CHAPTER 1
Friday, 8.iv
Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander five minutes
before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just
before 1.30 in the morning.
“What?” he said, confused.
“Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An
injured man and a younger woman. The woman has a
gunshot wound.”
“Alright,” Jonasson said wearily.
He felt groggy although he had slept for only half an hour.
He was on the night shift in A. & E. at Sahlgrenska hospital
in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. Since he
had come on duty at 6.00 p.m., the hospital had received
four victims of a head-on collision outside Lindome. One
was pronounced D.O.A. He had treated a waitress whose
legs had been scalded in an accident at a restaurant on
Avenyn, and he had saved the life of a four-year-old boy
who arrived at the hospital with respiratory failure after
swallowing the wheel of a toy car. He had patched up a girl
who had ridden her bike into a ditch that the road-repair
department had chosen to dig close to the end of a bike
path; the warning barriers had been tipped into the hole.
She had fourteen stitches in her face and would need two
new front teeth. Jonasson had also sewn part of a thumb
back on to an enthusiastic carpenter who had managed to
slice it off.
By 12.30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased
off. He had made a round to check on the state of his
patients, and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to
rest for a while. He was on duty until 6.00 in the morning,
and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency
patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost
as soon as he turned out the light.
Nurse Nicander handed him a cup of tea. She had not
been given any details about the incoming cases.
Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the
helicopter was coming in in the nick of time. All of a sudden
a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had
moved in over Göteborg.
moved in over Göteborg.
He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it
banked through the storm squalls down towards the
helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot
seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it
vanished from his field of view and he heard the engine
slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set
down the cup.
Jonasson met them in the emergency admissions area.
The other doctor on duty, Katarina Holm, took on the first
patient who was wheeled in – an elderly man with his head
bandaged, apparently with a serious wound to the face.
Jonasson was left with the second patient, the woman who
had been shot. He did a quick visual examination: it looked
like she was a teenager, very dirty and bloody, and
severely wounded. He lifted the blanket that the Rescue
Service had wrapped round her body and saw that the
wounds to her hip and shoulder were bandaged with duct
tape, which he considered a pretty clever idea. The tape
kept bacteria out and the blood in. One bullet had entered
the outer side of her hip and gone straight through the
muscle tissue. Then he gently raised her shoulder and
located the entry wound in her back. There was no exit
wound: the round was still inside her shoulder. He hoped it
had not penetrated her lung, and since he did not see any
blood in the woman’s mouth he concluded that probably it
had not.
had not.
“Radiology,” he told the nurse in attendance. That was all
he needed to say.
Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team
had wrapped round her skull. He froze when he saw
another entry wound. The woman had been shot in the
head and there was no exit wound there either.
Dr Jonasson paused for a second, looking down at the girl.
He felt dejected. He had often described his job as being
like that of a goalkeeper. Every day people came to his
place of work in varying conditions but with one objective:
to get help. It could be an old woman who had collapsed
from a heart attack in the Nordstan galleria, or a fourteen-year-old boy whose left lung had been pierced by a
screwdriver, or a teenage girl who had taken ecstasy and
danced for eighteen hours straight before collapsing, blue
in the face. They were victims of accidents at work or of
violent abuse at home. They were tiny children savaged by
dogs on Vasaplatsen, or Handy Harrys, who only meant to
saw a few planks with their Black & Deckers and in some
mysterious way managed to slice right into their wrist-bones.
So Dr Jonasson was the goalkeeper who stood between
the patient and Fonus Funeral Service. His job was to
decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the
decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the
patient might die or perhaps wake up disabled for life. Most
often he made the right decision, because the vast majority
of injured people had an obvious and specific problem. A
stab wound to the lung or a crushing injury after a car
crash were both particular and recognizable problems that
could be dealt with. The survival of the patient depended
on the extent of the damage and on Dr Jonasson’s skill.
There were two kinds of injury that he hated. One was a
serious burn case, because no matter what measures he
took it would almost inevitably result in a lifetime of
suffering. The second was an injury to the brain.
The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her
hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead
inside her brain was a trauma of a wholly different
magnitude. He was suddenly aware of Nurse Nicander
saying something.
“Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
“It’s her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Lisbeth Salander. The girl they’ve been hunting for the
past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.”
Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient’s face.
He realized at once that Nurse Nicander was right. He and
the whole of Sweden had seen her passport photograph
on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks.
And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was
surely poetic justice of a sort.
But that was not his concern. His job was to save his
patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple
murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.
