CHAPTER 11
Wednesday, March 23–Maundy Thursday, March 24
Blomkvist took his red pen and in the margin of Svensson’s manuscript drew a
question mark with a circle around it and wrote “footnote.” He wanted a source
reference inserted.
It was Wednesday, the evening before Maundy Thursday, and Millennium was more
or less closed down for Easter week. Nilsson was out of the country. Karim had
gone to the mountains with her husband. Cortez had come in to deal with
telephone messages for a few hours, but Blomkvist sent him home since nobody
was calling. Cortez left smiling happily, on his way to see a new girlfriend.
Svensson had not been around. Blomkvist sat in the office alone, plodding through
his manuscript. The book was going to be twelve chapters and 288 pages long.
Svensson had delivered the final text of nine of the twelve chapters, and Blomkvist
had been over every word and given the hard copy back with requests for
clarification and suggestions for reworking.
Svensson was a talented writer, and Blomkvist confined his editing for the most
part to marginal notes. During the weeks when the manuscript had been growing
on his desk they had disagreed about only one paragraph, which Blomkvist wanted
to delete and Svensson fought tooth and nail to keep. It stayed in.
In short, Millennium had an excellent book that would very soon be off to the
printer. There was no doubt that it would make dramatic headlines. Svensson was
merciless in his exposure of the johns, and he told the story in such a way that
nobody could fail to understand that there was something wrong with the system
itself. It was journalistic work of the type that should be on the endangered species
list.
Blomkvist had learned that Svensson was an exacting journalist who left very few
loose ends. He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other
social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash. His book was more than
an exposé—it was a declaration of war. Blomkvist smiled to himself. Svensson was
about fifteen years younger, but he recognized the passion that he himself had once
had when he took up the lance against second-rate financial reporters and put
together a scandalous book. Certain newsrooms had not forgiven him.
The problem with Svensson’s book was that it had to be watertight. A reporter who
sticks out his neck like that has to either stand behind his story 100 percent or
refrain from publishing it. Right now Svensson was at 98 percent. There were still a
few weak points that needed more work and one or two assertions that he had not
adequately documented.
At 5:30 p.m. Blomkvist opened his desk drawer and took out a cigarette. Berger had
decreed a total ban in the office, but he was alone and nobody else was going to be
there that weekend. He worked for another forty minutes before he gathered up
the pages and put the chapter on Berger’s desk. Svensson had promised to email
the final text of the remaining three chapters the following morning, which would
give Blomkvist a chance to go through them over the weekend. A summit meeting
was planned for the Tuesday after Easter when they would all sign off on the final
version of the book and the Millennium articles. After that only the layout
remained, which was Malm’s headache alone, and then it would go to the printer.
Blomkvist had not sought bids from different printers; he would entrust the job to
Hallvigs Reklam in Morgongåva. They had printed his book about the Wennerström
affair and had given him a damn good price and first-rate service.
Blomkvist looked at the clock and decided to reward himself with another
cigarette. He sat at the window and stared down on Götgatan. He ran his tongue
over the cut on the inside of his lip. It was beginning to heal.
He wondered for the thousandth time what really had happened outside Salander’s
building early on Sunday morning.
All he knew for certain was that Salander was alive and back in Stockholm.
He had tried to reach her every day since then. He had sent emails to the address
she had used more than a year ago. He had walked up and down Lundagatan. He
was beginning to despair.
The nameplate on the door now read SALANDER-WU. There were 230 people with
the surname Wu on the electoral roll, of whom about 140 lived in and around
Stockholm, none of them on Lundagatan. Blomkvist had no idea whether she had a
boyfriend or had rented out the apartment. No-one came to the door when he
knocked.
Finally he went back to his desk and wrote her a good old-fashioned letter:
Hello, Sally,
I don’t know what happened a year ago, but by now even a numbskull like me has
worked out that you’ve cut off all contact. It’s for you to decide who you hang
around with, and I don’t mean to nag. I just want to tell you that I still think of you
as my friend, that I miss your company and would love to have a cup of coffee with
you—if you felt like it.
I don’t know what kind of a mess you’ve got yourself into, but the ruckus on
Lundagatan was alarming. If you need help you can call me anytime. As you know, I
am deeply in your debt.
