CHAPTER 32
Thursday, April 7
Blomkvist arrived at Göteborg Central Station just after 9:00 p.m. The X2000 had
made up some time, but it was still late. He had spent the last hour of the journey
calling car rental companies. He’d first thought of finding a car in Alingsås and
getting off there, but the office was closed already. Ultimately he managed to order
a Volkswagen through a hotel booking agency in the city. He could pick up the car
at Järntorget. He decided not to try to navigate Göteborg’s confusing local traffic
and incomprehensible ticket system and took a cab to the lot.
When he got to the car there was no map in the glove compartment. He bought
one in a gas station, along with a flashlight, a bottle of mineral water, and a cup of
coffee, which he put in the holder on the dashboard. It was 10:30 before he drove
out of the city on the road to Alingsås.
A fox stopped and looked about restlessly. He knew that something was buried
there. But from somewhere nearby came the rustle of an unwary night animal and
the fox was instantly on the alert for easier prey. He took a cautious step. But
before he continued his hunt he lifted his hind leg and pissed on the spot to mark
his territory.
Bublanski did not normally call his colleagues late in the evening, but this time he
couldn’t resist. He picked up the phone and dialled Modig’s number.
“Pardon me for calling so late. Are you up?”
“No problem.”
“I’ve just finished going through Björck’s report.”
“I’m sure you had as much trouble putting it down as I did.”
“Sonja… how do you make sense of what’s going on?”
“It seems to me that Gunnar Björck, a prominent name on the list of johns, if you
remember, had Lisbeth Salander put in an asylum after she tried to protect herself
and her mother from a lunatic sadist who was working for Säpo. He was abetted in
this by Dr. Teleborian, among others, on whose testimony we in part based our
own evaluation of her mental state.”
“This changes the entire picture we have of her.”
“It explains a great deal.”
“Sonja, can you pick me up in the morning at 8:00?”
“Of course.”
“We’re going to go down to Smådalarö to have a talk with Gunnar Björck. I made
some enquiries. He’s on sick leave.”
“I’m looking forward to it already.”
Beckman looked at his wife as she stood by the window in the living room, staring
out at the water. She had her mobile in her hand, and he knew that she was
waiting for a call from Blomkvist. She looked so unhappy that he went over and
put his arm around her.
“Blomkvist is a grown man,” he said. “But if you’re really so worried you should call
that policeman.”
Berger sighed. “I should have done that hours ago. But that’s not why I’m unhappy.”
“Is it something I should know about?”
“I’ve been hiding something from you. And from Mikael. And from everyone else at
the magazine.”
“Hiding? Hiding what?”
She turned to her husband and told him that she had been offered the job of editor
in chief at Svenska Morgon-Posten. Beckman raised his eyebrows.
“But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” he said. “That’s a huge coup.
Congratulations.”
“It’s just that I feel like a traitor.”
“Mikael will understand. Everyone has to move on when it’s time. And right now
it’s time for you.”
“I know.”
“Have you already made up your mind?”
“Yes. I’ve made up my mind. But I haven’t had the guts to tell anybody. And it feels
as if I’m leaving in the midst of a huge disaster.” Beckman took his wife in his arms.
Armansky rubbed his eyes and looked out into the darkness.
“We ought to call Bublanski,” he said.
“No,” Palmgren said. “Neither Bublanski nor any other authority figure has ever
lifted a finger to help her. Let her take care of her own affairs.”
Armansky looked at Salander’s former guardian. He was still amazed by the
improvement in Palmgren’s condition compared with when he last saw him over
Christmas. He still slurred his words, but he had a new vitality in his eyes. There
was also a fury about the man that Armansky had never seen before. Palmgren told
him the whole story that Blomkvist had pieced together. Armansky was shocked.
“She’s going to try to kill her father.”
“That’s possible,” Palmgren said calmly.
“Or else Zalachenko might try to kill her.”
“That’s also possible.”
“So we’re just supposed to wait?”
“Dragan … you’re a good person. But what Lisbeth Salander does or doesn’t do,
whether she survives or whether she dies, is not your responsibility.”
