He knew very well that the legal basis for silencing journalists was shaky, and in any case he resented the autocratic behaviour of the men from the intelligence service. But he let it lie. He was not going to write one word until he had got to the bottom of the story anyway, so he stayed sitting on the bed, gathering his thoughts. He was not left in peace for long.
There was another knock at the door and a tall woman with dark-blonde hair and bloodshot eyes appeared in the room. For some reason – perhaps because he was just staring at all the missed calls on his mobile – it was a while before he realised it was Rebecka Forsell. Her hands were shaking, and she said she really wanted to thank him before he left.
“Is he better?” Blomkvist asked.
“The worst is over, thank God. But we don’t yet know if he’s suffered any brain damage. It’s too early to tell.”
He asked her to take a seat in the chair next to him.
“They say that you too had a close shave,” she said.
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”
“But still … do you realise quite what you’ve done – for us? Do you get that? It’s immense.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m touched.”
“Is there anything we can do for you?” she said.
Tell me everything you know about Nima Rita, he thought. Out with the truth.
“See to it that your husband gets better and finds himself a more restful job,” he said.
“It’s been a dreadful time.”
“I understand.”
“You know …”
She looked confused, and was nervously rubbing her hand against her left arm.
“Yes?”
“I’ve just been reading about Johannes on the net, and all of a sudden people are being nice again, not all of them, of course, but many. It’s almost unreal. It’s brought home to me the nightmare we’ve been living through.”
Blomkvist leaned forward and took her hand.
“I was the one who called Dagens Nyheter and told them it was a suicide attempt, even though I don’t know for certain what happened, exactly. Was that a bad thing to do?” she asked.
“You had your reasons, I suppose.”
“I wanted them to understand how far it had gone.”
“Fair enough.”
“The men from Must told me something very odd,” she said, looking distraught.
“What did they tell you?” he said, trying to sound calm.
“That you had found out about Nima Rita’s death here in Stockholm.”
“Yes, it’s really odd. Did the two of you know him?”
“I’m not sure I dare say anything. They keep badgering me all the time to keep quiet about it.”
“They’re on at me too,” he said, and added, “But do we have to be so obedient?”
She gave a sorrowful smile.
“Maybe not.”
“Well then, did you know him?”
“We did for a while at Base Camp. We liked him a lot, and I think he liked us. ‘Sahib, Sahib,’ he said all the time about Johannes, ‘very good person.’ He had a lovely wife.”
“Luna.”
“Luna,” she repeated. “She spoiled us all, she was constantly on the go. We helped them to build a house in Pangboche afterwards.”
“Good for you.”
“I’m not so sure. We all felt guilty about what happened to him.”
“Do you have any idea how he could have disappeared from Kathmandu, presumed dead, and then turn up in Stockholm three years later and die again?”
“It makes me sick to the stomach.” She looked at him, misery in her eyes.
“Tell me,” he said.
“You should have seen those little boys in Khumbu. They worshipped him. He saved lives, and he paid a terrible price.”
“I suppose that was the end of his climbing career.”
“His name was dragged through the mud.”
“But not by everybody, surely?” Blomkvist said.
“By a lot of people.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“The ones who were close to Klara Engelman.”
“Her husband, for example?”
“Of course, him as well.”
He could hear the change of tone in her voice.
“That’s a strange way of putting it.”
“Well, maybe. But you understand … the story is more complicated than most people realise, and many lawyers have been involved. A year or two ago, an American publisher had to withdraw a book about it.”
“That was down to Engelman’s lawyers, I bet.”
“Right. Engelman is a real-estate tycoon, ostensibly an entrepreneur, but at heart he’s a gangster, a mafioso, at least that’s my opinion. And I know he wasn’t that happy about his wife towards the end.”
“How come?”
“Because she fell in love with our guide, Viktor Grankin, and wanted to leave Stan. She said she was going to get a divorce and tell the press what a narcissistic pig he had been. That’s the stuff Engelman managed to suppress, even though you can probably still find bits and pieces on the internet gossip sites.”
“Got it,” he said.
“It was all very acrimonious.”
“Did Nima Rita know?”
“They kept it very quiet, but I’m sure he did. He was looking after her.”
“And did he also keep quiet about it?”
“I think so. At least while his mind was still reasonably sound. But after his wife died, he apparently became more and more confused. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he went around and blabbed about that, and other things too.”
Blomkvist looked into Rebecka Forsell’s eyes, and at her tall body huddled up in the chair. Somewhat reluctantly he said:
“In his last days he was talking about your husband too.”
Rebecka could feel her anger rising, but she was careful not to show it, and she knew she was being unfair. Blomkvist had a job to do. He had saved her husband’s life. But his words brought to mind her worst suspicions, that Johannes was keeping from her something to do with Everest and Nima Rita. In her heart she had never believed it was the hate campaign which had broken him.