Then the efficient chaos, the same in every A. & E. the
world over, erupted. The staff on Jonasson’s shift set about
their appointed tasks. Salander’s clothes were cut away. A
nurse reported on her blood pressure – 100/70 – while the
doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and listened to her
heartbeat. It was surprisingly regular, but her breathing was
not quite normal.
Jonasson did not hesitate to classify Salander’s condition
as critical. The wounds in her shoulder and hip could wait
until later with a compress on each, or even with the duct
tape that some inspired soul had applied. What mattered
was her head. Jonasson ordered tomography with the new
and improved C.T. scanner that the hospital had lately
acquired.
Dr Anders Jonasson was blond and blue-eyed, originally
from Umeå in northern Sweden. He had worked at
from Umeå in northern Sweden. He had worked at
Sahlgrenska and Eastern hospitals for twenty years, by
turns as researcher, pathologist, and in A. & E. He had
achieved something that astonished his colleagues and
made the rest of the medical staff proud to work with him;
he had vowed that no patient would die on his shift, and in
some miraculous way he had indeed managed to hold the
mortality rate at zero. Some of his patients had died, of
course, but it was always during subsequent treatment or
for completely different reasons that had nothing to do with
his interventions.
He had a view of medicine that was at times unorthodox. He
thought doctors often drew conclusions that they could not
substantiate. This meant that they gave up far too easily;
alternatively they spent too much time at the acute stage
trying to work out exactly what was wrong with the patient
so as to decide on the right treatment. This was correct
procedure, of course. The problem was that the patient
was in danger of dying while the doctor was still doing his
thinking.
But Jonasson had never before had a patient with a bullet
in her skull. Most likely he would need a brain surgeon. He
had all the theoretical knowledge required to make an
incursion into the brain, but he did not by any means
consider himself a brain surgeon. He felt inadequate but all
of a sudden realized that he might be luckier than he
deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating
deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating
clothes he sent for Nurse Nicander.
“There’s an American professor from Boston called Frank
Ellis, working at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm. He
happens to be in Göteborg tonight, staying at the Radisson
on Avenyn. He just gave a lecture on brain research. He’s
a good friend of mine. Could you get the number?”
While Jonasson was still waiting for the X-rays, Nurse
Nicander came back with the number of the Radisson.
Jonasson picked up the telephone. The night porter at the
Radisson was very reluctant to wake a guest at that time of
night and Jonasson had to come up with a few choice
phrases about the critical nature of the situation before his
call was put through.
“Good morning, Frank,” Jonasson said when the call was
finally answered. “It’s Anders. Do you feel like coming over
to Sahlgrenska to help out in a brain op.?”
“Are you bullshitting me?” Ellis had lived in Sweden for
many years and was fluent in Swedish – albeit with an
American accent – but when Jonasson spoke to him in
Swedish, Ellis always replied in his mother tongue.
“I’m sorry I missed your lecture, Frank, but I hoped you
might be able to give me private lessons. I’ve got a young
woman here who’s been shot in the head. Entry wound just
woman here who’s been shot in the head. Entry wound just
above the left ear. I badly need a second opinion, and I
don’t know of a better person to ask.”
“So it’s serious?” Ellis sat up and swung his feet out of bed.
He rubbed his eyes.
“She’s mid-twenties, entry wound, no exit.”
“And she’s alive?”
“Weak but regular pulse, less regular breathing, blood
pressure is 100/70. She also has a bullet wound in her
shoulder and another in her hip. But I know how to handle
those two.”
“Sounds promising,” Ellis said.
“Promising?”
“If somebody has a bullet in their head and they’re still
alive, that points to hopeful.”
“I understand … Frank, can you help me out?”
“I spent the evening in the company of good friends,
Anders. I got to bed at 1.00 and no doubt I have an
impressive blood alcohol content.”
“I’ll make the decisions and do the surgery. But I need
somebody to tell me if I’m doing anything stupid. Even a
falling-down drunk Professor Ellis is several classes better
than I could ever be when it comes to assessing brain
damage.”
“O.K. I’ll come. But you’re going to owe me one.”
“I’ll have a taxi waiting outside by the time you get down to
the lobby. The driver will know where to drop you, and
Nurse Nicander will be there to meet you and get you kitted
out.”
Ellis had raven-black hair with a touch of grey, and a dark
five-o’clock shadow. He looked like a bit player in E.R. The
tone of his muscles testified to the fact that he spent a
number of hours each week at the gym. He pushed up his
glasses and scratched the back of his neck. He focused his
gaze on the computer screen, which showed every nook
and cranny of the patient Salander’s brain.
