The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (17 page)

“Keep going.”

“Then Faria herself calls, from another number, and wants to see him. At the time Jamal is secretly renting an apartment on Upplandsgatan, with the help of Norstedts publishing company. It’s not clear what happens next. All we know is that the youngest brother in the family, Khalil, helps Faria to escape, and she goes straight to Upplandsgatan. Jamal and Faria’s reunion is like something out of a movie or a dream. They make love and talk, day and night. Faria, who otherwise said nothing during the police interviews, confirmed that. They decide to contact the police and PEN, for help to go into hiding. But then … it’s so sad. Faria wants to say goodbye to her youngest brother – and she’s come to trust him. They agree to meet at a café on Norra Bantorget. It’s a chilly autumn day. Faria heads out wearing Jamal’s blue down jacket with a hood which she draws over her head. She never arrives.”

“She was ambushed, right?”

“It was definitely an ambush – there were witnesses. But neither Lisbeth nor I believe that Khalil lured her there. Our suspicion is that the older brothers followed him. They were waiting for Faria in a red Honda Civic on Barnhusgatan and, with lightning speed as soon as they see her approach, drag her into the car and take her back to the family home in Sickla. It seems that the brothers contemplate packing Faria off to Dhaka. But unsurprisingly they see it as too risky. How would they prevent her from causing a scene at Arlanda, or on the flight? Would they have to drug her?”

“So they get her to write a letter to Jamal.”

“Exactly. But the letter’s not worth the paper it’s written on, Mikael. The handwriting is Faria’s, that much is clear. But it’s obvious her brothers or her father dictated it – except for the clues Faria manages to slip into the text. ‘I said all along that I have never loved you.’ That was certainly a secret message. In his diary, Jamal describes how they told each other over and over again, every evening and every morning, how much they loved each other.”

“Jamal must have raised the alarm when she didn’t come back from the meeting with Khalil.”

“Of course he did. Two police assistants dutifully visited Sickla, and when the father stood at the front door and assured them that all was well, except that Faria had flu, they left. But Jamal would not be fobbed off. He called everybody he could think of and the family must have realized they were running out of time. On Monday, October 23, Jamal writes in his account of events that he wakes up with a feeling of death in his body. The police made a big deal of this after it was all over, but I don’t interpret that to mean he has given up. It’s how Jamal expresses himself. He’s been torn apart, and has started to bleed to death. He can’t sleep, can’t think, can hardly function as a human. He ‘staggers on’, he writes. Cries out his ‘despair’. The police investigators read too much into those words. That’s my opinion. Between the lines he sounds much more like a man who wants to fight and to recover what he has lost. Above all he is worried. ‘What’s Faria doing now?’ ‘Are they hurting her?’ He makes no reference to Faria’s letter, even though it’s lying open on his kitchen table. He probably sees right through it. We know that he tries again to get in touch with Ferdousi, who’s at a conference in London. He rings Fredrik Lodalen, an associate professor of biology at Stockholm University with whom he’s become friendly. They meet at 7.00 in the evening on Hornsbruksgatan, where Lodalen lives with his wife and two children. Jamal stays for a long time. The children go to sleep. Lodalen’s wife goes to sleep. Lodalen has tremendous sympathy, but he also has to get up early the next morning and, like many people facing a crisis, Jamal is going over things again and again and, come midnight, Lodalen asks him to go home. He promises to contact the police and the women’s crisis centre in the morning. On the way to the Tunnelbana, Jamal telephones the author Klas Fröberg whom he’s got to know through PEN. There’s no answer, and Jamal goes down into Hornstull station. It’s 00.17 on Tuesday, October 24. A storm has just blown in. It’s raining.”

“So there aren’t many people around.”

“There’s one woman on the platform, a librarian. The C.C.T.V. camera catches Jamal as he’s walking by her, and he looks absolutely wretched. Understandably so. He has hardly slept since Faria disappeared, and he feels abandoned by everybody. But still, Mikael … Jamal would never abandon Faria when she needed him most. One of the C.C.T.V. cameras on the platform was broken, and that may have been an unfortunate coincidence. But I cannot believe it’s a coincidence that a young man walks up to the librarian and talks to her in English just as the train rolls into the station and Jamal falls onto the track. The woman doesn’t see what happens. She has no idea whether Jamal jumped or was pushed and it hasn’t been possible to identify the young man who spoke to her.”

“What does the train driver say?”

“His name is Stefan Robertsson and it’s basically because of him that the death was ruled a suicide. Robertsson says he’s certain that Jamal jumped. But he was also traumatised by the incident and my guess is that he was asked some leading questions.”

“In what way?”

“The person conducting the interview didn’t seem to want to consider any other possibility. In his first account – before his brain pieced together a more comprehensive description – Robertsson says he saw some wild flailing, as if Jamal had had too many arms and legs. He doesn’t refer to it again, and curiously enough his memory seems to get better as time goes by.”

“What about the guard at the ticket gate? He or she surely must have seen the perpetrator.”

“The guard was watching a film on his iPad and said that a number of people passed him. But he didn’t take notice of anybody in particular. He thinks that most of them were passengers who had got off the train. He has no clear recollection.”