Johannes was a fighter, a warrior, an over-optimistic fool who stormed on ahead, however lousy the odds. The only times she had seen him beaten were now, out on Sandön, and after his Everest ascent. She had already worked out for herself that there must be a connection. And this must be what had made her so angry, not Blomkvist. He was just the messenger.
“I don’t understand that,” she said.
“Not at all?”
She was silent. Then she said, “You ought to have a word with Svante,” and immediately regretted it.
“Svante Lindberg?”
“That’s right.”
She and Johannes had had a huge row at home on the day he appointed Lindberg his under-secretary. On the face of it Lindberg was a carbon copy of Johannes, with the same energy and military heartiness. But in fact he was something quite different. While Forsell thought well of everything and everybody – until the opposite proved true – Lindberg was always calculating and manipulative.
“What can Svante tell me?” Blomkvist said.
Whatever suits his interests, she thought.
“What happened on Everest,” she said, wondering if she was betraying Johannes with those words. But Johannes had failed her by not telling her everything that had taken place on the mountain. She got up, gave Blomkvist a hug and thanked him once more, and went back to the intensive care unit.
CHAPTER 18
26. – 27.viii, Night
Chief Inspector Ulrike Jensen was conducting a first interview with the complainant, Thomas Müller, at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. He had been admitted at 11.10 at night with burns to his arms and upper chest. Jensen was forty-four and a mother of small children, and had spent many years dealing with sexual offences. She had lately been transferred to the violent crimes squad and of
ten worked the night shift – it was what functioned best for her family at that point – so had had her fair share of confused and drunken witness statements. But what she was hearing now took the prize.
“I appreciate that you’re in a lot of pain, and the morphine will be affecting you,” she said. “But can we try to keep to the facts and concentrate on an accurate description.”
“I’ve never seen eyes like that,” he mumbled.
“So you’ve said. But you need to be more specific. Did this woman have any distinguishing features?”
“She was young and short with black hair, and she talked like a ghost.”
“And how do ghosts talk?”
“Without any feeling, or rather … as if her mind was on something else. She wasn’t really there.”
“What did she say? Can you please repeat it so we can get a clearer idea of what actually happened?”
“She said that she never ironed her own clothes, so she wasn’t very good at it and it was important for me to lie still.”
“That’s pretty harsh.”
“It was insane.”
“Is that all?”
“She said she would come for me again if I didn’t …”
“If you didn’t what?”
Müller squirmed in his hospital bed and gave her a helpless look.
“If you didn’t what?” she repeated.
“Leave my wife alone. I was not to see her again. I was to get a divorce.”
“Your wife is travelling, you said?”
“Yes, she …” He was muttering inaudibly.
“Have you done something to her?” Jensen said.
“I haven’t done a thing. She’s the one who …”
“What?”
“Left me.”
“Why has she left you, do you suppose?”
“She’s a fucking …”
He was on the point of saying something terrible, but was smart enough not to, and Jensen could tell there was a history which would not be very pretty either. But she put it aside for the time being.
“Do you recall anything else that might help us?” she said.
“The woman said I was ‘out of luck’.”
“What did she mean by that, do you think?”
“That she’d been keeping a whole load of shit bottled up inside her all summer long and had gone more or less crazy as a result.”
“That doesn’t tell us much, does it?”
“How am I supposed to know what the fuck she meant?”
“And how did it end?”
“She tore the tape off my mouth and repeated everything again.”
“That you should stay away from your wife?”
“And I will too. I never want to see her again.”
“O.K.,” she said. “That sounds like a plan for now. So you haven’t spoken to your wife this evening either?”
“I don’t even know where she is, I told you. But for God’s sake …”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got to get a move on and do something. This person is completely insane. She’s lethal. She’s going to kill someone next.”
“We’ll do our best,” Jensen said. “But it looks as if—”
“As if what?”
“As if all the surveillance cameras in the neighbourhood were out of action just then, so we’ve got very little to go on,” she continued, suddenly feeling very tired of her job.
It was just after midnight and Salander was in a taxi on her way in from Arlanda airport, reading up on a divorce lawyer recommended by Annika Giannini, when she received an encrypted message from Blomkvist. She was too tired and out of sorts to want to look at it, and she stared vacantly out of the window. What was the matter with her?
She had liked Paulina. Maybe in her own twisted way she had even loved her. And how had she gone about showing it? She had sent her home to her parents in Munich, heartbroken. She had assaulted her husband, as if taking revenge on him would somehow compensate for her own shortcomings in love. She could not bring herself to kill her own sister – who had caused so much harm – but would have put an end to Thomas Müller’s life in Copenhagen without batting an eyelid.
As she was sitting on top of him, holding the iron, images of Zalachenko and Bjurman the lawyer, and Teleborian the psychiatrist and all sorts of other brutes had flashed through her mind. It was as if the floodgates had burst open. As if she wanted revenge for the whole of her life, and it had taken all the self-control she could muster to stop her from going completely off the rails.
She had to get a grip on herself. Otherwise it would just go on like this: hesitation where action was needed, and madness in the place of calm.