Plus, I have your shoulder bag. When you want it back, just let me know. If you
don’t want to see me, just give me an address to mail it to. I promise not to bother
you, since you’ve indicated clearly enough that you don’t want anything to do with
me.
Mikael
As anticipated he never heard a word from her.
When he had got home the morning after the attack on Lundagatan, he opened the
shoulder bag and spread the contents on the kitchen table. There was a wallet with
an ID card, about 600 kronor, 200 American dollars, and a monthly travel card.
There was a pack of Marlboro Lights, three Bic lighters, a box of throat lozenges, a
packet of tissues, a toothbrush, toothpaste, three tampons in a side pocket, an
unopened pack of condoms with a price sticker that showed they were bought at
Gatwick Airport in London, a bound notebook with stiff black A4 dividers, five
ballpoint pens, a can of Mace, a small bag with makeup, an FM radio with an
earphone but no batteries, and Saturday’s Aftonbladet.
The most intriguing item was a hammer, easily accessible in an outside pocket.
However, the attack had come so suddenly that she had not been able to make use
of it or the Mace. She had evidently used her keys as brass knuckles—there were
still traces of blood and skin on them.
Of the six keys on the ring, three of them were typical apartment keys—front door,
apartment door, and the key to a padlock. But none of them fit the door of the
building on Lundagatan.
Blomkvist opened the notebook and went through it page by page. He recognized
Salander’s neat hand and could see at once that this was not a girl’s secret diary.
Three-quarters of the pages were filled with what looked like mathematical
notations. At the top of the first page was an equation that even Blomkvist
recognized.
(x3 + y3 = z3)
Blomkvist had never had trouble doing calculations. He had left secondary school
with the highest marks in math, which in no way meant, of course, that he was a
mathematician, only that he had been able to absorb the content of the school’s
curriculum. But Salander’s pages contained formulas of a type that Blomkvist
neither understood nor could even begin to understand. One equation stretched
across an entire double page and ended with things crossed out and changed. He
could not even tell whether they were real mathematical formulas and calculations,
but since he knew Salander’s peculiarities he assumed that the equations were
genuine and no doubt had some esoteric meaning.
He leafed back and forth for a long time. He might as well have come upon a
notebook full of Chinese characters. But he grasped the essentials of what she was
trying to do. She had become fascinated by Fermat’s Last Theorem, a classic riddle.
He let out a deep sigh.
The last page in the book contained some very brief and cryptic notes which had
absolutely nothing to do with math, but nevertheless still looked like a formula:
(Blond Hulk + Magge) = NEB
They were underlined and circled and meant nothing to him. At the bottom of the
page was a telephone number and the name of a car rental company in Eskilstuna,
Auto-Expert.
Blomkvist made no attempt to interpret the notes. He stubbed out his cigarette and
put on his jacket, set the alarm in the office, and walked to the terminal at Slussen,
where he took the bus out to the yuppie reserve in Stäket, near Lännersta Sound.
He had been invited to dinner with his sister, Annika Blomkvist Giannini, who was
turning forty-two.
Berger began her long Easter weekend with a furious and anxiety-filled two-mile
jog that ended at the steamboat wharf in Saltsjöbaden. She had been lazy about her
hours at the gym and felt stiff and out of shape. She walked home. Her husband
was giving a lecture at the Modern Museum and it would be at least 8:00 before he
got home. Berger thought she would open a bottle of good wine, switch on the
sauna, and seduce him. At least it would stop her thinking about the problem that
was worrying her.
A week earlier she had had lunch with the CEO of the biggest media company in
Sweden. Over salad he had set forth in all seriousness his intention to recruit her as
editor in chief of the company’s largest daily newspaper, the Svenska Morgon-Posten. The board has discussed several possibilities, but we are agreed that you
would be a great asset to the paper. You’re the one we want. Attached to the offer
was a salary that made her income at Millennium look ridiculous.
The offer had come like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, and it left her
speechless. Why me?
He had been oddly vague, but gradually the explanation emerged that she was
known, respected, and a certifiably talented editor. They were impressed by the
way she had dragged Millennium out of the quicksand it had been in two years
earlier. The Svenska Morgon-Posten needed to be revitalized in the same way. There
was an old-man atmosphere about the newspaper that was causing a steady
decline in the new-subscriber rate. Berger was a powerful journalist. She had clout.