Ellis liked living in Sweden. He had first come as an
exchange researcher in the late ’70s and stayed for two
years. Then he came back regularly, until one day he was
offered a permanent position at the Karolinska in
Stockholm. By that time he had won an international
reputation.
He had first met Jonasson at a seminar in Stockholm
fourteen years earlier and discovered that they were both
fly-fishing enthusiasts. They had kept in touch and had
gone on fishing trips to Norway and elsewhere. But they
had never worked together.
“I’m sorry for chasing you down, but …”
“Not a problem.” Ellis gave a dismissive wave. “But it’ll cost
you a bottle of Cragganmore the next time we go fishing.”
“O.K., that’s a fee I’ll gladly pay.”
“I had a patient a number of years ago, in Boston – I wrote
about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. It
was a girl the same age as your patient here. She was
walking to the university when someone shot her with a
crossbow. The arrow entered at the outside edge of her left
eyebrow and went straight through her head, exiting from
almost the middle of the back of her neck.”
“And she survived?”
“She looked like nothing on earth when she came in. We
cut off the arrow shaft and put her head in a C.T. scanner.
The arrow went straight through her brain. By all known
reckoning she should have been dead, or at least suffered
such massive trauma that she would have been in a coma.”
“And what was her condition?”
“She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was
terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely
rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow
through her skull.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I got the forceps and pulled out the arrow and
bandaged the wounds. More or less.”
“And she lived to tell the tale?”
“Obviously her condition was critical, but the fact is we
could have sent her home the same day. I’ve seldom had a
healthier patient.”
Jonasson wondered whether Ellis was pulling his leg.
“On the other hand,” Ellis went on, “I had a 42-year-old
patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head
on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately and was
taken by ambulance to A. & E. When I got to him he was
unconscious. He had a small bump and a very slight
bruise. But he never regained consciousness and died
after nine days in intensive care. To this day I have no idea
why he died. In the autopsy report, we wrote brain
haemorrhage resulting from an accident, but not one of us
was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so
was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so
minor and located in an area that shouldn’t have affected
anything else at all. And yet his liver, kidneys, heart and
lungs shut down one after the other. The older I get, the
more I think it’s like a game of roulette. I don’t believe we’ll
ever figure out precisely how the brain works.” He tapped
on the screen with a pen. “What do you intend to do?”
“I was hoping you would tell me.”
“Let’s hear your diagnosis.”
“Well, first of all, it seems to be a small-calibre bullet. It
entered at the temple, and then stopped about four
centimetres into the brain. It’s resting against the lateral
ventricle. There’s bleeding there.”
“How will you proceed?”
“To use your terminology – get some forceps and extract
the bullet by the same route it went in.”
“Excellent idea. I would use the thinnest forceps you have.”
“It’s that simple?”
“What else can we do in this case? We could leave the
bullet where it is, and she might live to be a hundred, but
it’s also a risk. She might develop epilepsy, migraines, all
sorts of complaints. And one thing you really don’t want to
sorts of complaints. And one thing you really don’t want to
do is drill into her skull and then operate a year from now
when the wound itself has healed. The bullet is located
away from the major blood vessels. So I would recommend
that you extract it … but …”
“But what?”
“The bullet doesn’t worry me so much. She’s survived this
far and that’s a good omen for her getting through having
the bullet removed, too. The real problem is here.” He
pointed at the screen. “Around the entry wound you have
all sorts of bone fragments. I can see at least a dozen that
are a couple of millimetres long. Some are embedded in
the brain tissue. That’s what could kill her if you’re not
careful.”
“Isn’t that part of the brain associated with numbers and
mathematical capacity?” Jonasson said.
Ellis shrugged. “Mumbo jumbo. I have no idea what these
particular grey cells are for. You can only do your best. You
operate. I’ll look over your shoulder.”
Mikael Blomkvist looked up at the clock and saw that it was
just after 3.00 in the morning. He was handcuffed and
increasingly uncomfortable. He closed his eyes for a
moment. He was dead tired but running on adrenaline. He
opened them again and gave the policeman an angry
opened them again and gave the policeman an angry
glare. Inspector Thomas Paulsson had a shocked
expression on his face. They were sitting at a kitchen table
in a white farmhouse called Gosseberga, somewhere near
Nossebro. Blomkvist had heard of the place for the first
time less than twelve hours earlier.
There was no denying the disaster that had occurred.
“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said.
