“Sad.”
“Ha, yes, perhaps. It’s a bit like mountaineering, I imagine. You can’t just take a guess at where the next rock ledge is going to be. You have to know. Otherwise you’re in trouble.”
“True.”
He glanced at his mobile and saw that Catrin had replied. She had answered with another question, and that was as good a reason as any to end the conversation. He said a friendly goodbye to Elin Felke and walked out into the street with his suitcase, but without any clue where to go.
Fredrika Nyman got back to her house in Trångsund late in the afternoon, and saw that she had got a long e-mail from a psychiatrist called Farzad Mansoor, senior physician at the closed psychiatric unit at the South Wing. Both she and the police had sent him detailed reports along with an inquiry as to whether Nima Rita had been a patient there.
Nyman had not been expecting much to come of it. The Sherpa had been in too shabby a state to have been institutionalised, she thought, even if the traces of antipsychotic drugs in his blood suggested the opposite. She was therefore eager to see what Dr Mansoor had written – and not only because of the investigation.
Dr Mansoor had spoken in a soft, pleasant tone on the telephone, and she liked what she saw of him online, the glint in his eye and the warmth of his smile, and even his interest in gliding, which he had written about on Facebook. But the e-mail he had sent to her and Chief Inspector Bublanski was a passionate statement, seething with anger, a clear attempt to justify the clinic’s treatment of the Sherpa.
Which event? Which case? Which stools? she wanted to know, as if cross that her mild-mannered glider pilot had so completely lost his composure. But after skimming the e-mail, which was long and meandering, she gathered that Nima Rita had indeed been a patient at the South Wing, but under another name, and that he had absconded during the evening of July 27 that year. Initially his absence had not been reported, for several good reasons, most of them to do with the people in charge not having been on duty. But there had also been a special classified procedure for this patient, which had been ignored – maybe out of fear, or guilt.
Farzad Mansoor wrote:
Nyman looked at her daughters, who were as usual sitting on the sofa with their mobiles. Dr Mansoor went on:
His delusions were too severe and, however keen he was to talk, he had developed a strong suspicion of our entire unit. But we were at least able to rectify some misunderstandings. We began to call him Nima, for example, and that was important to him. We addressed him as Sirdar Nima.
We could see that he had an obsessive fixation about his late wife Luna. In the evenings he would walk through the hospital corridors, calling her name. He said he could hear her cries for help. He would also launch into wild, incomprehensible outbursts where he talked about a Madam – or a Mam Sahib. Both Henrik and I took this to be another way in which he referred to his wife, for there were strong similarities between the stories. But now that we read your reports, we suspect that we’re not dealing with one trauma, as we thought, but two.
You may think us incompetent for not having been able to come up with a clearer picture of his case. But we were working in difficult circumstances from the start. I think it is fair to say that we did make some progress. At the end of June he was given back his down jacket, which he had been asking for, and that seemed to make him feel secure. It’s true that he was always asking for alcohol – probably because he was getting fewer sedatives – but there were some nights when he no longer seemed to hear voices, and his night terrors also improved.
I recall that both Henrik and I left for our respective holidays feeling reasonably confident. We felt that we were on the right track, both with him and the clinic generally.>
I’m sure you did, Nyman thought. But it still led to the death of Nima Rita, and it was absolutely clear that the management at the clinic had underestimated his determination to get away. It was reasonable for him to be allowed on the terrace. But it must have been against all the rules that he should be there alone, with no staff present.
During the afternoon of July 27, he disappeared. The evidence was a small scrap of material torn from his trousers when he squeezed through the narrow gap between the roof and the terrace’s tall railings. After that we can only assume he climbed down the steep cliffs beyond and vanished from Årstaviken. He must then have found somewhere to live in the area around Mariatorget.
Yet the most shocking thing of all was that no-one reported it until Henrik Alm returned from his holiday on August 4, and even then no-one alerted the police because, as Dr Mansoor also wrote, “it had been very clearly laid down that any new developments and incidents involving the patient were to be reported to the stipulated contact person.” What a load of gobbledygook, she thought, it positively reeked of classified information. In any event, it was patently obvious that something significant was being withheld. Once she had done a little more research on the South Wing clinic, and having had a long conversation with Chief Inspector Bublanski, she did precisely the same as before.