Putting a woman—a feminist no less—in charge of one of Sweden’s most
conservative and male-dominated institutions was a provocative and bold idea.
Everyone was agreed. Well, almost everyone. The ones who counted were all on his
side.
“But I don’t share the basic political views of the newspaper.”
“Who cares? You’re not an outspoken opponent either. You’re going to be the boss—
not an apparatchik—and the editorial page will take care of itself.”
He hadn’t said it in so many words, but it was also a matter of class. Berger came
from the right background.
She had told him that she was certainly attracted by the proposal but that she
could not give him an answer immediately. She was going to have to think the
matter through. But they agreed that she would give them her decision sooner
rather than later. The CEO had explained that if the salary offer was the reason for
her hesitation, she was probably in a position to negotiate an even higher figure. A
strikingly generous golden parachute would also be included. It’s time for you to
start thinking about your pension plan.
Her forty-fifth birthday was coming up. She had done her apprenticeship as a
trainee and a temp. She had put together Millennium and become its editor in chief
on her own merits. The moment when she would have to pick up the telephone
and say yes or no was fast approaching, and she did not know what she was going
to do. During the past week she had considered time and again discussing the
matter with Blomkvist, but she had not been able to summon up the nerve. Instead
she had been hiding the offer from him, which gave her a pang of guilt.
There were some obvious disadvantages. A yes would mean breaking up the
partnership with Blomkvist. He would never follow her to the Svenska Morgon-Posten, no matter how sweet a deal she or they could offer him. He did not need
the money now, and he was getting on fine writing articles at his own pace.
Berger liked being editor in chief of Millennium. It had given her a status within
the world of journalism that she considered almost undeserved. She had never been
the producer of the news. That was not her thing—she regarded herself as a
mediocre writer. On the other hand, she was first-rate on radio or TV, and above all
she was a brilliant editor. Besides, she enjoyed the hands-on work of editing, which
was a prerequisite for the post of editor in chief at Millennium.
Nevertheless, she was tempted. Not so much by the salary as by the fact that the
job meant that she would become without question one of Sweden’s big-time
media players. This is a once-in-a-lifetime offer, the CEO had said.
Somewhere near the Grand Hotel in Saltsjöbaden she realized to her dismay that
she was not going to be able to turn the offer down. And she shuddered at the
thought of having to tell Blomkvist.
Dinner at the Gianninis’ was, as always, mildly chaotic. Annika had two children:
Monica, thirteen, and Jennie, ten. Her husband, Enrico, who was the head of the
Scandinavian arm of an international biotech firm, had custody of Antonio, his
sixteen-year-old son from his first marriage. Also at dinner were Enrico’s mother
Antonia, his brother Pietro, his sister-in-law Eva-Lotta, and their children Peter and
Nicola. Plus Enrico’s sister Marcella and her four kids, who lived in the same
neighbourhood. Enrico’s aunt Angelina, who was regarded by the family as stark
raving mad, or on good days just extremely eccentric, had also been invited, along
with her new boyfriend.
At the dining-room table, abundant with food, the conversation went on in a
rattling mixture of Swedish and Italian, sometimes simultaneously. The situation
was made more annoying because Angelina spent the evening wondering out loud—
to anyone who would listen—why Annika’s brother was still a bachelor. She also
proposed a number of suitable solutions to his problem from among the daughters
of her friends. Exasperated, Blomkvist finally explained that he would be happy to
get married but that unfortunately his lover was already married. That shut up
even Angelina for a while.
At 7:30 Blomkvist’s mobile beeped. He’d thought he had shut it off and he almost
missed the call as he dug it out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which someone
had hung on the coatrack in the hall. It was Svensson.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Not particularly. I’m at dinner with my sister and a platoon of people from her
husband’s family. What’s up?”
“Two things. I’ve tried to get hold of Christer, but he’s not answering.”
“He’s at the theatre with his boyfriend.”
“Damn. I’d promised to meet him at the office tomorrow morning with the
photographs and graphics for the book. Christer was going to look at them over the
weekend. But Mia has suddenly decided to drive up to see her parents in Dalarna
for Easter to show them her thesis. We’ll have to leave early in the morning and
some of the pictures I can’t email. Could I messenger them over to you tonight?”