“Now, you listen here—”
“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said again. “I warned you he was
dangerous, for Christ’s sake. I told you that you would have
to handle him like a live grenade. He’s murdered at least
three people with his bare hands and he’s built like a tank.
And you send a couple of village policemen to arrest him
as if he were some Saturday night drunk.”
Blomkvist shut his eyes again, wondering what else could
go wrong that night.
He had found Salander just after midnight. She was very
badly wounded. He had sent for the police and the Rescue
Service.
The only thing that had gone right was that he had
persuaded them to send a helicopter to take the girl to
Sahlgrenska hospital. He had given them a clear
Sahlgrenska hospital. He had given them a clear
description of her injuries and the bullet wound in her
head, and some bright spark at the Rescue Service got the
message.
Even so, it had taken over half an hour for the Puma from
the helicopter unit in Säve to arrive at the farmhouse.
Blomkvist had got two cars out of the barn. He switched on
their headlights to illuminate a landing area in the field in
front of the house.
The helicopter crew and two paramedics had proceeded in
a routine and professional manner. One of the medics
tended to Salander while the other took care of Alexander
Zalachenko, known locally as Karl Axel Bodin. Zalachenko
was Salander’s father and her worst enemy. He had tried to
kill her, but he had failed. Blomkvist had found him in the
woodshed at the farm with a nasty-looking gash – probably
from an axe – in his face and some shattering damage to
one of his legs which he did not trouble to investigate.
While he waited for the helicopter, he did what he could for
Salander. He took a clean sheet from a linen cupboard and
cut it up to make bandages. The blood had coagulated at
the entry wound in her head, and he did not know whether
he dared to put a bandage on it or not. In the end he fixed
the fabric very loosely round her head, mostly so that the
wound would not be exposed to bacteria or dirt. But he had
stopped the bleeding from the wounds in her hip and
stopped the bleeding from the wounds in her hip and
shoulder in the simplest possible way. He had found a roll
of duct tape and this he had used to close the wounds.
The medics remarked that this, in their experience, was a
brand-new form of bandage. He had also bathed
Salander’s face with a wet towel and done his best to wipe
off the dirt.
He had not gone back to the woodshed to tend to
Zalachenko. He honestly did not give a damn about the
man. But he did call Erika Berger on his mobile and told
her the situation.
“Are you alright?” Berger asked him.
“I’m O.K.,” Blomkvist said. “Lisbeth is the one who’s in real
danger.”
“That poor girl,” Berger said. “I read Björck’s Säpo report
this evening. How should I deal with it?”
“I don’t have the energy to think that through right now,”
Blomkvist said. Security Police matters were going to have
to wait until the next day.
As he talked to Berger, he sat on the floor next to the
bench and kept a watchful eye on Salander. He had taken
off her shoes and her trousers so that he could bandage
the wound to her hip, and now his hand rested on the
trousers that he had dropped on the floor next to the
trousers that he had dropped on the floor next to the
bench. There was something in one of the pockets. He
pulled out a Palm Tungsten T3.
He frowned and looked long and hard at the hand-held
computer. When he heard the approaching helicopter he
stuffed it into the inside pocket of his jacket and then went
through all her other pockets. He found another set of keys
to the apartment in Mosebacke and a passport in the name
of Irene Nesser. He put these swiftly into a side pocket of
his laptop case.
The first patrol car with Torstensson and Ingemarsson from
the station in Trollhättan arrived a few minutes after the
helicopter landed. Next to arrive was Inspector Paulsson,
who took charge immediately. Blomkvist began to explain
what had happened. He very soon realized that Paulsson
was a pompous, rigid drill sergeant type. He did not seem
to take in anything that Blomkvist said. It was when
Paulsson arrived that things really started to go awry.
The only thing he seemed capable of grasping was that the
badly damaged girl being cared for by the medics on the
floor next to the kitchen bench was the triple murderer
Lisbeth Salander. And above all it was important that he
make the arrest. Three times Paulsson had asked the
urgently occupied medical orderly whether the girl could be
arrested on the spot. In the end the medic stood up and
shouted at Paulsson to keep the bloody hell out of his way.
Paulsson had then turned his attention to the wounded
man in the woodshed, and Blomkvist heard the inspector
report over his radio that Salander had evidently attempted
to kill yet another person.
By now Blomkvist was so infuriated with Paulsson, who had
obviously not paid attention to a word he had said, that he
yelled at him to call Inspector Bublanski in Stockholm
without delay. Blomkvist had even taken out his mobile and
offered to dial the number for him, but Paulsson was not
interested.