Palmgren threw out his arms. All of a sudden he had rediscovered a coordination
that he hadn’t had in a long time. It was as though the drama of the past few
weeks had revived his dulled senses.
“I’ve never been sympathetic towards people who take the law into their own
hands. But I’ve never heard of anyone who had such a good reason to do so. At the
risk of sounding like a cynic, what happens tonight will happen, no matter what
you or I think. It’s been written in the stars since she was born. And all that
remains is for us to decide how we’re going to behave towards Lisbeth if she makes
it back.”
Armansky sighed and looked grimly at the old lawyer.
“And if she spends the next ten years in prison, at least she was the one who chose
that path. I’ll still be her friend,” Palmgren said.
“I had no idea you had such a libertarian view of humanity.”
“Neither did I,” he said.
• • •
Miriam Wu stared at the ceiling. She had the nightlight on and the radio was
playing “On a Slow Boat to China” at a low volume.
The day before she had woken to find herself in the hospital where Paolo Roberto
had brought her. She slept and woke restlessly and went to sleep again with no real
grasp of passing time. The doctors told her that she had a concussion. In any case
she needed to rest. She had a broken nose, three broken ribs, and bruises all over
her body. Her left eyebrow was so swollen that her eye was merely a slit. It hurt
whenever she tried to change position. It hurt when she breathed in. Her neck was
painful and she was wearing a brace, just to be on the safe side. But the doctors
had assured her that she would make a complete recovery.
When she awoke towards evening, Paolo Roberto was sitting next to her bed. He
grinned and asked how she felt. She wondered if she looked as awful as he did.
She asked questions and he answered them. For some reason it didn’t seem at all
odd that he was a good friend of Salander’s. He was a cocky devil. Lisbeth liked
cocky devils, just as she detested pompous jerks. There was only a subtle difference,
but Paolo Roberto belonged to the former category.
She now had an explanation for why he had suddenly sprung out of nowhere into
the warehouse, but she was surprised that he’d decided so stubbornly to pursue the
van. And she was frightened by the news that the police were digging up bodies in
the woods around the warehouse.
“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”
He shook his head and sat quietly for a while.
“I tried to explain it to Blomkvist. He didn’t really get it. But I think you might
understand since you box yourself.”
She knew what he meant. No-one who hadn’t been there would ever know what it
was to fight a monster who couldn’t feel pain. She thought about how helpless
she’d been.
After that she had just held his bandaged hand. They didn’t speak for a long time.
There was nothing more to say. When she woke up, he was gone. She wished that
Lisbeth would get in touch. She was the one Niedermann had been after.
Miriam was afraid that he would catch her.
Salander couldn’t breathe. She had no sense of time, but she knew that she had
been shot, and she realized—more by instinct than by rational thought—that she
was buried underground. Her left arm was unusable, she couldn’t move a muscle
without waves of pain shooting through her shoulder, and she was floating in and
out of a foggy consciousness. I have to get air. Her head was bursting with a
throbbing pain the likes of which she had never felt before.
Her right hand had ended up underneath her face, and she began instinctively to
nudge the earth away from her nose and mouth. It was sandy and relatively dry.
She managed to create a space the size of her fist in front of her face.
How long she had been lying there buried she had no idea. But finally she
formulated a lucid thought and it gripped her with panic. He buried me alive. She
couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. A vast weight of soil held her bound to the
primal rock.
She tried to move a leg, but she could scarcely tense her muscles. Then she made
the mistake of trying to get up. She pressed down with her head to try to raise
herself and the pain flew like an electric charge through her temples. I can’t throw
up. She sank back into muddled consciousness.
When she could think again, she felt carefully to determine which parts of her body
were functional. The only limb she could move an inch or two was her right hand,
the one in front of her face. I have to get air. The air was above her, above the
grave.
Salander began to scratch. She pressed down on her elbow and managed to make a
little room to manoeuvre. With the back of her hand she enlarged the area in front
of her face by pressing the dirt away from her. I need to dig.
