David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

But his colleagues were not far away behind an overgrown aspen. He felt afraid — unusual for him — when he saw them staring down at the ground. What had they seen? Was the autistic boy dead?

He walked over slowly, thinking about his own boys, six and nine now. They were crazy about football — did nothing else, talked about nothing else. Björn and Anders. He and Dilvan had given them Swedish names because they had thought it would make their lives easier. What kind of people come out here to kill a child? He was gripped by a sudden fury. But in the next moment he breathed a sigh of relief.

There was no boy there, but two men lying on the ground, apparently both shot in the stomach. One of them — a brutal-looking type with pockmarked skin and a stubby boxer’s nose — tried to get up, but was easily pushed down again. His face betrayed his humiliation and his right hand was shaking with pain or rage. The other man, who was wearing a leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail, seemed in worse shape. He lay still and stared in shock at the dark sky.

“No sign of the child?” Barzani said.

“Nothing,” his colleague Klas Lang said.

“And the woman?”

“No sign.”

Barzani was not sure if this was good news and he asked a few more questions. But no-one knew what had happened. The only certainty was that two automatic weapons, Barrett REC7s, had been found thirty or forty metres away, close to the jetty. They were assumed to belong to the men, but when asked how they had ended up there, the man with the pockmarked face spat out an incomprehensible answer.

Barzani and his colleagues spent the next fifteen minutes combing the terrain. All they could find were further signs of combat. More and more people began to arrive on the scene: ambulance crew, Detective Sergeant Modig, two or three crime scene technicians, a succession of regular policemen and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who was accompanied by a massive American with a crew cut who immediately commanded everyone’s respect. At 5.25 they were informed that a witness was waiting to be interviewed down by the seashore and parking area. The man wanted to be addressed as K.G. He was actually called Karl-Gustav Matzon. He had fairly recently bought a new-build on the other side of the water. According to Lang, he needed to be taken with a pinch of salt: “The old boy has a very vivid imagination.”

Modig and Holmberg were standing in the parking area, trying to make sense of what had happened. The picture so far was fragmented and they were hoping that the witness K.G. Matzon would bring a measure of clarity to the night.

But when they saw him coming towards them along the shoreline, that seemed less and less likely. K.G. Matzon was resplendent in a Tyrolean hat, green checked trousers and a red Canada Goose jacket and he was sporting an absurd twirly moustache. He looked as if he were trying to be funny.

“K.G. Matzon?” Modig said.

“The very same,” he said, and without any prompting — maybe he realized that his credibility needed a boost — he explained that he ran True Crimes, a publishing house which produced books on notable crimes.

“Excellent. But right now we’d like a factual account — not some sales pitch for a forthcoming book,” Modig said, to be on the safe side. Matzon said that, of course, he understood.

He was after all a “respectable person”. He had woken up at a ridiculous hour, he said, and lain there listening to “the silence and the calm”. But just before 4.30 he heard something which he immediately recognized as a pistol shot, so he quickly got dressed and went onto his terrace — which had a view of the beach, the rock promontory and the parking area where they were now standing.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. It was eerily quiet. Then the air exploded. It sounded as if a war had broken out.”

“You heard more shots?”

“There were cracks of gunfire from the promontory on the other side of the inlet and I stared across, stunned, and then... did I mention I was a birdwatcher?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, it’s made my eyesight very good, you see. I’ve got eagle eyes. I’m used to pinpointing tiny details far off, and I’m sure that’s why I noticed a small dot on the rock ledge up there, do you see it? The edge of it sort of cuts into the rock slope like a pocket.”

Modig looked up at the slope and nodded.

“At first I couldn’t tell what it was,” Matzon continued. “But then I realized it was a child — a boy, I think. He was sitting up there in a crouch and trembling, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and then suddenly... my God, I’ll never forget it.”

“What?”

“Someone came racing down from above, a woman, and she leaped into the air and landed so violently on the rock ledge that she all but fell off it, and after that they sat there together, she and the boy, and just waited, and waited for the inevitable, and then...”

“Yes?”

“Two men appeared holding assault rifles and shot and shot, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I just threw myself to the ground. I was scared I’d get hit. But I couldn’t help looking up at them all the same. You see, from where I was the boy and the girl were clearly visible. But they were invisible to the men standing at the top, at least for the moment. It was obvious to me that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and there was no escape. As soon as they left the rock ledge the men would see them and kill them. It was a hopeless situation.”

“But we’ve found neither the boy nor the woman up there,” Modig said.

“That’s just it! The men got closer and closer — they only needed to lean forward to see the woman and the child. In the end they could probably have heard them breathing. But then...”

“Yes?’

“You’re not going to believe this. That man from the Rapid Response Unit definitely didn’t.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me, and we can worry later about whether it’s believable.”

“When the men stopped to listen, maybe they sensed they were very close, the woman leaped to her feet and shot them. Bang, bang! Then she rushed forward and threw their weapons away. It was like an action film, and after that she ran, or rather rolled, almost fell down the slope with the boy to a B.M.W. standing here in the parking area. Just before they got into the car I saw that the woman was holding something — it looked like a computer bag.”

“Did they drive away in the B.M.W.?”

“At a fearful speed. I have no idea where they went.”

“Of course not.”

“But that’s not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was another car there — a Range Rover, I think, black, a new model.”

“And what happened to that one?”

“I was busy ringing the emergency services, but just as I was about to hang up I saw two more people coming down from the wooden steps over there, a tall thin man and a woman. I didn’t get a good look at them from that distance. But I can still tell you two things about that woman.”

“Yes?”

“She was a twelve-pointer, and she was angry.”

“Twelve-pointer meaning beautiful?”

“Or at least glamorous, classy. You could see it a mile off. But boy was she furious. Just before they got into the Range Rover she slapped the man, and the weird thing is: he hardly reacted. He just nodded as if he thought he deserved it. Then he got behind the wheel and they were gone.”