The Girl Who Lived Twice (17 page)

“But I should have killed her. Now she’s coming after all of us.”

August 27

Bublanski had a bottle of Grant’s twelve-year-old scotch with him. It had been standing around at home for years, and doing this was clearly against his principles. But since the witness had asked him for whisky, he was not going to make an issue of it. Ever since yesterday, he had been focusing exclusively on Nima Rita’s death, so he had spared no effort to get hold of the last witness known to have seen the Sherpa alive. In the end he had tracked him down here in Haninge, to a small apartment in a yellow block on Klockarleden.

Bublanski had seen worse hangouts, but this was not the coziest he had seen either. The place smelled bad, and was littered with bottles and ashtrays and the remains of food. But the witness himself exuded a sort of bohemian elegance. He wore a more or less clean white shirt and a Parisian beret.

“Herr Järvinen,” Bublanski said.

“Chief Inspector.”

“Will this do?”

He held up the bottle and got a little smile in return, and then the two of them sat down on some blue wooden stools in the kitchen.

“You met the man we now know to be called Nima Rita on the night of the fourteenth of August, isn’t that right?” he said.

“Correct…yes…a total nutjob. I was feeling lousy and waiting for a man who usually sells drink at Norra Bantorget, and then this tramp shows up, reeling, and I should have kept my trap shut. You could see from a mile away that he was crazy. But I’m a talkative sort and so I asked him, politely and tactfully, how he was and he started yelling at me.”

“In which language?”

“English and Swedish.”

“So he could speak Swedish?”

“Well, not really. But he knew some words. I couldn’t make out a thing. He was shouting about having been up among the clouds, fighting with the gods and talking to the dead.”

“Was he talking about Mount Everest, do you think?”

“He might have been. I wasn’t listening all that carefully. I was feeling bloody awful, you see, and didn’t have the stomach for his gibberish.”

“So you recall nothing specific that he said?”

“He’d rescued lots of people. ‘I saved many lives,’ he said, and then he showed me the stumps on his hands. He was missing some fingers.”

“Did he say anything about Defence Minister Forsell?”

Heikki Järvinen looked at him in surprise and poured some whisky into a glass, then knocked it back with a shaky hand.

“Funny you should say that.”

“Why funny?”

“Because come to think of it he
did
mention Forsell in some way. But that’s perhaps no surprise. Everybody’s talking about him.”

“What did he actually say?”

“That he knew him, I think. And knew all sorts of other important people. He was giving me a headache and I couldn’t take it. I made a pretty stupid remark.”

“Like what?”

“Well…nothing racist or anything like that. But it probably wasn’t such a great idea. I said he looked like a bloody Chinaman or something, and he went berserk and thumped me. It took me so much by surprise that I didn’t stand a chance. He beat the shit out of me, to be honest. Can you imagine?”

“I can see that it wasn’t very nice.”

“I bled like a pig,” Järvinen went on, still in a state. “There’s a cut here, it hasn’t gone away. Look.”

He pointed to his lip and there was indeed a scar there. But then there were cuts and bruises all over him, so Bublanski was not especially impressed.

“Then what happened?”

“He stormed off, and had a real stroke of luck, or perhaps I shouldn’t say luck seeing as he died the next day. But that’s what it felt like at the time. He ran into someone selling booze down on Vasagatan.”

Bublanski leaned across the kitchen table.

“Someone selling booze?”

“A man stopped him on the pavement down by the hotel, you know the one I mean. At least it looked as if he was giving him a bottle. But it was quite a long way off and I may be wrong.”

“What can you tell me about the man?”

“The seller?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing much. He was thin, dark-haired, tall. He was wearing a black jacket and jeans. And a cap. But I didn’t see his face.”

“Did he look like a drunk himself?”

“He didn’t walk like one.”

“Meaning what?”

“He was too light on his feet, and quick.”

“Like someone who exercised regularly?”

“Could be.”

Bublanski observed Järvinen in silence for a while and felt that here was a man in free fall who, in spite of everything, was trying hard to keep up some sort of appearance. The fighting spirit was still there.

“Did you see where he went?”

“In the direction of Central Station. For a while I thought I’d follow him. But I had zero chance of catching up.”

“So maybe he wasn’t really there to sell alcohol? Maybe all he wanted to do was give a bottle to Nima Rita.”

“So you’re saying—?”

“I’m not saying anything. But Nima Rita was poisoned, and considering the way he lived it’s not inconceivable that the poison he drank came in the form of a bottle of alcohol, so you can see why I’m interested in this man.”