She discovered that she had a cavity within her fetal position, between her elbows
and her knees. That was where most of the air that was keeping her alive had been
trapped. She began desperately twisting her upper body back and forth and felt
how the soil ran into the space beneath her. The pressure on her chest lifted a
little. She could move her arm.
Minute by minute she worked in a semiconscious state. She scratched sandy earth
from her face and pressed handful after handful into the cavity beneath her.
Gradually she managed to free her arm so that she could shift the soil away from
the top of her head. Inch by inch she enlarged the space around her head. She felt
something hard and was suddenly holding a small root or stick in her hand. She
scratched upwards. The soil was still full of air and not very compact.
The fox paused by Salander’s grave on the way back to his den. He had found two
field mice and was feeling satisfied when suddenly he sensed another presence. He
froze and pricked up his ears. His whiskers and nose were quivering.
Salander’s fingers emerged like something dead from beneath the earth. Had there
been any human watching, he would probably have reacted like the fox. He was
gone like a shot.
Salander felt cool air stream down her arm. She could breathe again.
It took her half an hour more to free herself from the grave. She found it odd that
she couldn’t use her left hand, but mechanically went on scratching at the dirt and
sand with her right.
She needed something else to dig with. She pulled her arm down into the hole, got
to her breast pocket and worked the cigarette case free. She opened it and used it
as a scoop. She scraped soil loose and flicked it away. And then at last she could
move her right shoulder and managed to press it upwards through the earth above
her. Then she scraped more sand and dirt and eventually was able to straighten her
head. She now had her right arm and head above the ground. When she had
released part of her upper body she could start squirming upwards an inch at a
time until the ground suddenly released its grip on her legs.
She crawled from the grave with her eyes closed and didn’t stop until her shoulder
hit a tree trunk. Slowly she turned her body so that she had the tree to lean on and
wiped the dirt from her eyes with the back of her hand before she opened them. It
was pitch-black around her and the air was icy cold. She was sweating. She felt a
dull pain in her head, in her left shoulder, and in her hip, but didn’t spend any
energy wondering why. She sat still for ten minutes, breathing. Then it came to her
that she couldn’t stay there.
She struggled to her feet as the world swirled around her.
She felt instantly sick and bent over to vomit.
Then she started to walk. She had no idea which direction she was going. The pain
in her left hip was excruciating and she kept stumbling to her knees. Each time an
even greater pain shot through her head.
She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when she saw a light out of the
corner of her eye. She changed direction. It was only when she was standing by the
woodshed in the yard that she realized she had walked straight back to
Zalachenko’s farmhouse. She swayed like a drunk.
Photo cells on the driveway and in the clearing. She had come from the other
direction. They would not have noticed her.
She was confused. She knew that she was in no condition to take on Niedermann
and Zalachenko. She looked at the white farmhouse.
Click. Wood. Click. Fire.
She fantasized about a gasoline can and a match.
With enormous effort she turned towards the shed and staggered over to a door
that was secured with a crossbar. She managed to lift it by putting her right
shoulder under it. She heard the noise when the crossbar fell to the ground and hit
the side of the door with a bang. She took a step into the darkness and looked
around.
It was a woodshed. There was no gasoline.
At the kitchen table Zalachenko looked up when he heard the sound of the falling
crossbar. He pulled the curtain aside and peered out into the darkness. It was a few
seconds before his eyes adjusted. The wind was blowing harder now. The weather
forecast had predicted a stormy weekend. Then he saw that the door to the
woodshed was ajar.
He and Niedermann had brought in wood earlier that afternoon. It had been
unnecessary, but its purpose was to provide Salander with confirmation that she
had come to the right place and to draw her out.
Niedermann had obviously not set the crossbar in place properly. He could be so
phenomenally clumsy. Zalachenko glanced towards the door of the living room,
where Niedermann had dozed off on the sofa. He thought of waking him, but
decided not to.
To find gasoline Salander would have to go to the barn, where the cars were
parked. She leaned against a chopping block, breathing hard. She had to rest. She
sat there for about a minute before she heard the halting steps of Zalachenko’s
prosthesis.
