me why. Or at least they think they do.”
Salander nodded and tried to think clearly. Would it after all be better to wait? No, she decided, no. She could not hold back any longer, and she definitely couldn’t take Paulina with her to Stockholm. She had to go there at once – and by herself. She could not afford to remain passive, stuck in the past. She now had to follow the chase at closer quarters. If not, others would suffer, especially with people like Galinov on the scene.
“Shall I have a word with them?” she said.
“With my parents?”
“Yes.”
“Not on your life.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a social freak, Lisbeth, don’t you see that?” Paulina barked at her. Then she grabbed her handbag and marched out, slamming the door behind her.
Salander weighed up whether or not to run after her, but she remained frozen to the spot by her computer. She decided to try hacking the surveillance cameras around the apartment on Strandvägen, where Camilla apparently still was. But it was slow work. And she was distracted by so much else. Not just Paulina’s outburst, but all sorts of things. Including Blomkvist’s e-mail, although in the circumstances that seemed to be the lowest of her priorities.
It said:
Take care and a big thanks to you.
M.
P.S. There was a Mats Sabin, formerly an officer in the coastal artillery and a military historian at the Defence University. He died in Abisko a few years ago. We know he had a huge row with Forsell.>
“Is that so?” she mumbled. “Is that so?” She closed the e-mail and kept working on the surveillance cameras. But her fingers had a life of their own. Within half an hour she had looked up Forsell and Everest and become engrossed in endless reports about a woman called Klara Engelman.
Engelman looked a bit like Camilla, she thought, a cheaper version of her sister with the same charisma – someone who also took it for granted that she was the centre of attention – and Salander was certainly not going to waste any time on her. She had better things to do. She did, however, go on reading, even though her mind was not really on it at all. She sent a message to Plague about the cameras, and called Paulina, who didn’t pick up, but little by little she still managed to piece together a fuller picture, above all of Johannes Forsell’s ascent.
He and his friend Lindberg had reached the summit at one in the afternoon of May 13, 2008. The sky was still clear and they stayed up there for a while, admiring the view. They took photographs and reported back down to Base Camp. But not long after, in the narrow rock passage known as the Hillary Step, on the way down to the South Summit, they started to have problems and time began to run away from them.
At half past three – by which time they had only got as far as the so-called Balcony at eight thousand four hundred metres – they began to worry that they would run out of oxygen and would not make it down to Camp IV. Visibility had worsened too, and even though Forsell had no idea what was happening around them, he suspected that something serious had occurred.
He heard desperate voices on his radio. But by then he was too exhausted to fully grasp the situation, as he said later. He just staggered through the void, his legs barely holding him upright.
Soon after that the storm hit the mountain and everything turned into a lashing chaos. The cold was extreme, close to minus sixty degrees centigrade, and the two of them were freezing and hardly able to distinguish up from down. It was understandable that neither of them could give a detailed account of how they made it down to the tents on the South-East Ridge.
But if there was a time that was unaccounted for in all the reports of that day, then it was between seven and eleven in the evening. Even if that was not much to be going on, Salander did spot some discrepancies in their stories, especially with regard to Forsell’s condition and how bad it had really been.
It was as if his crisis had been made to appear less and less serious over time. Personally, she did not think it was all that remarkable, not compared to the real drama that was unfolding on another part of the mountain, where Klara Engelman and her guide Viktor Grankin died that afternoon. It was not so surprising that endless column inches had been devoted to that. Why, of all people, was it the prestige client who lost her life, when there were so many others on the mountain that day? Why did she have to die, she, the subject of so much gossip and vilification?
For a while there was talk that it was all down to envy and class hatred and misogyny. But once the initial furore had died down, it was clear that no effort had been spared to save Engelman, and that right from the start she had been beyond rescue – ever since she collapsed very suddenly in the snow. The assistant guide, Robin Hamill, even said:
“It wasn’t that too little was done to save Klara, but too much. She was considered so important to Viktor and the expedition that we risked the lives of many others in our endeavours,” and that sounded plausible, Salander thought.
Engelman was such a major celebrity that nobody had dared to send her down while there was still time. The whole expedition was held up as she dragged herself along, and after she tore off her oxygen mask in confusion and desperation, just before one in the afternoon, she only became weaker.
She collapsed on her knees and toppled forwards onto the snow. Panic broke out and Grankin, who was clearly not his usual robust self that day, shouted at everybody to stop. Significant efforts were made to bring her down at that point. But not long afterwards the weather deteriorated, and the snow storm slammed into them. Many others in the group – in particular Mads Larsen, a Dane, and Charlotte Richter, a German – found themselves in a critical condition, and for a few hours it looked as if they were heading for a full-scale catastrophe.