Järvinen had another slug of whisky and said:

“Well, in that case, there’s one more thing I should mention. He did say that they’d tried to poison him before.”

“Did he say how?”

“I had a hard job understanding that too. He was screaming and shouting about all the amazing things he’d done and all the fancy people he knew. All the same, I got a feeling that he’d spent time in the nut house and had refused to take his medicines. ‘They tried to poison me,’ he yelled. ‘But I ran, I climbed down a mountain to the lake.’ At least that’s what I think he said. That he’d run away from some doctors.”

“From a mountain, down to a lake?”

“I think so.”

“Did you have the impression that he’d been in hospital in Sweden or abroad?” Bublanski said.

“In Sweden, I think. He pointed behind him, as if it was somewhere around here. But then again, he was always pointing all over the place, as if the heavens and the gods he’d been doing battle with were also here, somewhere around the corner.”

“I see,” Bublanski said, keen to get away as soon as possible.

At the desk in her hotel room Lisbeth noted that the men from Svavelsjö, among others their president Sandström, were leaving the Strandvägen address. She would have to think about her next steps.

She closed down her computer and saw that Blomkvist had got dressed and was sitting on the bed, reading on his mobile. She really didn’t want to talk about her own life, or hear how she was actually quite nice deep down, or whatever Mikael had been trying to tell her.

“What are you up to?”

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m working on the Sherpa story,” he said.

“Are you getting anywhere?”

“I’m checking out this Engelman.”

“Nice guy, isn’t he?”

“Absolutely. Just your type.”

“And then there’s Mats Sabin,” she said.

“Yes, him too.”

“And what do you think about him?”

“I haven’t really got that far.”

“I think you can forget him,” she said.

He was curious and looked up.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’m guessing it’s one of those things you pick up and get all excited about because there are so many different connections. But I don’t think there’s anything to it.”

“Why not?”

Salander was thinking about Camilla and Svavelsjö as she walked over to the window and looked down at Luntmakargatan through a gap in the curtains. Maybe she ought to apply some pressure after all.

“Why not?” he repeated.

“You found his name rather quickly, didn’t you? Before you were even sure what exactly was said.”

“True.”

“You’d be better off going back in history, to colonial times.”

“Why’s that?”

“Isn’t the whole Everest thing one big hangover from those days, with white climbers and people with a different skin colour carrying their gear?”

“Well, perhaps so.”

“I think you should focus on that, and try to find out how Nima Rita would have expressed himself.”

“Would you mind saying exactly what you mean, for once?”

Blomkvist sat on the bed, waiting for her to answer, but noticed how she seemed to be drifting off again, just as she had that morning when she’d been sitting in the armchair. He decided he might as well check it out himself and he began to pack. He would get going and meet up with her again later, so he put his laptop in the bag and stood up to hug her, and to tell her to take care. But she did not react even when he came close to her.

“Earth to Lisbeth,” he said, feeling a little silly, and only then did her eyes begin to focus, and she looked at his bag.

It seemed to be telling her something.

“You can’t go home,” she said.

“In that case, I’ll go somewhere else.”

“I mean it,” she said. “You can’t go home, or to anybody else you’re close to. They’re watching you.”

“I can look after myself.”

“You can’t. Give me your mobile.”

“Just stop it. Not again.”

“Give it to me.”

He thought that she had already messed around enough with his mobile, and was about to put it in his pocket. But she snatched it from him, ignoring his protests, and was immediately hard at work with programme codes. So he let her get on with it. She had always done as she pleased with his computers. But after a few minutes he said rather testily:

“What are you doing?”

She looked up, with the shadow of a smile on her face.

“I like that,” she said.

“What do you like?”

“Those words.”

“Which words?”

“ ‘What are you doing?’ Can you repeat them, in the same tone of voice?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just say it.”

She held out the mobile.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Great, perfect.”

She fiddled some more with his mobile and then handed it back.

“What have you done?”

“I’m going to be able to see where you are, and hear what’s going on around you.”

“What?! So I won’t have any private life at all?”

“You can have whatever private life you like, and I’m not going to listen in unnecessarily, at least not unless you say those words.”

“So I can go on talking crap about you?”

“What?”

“That was a joke, Lisbeth.”

“OK.”

He smiled.

Maybe she smiled too. He put his mobile away, looked at her again and said, “Thank you.”

“Keep a low profile now,” she said.

“I will. Just as well no-one knows who I am.”

“What?”

She didn’t get that joke either, and then he really did hug her.