“You could … but look, I’m out in Lännersta. I’ll be here for a while, but I’m coming
back into town later. Enskede wouldn’t be that far out of my way. I could drop by
and pick them up. Would around 11:00 be OK?”
“That’s fine. The second thing … I don’t think you’re going to like this.”
“Shoot.”
“I stumbled across something I think I had better check out before the book goes
to the printer.”
“OK—what is it?”
“Zala, spelled with a Z.”
“Ah. Zala the gangster. The one people seem to be terrified of and nobody wants to
talk about.”
“That’s him. A couple of days ago I came across him again. I believe he’s in Sweden
now and that he ought to be in the list of johns in chapter seven.”
“Dag—you can’t start digging up new material three weeks before we go to press.”
“I know. But this is a bit special. I talked to a policeman who had heard some talk
about Zala. Anyway, I think it would make sense to spend a couple of days next
week checking up on him.”
“Why him? You’ve got plenty of other assholes in the book.”
“This one seems to be an Olympian asshole. Nobody really knows who he is. I’ve
got a gut feeling that it would be worth our while to poke around one more time.”
“Don’t ever discount your gut feelings,” Blomkvist said. “But honestly … we can’t
push back the deadline. The printer is booked, and the book has to come out
simultaneously with the Millennium issue.”
“I know,” Svensson said, sounding dejected.
“I’ll call you later,” Blomkvist said.
Johansson had just brewed a pot of coffee and poured it into the table thermos
when the doorbell rang. It was just before 9:00 p.m. Svensson was closer to the
door and, thinking it was Blomkvist coming earlier than he had said he would, he
opened it without first looking through the peephole. Not Blomkvist. Instead he
was confronted by a short, doll-like girl in her late teens.
“I’m looking for Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson,” the girl said.
“I’m Dag Svensson.”
“I’d like to speak with both of you.”
Svensson automatically looked at the clock. Johansson was curious and came into
the hall to stand behind her boyfriend.
“It’s a bit late for a visit,” Svensson said.
“I’d like to talk about the book you’re planning on publishing at Millennium.”
Svensson and Johansson looked at each other.
“And who are you?”
“I’m interested in the subject. May I come in, or shall we discuss it here on the
landing?”
Svensson hesitated for a second. The girl was a total stranger, and the time of her
visit was odd, but she seemed harmless enough, so he held the door open. He
showed her to the table in the living room.
“Would you like some coffee?” Johansson said.
“How about first telling us who you are,” Svensson said.
“Yes, please. To the coffee, I mean. My name is Lisbeth Salander.”
Johansson shrugged and opened the table thermos. She had already set out cups in
anticipation of Blomkvist’s visit. “And what makes you think I’m publishing a book
at Millennium?” Svensson said.
He was suddenly deeply suspicious, but the girl ignored him and turned instead to
Johansson. She made a face that could have been a crooked smile.
“Interesting thesis,” she said.
Johansson looked shocked.
“How could you know anything about my thesis?”
“I happened to get hold of a copy,” the girl said cryptically.
Svensson’s annoyance grew. “Now you’re really going to have to explain who you
are and what you want.”
The girl’s eyes met his. He suddenly noticed that her irises were so dark that in this
light her eyes might be raven black. And perhaps he had underestimated her age.
“I’d like to know why you’re going around asking questions about Zala. Alexander
Zala,” Salander said. “And above all I’d like to know exactly what you know about
him already.”
Alexander Zala, Svensson thought in shock. He had never known the first name.
The girl lifted her coffee cup and took a sip without releasing him from her gaze.
Her eyes had no warmth at all. He suddenly felt vaguely uneasy.
Unlike Blomkvist and the other adults at the dinner party (and despite the fact that
she was the birthday girl), Annika Giannini had drunk only light beer and refrained
from any wine or aquavit with the meal. So at 10:30 she was stone-cold sober. Since
in some respects she took her big brother for a complete idiot who needed to be
looked after, she generously offered to drive him home via Enskede. She had already
planned to drive him to the bus stop on Värmdövägen, and it wouldn’t take that
much longer to go into the city.
“Why don’t you get your own car?” she complained anyway as Blomkvist fastened
his seat belt.
“Because unlike you I live within walking distance of my work and need a car
about once a year. Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to drive anyway after your
husband started serving spirits from Skåne.”