Blomkvist then made two mistakes.
First, he patiently but firmly explained that the man who
had committed the murders in Stockholm was Ronald
Niedermann, who was built like a heavily armoured robot
and suffered from a disease called congenital analgesia,
and who at that moment was sitting in a ditch on the road
to Nossebro tied to a traffic sign. Blomkvist told Paulsson
exactly where Niedermann was to be found, and urged him
to send a platoon armed with automatic weapons to pick
him up. Paulsson finally asked how Niedermann had come
to be in that ditch, and Blomkvist freely admitted that he
himself had put him there, and had managed only by
holding a gun on him the whole time.
“Assault with a deadly weapon,” was Paulsson’s immediate
response.
At this point Blomkvist should have realized that Paulsson
was dangerously stupid. He should have called Bublanski
himself and asked him to intervene, to bring some clarity to
the fog in which Paulsson was apparently enveloped.
Instead he made his second mistake: he offered to hand
over the weapon he had in his jacket pocket – the Colt .45
1911 Government model that he had found earlier that day
at Salander’s apartment in Stockholm. It was the weapon
he had used to disarm and disable Niedermann – not a
straightforward matter with that giant of a man.
At which Paulsson swiftly arrested Blomkvist for possession
of an illegal weapon. He then ordered his two officers,
Torstensson and Ingemarsson, to drive over to the
Nossebro road. They were to find out if there was any truth
to Blomkvist’s story that a man was sitting in a ditch there,
tied to a MOOSE CROSSING sign. If this was the case, the
officers were to handcuff the person in question and bring
him to the farm at Gosseberga.
Blomkvist had objected at once, pointing out that
Niedermann was not a man who could be arrested and
handcuffed just like that: he was a maniacal killer, for God’s
sake. When Blomkvist’s objections were ignored by
Paulsson, the exhaustion of the day made him reckless. He
told Paulsson he was an incompetent fool and yelled at him
that Torstensson and Ingemarsson should fucking forget
about untying Niedermann until they had called for back-up. As a result of this outburst, he was handcuffed and
pushed into the back seat of Paulsson’s car. Cursing, he
watched as Torstensson and Ingemarsson drove off in their
patrol car. The only glimmer of light in the darkness was
that Salander had been carried to the helicopter, which was
even now disappearing over the treetops in the direction of
Göteborg. Blomkvist felt utterly helpless: he could only
hope that she would be given the very best care. She was
going to need it, or die.
Jonasson made two deep incisions all the way down to the
cranium and peeled back the skin round the entry wound.
He used clamps to secure the opening. A theatre nurse
inserted a suction tube to remove any blood. Then came
the awkward part, when he had to use a drill to enlarge the
hole in the skull. The procedure was excruciatingly slow.
Finally he had a hole big enough to give access to
Salander’s brain. With infinite care he inserted a probe into
the brain and enlarged the wound channel by a few
millimetres. Then he inserted a thinner probe and located
the bullet. From the X-ray he could see that the bullet had
turned and was lying at an angle of forty-five degrees to
the entry channel. He used the probe cautiously to prise at
the edge of the bullet, and after a few unsuccessful
attempts he managed to lift it very slightly so that he could
attempts he managed to lift it very slightly so that he could
turn it in the right direction.
Finally he inserted narrow forceps with serrated jaws. He
gripped the base of the bullet, got a good hold on it, then
pulled the forceps straight out. The bullet emerged with
almost no resistance. He held it up to the light for a few
seconds and saw that it appeared intact; then he dropped
it into a bowl.
“Swab,” he said, and his request was instantly met.
He glanced at the E.C.G., which showed that his patient still
had regular heart activity.
“Forceps.”
He pulled down the powerful magnifying glass hanging
overhead and focused on the exposed area.
“Careful,” Ellis said.
Over the next forty-five minutes Jonasson picked out no
fewer than thirty-two tiny bone chips from round the entry
wound. The smallest of these chips could scarcely be seen
with the naked eye.
As Blomkvist tried in frustration to manoeuvre his mobile
out of the breast pocket of his jacket – it proved to be an
impossible task with his hands cuffed behind his back, nor
impossible task with his hands cuffed behind his back, nor
was it clear to him how he was going to be able to use it –
several more vehicles containing both uniformed officers
and technical personnel arrived at the Gosseberga farm.
They were detailed by Paulsson to secure forensic
evidence in the woodshed and to do a thorough
examination of the farmhouse, from which several weapons
had already been confiscated. By now resigned to his
futility, Blomkvist had observed their comings and goings
from his vantage point in Paulsson’s vehicle.