She rang Blomkvist.
Blomkvist had not yet answered Catrin’s question. He was having a Guinness at the Tudor Arms on Grevgatan and trying to draw up a plan of action. He should get hold of Svante Lindberg. Blomkvist was increasingly convinced that he was a key person in the drama. But something told him that before he did so he needed more to go on. Forsell himself would be the best source, but Blomkvist had no idea what sort of condition he was in, and in any event he could not get hold of either him, or Rebecka Forsell, or even his press secretary, Niklas Keller. In the end he decided to take a break to organise somewhere to stay. He had to find a place where he could work and sleep and not endanger his host. Then he could continue. But just then his mobile rang.
It was Nyman, saying that she had discovered something interesting. He asked her to hang up, and sent a text message telling her to install the Signal app, which would allow them to talk on a secure line.
There was a pause and he sipped his Guinness and kept an eye on the street where two women passed with prams, and he let his thoughts drift until he got a text in a new language.
He decided to show what a techie he was and sent a selfie of him giving a thumbs up.
“I’ve just gone way up in my daughters’ estimation,” she said.
“Well, at least I’ve done one useful thing today. What did you want to tell me?”
Nyman poured herself a glass of white wine and told Blomkvist what she had discovered.
“So nobody has yet said how or why he ended up there in the first place,” he said.
“There’s some kind of confidentiality around the whole thing. Military secrecy, I think.”
“As if it had something to do with national security?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or else it’s designed to protect certain individuals, rather than the country.”
“It could be that,” Nyman said.
“Isn’t it all a bit strange?”
“Certainly is,” she answered slowly, “and a huge scandal too. He seems to have been locked up in a small room there for several years, without even seeing a dentist, or anybody else as far as I can tell. I’m not sure if you know the place.”
“I read Gustav Stavsjö’s manifesto once upon a time,” he said.
“It all sounded great, didn’t it? The sickest of us would get the best care. The dignity of a society is defined by the way it looks after its weakest members.”
“He felt very strongly about his cause, didn’t he?”
“But those were different times, and his faith in dialogue and therapy was naive, at least for patients with such severe symptoms, and psychiatry generally was also moving in a different direction, wasn’t it, towards more medication and coercive measures. The clinic, even though it’s so beautifully located by the water and looks like some sort of mansion, became more and more of a depository for hopeless cases, especially refugees traumatised by war, and it grew increasingly difficult to recruit people to work there. The clinic got a lousy reputation.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
“There were ambitious plans to close it down and integrate the patients into the county council’s healthcare system. But the sons who ran the Gustav Stavsjö Foundation managed to prevent it by persuading Professor Alm, who had a good reputation, to take over. He began to modernise the clinic and rebuild the organisation, and it was in that context that he and his colleague became aware of Nima, or Nihar Rawal, as he was known in his medical records.”
“At least he got to keep his initials.”
“He did. But there’s something fishy about it. There was a particular contact person for him, whose identity the clinic has refused to disclose, who was supposed to have direct access to all information about him before anyone else. I don’t know, but I got the impression it’s a big name, someone important who the staff were in awe of.”
“Like Under-Secretary Lindberg, for example.”
“Or Defence Minister Forsell.”
“It’s hopeless.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are too many questions.”
“Far too many.”
“Did you find out whether Nima named Forsell during the clinic’s attempts at therapy with him?” he said.
“No, I don’t know that either. But Bublanski may be right in thinking that his obsession with Forsell began after he saw him on T.V. in the shop on Hornsgatan. He probably also got hold of your number while he was there.”
“I’ll have to look into that.”
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks, I’m going to need it.”
“Can I ask you something totally different?” she said.
“Sure.”
“That D.N.A. researcher you put me in touch with, who was it?”
“Just someone I know,” he said.
“She’s got one hell of an attitude.”
“There’s a good reason for that,” he said.
Then they said goodbye and good night, and Nyman was left sitting alone, looking out at the lake and the swans, which she could just make out over on the far side.
CHAPTER 23
27.viii
Salander got an encrypted text from Blomkvist. She was busy with other things, so she ignored it. Over the course of the day she had not only acquired a new weapon – a Beretta 87 Cheetah like the one she had had in Moscow – and an I.M.S.I.-catcher; she had also collected her motorcycle, her Kawasaki Ninja, from the garage on Fiskargatan.