He left the hotel and tried to melt into the life of the city. Not all that successfully. He had got only as far as Tegnérgatan when a young man asked for a selfie, and he continued to Sveavägen. He should have kept his head down, but he sat on a bench not far from the Stockholm Public Library and once more looked up Nima Rita. He ended up reading a long article in
Outside
magazine from August 2008.

It was the most detailed account ever given by Nima Rita. But the quotes were nothing to get excited about, at least not at first sight. Blomkvist had read it all before, dutiful or sorrowful answers to questions about Klara Engelman. But then he saw something which made him sit up, and at first it was not clear to him why. It was contained in the simple, heartbroken message:

“I really tried to take care of her. I tried. But Mamsahib just fell, and then the storm came, and the mountain was angry and we couldn’t save her. I am very, very sorry for Mamsahib.”

Mamsahib.

Of course.
Mamsahib
could also be “memsahib,” the feminine of “sahib,” a form of address for whites in colonial India. Why had that not occurred to him? In the course of his investigations he had read that Sherpas often referred to Western climbers in that way.

I took Forsell. And I left Mamsahib.

That is what he must have said, and he was therefore presumably talking about Klara Engelman. But what did that mean? Had Nima Rita rescued Johannes Forsell instead of her? That was inconsistent with what he had read of the sequence of events.

Klara Engelman and Johannes Forsell had been in two different places on the mountain, and Engelman was probably already dead by the time Forsell got into difficulties. And yet…had something different happened which needed to be hushed up? It could be, and it could also be nonsense. But he definitely got a boost from the feeling that he could forget about his holiday; now he was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the story. He immediately sent a text to Lisbeth:

August 27

Paulina Müller was sitting in pyjamas on her bed in the room where she had spent her teenage years, in Bogenhausen in Munich. She was talking on the telephone and drinking hot chocolate. Her mother had been running around looking after her as if she were ten again and, all things considered, life could be worse.

That is what she wanted, to be a child again, and to have no responsibilities. She wanted to be able to cry her eyes out. What is more, she had been wrong. Her parents had known all too well what Thomas Müller was about. There had been not the slightest disbelief in their eyes when she told them what he had done to her. But now she had locked her bedroom door, saying that she did not want to be disturbed for the moment.

“So you have no idea who this woman could be,” Chief Inspector Jensen said on the phone, sounding as if she did not believe one word of what Paulina was telling her.

Not only had it been instantly obvious to Paulina who the woman with the iron was. She even saw some kind of dark logic in it, and was terrified that somehow she had sanctioned what had happened. Countless times during the trip home she had said: “I can’t see him again, I just can’t. I’d rather die.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”

“Your husband told me that you’d met a woman and fallen in love,” Jensen said.

“I only wrote that to annoy him.”

“Yet he got the impression that there was some kind of emotional connection between the perpetrator and you. It even seemed as if the message was all about you. Your husband had to swear never to bother you again.”

“That’s odd.”

“Is it really so strange? The neighbours have said you were wearing a bandage on your arm the last few days before you left. That you told them you’d burned yourself with the iron.”

“That’s correct.”

“Not everybody believed you, Paulina. They heard screams from your apartment. Screams and the sound of people fighting.”

She hesitated before answering.

“Is that really so?” she said.

“So maybe it was Thomas who burned you?”

“Maybe.”

“You’ll understand, then, that we suspect this may be an act of revenge—by someone who’s close to you.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know…”

That is how it went on, back and forth, until Jensen’s tone suddenly changed and she said:

“By the way…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think you need to worry about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your husband seems terrified of this woman. I think he’ll be staying away from you.”

Paulina hesitated, then said: “Is that all?”

“For the time being, yes.”

“Well, I suppose I should be saying thank you, then.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know,” she said, adding—because it seemed like the right thing to say—that she hoped Thomas would be better soon.

She certainly did not mean a word of it, and as she was sitting there on her bed after hanging up, trying to absorb the information, her mobile rang again. It was a divorce lawyer called Stephanie Erdmann. Paulina had read about her in the newspapers. Erdmann wanted to represent her, and she said Paulina did not have to worry about paying her fees. That had already been taken care of.

Inspector Modig met Bublanski in the corridor of police headquarters and was shaking her head. He guessed that meant they had found no trace of Nima Rita in the county council registers either. But they had at least been given permission to search, and that alone had been a minor victory, given that there had been no shortage of obstructions. Their contact with military intelligence had so far consisted of one-way communication only, and he was growing increasingly irritated. He gave Modig a meaningful look and said:

“We may have a suspect.”