An hour passed before it dawned on Paulsson that
Torstensson and Ingemarsson had not yet returned from
their mission to retrieve Niedermann. He had Blomkvist
brought into the kitchen, where he was required once more
to provide precise directions to the spot.
Blomkvist closed his eyes.
He was still in the kitchen with Paulsson when the armed
response team sent to relieve Torstensson and
Ingemarsson reported back. Ingemarsson had been found
dead with a broken neck. Torstensson was still alive, but he
had been savagely beaten. The men had been discovered
near a MOOSE CROSSING sign by the side of the road.
Their service weapons and the marked police car were
gone.
Inspector Paulsson had started out with a relatively
manageable situation: now he had a murdered policeman
and an armed killer on the run.
“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said again.
“It won’t help to insult the police.”
“That certainly seems to be true in your case. But I’m going
to report you for dereliction of duty and you won’t even
know what hit you. Before I’m through with you, you’re
going to be celebrated as the dumbest policeman in
Sweden on every newspaper billboard in the country.”
The notion of being the object of public ridicule appeared
at last to have an effect on Inspector Paulsson. His face
was lined with anxiety.
“What do you propose?”
“I don’t propose, I demand that you call Inspector Bublanski
in Stockholm. This minute. His number’s on my mobile in
my breast pocket.”
Inspector Modig woke with a start when her mobile rang at
the other end of the bedroom. She saw to her dismay that
it was just after 4.00 in the morning. Then she looked at
her husband, who was snoring peacefully. He would
probably sleep through an artillery barrage. She staggered
out of bed, unplugged her mobile from the charger, and
out of bed, unplugged her mobile from the charger, and
fumbled for the talk button.
Jan Bublanski, she thought. Who else?
“Everything has gone to hell down in Trollhättan,” her
senior officer said without bothering to greet her or
apologize. “The X2000 to Göteborg leaves at 5.10. Take a
taxi.”
“What’s happened?”
“Blomkvist found Salander, Niedermann and Zalachenko.
Got himself arrested for insulting a police officer, resisting
arrest, and for possession of an illegal weapon. Salander
was taken to Sahlgrenska with a bullet in her head.
Zalachenko is there too with an axe wound to his skull.
Niedermann got away. And he killed a policeman tonight.”
Modig blinked twice, registering how exhausted she felt.
Most of all she wanted to crawl back into bed and take a
month’s holiday.
“The X2000 at 5.10. O.K. What do you want me to do?”
“Meet Jerker Holmberg at Central Station. You’re to contact
an Inspector Thomas Paulsson at the Trollhättan police. He
seems to be responsible for much of the mess tonight.
Blomkvist described him as an Olympic-class idiot.”
“You’ve talked to Blomkvist?”
“Apparently he’s been arrested and cuffed. I managed to
persuade Paulsson to let me talk to him for a moment. I’m
on my way to Kungsholmen right now, and I’ll try to work out
what’s going on. We’ll keep in touch by mobile.”
Modig looked at the time again. Then she called a taxi and
jumped into the shower for a minute. She brushed her
teeth, pulled a comb through her hair, and put on long
black trousers, a black T-shirt, and a grey jacket. She put
her police revolver in her shoulder bag and picked out a
dark-red leather coat. Then she shook enough life into her
husband to explain where she was off to, and that he had
to deal with the kids in the morning. She walked out of the
front door just as the taxi drew up.
She did not have to search for her colleague, Criminal
Inspector Holmberg. She assumed that he would be in the
restaurant car and that is where she found him. He had
already bought coffee and sandwiches for her. They sat in
silence for five minutes as they ate their breakfast. Finally
Holmberg pushed his coffee cup aside.
“Maybe I should get some training in some other field,” he
said.
Some time after 4.00 in the morning, Criminal Inspector
Marcus Erlander from the Violent Crimes Division of the
Göteborg police arrived in Gosseberga and took over the
investigation from the overburdened Paulsson. Erlander
was a short, round man in his fifties with grey hair. One of
the first things he did was to have Blomkvist released from
his handcuffs, and then he produced rolls and coffee from
a thermos. They sat in the living room for a private
conversation.
“I’ve spoken with Bublanski,” Erlander said. “Bubble and I
have known each other for many years. We are both of us
sorry that you were subjected to Paulsson’s rather primitive
way of operating.”
“He succeeded in getting a policeman killed tonight,”
Blomkvist said.
