David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Blomkvist’s second question was:

He did not explain why he was interested in the place. But she knew that Blomkvist was not someone who threw questions out at random. Nor did he make a habit of being unclear.

If he was being cryptic, then he had a reason to be: the information must be sensitive. There was evidently something significant about this medical centre. Salander soon discovered that it had attracted a number of complaints — children had been forgotten or ignored and had been able to self-harm. Oden’s was managed privately by its director, Torkel Lindén, and his company Care Me and, if one was to believe past employees, Lindén’s word was law. The profit margin was always high because nothing was bought unless absolutely necessary.

Lindén himself was a former star gymnast, among other things a one-time Swedish high-bar champion. Nowadays he was a passionate hunter and member of a Christian congregation that took an uncompromising line on homosexuality. Salander went onto the websites of the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management and the Friends of Christ to see what kinds of activities were going on there. Then she sent Lindén two fake but enticing emails which looked as if they had come from the organizations, attaching PDF files with sophisticated malware which would open automatically if Lindén clicked on the messages.

By 8.23 she had got onto the server and immediately confirmed her suspicions. August Balder had been admitted to the clinic the previous afternoon. In the medical file, underneath a description of the circumstances which had resulted in his admittance, it said:

Infantile autism, severe mental impairment. Restless. Severely traumatized by death of father. Constant observation required. Difficult to handle. Brought jigsaw puzzles. Not allowed to draw! Observed to be compulsive and destructive. Diagnosis by psychologist Forsberg, confirmed by T.L.

And the following had been added underneath, clearly somewhat later:

Professor Charles Edelman, Chief Inspector Bublanski and Detective Sergeant Modig will visit A. Balder at 10.00 on Wednesday, November 22. T.L. will be present. Drawing under supervision.

Further down still it said:

Change of venue. A. Balder to be taken by T.L. and Professor Edelman to his mother Hanna Balder on Torsgatan, Bublanski and Modig will join. A.B. is thought likely to draw better in his home environment.

Salander quickly checked who Edelman was, and when she saw that his specialism was savant skills she understood straight away what was going on. They seemed to be working towards some sort of witness statement in the form of a sketch. Why else would Bublanski and Sonja Modig be interested in the boy’s drawing, and why else would Blomkvist have been so cautious in framing his question?

None of this must be allowed to get out. No killer must be able to find out that the boy might be able to draw a picture of him. Salander decided to see for herself how careful Lindén had been in his correspondence. Luckily he had not written anything more about the boy’s drawing ability. He had on the other hand received an email from Edelman at 23.10 last night, copied to Modig and Bublanski. That email was clearly the reason why the meeting place had been changed. Edelman wrote:

The hell you have, Salander thought, and read on:

Best regards

Bublanski and Modig had replied at 7.01 and 7.14 respectively. There was good reason, they wrote, to rely on Edelman’s expertise and follow his advice. Lindén had just now, at 7.57, confirmed that he and the boy would wait for Charles Edelman outside the entrance on Sveavägen. Salander sat for a while, lost in thought. Then she went to the kitchen and picked up a few old biscuits from the larder, and looked out towards Slussen and Riddarfjärden. So , she thought, the venue for the meeting has been changed .

Instead of doing his drawing at the medical centre, the boy would be driven home to his mother. The presence of the mother has a positive effect, Edelman wrote. There was something about that phrase Salander did not like. It felt old-fashioned, didn’t it? And the introduction itself was not much better: “The reason being that it is recognized in literature on the subject...”

It was stilted. Although it was true that many academics could not write to save their lives, and she knew nothing about the way in which this professor normally expressed himself, would one of the world’s leading neurologists really feel the need to lean on what is recognized in the literature? Wouldn’t he be more self-assured?

Salander went to her computer and skimmed through some of Edelman’s papers on the net; she may have found the odd little touch of vanity, even in the most factual passages, but there was nothing clumsy or psychologically naive in what he had written. On the contrary, the man was sharp. So she went back to the emails and checked to find out which SMTP server it had been transmitted through, and that made her jump right away. The server, Birdino, was not familiar, which it should have been, so she sent it a series of commands to see exactly what it was. In a matter of seconds she had the evidence in black and white: the server supported open mail relay, and the sender could therefore transmit messages from any address he or she wanted.

In other words, the email from Edelman was a fake, and the copies to Bublanski and Modig were no more than a smokescreen. She hardly even needed to check; she already knew what had happened: the police’s replies and the approval of the altered arrangements were also a bluff. It didn’t just mean that someone was pretending to be Edelman. There also had to be a leak, and above all, somebody wanted the boy outside on the street on Sveavägen.

Somebody wanted him defenceless in the street so that... what? They could kidnap or get rid of him? Salander looked at her watch; it was already 8.55. In just twenty minutes Torkel Lindén and August Balder would be outside waiting for someone who was not Professor Edelman, and who had anything but good intentions towards them.

What should she do? Call the police? That was never her first choice. She was especially reluctant when there was a risk of leaks. Instead, she went onto Oden’s website and got hold of Lindén’s office number. But she only made it as far as the switchboard. Lindén was in a meeting. So she found his mobile. After ending up in his voicemail, she swore out loud, and sent him both a text and an email telling him not to go out into the street with the boy, not under any circumstances. She signed herself “Wasp” for lack of any better idea.

Then she threw on her leather jacket and rushed out. But she turned, ran back into the apartment and packed her laptop with the encrypted file and her pistol, a Beretta 92, into a black sports bag before hurrying out again. She wondered if she should take her car, the B.M.W. M6 Convertible gathering dust in the garage. But she decided a taxi would be quicker. She soon regretted it. When a taxi finally appeared, it was clear that rush-hour had not subsided.

Traffic inched forward and Centralbron was almost at a standstill. Had there been an accident? Everything went slowly, everything but the time, which flew. Soon it was 9.05, then 9.10. She was in a tearing hurry and in the worst case it was already too late. Most likely Lindén and the boy went out onto the street ahead of time and the killer, or whoever it was, had already struck.

She dialled Lindén’s number again. This time the call went through, but there was no answer, so she swore again and thought of Mikael Blomkvist. She had not actually spoken to him in ages. But now she called him and he answered, sounding irritated. Only when he realized who it was did he brighten up: