The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series

by David Lagercrantz

  “I couldn’t care less what you think. I have the proof. All I need to know is what you’re going to do about Faria Kazi.”

  His gaze was unsteady.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll look after her,” he said.

  He seemed embarrassed by what he was saying, and added ominously:

  “You know that Faria Kazi isn’t the only person receiving serious threats.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  “I’m warning you. I will not tolerate—”

  “Out!”

  Fager’s right hand shook. His lips twitched, and for a second or two he stood as if paralysed. He clearly wanted to say something more, but instead he turned and ordered Lindfors to lock up. Then he slammed the door shut and his heavy footsteps resounded in the corridor.

  Faria Kazi heard them and thought of Salander. In her mind’s eye she kept seeing Salander going on the attack and Benito crashing to the concrete floor. She could hardly concentrate on anything else. The scene played over and again in her thoughts. Sometimes it triggered associations, to the events that had led to her now sitting in prison.

  She remembered how she had been lying in her room in Sickla a few days after the stolen telephone conversation with Jamal, reading poems by Tagore. Bashir had looked in at around 3.00 p.m. that day and had snarled that girls should not read because it only turns them into whores and heretics, and then he had slapped her. But for once she felt neither angry nor humiliated. In fact she gained strength from that blow. She got up and paced around the apartment, seldom taking her eyes off her youngest brother Khalil.

  That afternoon she changed her plans by the minute. She considered asking Khalil to let her out of the apartment when nobody was looking. She would get him to call the social services, the police, her old school. Or he could contact a journalist or Imam Ferdousi, or her aunt Fatima. She would tell him that if he did not help her, she would slit her wrists.

  But she said none of those things. Just before 5.00 p.m. she looked in her wardrobe. There was nothing much there except for veils and casual wear. The dresses and skirts had long since been cut up or thrown away. But she still had a pair of jeans and a black blouse. She pulled them on with some trainers and went into the kitchen, where Bashir was sitting with Ahmed. They glared suspiciously at her before turning away. She wanted to scream and smash every glass and plate in there. But she just stood still and listened as footsteps headed towards the front door. Khalil’s footsteps. Then she acted with lightning speed, as if she could not quite believe what she was doing, and pulled a kitchen knife out of a drawer, hiding it under her blouse before hurrying out of the kitchen.

  Khalil was standing at the front door in his blue tracksuit, looking miserable and lost. He must have heard her steps, because he was fumbling nervously with the key in the security lock. Faria was panting. She said:

  “You have to let me out, Khalil. I can’t live like this. I’d rather kill myself.”

  Khalil turned and gave her a look of such unhappiness that she recoiled. At the same moment, she heard Bashir and Ahmed pushing back their chairs in the kitchen. She drew her knife and said quietly:

  “Pretend that I threatened you, Khalil, do whatever you want. Just let me out!”

  “They’ll kill me,” he said, and then she thought it was all over.

  It was not going to work. That was too high a price to pay. Bashir and Ahmed came closer, and she could also hear voices coming up the stairs. That was it. She was sure she had failed. And yet … his face still a picture of sorrow, Khalil opened the door, and she dropped the knife on the floor and ran. She dodged past her father and Razan out in the corridor and raced down the stairs and for a while she heard nothing, only her own breathing and her own steps. Then voices came rumbling from above. Heavy, angry feet pounded after her and now she remembered how it had felt to be actually running away. It had felt so strange. She had not been outside for months. She had hardly moved and was obviously not in any sort of shape. But it felt as if she were being borne along by the autumn winds and the bracing cold.

  She ran as she had never run before, this way and that among the houses, along the waterfront at Hammarbyhamnen and then up again along the streets over the bridge to Ringvägen. There she jumped on a bus which took her to Vasastan, where she kept on running, and once or twice she lost her footing and fell. Her elbows were bleeding by the time she went in through the street entrance at Upplandsgatan and rushed up three flights of stairs.