Erlander said: “I knew Officer Ingemarsson personally. He
served in Göteborg before he moved to Trollhättan. He has
a three-year-old daughter.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to warn him.”
“So I heard. You were quite emphatic, it seems, and that’s
why you were cuffed. You were the one who exposed
Wennerström last year. Bublanski says that you’re a
shameless journalist bastard and an insane private
investigator, but that you just might know what you’re
talking about. Can you bring me up to speed so that I can
talking about. Can you bring me up to speed so that I can
get the hang of what’s going on?”
“What happened here tonight is the culmination of the
murders of two friends of mine in Enskede, Dag Svensson
and Mia Johansson. And the murder of a person who was
no friend of mine … a lawyer called Bjurman, also Lisbeth
Salander’s guardian.”
Erlander made notes between taking sips of his coffee.
“As you no doubt know, the police have been looking for
Salander since Easter. She was a suspect in all three
murders. First of all, you have to realize that Salander is
not only not guilty of these murders, she has been
throughout a victim in the whole affair.”
“I haven’t had the least connection to the Enskede
business, but after everything that was in the media about
her it seems a bit hard to swallow that Salander could be
completely innocent.”
“Nonetheless, that’s how it is. She’s innocent. Full stop.
The killer is Ronald Niedermann, the man who murdered
your officer tonight. He works for Karl Axel Bodin.”
“The Bodin who’s in Sahlgrenska with an axe in his skull?”
“The axe isn’t still in his head. I assume it was Salander
who nailed him. His real name is Alexander Zalachenko and
who nailed him. His real name is Alexander Zalachenko and
he’s Lisbeth’s father. He was a hit man for Russian military
intelligence. He defected in the ’70s, and was then on the
books of Säpo until the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s
been running his own criminal network ever since.”
Erlander scrutinized the man opposite him. Blomkvist’s face
was shiny with sweat, but he looked both frozen and
deathly tired. Until now he had sounded perfectly rational,
but Paulsson – whose opinion had little influence on
Erlander – had warned him that Blomkvist had been
babbling on about Russian agents and German hit men –
hardly routine elements in Swedish police work. Blomkvist
had apparently reached the point in his story at which
Paulsson had decided to ignore everything else he might
say. But there was one policeman dead and another
severely wounded on the road to Nossebro, so Erlander
was willing to listen. But he could not keep a trace of
incredulity out of his voice.
“O.K. A Russian agent.”
Blomkvist smiled weakly, only too aware of how odd his
story sounded.
“A former Russian agent. I can document every one of my
claims.”
“Go on.”
“Zalachenko was a top spy in the ’70s. He defected and
was granted asylum by Säpo. In his old age he became a
gangster. As far as I understand it, it’s not a unique
situation in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.”
“O.K.”
“As I said, I don’t know exactly what happened here tonight,
but Lisbeth tracked down her father whom she hadn’t seen
for fifteen years. Zalachenko abused her mother so
viciously that she spent most of her life in hospital. He tried
to murder Lisbeth, and through Niedermann he was the
architect of the murders of Svensson and Johansson. Plus,
he was behind the kidnapping of Salander’s friend Miriam
Wu – you probably heard of Paolo Roberto’s title bout in
Nykvarn, as a result of which Wu was rescued from certain
death.”
“If Salander hit her father in the head with an axe she isn’t
exactly innocent.”
“She has been shot three times. I think we could assume
her actions were on some level self-defence. I wonder …”
“Yes?”
“She was so covered with dirt, with mud, that her hair was
one big lump of dried clay. Her clothes were full of sand,
one big lump of dried clay. Her clothes were full of sand,
inside and out. It looked as though she might have been
buried during the night. Niedermann is known to have a
habit of burying people. The police in Södertälje have
found two graves in the place that’s owned by Svavelsjö
Motorcycle Club, outside Nykvarn.”
“Three, as a matter of fact. They found one more late last
night. But if Salander was shot and buried, how was she
able to climb out and start wandering around with an axe?”
“Whatever went on here tonight, you have to understand
that Salander is exceptionally resourceful. I tried to
persuade Paulsson to bring in a dog unit—”
“It’s on its way now.”
“Good.”
“Paulsson arrested you for insulting a police officer …”
“I will dispute that. I called him an imbecile and an
incompetent fool. Under the circumstances neither of these
epithets could be considered wide of the mark.”
“Hmm. It’s not a wholly inaccurate description. But you were
also arrested for possession of an illegal weapon.”
“I made the mistake of trying to hand over a weapon to him.