In the dark Blomkvist took a wrong turn at Mellby, north of Sollebrunn. Instead of
getting off at Nossebro he had continued north. He realized his mistake just before
he got to Trökörna. He stopped and looked at the map.
He cursed and turned back towards Nossebro.
• • •
With her right hand Salander grabbed the axe from the chopping block a second
before Zalachenko came into the woodshed. She didn’t have the strength to lift it
over her shoulder, but she swung it with one hand in an upward arc, putting her
weight on her uninjured hip and turning her body in a semicircle.
At the same moment that Zalachenko turned on the light switch, the blade of the
axe struck him across the right side of his face, smashing his cheekbone and
penetrating into his forehead. He didn’t know what had happened, but in the next
second his brain registered the pain and he howled as if possessed.
Niedermann woke with a start and sat up, bewildered. He heard a screaming that
at first he couldn’t believe was human. It was coming from outside. Then he
realized it was Zalachenko. He got swiftly to his feet.
Salander planted her feet and swung the axe again, but her body was not obeying
orders. Her aim was to bury the axe in her father’s head, but she had exhausted all
her strength and struck him far from the intended target, just below his kneecap.
But the weight of the axe head buried it so deep that it stuck and was pulled out of
her hands when Zalachenko pitched forward into the shed. He was screaming
incessantly.
She bent again to grasp the axe. The earth shook as lightning flashed inside her
head. She had to sit down. She reached out her hand and felt his jacket pockets. He
still had the gun, and she focused her gaze as the ground swayed.
A Browning .22 calibre.
A fucking Boy Scout pistol.
That was why she was still alive. If she’d been hit with a bullet from Niedermann’s
Sig Sauer or from a revolver with heavier ammo, she would have a gigantic hole
through her skull.
At that moment she heard the stumbling approach of Niedermann, who then filled
the doorway of the shed. He stopped short and registered the scene before him
with uncomprehending and staring eyes. Zalachenko was wailing like a man
possessed. His face was a bloody mask. He had an axe wedged in his knee. A bloody
and filthy Salander was sitting on the floor next to him. She looked like something
from a horror movie, and far too many of those had already played out in
Niedermann’s mind.
He, who could feel no pain and was built like a tank, had never liked the dark.
With his own eyes he had seen creatures in the dark, and an indeterminate terror
was always lurking, waiting for him. And now the terror had materialized.
The girl on the floor was dead. There was no doubt about that.
He had buried her himself.
Consequently, the creature on the floor was no girl, but a being from the other side
of the grave who couldn’t be conquered with human strength or weapons known
to man.
The transformation from human being to corpse had already begun. Her skin had
changed into a lizardlike armour. Her bared teeth were piercing spikes for ripping
chunks of meat from her prey. Her reptilian tongue shot out and licked around her
mouth. Her bloody hands had razor-sharp claws four inches long. He could see her
eyes glowing. He could hear her growling low and saw her tense her muscles to
pounce at his throat.
He saw clearly that she had a tail that curled and ominously began to whip the
floor.
Then she raised the pistol and fired. The bullet passed so close to Niedermann’s ear
that he could feel the lash of the wind. He saw her mouth spout flames at him.
That was too much.
He stopped thinking.
He spun around and ran for his life. She fired another shot that missed him but
that seemed to give him wings. He hopped over a fence and was swallowed up by
the darkness of the field as he sprinted towards the main road.
Salander watched in astonishment as he disappeared from view.
She shuffled to the doorway and gazed into the darkness, but she couldn’t see him.
After a while Zalachenko stopped screaming, but he lay moaning in shock. She
opened the pistol, checked that she had one round left, and considered shooting
him in the head. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the
dark, and she had better save it. She would need more than one .22 bullet for him.
But it was better than nothing.
• • •
It took her five minutes to put the crossbar in place. She staggered across the yard
and into the house and found the telephone on a sideboard in the kitchen. She
dialled a number she hadn’t used in two years. The answering machine clicked in.
Hi. This is Mikael Blomkvist. I can’t answer right now, but please leave your name
and number and I’ll call you as soon as I can.