She had exchanged her suit for a hoodie, jeans and trainers, and was now in a room at the Nobis Hotel in Norrmalmstorg, not far from Strandvägen, where she was keeping an eye on a bank of surveillance cameras and trying to work up the same thirst for revenge she had felt earlier in the summer. But the past kept intruding. And she had no time for the old.
She had to be focused, the more so now that Galinov was around. He was ruthless. Not that she knew all that much about him beyond the rumours buzzing about on the dark web. But some things had been confirmed to her, and that was more than enough: Galinov had been connected to her father, was a disciple of his and an ally at the G.R.U.
He had often worked undercover with rebel movements and with arms smugglers. He was said to possess an indefinite quality: he blended in everywhere, not because he was so good at adapting himself or had any acting talent. On the contrary, he was always his own man, and that apparently inspired trust.
He was fluent, it was said, in a number of languages, and was receptive and erudite. Because of his height and bearing, and his distinguished features, he took over every room he entered, and that too spoke in his favour. Nobody could believe that the Russians would have used a person with such a noticeable profile as a spy and an infiltrator, and he was unwavering in his loyalty. He found it just as easy to be brutal as to be tender and fatherly.
He became best friends with people whom he later had no difficulty in torturing. His days as an intelligence officer or undercover agent were long past, and nowadays he would simply call himself a businessman or an interpreter, euphemisms of sorts for gangster. But although he was heavily involved with the Zvezda Bratva, the “Star Mob” crime syndicate, he often worked with Camilla, and was extremely useful to her. His name alone was an asset.
The one thing that really worried Salander was Galinov’s network of contacts and his links to the G.R.U. He had resources behind him which would sooner or later encircle her, so she could no longer afford to be indecisive. Standing by her hotel window facing Norrmalmstorg, she was now set to do what she had been preparing for all day: put them under pressure. Try to force them to make a mistake. But first she glanced at Blomkvist’s message:
She did not answer. She forgot the message in a second and put her weapon in her grey shoulder bag. She then pulled her hood over her head, put on sunglasses and left the room, taking the lift down and striding purposefully into the square.
It looked as if it was going to cloud over. There were lots of people out and about and the open-air restaurants and shops were full. She turned ri
ght into Smålandsgatan, emerging into Birger Jarlsgatan and dropping down into Östermalmstorg station, where she took the Tunnelbana to Södermalm.
Rebecka Forsell was sitting at her husband’s bedside at the Karolinska hospital when Blomkvist called again. She was just about to answer when Johannes made a sudden movement, as if he were having a nightmare, so she stroked his hair and let her mobile ring. Three soldiers were sitting outside the room, looking in at her through the glass in the door.
She was very conscious of being under surveillance. It intruded on her need to watch over him and she resented that. How could they treat them like this? They had even frisked Johannes’ mother. It was scandalous, and the worst was Klas Berg, head of Must, and of course also Svante Lindberg, who had claimed to be so goddamn sympathetic and upset.
He had come with chocolates and flowers and tears in his eyes, and he commiserated and hugged her. But he had not fooled her. He was sweating too much, and his eyes were darting back and forth. At least twice he asked if Johannes had said anything out on Sandön he needed to know about, and all she had wanted to do was scream: “What are you hiding from me?” But she said nothing. She just thanked him for his support, then told him she couldn’t face visitors and asked him to leave. He left reluctantly, and that was lucky because shortly afterwards Johannes came to, and told her he was sorry. His apology seemed sincere, and they talked briefly about their sons and how he was feeling, but when she asked, “Why, Johannes, why?” he gave no answer.
Perhaps he was not strong enough. Perhaps he simply wanted to escape from everything. Now he was asleep again, or just dozing. He looked anything but relaxed, however, and she took his hand. It was then that a text came through from Blomkvist. He apologised for disturbing her but said that they needed to talk, either on an encrypted line or face to face, in private. But she couldn’t, not now, and she looked in despair at her husband who was murmuring in his dreams.
Forsell was back on Everest. In his mind he was staggering ahead in the lashing snowstorm, it was cold and unbearable, and he could hardly think any longer. He just tramped on and could hear his crampons creak, and the thunder in the skies and the wide-open spaces. He wondered how much longer he could take it.
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