  She rang the bell and stood there, and she recalled hearing footsteps inside. She prayed and hoped and closed her eyes. Then the door opened and she was terrified. Jamal Chowdhury was wearing a dressing gown even though it was the middle of the day, and he was unshaven and tousle-haired and seemed disorientated, almost frightened. For a second she thought she had made a mistake. But Jamal was only shocked. He could hardly take it in.

  “Thank God!” he said.

  Shaking all over, she fell into his arms and would not let him go. He led her into the apartment and closed the door. He too had a heavy security lock, but here it just made her feel safe. For a long time they did not utter a word. They just lay entwined on the narrow bed and the hours went by, and then they began to talk and kiss and cry, and in the end they made love. Slowly, the pressure in her chest eased, the fear ebbed away. She and Chowdhury became one in a way she had never experienced with anyone. But what she did not know – and would not have wanted to know – was that something was changing back at the apartment in Sickla. The family had acquired a new enemy, and that enemy was her brother Khalil.

  Blomkvist could not understand what Malin was telling him. He was so focused on trying to get hold of Hilda von Kanterborg that he was barely listening. He was in a taxi crossing Västerbron on his way to Rutger Fuchsgatan in Skanstull. People were sunbathing in the park below. Motorboats cruised out on Riddarfjärden.

  “Now listen, Micke,” she said. “Please concentrate. You’re the one who dragged me into this whole mess.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I have to pull myself together. Let’s take it from the top. It’s this thing about Leo sitting and writing something in his office, is that right?”

  “Exactly, there was something odd about it.”

  “You thought he was writing a will.”

  “It wasn’t what he was writing. It was how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was writing with his left hand, Mikael. Leo was always left-handed – suddenly I remembered it very clearly. He always wrote with his left hand. He caught apples, oranges, anything at all, with his left hand. But now he’s right-handed.”

  “Sounds a bit weird.”

  “It’s true all the same. Must have been already there in my sub-conscious, ever since I saw Leo on T.V. a while back. He was making a PowerPoint presentation and holding the remote in his right hand.”

  “Sorry Malin, but that’s not enough to persuade me.”

  “I’m not done yet. I didn’t attach too much importance to it either. I hadn’t even really taken it on board. But there was something nagging at me and so I observed Leo very carefully at Fotografiska. We were quite close towards the end of my time at Alfred Ögren, so I was very familiar with his gestures.”

  “O.K.”

  “The movements were exactly the same when he gave his talk at Fotografiska, only the opposite way round. Like all right-handers, he picked up the water bottle with his right hand, transferred it to his left and unscrewed the top with his right, and then also held the glass with his right hand. That was when I realized. Afterwards, I went to talk to him.”

  “Not a successful conversation.”

  “I could tell he just wanted to be rid of me, and then at the bar he was holding his wine glass with his right hand. It actually gave me the shivers.”

  “Could it be something neurological?”

  “That’s more or less what he said himself.”

  “What? You confronted him about it?”

  “Not me, but af
terwards I refused to believe my own eyes. I watched all the T.V. clips of Leo I could find on the net. I even called and spoke to my old colleagues, but none of them had noticed a thing. Nobody ever seems to notice anything. Then I spoke to Nina West. She’s a Forex trader and pretty sharp, and she’d noticed the change. You can imagine how relieved I was to hear that. She’s the one who asked him about it.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He was embarrassed and started muttering. He said he was ambidextrous, that he decided to change hands after his mother died, as a part of his liberation. That he was looking for a new way of living.”

  “Isn’t that a good enough explanation?”

  “Both hyperacoustic and ambidextrous? That seems a bit much to me.”

  Blomkvist looked out at Zinkensdamm.

  “Maybe, but it’s not impossible. But …” He reflected for a while longer. “You’re right in saying something doesn’t feel right about this story. Let’s get together again soon.”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  They ended the call and he continued in the direction of Skanstull and Hilda von Kanterborg.