“He’s becoming Swedish. Ten years ago it would have been grappa.”
They spent the ride talking as brothers and sisters do. Apart from a persistent
paternal aunt, two less persistent maternal aunts, two distant cousins, and one
second cousin, Mikael and Annika had only each other for family. The three-year
age difference meant that they had not had much in common during their teens.
But they had become closer as adults.
Annika had studied law, and Blomkvist thought of her as a great deal more talented
than he was. She sailed through university, spent a few years in the district courts,
and then became the assistant to one of the better-known lawyers in Sweden. Then
she started her own practice. She had specialized in family law, which gradually
developed into work on equal rights. She became an advocate for abused women,
wrote a book on the subject, and became a respected name. To top it off, she had
become involved politically for the Social Democrats, which prompted Blomkvist to
tease her about being an apparatchik. Blomkvist himself had decided early on that
he could not combine party membership with journalistic credibility. He never
willingly voted, and on the occasions when he felt absolutely obliged to vote he
refused to talk about his choices, even with Berger.
“How are you doing?” Annika said as they crossed Skurubron.
“Oh, I’m doing fine.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“What problem?”
“I know you, Micke. You’ve been preoccupied all evening.”
Blomkvist sat in silence for a moment.
“It’s a complicated story. I’ve got two problems right now. One is about a girl I met
two years ago who helped me on the Wennerström affair and then just disappeared
from my life with no explanation. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her in more than a
year, except for last week.”
Blomkvist told her about the attack on Lundagatan.
“Did you report it to the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“This girl is manically private. She was the one who was attacked. She’ll have to
make the report.”
Which Blomkvist expected would not be high on Salander’s list of priorities.
“Bullheaded as usual,” Annika said, patting Blomkvist on the cheek. “What’s the
second problem?”
“We’re working on a story at Millennium that’s going to make headlines. I’ve been
sitting all evening wondering whether I should consult you. As a lawyer, I mean.”
Annika glanced in surprise at her brother. “Consult me?” she exclaimed. “That’d be
something new.”
“The story’s about trafficking and violence against women. You deal with violence
against women and you’re a lawyer. You probably don’t work with cases of
freedom of the press, but I would be really grateful if you could read through the
manuscript before we send it to the printer. There are magazine articles and a
book, so there’s quite a bit to read.”
Annika was silent as she turned down the Hammarby industrial road and passed
Sickla lock. She wound her way down side streets parallel to Nynäsvägen until she
could turn up Enskedevägen.
“You know, Mikael, I’ve been really mad at you only once in my whole life.”
“Is that so?” he said, surprised.
“It was when you were taken to court by Wennerström and sent to prison for libel.
I was so furious with you that I thought I would explode.”
“Why? I only made a fool of myself.”
“You’ve made a fool of yourself many times before. But this time you needed a
lawyer, and the only person you didn’t turn to was me. Instead you sat there taking
shit in both the media and the courtroom. You didn’t even defend yourself. I
thought I was going to die.”
“There were special circumstances. There wasn’t a thing you could have done.”
“All right, but I didn’t understand that until later, when Millennium got back on its
feet and mopped the floor with Wennerström. Until that happened I was so damn
disappointed in you.”
“There was no way we could have won that trial.”
“You’re not getting the point, big brother. I understand that it was a hopeless case.
I’ve read the judgment. The point was that you didn’t come to me and ask for help.
As in, hey, little sister, I need a lawyer. That’s why I never turned up in court.”
Blomkvist thought it over.
“I’m sorry. I admit it, I should have done that.”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I wasn’t functioning at all that year. I couldn’t face talking to anybody. I just
wanted to lie down and die.”
“Which you didn’t do, exactly.”
“Forgive me.”
Annika Giannini gave him a big smile.
“Beautiful. An apology two years later. OK. I’ll happily read through the text. Are
you in a rush?”
“Yes. We’re going to press very soon. Turn left here.”
Annika parked across the street from the building on Björneborgsvägen where
Svensson and Johansson lived. “This’ll just take a minute,” Blomkvist said. He jogged
across the street to punch in the door code. As soon as he was inside he could tell
that something was wrong. He heard excited voices echoing in the stairwell and
ran up the three flights to the apartment. Not until he reached their floor did he
realize that the commotion was all around their apartment. Five neighbours were
standing on the landing. The apartment door was ajar.
