Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

“Apart from Bjurman’s body in the bedroom, you mean? We found the empty box for the Magnum. It’s being checked for prints. Bjurman has a file with copies of his monthly reports about Salander that he sent to the Guardianship Agency. If they are to be believed, Salander is a regular little angel, big time.”

“Not him too,” Bublanski said.

“Not him too what?”

“Another admirer of Fröken Salander.”

Bublanski summed up what he had learned from Armansky and Blomkvist. Modig listened without interrupting. When he finished, she ran her fingers through her hair and rubbed her eyes.

“That sounds completely absurd,” she said.

Bublanski tugged on his lower lip. Modig glanced at him and had to suppress a smile. He had a rough-chiselled face that looked almost brutal. But when he was confused or unsure of something, his expression turned sullen. It was in those moments that she thought of him as Officer Bubble. She had never used the nickname to his face and did not know who had coined it. But it suited him perfectly.

“How sure are we ?”

“The prosecutor seems sure. An APB went out nationally for Salander this evening,” Bublanski said. “She spent the past year abroad, and it’s possible she could try to leave again.”

“But how sure are we?”

He shrugged. “We’ve taken people in for a lot less.”

“Her prints were on the murder weapon in Enskede. Her guardian was murdered. Without trying to get ahead of things, I’m guessing it’s the same weapon that was used here. We’ll know tomorrow – the techs found a fairly intact bullet fragment in the bed frame.”

“Good.”

“There are some rounds for the revolver in the bottom desk drawer. Bullets with uranium cores and gold tips.”

“Very useful.”

“We have lots of paperwork that says Salander is unstable. Bjurman was her guardian and he owned the gun.”

“Mmm…,” Bublanski said glumly.

“We have a link between Salander and the couple in Enskede-Mikael Blomkvist.”

“Mmm…,” he said again.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I can’t get a clear line on Salander. The paperwork says one thing, but Armansky and Blomkvist say something else. According to the paperwork she is a developmentally disabled near-psychopath. According to the two men who have worked with her, she’s a skilled researcher. That’s a huge discrepancy. We have no motive for Bjurman and nothing to say that she knew the couple in Enskede.”

“How much of a motive does a psychotic nutcase need?”

“I haven’t been in the bedroom yet. How does it look?”

“I found the body prostrate against the bed. He was kneeling on the floor as if he were saying his prayers. He’s naked. Shot in the back of the neck.”

“One shot, just like in Enskede?”

“As far as I could see. It seems that Salander, if she’s the one who did it, forced him onto his knees by the bed before she fired. The bullet went up through the back of his head and exited through his face.”

“Like an execution, then.”

“Precisely.”

“I was thinking… somebody must have heard the shot.”

“His bedroom overlooks the rear courtyard, and the neighbours above and below had left for the holiday. The window was closed. Besides, she used a pillow to muffle the sound.”

“Smart thinking.”

At that moment Gunnar Samuelsson from forensics stuck his head in the door.

“Hi, Bubble,” he said, and then turned to his colleague. “Modig, we were thinking of removing the body, so we turned him over. There’s something you ought to take a look at.”

They all went into the bedroom. Bjurman’s body had been placed on its back on a wheeled stretcher, the first stop on the way to the pathologist. There was no doubt about the cause of death. His forehead bore a wound four inches across, and a large part of his skull was hanging by a flap of skin. The blood splattered across the bed and the wall told the tale.

Bublanski pouted.

“What are we supposed to be looking at?” Modig asked.

Samuelsson lifted the plastic sheet which covered Bjurman’s lower body. Bublanski put on his glasses when he and Modig stepped closer to read the text tattooed on Bjurman’s abdomen. The letters were irregular and clumsy – obviously whoever wrote them was a novice tattoo artist – but the message could not have been clearer: I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.

Modig and Bublanski looked at each other in astonishment.

“Are we possibly looking at a motive?” Modig said at last.

Blomkvist bought a pasta meal from the 7-Eleven on his way home and put the paper carton in the microwave as he undressed and stood under the shower for three minutes. He got a fork and ate standing up, right out of the carton. He was hungry, but he had no appetite for food; he just wanted to take it on board as fast as he could. When it was finished he opened a Vestfyn Pilsner beer and drank it straight from the bottle.

Without turning on a lamp he stood by the window overlooking Gamla Stan for more than twenty minutes, while he tried to stop thinking.

Twenty-four hours ago he had been at his sister’s house when Svensson had called him on his mobile. He and Johansson had still been alive.

Blomkvist had not slept for thirty-six hours, and the days when he could skip a night’s sleep with impunity were long gone. And he knew that he would not be able to sleep without thinking about what he had seen. The images from Enskede felt ingrained in his memory for all time.

Finally he turned off his mobile and crept under the covers. At 11:00 he was still awake. He got up and brewed some coffee. He put on the CD player and listened to Debbie Harry singing “Maria.” He wrapped himself in a blanket and sat on the living-room sofa and drank coffee while he worried about Salander.

What did he actually know about her? Hardly anything.

She had a photographic memory and she was a hell of a hacker. He knew that she was a peculiar, introverted woman who didn’t like to talk about herself, and that she had absolutely no trust in authority of any kind.

She could be viciously violent. He owed his life to that.

But he had had no idea that she had been declared incompetent or was under guardianship, or that she had spent any part of her teenage years in a psychiatric clinic.

He had to choose whose side he was on.

Sometime after midnight he decided that he couldn’t accept the police’s assumption that she had murdered Svensson and Johansson. At the very least, he owed her a chance to explain herself before he passed judgment.

He had no idea when he nodded off, but at 4:30 a.m. he woke up on the sofa. He staggered into the bedroom and fell instantly back to sleep.

Eriksson leaned back into Blomkvist’s sofa. Without thinking, she put her feet up on the coffee table – exactly as she would have done at home – and quickly took them off again. Blomkvist gave her a smile.

“That’s OK,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

She grinned and put her feet up again.

On Good Friday Blomkvist had brought the copies of Svensson’s papers from the Millennium offices to his apartment. He had laid out the material on the floor of the living room, and he and Eriksson had spent eight hours going through emails, notes, jottings in Svensson’s notebook, and above all the manuscript of the book.

On Saturday morning Annika Giannini had come to see her brother. She brought the evening newspapers from the day before with their glaring headlines and a huge reproduction of Salander’s passport photograph on the front page. One read: