David Lagercrantz: The Girl in the Spider's Web

So on Friday afternoon, when he heard that Levin had hired a consultant and commissioned several consumer surveys to present on Monday, Blomkvist had simply gone home. For a long time he had sat at his desk or lain in bed composing various impassioned speeches about why Millennium had to remain true to its vision: there is rioting in the suburbs; an openly racist party sits in Riksdagen, the parliament; intolerance is growing; fascism is on the rise and there are homeless people and beggars everywhere. In so many ways Sweden has become a shameful nation. He came up with lots of fine and lofty words and in his daydreams he enjoyed a whole series of fantastic triumphs in which what he said was so relevant and compelling that all of the editorial team and even the entire Serner Group were roused from their delusions and decided to follow him as one.

But when sobriety set in, he realized how little weight such words carry if nobody believes in them from a financial point of view. Money talks, bullshit walks, and all that. First and foremost the magazine had to pay its way. Then they could go about changing the world. He began to wonder whether he could rustle up a good story. The prospect of a major revelation might boost the confidence of the editorial team and get them all to forget about Levin’s surveys and forecasts.

Blomkvist’s big scoop about the Swedish government conspiracy that had protected Zalachenko turned him into a news magnet. Every day he received tips about irregularities and shady dealings. Most of it, to tell the truth, was rubbish. But just occasionally an amazing story would emerge. A run-of-the-mill insurance matter or a trivial report of a missing person could be concealing something crucial. You never knew for sure. You had to be methodical and look through it all with an open mind, and so on the Saturday morning he sat down with his laptop and his notebooks and picked his way through what he had.

He kept going until 5.00 in the afternoon and he did come across the odd item which would probably have got him going ten years ago, but which did not now stir any enthusiasm. It was a classic problem; he of all people knew that. After a few decades in the profession most things feel pretty familiar, and even if something looks like a good story in intellectual terms it still might not turn you on. So when yet another squall of freezing rain whipped across the rooftops he stopped working and turned to Elizabeth George.

It wasn’t just escapism, he persuaded himself. Sometimes the best ideas occur to you while your mind is occupied with something completely different. Pieces of the puzzle can suddenly fall into place. But he failed to come up with anything more constructive than the thought that he ought to spend more time lying around like this, reading good books. When Monday morning came and with it yet more foul weather he had ploughed through one and a half George novels plus three old copies of the New Yorker which had been cluttering up his bedside table.

So there he was, sitting on the living-room sofa with his cappuccino, looking out at the storm. He had been feeling tired and listless until he got to his feet with an abrupt start — as if he had suddenly decided to pull himself together and do something — and put on his boots and his winter coat and went out. It was a parody of hell out there.

Icy, heavy, wet squalls bit into his bones as he hurried down towards Hornsgatan, which lay before him looking unusually grey. The whole of Södermalm district seemed to have been drained of all colour. Not even one tiny bright autumn leaf flew through the air. With his head bent forward and his arms crossed over his chest he continued past Maria Magdalena kyrka to Slussen, all the way until he turned right on to Götgatsbacken and as usual he slipped in between the Monki boutique and the Indigo pub, then went up to the magazine on the fourth floor, just above the offices of Greenpeace. He could already hear the buzz when he was in the stairwell.

An unusual number of people were up there. Apart from the editorial team and the key freelancers, there were three people from Serner, two consultants and Levin, Levin who had dressed down for the occasion. He no longer looked like an executive and had picked up some new expressions, among others a cheery “Hi”.

“Hi, Micke, how’s things?”

“That depends on you,” Blomkvist said, not actually meaning to sound unfriendly.

But he could tell that it was taken as a declaration of war and he nodded stiffly, walked on in and sat down on one of the chairs which had been set out so as to make a small auditorium in the office.

Levin cleared his throat and looked nervously in Blomkvist’s direction. The star reporter, who had seemed so combative in the doorway, now looked politely interested and showed no sign of wanting to have a row. But this did nothing to set Levin’s mind at ease. Once upon a time he and Blomkvist had both temped for Expressen . They mostly wrote quick news stories and a whole lot of rubbish. But afterwards in the pub they had dreamed about the big scoops and talked for hours of how they would never be satisfied with the conventional or the shallow, but instead would always dig deep. They were young and ambitious and wanted it all, all at once. There were times when Levin missed that, not the salary, of course, or the working hours, or even the easy life in the bars and the women, but the dreams — he missed the power in them. He sometimes longed for that throbbing urge to change society and journalism and to write so that the world would come to a standstill and the mighty powers bow down. Even a hotshot like himself wondered: Where did the dreams go?

Micke Blomkvist had of course made every single one of them come true, not just because he had been responsible for some of the big exposés of modern times, but also because he really wrote with that passion and power that they had fantasized about. Never once had he bowed to pressure from the establishment or compromised his ideals, whereas Levin himself... Well, really he was the one with the big career, wasn’t he? He was probably making ten times as much as Blomkvist these days and that gave him an enormous amount of pleasure. What use were Blomkvist’s scoops when he couldn’t even buy himself a country place nicer than that little shack on the island of Sandhamn? My God, what was that hut compared to a new house in Cannes? Nothing! No, it was he who had chosen the right path.

Instead of slogging it out in the daily press, Levin had taken a job as media analyst at Serner and developed a personal relationship with Haakon Serner himself, and that had changed his life and made him rich. Today he was the most senior journalist responsible for a whole series of newspaper houses and channels and he loved it. He loved the power, the money and all that went with it, yet he was not above admitting that even he sometimes dreamed about that other stuff, in small doses, of course, but still. He wanted to be regarded as a fine writer, just like Blomkvist, and that was probably why he had pushed so hard for the group to buy a stake in Millennium . A little bird had told him that the magazine was up against it and that the editor-in-chief, Erika Berger, whom he had always secretly fancied, wanted to keep on her two latest recruits, Sofie Melker and Emil Grandén, and she would not be able to do so unless they got some fresh capital.

In short, Levin had seen an unexpected opportunity to buy into one of the most prestigious brands in Swedish media. But Serner’s management was not enthusiastic, to put it mildly. On the contrary, people were heard to mutter that Millennium was old-fashioned and had a left-wing bias and a tendency to end up in fights with important advertisers and business partners. The plan would have come to nothing if Levin had not argued his case so passionately. But he had insisted. In a broader context, he argued, investing in Millennium represented a negligible amount, which might not yield vast profits but which could give them something much greater, namely credibility. Right now, after the cutbacks and blood-letting, Serner’s reputation wasn’t exactly their prime asset. Taking a stake in Millennium would be a sign that the group did after all care about journalism and freedom of expression, even if Serner’s board was not conspicuously keen on either. This much they were able to understand, and Levin got his acquisition through. For a long time it looked like a winning outcome for all parties.