“What’s going on?” Blomkvist said, more out of curiosity than concern.
They all fell silent and looked at him. Three women, two men, all in their seventies
it seemed. One of the women was wearing a nightgown.
“It sounded like shots,” said a man in a brown dressing gown, who seemed to know
what he was talking about.
“Shots?”
“Just now. There was shooting in the apartment about a minute ago. The door was
open.”
Blomkvist pushed forward and rang the doorbell as he walked into the apartment.
“Dag? Mia?” he called.
No answer.
Suddenly he felt an icy shiver run down his neck. He recognized the smell: cordite.
Then he approached the living-room door. The first thing he saw was
HolyMotherofGod Svensson slumped beside the dining-room chairs in a pool of
blood a yard across.
Blomkvist hurried over. At the same time he pulled out his mobile and dialled 112
for emergency services. They answered right away.
“My name is Mikael Blomkvist. I need an ambulance and police.”
He gave the address.
“What is this regarding?”
“A man. He seems to have been shot in the head and is unconscious.”
Blomkvist bent down and tried to find a pulse on Svensson’s neck. Then he saw the
enormous crater in the back of his head and realized that he must be standing in
Svensson’s brain matter. Slowly he withdrew his hand.
No ambulance crew in the world would be able to save Dag Svensson now.
Then he noticed shards from one of the coffee cups that Johansson had inherited
from her grandmother and that she was so afraid would get broken. He
straightened up quickly and looked all around.
“Mia,” he yelled.
The neighbour in the brown dressing gown had come into the hall behind him.
Blomkvist turned at the living-room door and held his hand up.
“Stop there,” he said. “Back out to the stairs.”
The neighbour at first looked as if he wanted to protest, but he obeyed the order.
Blomkvist stood still for fifteen seconds. Then he stepped around the pool of blood
and proceeded warily past Svensson’s body to the bedroom door.
Johansson lay on her back on the floor at the foot of the bed.
NonononotMiatooforGodssake. She had been shot in the face. The bullet had
entered below her jaw by her left ear. The exit wound in her temple was as big as
an orange and her right eye socket gaped empty. The flow of blood was if possible
even greater than that from her partner. The force of the bullet had been such that
the wall above the head of the bed, several yards away, was covered with blood
splatter.
Blomkvist became aware that he was clutching his mobile in a death grip with the
line to the emergency centre still open and that he had been holding his breath. He
took air into his lungs and raised the telephone.
“We need the police. Two people have been shot. I think they’re dead. Please hurry.”
He heard the voice from emergency services say something but did not catch the
words. He felt as if there was something wrong with his hearing. It was utterly
silent around him. He did not hear the sound of his own voice when he tried to say
something. He backed out of the apartment. When he got out to the landing he
realized that his whole body was shaking and that his heart was pounding
painfully. Without a word he squeezed through the petrified crowd of neighbours
and sat down on the stairs. From far away he could hear the neighbours asking him
questions. What happened? Are they hurt? Did something happen? The sound of
their voices echoed as if coming through a tunnel.
Blomkvist felt numb. He knew that he was in shock. He leaned his head down
between his knees. Then he began to think. Good God—they’ve been murdered. They
were shot just a few minutes ago. The killer could still be in the apartment… no, I
would have seen him. He couldn’t stop shaking. The sight of Johansson’s shattered
face could not be erased from his retina.
Suddenly his hearing came back, as if someone had turned up a volume control. He
got up quickly and looked at the neighbour in the dressing gown.
“You,” he said. “Stay here and make sure nobody goes inside the apartment. The
police and an ambulance are on their way. I’ll go down and let them in.”
Blomkvist took the stairs three at a time. On the ground floor he glanced at the
cellar stairs and stopped short. He took a step towards the cellar. Halfway down
the stairs lay a revolver in plain sight. Blomkvist thought it looked like a Colt .45
Magnum—the kind of weapon used to murder Olof Palme.*
He suppressed the impulse to pick up the weapon. Instead he went and opened the
front door and stood in the night air. It was not until he heard the brief honk of a
car horn that he remembered his sister was waiting for him. He walked across the
street.
Annika opened her mouth to say something sarcastic about her brother’s tardiness.
Then she saw the expression on his face.
