Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

Salander grumbled for a moment, but finally she acquiesced and stuffed the folder into her shoulder bag. She promised to read through it and send instructions as to what she wanted Giannini to do. Then she went back to her beer. Giannini kept her company for an hour, drinking mostly mineral water.

It was not until several days later, when Giannini telephoned to remind her about the estate inventory, that Salander took out the crumpled papers. She sat at the kitchen table, smoothed out the documents, and read through them.

The inventory covered several pages. There was a detailed list of all kinds of junk – the china in the kitchen cupboards in Gosseberga, clothing, cameras and other personal effects. Zalachenko had not left behind much of real value, and not one of the objects had the slightest sentimental value for Salander. She decided that her attitude had not changed since she met with Giannini at the theatre bar. Sell the crap and give the money away. Or something. She was positive that she did not want a single öre of her father’s wealth, but she also was pretty sure that Zalachenko’s real assets were hidden where no tax inspector would look for them.

Then she opened the title deeds for the property in Norrtälje.

It was an industrial site of three buildings totalling twenty thousand square metres in the vicinity of Skederid, between Norrtälje and Rimbo.

The estate assessor had apparently paid a cursory visit, and noted that it was an old brickworks that had been more or less empty and abandoned since it was shut down in the ’60s, apart from a period in the ’70s when it had been used to store timber. He noted that the buildings were in “extremely poor condition” and could not in all likelihood be renovated for any other activity. The term “poor condition” was also used to describe the “north building,” which had in fact been destroyed by fire and collapsed. Some repairs, he wrote, had been made to the “main building”.

What gave Salander a jolt was the site’s history. Zalachenko had acquired the property for a song on 12 March, 1984, but the signatory on the purchase documents was Agneta Sofia Salander.

So Salander’s mother had in fact been the owner of the property. Yet in 1987 her ownership had ceased. Zalachenko had bought her out for 2,000 kronor. After that the property had stood unused for fifteen years. The inventory showed that on 17 September, 2003, K.A.B. Import A.B. had hired the builders NorrBygg Inc. to do renovations which included repairs to the floor and roof, as well as improvements to the water and electrical systems. Repair work had gone on for two months, until the end of November, and then discontinued. NorrBygg had sent an invoice which had been paid.

Of all the assets in her father’s estate, this was the only surprising entry. Salander was puzzled. Ownership of the industrial site made sense if her father had wanted to give the impression that K.A.B. Import was carrying on legitimate activities or owned certain assets. It also made sense that he had used her mother as a front in the purchase and had then for a pittance bought back the property.

But why in heaven’s name would he spend almost 440,000 kronor to renovate a ramshackle building, which according to the assessor was still not being used for anything in 2005?

She could not understand it, but was not going to waste time wondering. She closed the folder and called Giannini.

“I’ve read the inventory. What I said still holds. Sell the shit and do whatever you like with the money. I want nothing from him.”

“Very well. I’ll see to it that half the revenue is deposited in an account for your sister, and I’ll suggest some suitable recipients for the rest.”

“Right,” Salander said and hung up without further discussion.

She sat in her window seat, lit a cigarette, and looked out towards Saltsjön.

Salander spent the next week helping Armansky with an urgent matter. She had to help track down and identify a person suspected of being hired to kidnap a child in a custody battle resulting from a Swedish woman divorcing her Lebanese husband. Salander’s job amounted to checking the email of the person who was presumed to have hired the kidnapper. Milton Security’s role was discontinued when the parties reached a legal solution.

On December 18, the Sunday before Christmas, Salander woke at 6.00 and remembered that she had to buy a Christmas present for Palmgren. For a moment she wondered whether there was anyone else she should buy presents for – Giannini perhaps. She got up and took a shower in no particular hurry, and ate a breakfast of toast with cheese and marmalade and a coffee.

She had nothing special planned for the day and spent a while clearing papers and magazines from her desk. Then her gaze fell on the folder with the estate inventory. She opened it and reread the page about the title registration for the site in Norrtälje. She sighed. O.K. I have to find out what the hell he had going on there.

She put on warm clothes and boots. It was 8.30 when she drove her burgundy Honda out of the garage beneath Fiskargatan 9. It was icy cold but beautiful, sunshine and a pastel-blue sky. She took the road via Slussen and Klarabergsleden and wound her way on to the E18 going north, heading for Norrtälje. She was in no hurry. At 10.00 she turned into an O.K. petrol station and shop a few miles outside Skederid to ask the way to the old brickworks. No sooner had she parked than she realized that she did not even need to ask.

She was on a hillside with a good view across the valley on the other side of the road. To the left towards Norrtälje she could see a paint warehouse, some sort of builder’s yard, and another yard with bulldozers. To the right, at the edge of the industrial area, about four hundred metres from the road was a dismal brick building with a crumbling chimney-stack. The factory stood like a last outpost of the industrial area, somewhat isolated beyond a road and a narrow stream. She surveyed the building thoughtfully and asked herself what on earth had possessed her to drive all the way up to Norrtälje.

She turned and glanced at the O.K. station, where a long-distance truck and trailer with the emblem of the International Road Transport Union had just pulled in. She remembered that she was on the main road from the ferry terminal at Kapellskär, through which a good deal of the freight traffic between Sweden and the Baltic countries passed.

She started the car and drove out on to the road towards the old brickworks. She parked in the middle of the yard and got out. It was below freezing outside, and she put on a black knitted cap and leather gloves.

The main building was on two floors. On the ground floor all the windows had been boarded up with plywood, and she could see that on the floor above many of them had been broken. The factory was a much bigger building than she had imagined, and it was incredibly dilapidated. She could see no evidence of repairs. There was no trace of a living soul, but she saw that someone had discarded a used condom in the yard, and that graffiti artists had attacked part of the facade.

Why had Zalachenko owned this building?

She walked around the factory and found the ramshackle north building to the rear. She saw that the doors to the main building were locked. In frustration she studied a door at one end of the building. All the other doors had padlocks attached with iron bolts and galvanized security strips, but the lock on the gable end seemed weaker and was in fact attached only with rough spikes. Damn it, it’s my building. She looked about and found a narrow iron pipe in a pile of rubbish. She used it to lever open the fastening of the padlock.

She entered a stairwell with a doorway on to the ground floor area. The boarded-up windows meant that it was pitch black inside, except for a few shafts of light seeping in at the edges of the boards. She stood still for several minutes until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She saw a sea of junk, wooden pallets, old machine parts and timber in a workshop that was forty-five metres long and about twenty metres wide, supported by massive pillars. The old brick ovens seemed to have been disassembled, and in their place were big pools of water and patches of mould on the floor. There was a stale, foul smell from all the debris. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.