Some part of what had happened on Tverskoy Boulevard had knocked her off balance. It was a fresh realisation from her past. Not just the fact that she had lain there powerless when Zala came to fetch Camilla at night. There was her mother, too. What had she known? Had she too shut her eyes to the truth? This thought was constantly chafing at her, so much so that it made her frightened of herself – frightened by her indecision, frightened that she would be a useless warrior in what inevitably awaited: her life’s crucial battle.
She had known that Camilla had received a visit from Svavelsjö M.C. ever since Plague helped her to hack the surveillance cameras around the apartment on Strandvägen. She was aware that her sister was pursuing her with all the means at her disposal and that, given the chance, Camilla herself would be unlikely to hesitate. So yes, goddamnit, she had to pull herself together. She had to be strong and unwavering. But first she had to find somewhere to go.
She no longer had a home in Stockholm, so she gave that some thought and weighed the alternatives. And then she quickly read Blomkvist’s e-mail after all. It was to do with Forsell and the Sherpa, and interesting in more ways than one. But she could not deal with it just then. She wrote back on impulse, and surprised even herself.
It wasn’t simply an indecent proposal, she thought, or even a reaction to having felt lonely, without hope. It was also … a safety precaution, because it was not unthinkable, was it, that having failed to track her down, Camilla and her henchmen would go for her close circle instead. For that reason alone it would make sense to lock Kalle Blomkvist away in a hotel room.
But then again, he was perfectly capable of locking himself up somewhere. When she got no response from him after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, she snorted, closed her eyes and felt that she could sleep forever, and maybe she did actually drop off to sleep because when Blomkvist eventually wrote back, she jumped as if she had been attacked.
His sister Annika had brought him a change of clothes and shoes and driven him home to Bellmansgatan. He thought he would immediately collapse into bed. Instead he sat down at his computer and did some research on Stan Engelman. He was now seventy-four and had remarried, and he was under investigation for bribery and intimidation in connection with the sale of three hotels in Las Vegas. Although the situation was far from clear – he, of course, maintained the exact opposite – his empire seemed to be teetering. He was said to be seeking help from business contacts in Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Engelman had not made a single public comment about Nima Rita. He had, however, viciously attacked the late guide Viktor Grankin, who had employed Nima as Sirdar, and he had sued Grankin’s company, Everest Adventure Tours. They had reached a settlement before a Moscow judge, as a result of which the company went into liquidation. The rage he felt against the expedition – of which Nima Rita had been a part – was in no doubt. But that did not explain why the Sherpa had appeared in Stockholm, of all places, and Blomkvist dropped that line of enquiry for the time being; he was too tired to delve into Engelman’s many real estate transactions and love affairs and other ludicrous escapades, and instead he checked out Svante Lindberg, who was probably the person who knew best what Forsell had encountered on Everest.
Lindberg was a lieutenan
t general, a former coastal ranger, and presumably also an intelligence officer. He had been a close friend of Johannes Forsell since they were young. He was also an experienced mountaineer. Before Everest, he had climbed three other eight-thousanders – Broad Peak, Gasherbrum and Annapurna – and that was probably why Viktor Grankin let him and Johannes go for the summit ahead of the others when the pace of the group was slowing during the morning of May 13, 2008. But Blomkvist resolved to look more closely at the actual events on the mountain later, probably tomorrow now. For the time being he recorded that Lindberg had himself been one of the targets in the hate campaign against Forsell.
Some sources suggested that he was the real centre of power at the Defence Ministry. But he rarely gave interviews, and the closest thing Blomkvist found to anything personal was a long profile in Runner’s World from three years ago, which he started to read. He later remembered that Lindberg was quoted as saying, “When you’re completely finished, you’ve still got another 70 per cent.” But he must have nodded off then.
He woke up at his computer, shaking all over and with the image of Forsell sinking beneath the waves clearly in his mind. He realised that not only was he totally exhausted, he was also in a state of shock. So he dragged himself off to bed, expecting to fall asleep immediately. But his thoughts were racing too much, and in the end he picked up his mobile and saw that Salander had answered.
He was so tired that he had to read it twice. Then he felt … what? Embarrassed, awkward? He couldn’t be sure. He knew only that he wanted to pretend not to have seen the message, though that would not work with Salander; by now she would have seen that he had read it. What to do? He could not bring himself to say no. He most definitely did not want to say yes. He closed his eyes, tried to organise his thoughts. So she was in Stockholm, and wanted to see him now, right away, at a hotel? Did it mean something more than that she wanted to see him now, right away, at a hotel?
“For Christ’s sake, Lisbeth,” he muttered.
He got up and wandered nervously around the apartment. She had thrown him even further out of kilter, and at some point he looked out of the window towards Bellmansgatan. There he saw a figure he recognised at once, standing over by the Bishops Arms. It was the man with the ponytail from Sandhamn, and at that he flinched as if he had been punched in the stomach. Because now there could be no doubt, could there?
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 16