“Did you see anyone while you were waiting?” Blomkvist asked. His voice sounded
hoarse and unnatural.
“No. Who would that be? What happened?”
Blomkvist was silent for a few seconds while he looked left and right. Everything
was quiet on the street. He reached into his jacket pocket and found a crumpled
pack with one cigarette left. As he lit it he could hear sirens approaching in the
distance. He looked at his watch. It was 11:17 p.m.
“Annika—this is going to be a long night,” he said without looking at her as the
police car turned up the street.
• • •
The first to arrive were officers Magnusson and Ohlsson. They had been on
Nynäsvägen responding to what turned out to be a false alarm. Magnusson and
Ohlsson were followed by a staff car with the field superintendent, Oswald
Mårtensson, who had been at Skanstull when the central switchboard had sent out
a call for all cars in the area. They arrived at almost the same time from different
directions and saw a man in jeans and a dark jacket standing in the middle of the
street raising his hand for them to stop. At the same time a woman got out of a car
parked a few yards away.
All three policemen froze. The central switchboard had reported that two people
had been shot, and the man was holding something in his left hand. It took a
couple of seconds to be sure that it was a mobile telephone. They got out of their
cars at the same time and adjusted their belts. Mårtensson assumed command.
“Are you the one who called about a shooting?”
The man nodded. He seemed badly shaken. He was smoking a cigarette and his
hand was trembling when he put it in his mouth.
“What’s your name?”
“Mikael Blomkvist. Two people were just shot in this building a very short time ago.
Their names are Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. Three floors up. Their neighbours
are standing outside the door.”
“Good Lord,” the woman said.
“And who are you?” Mårtensson asked Annika.
“Annika Giannini. I’m his sister,” she said, pointing at Blomkvist.
“Do you live here?”
“No,” Blomkvist said. “I was going to visit the couple who were shot. My sister gave
me a ride from a dinner party.”
“You say that two people were shot. Did you see what happened?”
“No. I found them.”
“Let’s go up and have a look,” Mårtensson said.
“Wait,” Blomkvist said. “According to the neighbours the shots were fired only a
minute or so before I arrived. I dialled 112 within a minute of getting here. Since
then less than five minutes have passed. That means the person who killed them
must still be in the area.”
“Do you have a description?”
“We haven’t seen anyone, but it’s possible that some of the neighbours saw
something.”
Mårtensson motioned to Magnusson, who raised his radio and talked into it in a
low voice. He turned to Blomkvist.
“Can you show us the way?” he said.
When they got inside the front door Blomkvist stopped and pointed to the cellar
stairs. Mårtensson bent down and looked at the weapon. He went all the way
down the stairs and tried the cellar door. It was locked.
“Ohlsson, stay here and keep an eye on this,” Mårtensson said.
Outside the apartment the crowd of neighbours had thinned out. Two had gone
back to their own apartments, but the man in the dressing gown was still at his
post. He seemed relieved when he saw the uniformed officers.
“I didn’t let anyone in,” he said.
“That’s good,” Blomkvist and Mårtensson said together.
“There seem to be bloody tracks on the stairs,” Officer Magnusson said.
Everyone looked at the footprints. Blomkvist looked at his Italian loafers.
“Those are probably from my shoes,” he said. “I was inside the apartment. There’s
quite a bit of blood.”
Mårtensson gave Blomkvist a searching look. He used a pen to push open the
apartment door and found more bloody footprints in the hall.
“To the right. Dag Svensson’s in the living room and Mia Johansson’s in the
bedroom.”
Mårtensson did a quick inspection of the apartment and came out after only a few
seconds. He radioed to ask for backup from the criminal duty officer. As he finished
talking, the ambulance crew arrived. Mårtens son stopped them as they were going
in.
“Two victims. As far as I can see, they’re beyond help. Can one of you look in
without messing up the crime scene?”
It did not take long to confirm. A paramedic decided that the bodies would not be
taken to hospital for resuscitation. They were beyond help. Blomkvist suddenly felt
sick to his stomach and turned to Mårtensson.
“I’m going outside. I need some air.”
“Unfortunately I can’t let you go just yet.”
“I’ll just sit on the porch outside the door.”
“May I see your ID, please?”
Blomkvist took out his wallet and put it in Mårtensson’s hand. Then he turned
without a word and went outside, where Annika was still waiting with Officer
Ohlsson. She sat down next to him.