But the expedition Sherpas, above all their Sirdar, Nima Rita, worked ceaselessly in the storm and led people down on ropes or steadied them as they descended. By evening, all had been rescued, all except for Klara Engelman and Viktor Grankin. He had refused to leave Engelman, rather like a captain staying on his sinking ship.
In the weeks and months that followed there was an extensive investigation of the drama, and by now most of the questions seemed to have been answered. The only thing that was never fully explained – although it was assumed to have been caused by the powerful jet stream at those altitudes – was that Engelman was found one kilometre further down, even though all witnesses said that she and Grankin had died together, side by side in the snow.
Salander thought about this, and about all the other bodies left up there on the slopes, year after year, without anybody being able to bring them down and bury them. As the hours went by she scrutinised the various accounts until it seemed that there was perhaps something not quite right with the story after all. She even read about Mats Sabin – Blomkvist had mentioned him – and then drifted into the gossip threads on the internet. At some point an entirely different thought struck her, but that was as far as she got.
The door flew open and Paulina came in, quite drunk, and tore a strip off her for being a total monster. Salander gave as good as she got, until they threw themselves over each other and made frenzied love, united in a feeling of despair and loneliness.
CHAPTER 15
26.viii
Mikael ran a full ten kilometres along the water’s edge and back that morning, and when he got home to the cabin the telephone was ringing. It was Erika Berger. The next issue of Millennium was going to press the following day. She was not altogether happy with it, but she was not unhappy either.
“We’re back to normal,” she said, and asked him what he was up to.
He said he was breathing some fresh air and had started running again, but also that he was doing some research into the Minister of Defence and the campaign against him, which Berger said was funny.
“Why funny?”
“Sofie has that in her story.”
“In what way?”
“She’s written about the aggression shown towards Forsell’s kids, and the policemen having to patrol outside the Jewish school.”
“I read about that.”
“You know …”
He was disturbed to hear the pensive tone in her voice. That was how she always sounded when she had an idea for a story.
“If you really don’t want to pursue your report about the stock market crash, maybe you can do a profile on Forsell instead, and show him in a more sympathetic light. I remember that you got on well together.”
His eyes scanned the water.
“I think we probably did.”
“So what do you say? You could also help our readers by doing a spot of fact-checking.”
“Not such a bad idea,” he said.
He was thinking about the Sherpa and the Everest expedition.
“I’ve just been told that Forsell has taken an extra week’s holiday himself. Doesn’t he have a place near you?”
“On the other side of the island.”
“Well, then,” she said.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You used not to think so much. You used to just get on with it.”
“I’m on holiday too, you know,” he said.
“You�
��re never on holiday. You’re way too much of a guilt-ridden old workaholic to get the whole holiday thing.”
“So there’s no point in even trying, you mean?”
“No,” she said and laughed, and then he felt he had to laugh too. He was relieved that she hadn’t suggested coming out to see him.
He did not want to complicate things with Catrin, so he said good luck and goodbye to Erika. He was thoughtful as he watched the storm whipping up the waves. What should he do? Show her that he did get the whole holiday thing after all? Or keep working?
He came to the conclusion that a meeting with Forsell was a good idea, but first he would have to read his way through more of the filth that had been written about him, and after moaning and grumbling to himself and taking a long shower, he got down to work. At the beginning it was depressing and nauseating, as if he had climbed back down into the same quagmire as when he was investigating the troll factories.
But slowly he became absorbed, and he put a great deal of effort into tracing the original sources of all the allegations and mapping out how they had spread and been distorted. He was gradually getting closer to the events on Everest once more when his mobile rang, startling him. This time it was Bob Carson from Denver.
Carson sounded excited.
Charlie Nilsson was sitting with a furrowed brow on a bench outside the Prima Maria Addiction Centre, or the Spin Dryer, as he called it. He did not like talking to the police, and he especially did not want his friends seeing him do it. But the woman, whose name was Moody or something, frightened him, and he did not want any grief.
“Gimme a break, will you?” he said. “I’d never sell a bottle what’s been messed with.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you? So you taste everything first?”
“Very funny.”
“Funny?” Modig said. “I couldn’t be less funny if I tried.”
“Just lay off,” he said. “Anyone could have given him that booze, couldn’t they? You know what they call this place?”
“No, Charlie, I don’t.”
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 13