“We may?”

“But no name, hardly even a description.”

“And you call that a suspect?”

“Well, let’s call it a lead.”

He told her about the man Heikki Järvinen had seen from where he was standing on Norra Bantorget, some time between one and two on the morning of Saturday, August 15, who may have given Nima Rita a bottle of moonshine.

Modig was taking notes as they walked into his office and sat down opposite each other, at first in silence. Bublanski was shifting in his chair. He was trying to pin down something that was stirring in his subconscious.

“So there are no indications to suggest that he’s used our health-care system?” he said.

“Not so far,” she said. “But I haven’t given up. He could have registered under a different name, don’t you think? We’ve applied for a court order to be allowed to conduct a broader search based on his physical characteristics.”

“Do we have any idea how long he was seen around the city?”

“It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with people’s perception of time, but there’s nothing to suggest he was in the neighbourhood for more than a couple of weeks.”

“Could he have come from another part of the city, or from another town?”

“I don’t think so. That’s my gut feeling.”

Bublanski leaned back in his chair and looked out of the window towards Bergsgatan, and in an instant it became clear to him what he had been looking for.

“The South Wing,” he said.

“What?”

“The closed psychiatric unit at Södra Flygeln—the South Wing. I think he may have been committed there.”

“What makes you say so?”

“It fits. It’s exactly the sort of place you’d put someone you wanted to hide. The South Wing doesn’t even report to the county council. It’s an independent foundation and I know from old that there’s a working relationship between the military authorities and the clinic. Do you remember Andersson, that crazy UN soldier from Congo who attacked people in the city? He was a patient there.”

“I do remember him,” Modig said. “But this sounds like a bit of a long shot to me.”

“I haven’t finished yet.”

“In that case, Chief Inspector, please continue.”

“According to Järvinen, Nima said that he had climbed down from a mountain to get away, down to a lake, and that tallies too, doesn’t it? The South Wing is in a rather dramatic position on the edge of a cliff, above Årstaviken Bay. Besides, it’s not that far from Mariatorget.”

“Good thinking,” Modig said.

“It may just be a wild guess.”

“I’ll check it out right away, in case.”

“Excellent, although…”

“What?”

“It still wouldn’t explain how Nima Rita turned up in Sweden and managed to get through all the passport checks without having his name registered.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Modig said. “But it’s something to be getting on with.”

“And it would also be a useful start if we could talk to Rebecka Forsell, although it seems we’re not allowed to do that either.”

“No,” she said, looking at him thoughtfully.

“What is it?”

“There’s supposed to be another woman in Stockholm, someone who knew Nima Rita and Klara Engelman.”

“Who’s that?”

Modig told him.

Catrin Lindås was walking along Götgatan and tried again to call Blomkvist, but he was still not answering, infuriatingly, even though sometimes his line was busy. What did she care? She had more important things to think about. She had just finished recording her podcast—a discussion about the media campaign against Forsell with Alicia Frankel, the Minister of Culture, and Jörgen Vrigstad, professor of journalism—but it had not made her any more relaxed. She felt off kilter, as she often did after a recording session.

There was always some retort or question which niggled at her, and now she worried that she might have taken too tough a line, or been as partisan as the media she was criticizing; that she had demanded nuance from others without living up to that herself. But then she never shrank from being self-critical, and she was well aware that the hysteria over Forsell had got under her skin. Maybe it was more about her than about him.

She knew only too well how such hatred and lies could destroy a person and, although she had never considered taking her own life, she did sometimes lose her footing and self-harm—just as she had when she was a teenager—by cutting herself. She had felt out of sorts ever since she woke up at dawn that day and prepared for her recording, as if something dark from the past were trying to come back. But she dismissed it. Götgatan was full of people. There was a group of day-care children milling about with balloons on the pavement in front of her, and she turned into Bondegatan and found her way to Nytorget, where she breathed a little easier.

Nytorget was considered one of the most stylish addresses in Söder and, although to some it was almost a dirty word, it was a synonym for the in-crowd among the media elite. She felt safe in the neighbourhood, as if she had found both a home and place of refuge. It was true that she had overmortgaged herself in buying the apartment. But since her programme had become such a success—it was Sweden’s most-listened-to media podcast—she felt reasonably secure, and could in any case always sell the place and move to the suburbs if necessary. She never doubted that everything could be taken away from her at a moment’s notice.