“Micke, what happened?”
“Two people I liked a lot have been murdered. Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. It
was his manuscript I wanted you to read.”
Annika realized that this was no time to ply him with questions. Instead she put
her arm around her brother’s shoulders and hugged him. More police cars arrived.
A handful of curious nighttime onlookers had stopped on the pavement across the
street. Blomkvist watched them while the police started to set up a cordon. A
murder investigation was beginning.
It was past 3:00 a.m. by the time Blomkvist and his sister were allowed to leave the
police station. They had spent an hour in Annika’s car outside the apartment
building in Enskede, waiting for a duty prosecutor to arrive to initiate the pre-investigative stage. Then, since Blomkvist was a good friend of the two victims and
since he was the one who had found them, they were asked to follow along to
Kungsholmen to assist the investigation.
There they’d had to wait a long time before they were interviewed by an Inspector
Nyberg at the station. She had light blond hair and looked like a teenager.
I’m getting old, Blomkvist thought.
By 2:30 he had drunk so many cups of police canteen coffee that he was sober and
feeling unwell. He had to interrupt the interview and run to the toilet, where he
was violently sick. He still had the image of Johansson’s face swimming in his head.
He drank three cups of water and rinsed his face over and over before returning to
the interview. He tried to pull himself together to answer all of Inspector Nyberg’s
questions.
“Did Dag Svensson or Mia Johansson have enemies?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“Had they received any threats?”
“Not that I know of.”
“How would you describe their relationship?”
“They gave every appearance of loving each other. Dag told me that they were
thinking of having a baby after Mia got her doctorate.”
“Did they use drugs?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so, and if they did it would be nothing
more than a joint at a party when they had something to celebrate.”
“Why were you visiting them so late at night?”
Blomkvist explained that they were doing last-minute work on a book, without
identifying the subject.
“Wasn’t it unusual to call on people so late at night?”
“That was the first time it had ever happened.”
“How did you know them?”
“Through work.”
The questions were relentless as they tried to establish the time frame.
The shots had been heard all over the building. They had been fired less than five
seconds apart. The seventy-year-old man in the dressing gown, a retired major from
the coastal artillery, as it turned out, was their nearest neighbour. He was watching
TV. After the second shot, he went out to the stairwell. He had a hip problem and
so getting up from the sofa was a slow process. He estimated that it had taken him
thirty seconds to reach the landing. Neither he nor any other neighbour had seen
anybody on the stairs.
According to the neighbours, Blomkvist had arrived at the apartment less than two
minutes after the second shot was fired.
Calculating that he and Annika had had a view of the street for half a minute while
she found the right building, parked, and exchanged a few words before he crossed
the street and went up the stairs, Blomkvist figured there was a window of thirty
to forty seconds. During which time the killer had left the apartment, gone down
three flights of stairs—dropping the weapon on the way—left the building, and
disappeared before Annika turned into the street. They had just missed him.
For a dizzying moment Blomkvist realized that Inspector Nyberg was toying with
the possibility that he himself could have been the killer, that he had only run
down one flight and pretended to arrive on the scene after the neighbours had
gathered. But he had an alibi in the form of his sister. His whole evening, including
the telephone conversation with Svensson, could be vouched for by a dozen
members of the Giannini family.
Eventually Annika put her foot down. Blomkvist had given all reasonable and
conceivable help. He was visibly tired and he was not feeling well. She told the
inspector that she was not only Blomkvist’s sister but also his lawyer. It was time
to bring all this to a close and let him go home.
When they got out to the street they stood for a time next to Annika’s car. “Go
home and get some sleep,” she said.
Blomkvist shook his head.
“I have to go to Erika’s,” he said. “She knew them too. I can’t just call and tell her,
and I don’t want her to wake up and hear it on the news.”
Annika hesitated, but she knew that her brother was right.
“So, off to Saltsjöbaden,” she said.
“Can you take me?”
“What are little sisters for?”
“If you give me a lift out to Nacka I can take a taxi from there or wait for a bus.”
“Nonsense. Jump in and I’ll drive you.”
* Olof Palme was the prime minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986.
He was assassinated in 1986, shot twice in a street ambush in central Stockholm.
His murder remains unsolved.
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