Beep.
“Mir-g-kral,” she said, and heard that her voice sounded like mush. She swallowed.
“Mikael. It’s Salander.”
Then she did not know what to say.
She hung up the receiver.
Niedermann’s Sig Sauer lay disassembled for cleaning on the kitchen table in front
of her, and next to it Sonny Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad. She dropped Zalachenko’s
Browning on the floor and lurched over to pick up the Wanad and check the
magazine. She also found her Palm PDA and dropped it in her pocket. Then she
hobbled to the sink and filled an unwashed cup with cold water. She drank four
cups. When she looked up she saw her face in an old shaving mirror on the wall.
She almost fired a shot out of sheer fright. What she saw reminded her more of an
animal than a human being. She was a madwoman with a distorted face and a
gaping mouth. She was plastered with dirt. Her face and neck were a coagulated
gruel of blood and soil. Now she had an idea what Niedermann had encountered in
the woodshed.
She went closer to the mirror and was suddenly aware that her left leg was
dragging behind her. She had a sharp pain in her hip where Zalachenko’s first bullet
had hit her. His second bullet had struck her shoulder and paralyzed her left arm. It
hurt.
But the pain in her head was so sharp it made her stagger. Slowly she raised her
right hand and fumbled across the back of her head. With her fingers she could feel
the crater of the entry wound.
As she fingered the hole in her skull she realized with sudden horror that she was
touching her own brain, that she was so seriously wounded she was dying or
maybe should already be dead. She couldn’t comprehend how she could still be on
her feet.
She was suddenly overcome by a numbing weariness. She wasn’t sure if she was
about to faint or fall asleep, but she made her way to the kitchen bench, where she
stretched out and laid the unwounded right side of her head on a cushion.
She had to regain her strength, but she knew that she couldn’t risk sleeping while
Niedermann was still at large. Sooner or later he would come back. Sooner or later
Zalachenko would manage to get out of the woodshed and drag himself to the
house. But she no longer had the energy to stay upright. She was freezing. She
clicked off the safety on the pistol.
Niedermann stood, undecided, on the road from Sollebrunn to Nossebro. He was
alone. It was dark. He had begun to think rationally again and was ashamed that he
had run away. He didn’t understand how it could have happened, but he came to
the logical conclusion that she must have survived. Somehow she must have
managed to dig herself out.
Zalachenko needed him. He ought to go back to the house and wring her neck.
At the same time he had a powerful feeling that everything was over. He had had
that feeling for a long time. Things had started to go wrong and kept going wrong
from the moment Bjurman had contacted them. Zalachenko had changed beyond
recognition when he heard the name Lisbeth Salander. All the rules about caution
and moderation he had preached for so many years had been blown away.
Niedermann hesitated.
Zalachenko needed to be looked after.
If she hadn’t already killed him.
That meant there would be questions.
He bit his lower lip.
He had been his father’s partner for many years. They had been good years. He had
money put away and he also knew where Zalachenko had hidden his own fortune.
He had the resources and the skill required to drive the business forward. The
sensible thing would be to walk away from all this and not look back. If there was
one thing that Zalachenko had drummed into him, it was always to retain the
ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt
unmanageable. That was a basic rule for survival. Don’t lift a finger for a lost cause.
She wasn’t supernatural. But she was bad news. She was his half sister.
He had underestimated her.
Niedermann was torn. Part of him wanted to go back and wring her neck. Part of
him wanted to keep running through the night.
He had his passport and wallet in his pocket. He didn’t want to go back. There was
nothing at the farm he needed.
Except perhaps a car.
He was still hesitating when he saw the gleam of headlights approaching from the
other side of the hill. He turned his head. All he needed was a car to get him to
Göteborg.
For the first time in her life—at least since she had been a little girl—Salander was
unable to take command of her situation. Over the years she had been mixed up in
fights, subjected to abuse, been the object of both official and private injustices. She
had taken many more punches to both body and soul than anyone should ever
have to endure.
