David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Modig and Bublanski looked at each other.

“Are you sure about that?” Modig said.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you might have thought you heard him saying that because he had a questioning look on his face.”

“Why would I have thought that?”

“Because the boy’s mother says he doesn’t speak at all, has never said a single word,” Modig said.

“Are you joking?”

“No, and it would be odd for him to suddenly start speaking under these very circumstances.”

“I heard what I heard.”

“O.K., and what did the woman answer?”

“‘Away’, I think. ‘Away from here.’ Something like that. Then she almost collapsed, like I said. And she told me to drive off.”

“And you did?”

“Like a bat out of hell.”

“And then you realized who you’d had in your car?”

“I’d already worked out that the boy was the son of that genius who’d been murdered. But the girl... she vaguely reminded me of someone. I was shaking like a leaf and in the end I couldn’t drive any more. I stopped on Ringvägen, by Skanstull, got myself a beer at Clarion Hotel and tried to calm down. And that’s when it hit me. It was the girl who was wanted for murder a few years ago, but then the charges were dropped, and it came out that she’d been through some terrible things in a mental hospital when she was a child. I remember it well — the father of a friend of mine had been tortured in Syria, and he was having more or less the same stuff done to him at the time, electroshock therapy and that sort of shit, because he couldn’t deal with his memories. It was like he was being tortured all over again.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“That he was tortured?”

“No, that it was her, Lisbeth Salander.”

“I looked at all the pictures online and there’s no doubt about it. There were other things that fit too, you know...”

Charro hesitated, as if embarrassed.

“She took off her T-shirt because she needed to use it as a bandage, and when she turned to wrap it around her shoulder I saw that she had a large tattoo of a dragon all the way up her back. That same tattoo was mentioned in one of the old newspaper articles.”

Berger arrived at Grane’s summer house with several shopping bags filled with food, crayons and paper, a couple of difficult puzzles and a few other things. But there was no sign of August or Salander. Salander had not responded, either on her Redphone app or on the encrypted link. Berger was sick with anxiety.

Whichever way she looked at it, this did not bode well. Admittedly Salander was not known for needless communication or reassurance, but it was she who had asked for a safe house. Also she had responsibility for a child, and if she was not answering their calls under those circumstances, she must be in a bad way.

Berger cursed aloud and walked out onto the terrace where she and Grane had been sitting and talking about escaping from the world. That was only a few months ago, but it felt like an age. There was no table now, no chairs, no bottles, no hubbub behind them, only snow, branches and debris flung there by the storm. It was as if life itself had abandoned the place. Somehow the memory of that crayfish party increased the sense of desolation, as if the festivities were draped like a ghost over its walls.

Berger went back into the kitchen and put some microwaveable food into the refrigerator: meatballs, packets of spaghetti with meat sauce, sausage stroganoff, fish pie, potato cakes and a whole lot of even worse junk food Blomkvist had advised her to buy: Billy’s Pan Pizza, piroshki, chips, Coca-Cola, a bottle of Tullamore Dew, a carton of cigarettes, three bags of crisps, three bars of chocolate and some sticks of fresh liquorice. She set out drawing paper, crayons, pencils, an eraser and a ruler and compass on the large round table. On the top sheet of paper she drew a sun and a flower and wrote the word WELCOME in four warm colours.

The house was close to Ingarö beach, but you could not see it from there. It lay high up on the rock promontory, concealed behind pine trees. It consisted of four rooms. The kitchen with glass doors onto the terrace was the largest and also the heart of the house. In addition to the round table there was an old rocking chair and two worn, sagging sofas which nonetheless managed to look inviting thanks to a pair of red tartan rugs. It was a cosy home.

It was also a good safe house. Berger left the door open, put the keys in the top drawer of the hall closet, as agreed, and made her way back down the flight of wooden steps flanking the steep, smooth rock slope — the only way to the house for anyone arriving by car.

The sky was dark and turbulent, the wind blowing hard again. Her spirits were low and did not improve during the drive home. Her thoughts turned to Hanna Balder. Berger had not exactly been a member of the fan club — Hanna often played the parts of women who were both sexy and dim-witted, whom all men thought they could seduce, and Berger was disgusted by the film industry’s devotion to that type of character. But none of that was true any longer and Berger regretted that she had been so ungracious at the time. She had been too hard on the woman; it was much too easy to criticize when a pretty girl gets a big break early in her career.

Nowadays, on the rare occasions Hanna Balder appeared in a major production, her eyes tended to reflect a restrained sorrow, which gave depth to the parts she played, and — what did Berger know? — that may have been genuine. She had been through some difficult times, not least the past twenty-four hours. Since morning, Berger had been insisting that Hanna be taken to August. This was surely a situation in which a child needed his mother more than ever.

But Salander, who was still communicating with them at the time, had been against the idea. No-one yet knew where the leak had come from, she had written, and they could not rule out the mother’s immediate circle. Lasse Westman for one, whom nobody trusted, seemed to be staying in the house all day to avoid the journalists camped outside. They were in a bind, and Berger did not like it. She hoped Millennium would still be able to tell the story with dignity and depth, without the magazine or anyone else coming to harm. She had no doubt that Blomkvist would be up to it, given the way he looked right now. Besides, he had Zander to help him.

Berger had a soft spot for Zander. Not long ago, over dinner at her and Greger’s home in Saltsjöbaden, he had told them his life story, which had only increased her sympathy.

When Zander was eleven he lost both his parents in a bomb blast in Sarajevo. After that he came to live in Tensta outside Stockholm with an aunt who altogether failed to notice either his intellectual disposition or the psychological wounds he bore. He had not been there when his parents were killed, but his body reacted still as if he were suffering from post-traumatic stress. To this day he detested loud noises and sudden movements. He hated seeing unattended bags in public places, and loathed violence with a passion Berger had never encountered in anyone else.

As a child he sought refuge in his own worlds. He immersed himself in fantasy literature, read poetry and biographies, adored Sylvia Plath, Borges and Tolkien and learned everything there was to know about computers. He dreamed of writing heart-rending novels about love and human tragedy, and was an incurable romantic who hoped that great passion would heal his wounds. He was not in the least bit interested in the outside world. One evening in his late teens, however, he attended a public lecture given by Mikael Blomkvist at the Institute for Media Studies at Stockholm University. It changed his life.