I don’t want to say anything more about that until I talk to
I don’t want to say anything more about that until I talk to
my lawyer.”
“Alright. We’ll leave it at that. We have more serious issues
to discuss. What do you know about this Niedermann?”
“He’s a murderer. And there’s something wrong with him.
He’s over two metres tall and built like a tank. Ask Paolo
Roberto, who boxed with him. He suffers from a disease
called congenital analgesia, which means the transmitter
substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function. He feels
no pain. He’s German, was born in Hamburg, and in his
teens he was a skinhead. Right now he’s on the run and
he’ll be seriously dangerous to anyone he runs into.”
“Do you have an idea where he might be heading?”
“No. I only know that I had him neatly trussed, all ready to
be arrested, when that idiot from Trollhättan took charge of
the situation.”
Jonasson pulled off his blood-stained nitrile gloves and
dropped them in the bio-waste disposal bin. A theatre
nurse was applying bandages to the gunshot wound on
Salander’s hip. The operation had lasted three hours. He
looked at the girl’s shaved and wounded head, which was
already wrapped in bandages.
He felt a sudden tenderness, as he often did for patients
after an operation. According to the newspapers, she was
after an operation. According to the newspapers, she was
a psychopathic mass murderer, but to him she looked more
like an injured sparrow.
“You’re an excellent surgeon,” Ellis said, looking at him with
amused affection.
“Can I buy you breakfast?”
“Can one get pancakes and jam anywhere round here?”
“Waffles,” Jonasson said. “At my house. Let me call my wife
to warn her, then we can take a taxi.” He stopped and
looked at the clock. “On second thoughts, it might be better
if we didn’t call.”
Annika Giannini woke with a start. She saw that it was 5.58
a.m…. She had her first client meeting at 8.00. She turned
to look at Enrico, who was sleeping peacefully and
probably would not be awake before 8.00. She blinked
hard a few times and got up to turn on the coffeemaker
before she took her shower. She dressed in black trousers,
a white polo neck, and a muted brick-red jacket. She made
two slices of toast with cheese, orange marmalade and a
sliced avocado, and carried her breakfast into the living
room in time for the 6.30 television news. She took a sip of
coffee and had just opened her mouth to take a bite of
toast when she heard the headlines.
One policeman killed and another seriously wounded.
Drama last night as triple murderer Lisbeth Salander is
finally captured.
At first she could not make any sense of it. Was it Salander
who had killed a policeman? The news item was sketchy,
but bit by bit she gathered that a man was being sought for
the killing. A nationwide alert had gone out for a man in his
mid-thirties, as yet unnamed. Salander herself was critically
injured and at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg.
She switched to the other channel, but she learned nothing
more about what had happened. She reached for her
mobile and called her brother, Mikael Blomkvist. She only
got his voicemail. She felt a small twinge of fear. He had
called on his way to Göteborg. He had been tracking
Salander. And a murderer who called himself Ronald
Niedermann.
As it was growing light an observant police officer found
traces of blood on the ground behind the woodshed. A
police dog followed the trail to a narrow trench in a clearing
in a wood about four hundred metres north-east of the
farmhouse.
Blomkvist went with Inspector Erlander. Grimly they studied
the site. Much more blood had obviously been shed in and
around the trench.
They found a damaged cigarette case that seemed to have
been used as a scoop. Erlander put it in an evidence bag
and labelled the find. He also gathered samples of blood-soaked clumps of dirt. A uniformed officer drew his
attention to a cigarette butt – a filterless Pall Mall – some
distance from the hole. This too was saved in an evidence
bag and labelled. Blomkvist remembered having seen a
pack of Pall Malls on the kitchen counter in Zalachenko’s
house.
Erlander glanced up at the lowering rain clouds. The storm
that had ravaged Göteborg earlier in the night had
obviously passed to the south of the Nossebro area, but it
was only a matter of time before the rain came. He
instructed one of his men to get a tarpaulin to cover the
trench and its immediate surroundings.
“I think you’re right,” Erlander said to Blomkvist as they
walked back to the farmhouse. “An analysis of the blood
will probably establish that Salander was buried here, and
I’m beginning to expect that we’ll find her fingerprints on the
cigarette case. She was shot and buried here, but
somehow she managed to survive and dig herself out
and—”
“And somehow got back to the farm and swung an axe into
Zalachenko’s skull,” Blomkvist finished for him. “She can be
a moody bitch.”
“But how on earth did she handle Niedermann?”
Blomkvist shrugged. He was as bewildered as Erlander on
that score.
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