She stepped up her pace. Were those footsteps behind her? No, she was just imagining it, silly old fears. Yet she wanted to get home as quickly as possible. She wanted to forget the world and lose herself in a romantic comedy, or anything that was not part of her own life.

Blomkvist was sitting on a balcony in Östermalm, interviewing the woman Modig had spoken about. He had come from Kungliga Biblioteket, the National Library, where he had spent the whole day reading. He was now beginning to see the chain of events more clearly, or at least where there were gaps and what else he needed to find out.

He had therefore invited himself to Elin’s home on Jungfrugatan. She was now thirty-nine years old, an elegant woman with distinctive features, very slim and somewhat distant. Felke was her married name, but in 2008 she had been called Malmgård and she was quite a celebrity in the fitness world—with her own advice column in
Aftonbladet—
and had been a member of the Everest expedition led by the American, Greg Dolson.

Dolson’s group made their summit bid on the same day as Viktor Grankin’s climbers: May 13. During their acclimatization period, the two expeditions had lived side by side at Base Camp, and Elin had grown close to her countrymen Johannes Forsell and Svante Lindberg. She had also made friends with Klara Engelman.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” Blomkvist said.

“It’s not a problem, but as you can imagine I’m rather tired of this story. I’ve given almost two hundred talks about it.”

“Sounds like good money to me,” he said.

“There was a financial crisis then too, if you recall, so it’s never been that lucrative.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But tell me about Klara Engelman. I know she and Grankin were an item, so there’s no need to tiptoe around that.”

“Are you going to quote me?”

“Not if you don’t want me to. I only need to understand what happened.”

“OK. They did have an affair. But they were discreet about it. Even at Base Camp not many people knew about it.”

“But you did?”

“Because Klara told me.”

“Isn’t it a bit odd that Klara was a member of Viktor Grankin’s expedition? With all her money and connections, why didn’t she choose one of the American leaders, Dolson, for example, who was better known?”

“Grankin had a good reputation too, but there was also a link of sorts between Viktor and Stan Engelman. They knew each other somehow.”

“Yet Grankin went after his wife?”

“Yes, that must have been unbearable for Stan.”

“I read that you thought Klara had been unhappy at first, when she was at Base Camp?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I saw her as the ultimate stuck-up bitch. But then gradually I came to realize how sad she was and understood that, for her, the whole Everest adventure was about freedom. She hoped it would give her the courage to get a divorce. One evening, when we were drinking wine in her tent, she told me she’d got herself a lawyer.”

“Charles Mesterton, right?”

“Maybe, I don’t remember his name. And she’d also been in touch with a publisher. She said she wanted to write not only about climbing the mountain but also about Stan’s affairs with prostitutes and porn stars, and all his criminal contacts.”

“You would have expected Engelman to feel threatened by that.”

“I find that difficult to imagine. If Klara had one lawyer, then he had twenty, and I know she was scared. ‘He’s going to destroy me,’ she said.”

“But then something happened.”

“Our hero set his sights on her.”

“Grankin.”

“Precisely.”

“How did he do it?”

“I have no idea. But it was easy to be charmed by Viktor. He exuded such wonderful calm in the face of any practical difficulties. Just one look at him and we all felt:
Viktor will fix it.
He had a big, bear-like presence and dismissed all our worries with a glorious laugh. I remember envying the other group, I wished we had him as our leader too.”

“And Klara fell for him.”

“Hook, line and sinker.”

“Why, do you suppose?”

“Afterwards I wondered if it wasn’t something to do with Stan. I think Klara imagined that she could defeat her husband if she had Viktor by her side. He looked as if he could stand in a hail of bullets and simply smile.”

“But then something changed.”

“Yes. Even Viktor began to seem nervous, and that threw us all. It was a bit like, you know, when the flight attendant suddenly starts to look worried halfway through the flight. Then you really do begin to think that the plane is going to go down.”

“What do you think had happened?”

“I’ve no idea. It’s possible he was beginning to worry about his little escapade. Realized that Stan wasn’t to be trifled with, and that there would be consequences, and to be honest…”

“Yes?”

“He was right to worry. I was so young at the time, and I thought the romance was pretty cool. It was as if the world’s biggest secret had been entrusted to me. But with hindsight I realize it was bloody irresponsible. I’m not thinking so much about Stan or about Viktor’s wife, but the climbers on the expedition. Viktor was supposed to look after all of them and not favour anybody. He let them down by becoming so fixated on Klara, and I think that’s one of the reasons it all went horribly wrong. He wanted to get her up onto the summit, come what may.”