But she had been able to rebel every time. She had refused to answer Teleborian’s
questions, and when she was subjected to any kind of physical violence, she had
been able to slink away and retreat.
A broken nose she could live with.
But she couldn’t live with a hole in her skull.
This time she couldn’t drag herself home to bed, pull the covers over her head,
sleep for two days and then get up and go back to her daily routine as if nothing
had happened.
She was so seriously injured that she couldn’t cope with the situation by herself.
She was so exhausted that her body refused to listen to her commands.
I have to sleep for a while, she thought. And suddenly she realized that if she closed
her eyes and let go there was a good chance she would never wake up again. She
analyzed this conclusion and gradually came to understand that she didn’t care. On
the contrary. She felt almost attracted by the thought. To rest. To not wake up.
Her last thoughts were of Miriam Wu.
Forgive me, Mimmi.
She was still holding Nieminen’s pistol, with the safety off, when she closed her
eyes.
Blomkvist saw Niedermann in the beam of his headlights from a long way off and
recognized him at once. It was hard to mistake a blond behemoth built like an
armor-piercing robot. Niedermann was running in his direction, waving his arms.
Blomkvist slowed down. He slipped his hand into the outer pocket of his laptop
case and took out the Colt 1911 Government he had found on Salander’s desk. He
stopped about five yards away from Niedermann and turned off the engine before
opening the car door and stepping out.
“Thanks for stopping,” Niedermann said, out of breath. “I had a … car accident. Can
you give me a lift to town?”
He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice.
“Of course. I can see that you get to town,” Blomkvist said. He pointed the gun at
Niedermann. “Lie down on the ground.”
There was no end to the tribulations Niedermann was having to suffer that night.
He stared in puzzlement at Blomkvist.
Niedermann was not the least bit afraid of either the pistol or the man holding it.
On the other hand, he had respect for weapons. He had lived with violence all his
life. He assumed that if somebody pointed a gun at him, that person was prepared
to use it. He squinted and tried to take stock of the man behind the pistol, but the
headlights turned him into a shadowy figure. Police? He didn’t sound like a cop.
Cops usually identified themselves. At least that’s what they did in the movies.
He weighed his chances. He knew that if he charged the man he could take away
the gun. But the man sounded cold and was standing behind the car door. He
would be hit by at least one, maybe two bullets. If he moved fast the man might
miss, or at least not hit a vital organ, but even if he survived, the bullets would
make it difficult and perhaps impossible for him to escape. It would be better to
wait for a more suitable opportunity.
“LIE DOWN NOW!” Blomkvist yelled.
He moved the muzzle an inch and fired a round into the ditch.
“The next one hits your kneecap,” Blomkvist said in a loud, clear voice of command.
Niedermann got down on his knees, blinded by the headlights.
“Who are you?” he said.
Blomkvist reached his other hand into the pocket in the car door and took out the
flashlight he had bought at the gas station. He shone the beam into Niedermann’s
face.
“Hands behind your back,” Blomkvist commanded. “And spread your legs.”
He waited until Niedermann reluctantly obeyed the orders.
“I know who you are. If you even begin to do anything stupid I’ll shoot you without
warning. I’m aiming at your lung below your shoulder blade. You might be able to
take me … but it’ll cost you.”
He put the flashlight on the ground and took off his belt and made a noose with it,
exactly as he’d learned two decades earlier as a rifleman in Kiruna when he did his
military service. He stood between the giant’s legs, looped the noose around his
arms and pulled it tight above the elbows. The mighty Niedermann was for all
practical purposes helpless.
And then what? Blomkvist looked around. They were completely alone on a road in
the dark. Paolo Roberto hadn’t been exaggerating when he described Niedermann.
The man was huge. The question was only why such a massive guy had come
running in the middle of the night as if he were being chased by the Devil himself.
“I’m looking for Lisbeth Salander. I assume you met her.”
Niedermann did not answer.
“Where is Lisbeth Salander?”
Niedermann gave him a peculiar look. He didn’t understand what was happening
to him on this strange night when everything seemed to be going wrong.