  Over the years, Bublanski had taken quite a liking to Salander, but he still did not feel at ease in her presence. He knew that she disliked authority, and even though he could sympathize, given her background, he hated generalizations.

  “Eventually you’ll have to start trusting people, Lisbeth, even the police. Otherwise you’ll have a hard time of it,” he said.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said drily.

  He was sitting facing her in the visitors’ section in H Block, fidgeting. She looked oddly young, he thought.

  “Let me begin by expressing my deepest sympathies at the death of Holger Palmgren. It must have been a big blow. I remember when I lost my wife—”

  “Skip it,” she said.

  “O.K., let’s get to the point. Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kill Palmgren?”

  Salander raised her hand to her shoulder, just above the chest, where she had an old bullet wound. She started to speak with a strange coldness which made Bublanski feel quite uncomfortable, but what she said did at least have the advantage of being concise and accurate – an interrogator’s dream, in a way.

  “A few weeks ago, Holger had a visit from an elderly woman named Maj-Britt Torell, a former secretary to Professor Johannes Caldin who was once head of St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala.”

  “Where you were a patient?”

  “She had read about me in the newspapers, and left him a bunch of documents. At first Holger didn’t think they contained anything new, but in the end, they turned out to have serious implications. There had been plans to have me adopted when I was little and I’d always thought it was a misguided attempt to help deal with the problems linked to my bastard of a father. But these documents prove it was actually part of a scientific experiment set up by an authority called the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment. Its existence is a secret and I was annoyed that I couldn’t find the names of the people in charge of it. So I called Holger and asked him to take a closer look at those documents. I have no idea what he found. All I know is that Mikael Blomkvist called to tell me that Holger was dead, that he might have been murdered. So my advice is that you contact Maj-Britt Torell. She lives in Aspudden. She may have copies of the documents or they may be backed up somewhere. It might also be a good idea to check that she’s O.K. from time to time.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “That is helpful. What exactly did this authority do?”

  “The name ought to give you a clue.”

  “Names can be misleading.”

  “There’s a creep called Teleborian.”

  “We’ve questioned him already.”

  “Do it again.”

  “What should we be looking for?”

  “You could try grilling the heads of the genetics centre at Uppsala. But I doubt you’ll get very far.”

  “Could you be a bit more specific, Lisbeth. What’s all this about?”

  “About science – or rather pseudo-science – and about some idiots who imagined you could study the impact of social environment and heredity by sending children away for adoption.”

  “Doesn’t sound too good.”

  “Full marks for insight,” she said.

  “Any other clues?”

  “No.”

  Bublanski did not believe her.

  “I’m sure you know that Holger’s last words were ‘Talk to Hilda von …’ Does that ring any bells?”

  It certainly did. It had rung a bell when Blomkvist called the day before, too. But for the time being she kept that to herself. She had her reasons. Neither did she mention anything about Leo Mannheimer or the woman with the birthmark. She gave only brusque answers to the rest of Bublanski’s questions. Then she said goodbye and was taken back to her cell. At 9.00 a.m. the following morning she would be leaving Flodberga. She supposed that Fager was eager to be rid of her.

  CHAPTER 12

  20.vi

  Rakel Greitz was, as usual, unhappy about the job the cleaners had done. She should have given firmer instructions. Now she had to do the mopping and drying herself, and water her house plants and tidy up the books, the glasses, the cups. No matter that she was feeling sick and that her hair was coming out in tufts. She gritted her teeth. She had a lot to do.

  She read one more time through the documents she had taken from Holger Palmgren. It was not hard to see which were the references that had prompted his telephone call. The notes in themselves were not so much of a problem, especially since Teleborian had been good enough to refer to her using only her initial. There was no detailed description of the actual research being done, and no other children had been named. In any case, that is not what made her very uncomfortable. What upset her was the fact that Palmgren had been reading them now, after all these years.

  It could have been a coincidence. Martin Steinberg believed so. Maybe Palmgren had had the papers for ages and decided on a whim to look through them, which then got him thinking about the information without attaching too much importance to it. If that is how it was, then her recent actions would have been a disastrous mistake. But Greitz did not believe in coincidence, not now that so much was teetering on the brink of disaster.