Blomkvist shrugged. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, and found a neatly
coiled rope. He couldn’t leave Niedermann tied up in the middle of the road, so he
looked around. Thirty yards further along the road he saw a traffic sign in the
headlights. CAUTION: MOOSE CROSSING.
“Get up.”
He put the muzzle of the gun against Niedermann’s neck, led him to the sign, and
forced him into the ditch. He told Niedermann to sit with his back against the pole.
Niedermann hesitated.
“This is all quite simple,” Blomkvist said. “You killed Dag Svensson and Mia
Johansson. They were my friends. I’m not going to let you loose on the road, so
either you sit here while I tie you or I’ll shoot you in the kneecap. Your choice.”
Niedermann sat. Blomkvist ran the tow rope around his neck and tied his head
securely to the pole. Then he used fifty feet of rope to bind the giant fast around
the torso and waist. He saved a length to tie his forearms to the pole, and finished
off his handiwork with some real sailor’s knots.
When he was finished, he asked again where Salander was. He got no reply, so he
shrugged and left Niedermann there. It wasn’t until he was back in the car that he
felt the adrenaline flowing and realized what he had just done. The image of
Johansson’s face flickered before his eyes.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and drank some water out of the bottle. He looked at the
figure in the dark beneath the moose sign. Then he looked at the map and saw that
he had about half a mile before the turnoff to Karl Axel Bodin’s farm. He started the
engine and drove past Niedermann.
• • •
He drove slowly past the turnoff with the sign to Gosseberga and parked next to a
barn on a forest road a hundred yards further north. He took his pistol and turned
his flashlight on. He found fresh tire tracks in the mud and decided that another
car had been parked in that same place earlier, but he didn’t stop to consider what
that might mean. He walked back to the turnoff and shone light on the mailbox.
P.O. BOX 192—K. A. BODIN. He continued along the road.
It was almost midnight when he saw the lights from Bodin’s farmhouse. He stood
still for several minutes but heard nothing other than the usual nighttime sounds.
Instead of taking the road straight to the farm, he walked along the edge of the
field and approached the building from the barn, stopping in the yard about a
hundred feet from the house. His every nerve was on edge. The fact that
Niedermann had been running away was reason enough to believe that some
catastrophe had occurred here.
Suddenly he heard a sound. He spun around and dropped to one knee with his gun
raised. It took him a few seconds to identify the source: one of the outbuildings.
Somebody moaning. He moved quickly across the grass and stopped by the shed.
Peering round the corner he could see a light inside.
He listened. Someone was moving around. Holding the pistol in front of him, he
lifted the crossbar with his left hand, pulled open the door, and was confronted by
a pair of terrified eyes in a blood-streaked face. He saw the axe on the floor.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Then he saw the prosthesis.
Zalachenko.
Salander had definitely paid him a visit, but Blomkvist couldn’t imagine what must
have happened. He closed the door and replaced the crossbar.
With Zalachenko in the woodshed and Niedermann bound hand and foot beside the
road to Sollebrunn, Blomkvist hurried across the courtyard to the farmhouse. It was
possible that there was a third person who might yet be a danger, but the house
seemed unoccupied, almost abandoned. Pointing his gun at the ground, he eased
open the front door. He came into a dark hall and saw a rectangle of light from the
kitchen. The only sound was the ticking of a wall clock. When he reached the door
he saw Salander lying on the kitchen bench.
For a moment he stood as if petrified, staring at her mangled body. He noticed that
she was holding a pistol in her hand, which hung loosely off the edge of the bench.
He went to her side and sank to his knees. He thought about how he had found
Svensson and Johansson and thought that she was dead too. Then he saw a slight
movement in her chest and heard a feeble, wheezing breath.
He reached out his hand and carefully loosened the gun from her grip. Suddenly
her fist tightened around its butt. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and
stared at him for many long seconds. Her eyes were unfocused. Then he heard her
mutter in such a low voice that he could only with difficulty catch the words.
Kalle Fucking Blomkvist.
She closed her eyes and let go of the gun. He put it on the floor, took out his
mobile, and dialled the number for emergency services.
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