  Plus she knew that Palmgren had recently been to see Salander at Flodberga women’s prison. Greitz was not going to underestimate Salander again, especially not with Hilda von Kanterborg’s name in the documents. Hilda was the only connection Greitz could think of that might lead Salander to her. She was pretty certain that Hilda had not been indiscreet again, not since her unfortunate friendship with Agneta Salander. But you could never be sure about anything and it was possible that there were copies of the documents out there, which was why it was crucial for Greitz to find out how Palmgren had got hold of them. Had it been in the context of the Teleborian investigation, or had he got them later – and, if so, from whom? Greitz had been convinced they had removed all the sensitive material from St Stefan’s, but maybe … she was deep in thought when an idea struck her: Johannes Caldin, the head of the clinic. He had always been a thorn in their side. Could he have handed over the papers before he died? Or had someone close to him done so – such as his …?

  Greitz swore to herself. “Of course, that bloody woman.”

  She went into the kitchen and swallowed two painkillers with a glass of lemonade. Then she called Steinberg – that wimp could get off his backside and make himself useful – and told him to get in touch with Maj-Britt Tourette, as Greitz liked to call her.

  “Right away,” she said. “Now!”

  Then she made herself a rocket salad with walnuts and tomatoes and cleaned the bathroom. It was 5.30 p.m. She felt warm, even though the balcony door was open. She longed to be able to take off her polo neck and put on a linen shirt, but resisted the temptation and again thought of Hilda. She had nothing but contempt for the woman. Hi
lda was a lush and a slut. Yet there had been a time when Greitz envied her. Men flocked around her, women and children too, for that matter. She had an open and generous mind in the good old days, when they had all had such high hopes.

  Their project was not the only one of its kind. Their source of inspiration had been in New York, though she and Steinberg had driven their project further. Even though they had sometimes been surprised or disappointed by their findings, she had never thought the broader costs, taken as a whole, were too high. Admittedly, some of the children were worse off than others. But that was the lottery of life.

  Project 9 was fundamentally worthy and important – that was how she saw it. It would show the world how to produce stronger and better-balanced individuals, and that is why it was such a tragedy that two of their subjects had jeopardized everything and forced her to take such extreme measures. She was not particularly troubled by her transgressions – and sometimes that surprised her. She did not after all lack self-knowledge and she knew that she was not much inclined to remorse. But she did worry about consequences.

  Distant shouting and laughter could be heard out on Karlbergsvägen. Her apartment smelled of detergent and surgical spirit. She looked at her watch again, got up from her desk and took out another doctor’s bag – this one was black and more modern – and a new, discreet wig, new sunglasses, a few syringes and ampoules and a small bottle containing bright-blue liquid. Then she retrieved a walking stick with a silver handle from the closet and a grey hat from the shelf in the hall, and she went down to wait for Benjamin to pick her up and take her to Skanstull.

  Hilda von Kanterborg poured herself a glass of white wine and drank it slowly. She was without question an alcoholic, even if she did not drink as much as was widely believed. But she did drink too much, just as she over-indulged in her other vices. Contrary to what people thought, Hilda was not some grand noblewoman fallen on hard times. Nor was she someone who just drifted around and got drunk. She was still publishing articles on psychology under the pseudonym Leonard Bark.

  Her father, Wilmer Karlsson, had been a contractor and a conman until he was convicted of gross fraud by Sundsvall district court. Later, he came across the name of one Johan Fredrik Kanterberg, a young lieutenant in the Royal Life Guard Dragoons who died in a duel in 1787, the last of his line. Thanks to some negotiating and one or two tricks, and despite the strict rules of the Swedish House of Nobility, Wilmer Karlsson managed to change his name – not to Kanterberg but to Kanterborg – and on his own initiative he added a “von”, which in due course found its way into official records.