“Aren’t there cameras up there?”

“There are, and I’ve found something. Nothing significant, but most of the people who come up out of the station have been identified, apart from one man who looks young and lanky. He keeps his head down, so it’s impossible to see his face. But his attitude suggests that he’s nervous and doesn’t want to be recognized. It’s a disgrace that he hasn’t been followed up, especially since he has a very distinctive, jerky way of moving.”

“I agree. I’ll give it a closer look,” Blomkvist said.

“Then we’ve got Faria’s own offence, the one she’s been convicted of,” Giannini said. She was about to go on when the food arrived and their concentration lapsed. Not just because of the waiter and his fussing with the plates and the grated parmesan but also because a group of noisy youths came by on their way towards Yttersta Tvärgränd and Skinnarviksberget.

Palmgren was thinking about the war in Syria and all sorts of other miseries – including the pain which felt like knives in his hips – and about the idiotic call he had made to Martin Steinberg. He was also terribly thirsty. He had drunk very little, and he hadn’t had anything to eat either. It would still be a while before Lulu arrived and took him through his evening ritual, if indeed Lulu was coming at all.

It seemed as if nothing was working. His telephones certainly weren’t, neither of them, and no help had come, not even Marita. He had spent all day lying in bed, getting more and more upset. He really should trigger his alarm. He wore it on a cord around his neck and although he was reluctant to use it, now seemed the right time. He was so thirsty that he could hardly think straight. It was warm too. No-one had aired his room or opened a window all day. No-one had done anything. Almost in desperation he listened out for sounds in the stairwell. Was that the lift? You could hear the lift all the time. People came and went. But nobody stopped at his door. He swore and turned in his bed and felt terrible shooting pains. Instead of calling Professor Steinberg – who was probably a crook – he should have got in touch with the psychologist who was also mentioned in the confidential notes, the one named Hilda von Kanterborg, who was said to have breached her duty of confidence by talking to Lisbeth’s mother about the Registry. If anyone could have helped him, surely she was rather than the one who ran the whole project. What a prize donkey he had been, and how dreadfully thirsty he was! He considered shouting as loudly as he could in the direction of the stairwell. Perhaps one of the neighbours would hear him. But, wait … now he heard footsteps heading his way. A smile spread across his face. That must be Lulu, his wonderful Lulu.

As the door opened and closed and shoes were wiped on the doormat, he called out with his last reserves of strength, “Hello, hello, now tell me all about Haninge. What was his name again?” He got no answer, and now he could hear that the steps were lighter than Lulu’s, more rhythmic and somehow harder. He looked around for something to defend himself with. Then he breathed out. A tall, slender woman in a black polo neck appeared in the doorway and smiled at him. The woman was sixty, maybe seventy years old, and she had sharp features. There was a cautious warmth in her eyes. She was carrying a brown doctor’s bag which seemed to belong to another era, and she held herself upright. There was a natural dignity about her. The smile was refined.

“Good afternoon, Herr Palmgren,” she said. “Lulu is very sorry, but she can’t come today.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her, I hope.”

“No, no, it’s just a personal matter, nothing serious,” the woman said, and Palmgren felt a sting of disappointment.

He could sense something else, too, but he could not quite put his finger on it. He was far too dazed and thirsty.

“Could you please bring me a glass of water?”

“Oh my goodness, of course,” the woman said, and she sounded just like his old mother all those years ago.

She put on a pair of latex gloves and went off, returning with two glasses. They restored him to some sort of stability. He drank with a shaky hand and felt that the world was getting its colour back. Then he looked up at the woman. Her eyes seemed warm and affectionate, but he did not like the latex gloves or the hair, which was thick and did not suit her at all. Was she wearing a wig?

“Now that’s better, isn’t it?” she said.

“Much better. Are you temping for the care company?”

“I sometimes help out in an emergency. I’m seventy, so sadly they don’t like to call on me too often,” the woman answered and unbuttoned his nightshirt, which was damp with sweat after the long day in bed.

She took a morphine plaster from the brown leather bag, raised his medical bed and swabbed a patch high up on his back with some cotton wool. Her movements were precise, her touch careful. She knew what she was doing, no question about it. He was in good hands. There was none of the clumsiness of some of the other helpers. But it also made Palmgren feel vulnerable – the woman’s professionalism was almost too much.

“Not so fast,” he said.

“I’ll be careful. I read about your pain in the notes. It sounds very unpleasant.”

“It’s bearable.”

“Bearable?” she repeated. “That’s not good enough. Life should be better than that. I’ll give you a slightly stronger dose today. I think they’ve been a bit stingy with you.”

“Lulu—” he began.

“Lulu’s wonderful. But she isn’t the one who decides about the morphine. That’s beyond her authority,” the woman interrupted, and with her practised hands – her easy mastery – she applied the plaster.

It felt as if the morphine was taking effect immediately.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“No, no, I never got that far. For many years I was an ophthalmic nurse at Sophiahemmet.”

“Is that so?” he said, and he seemed to detect something tense about the woman, a twitch around her mouth. But perhaps it was nothing.

Or so he tried to tell himself. Still, he could not help examining her face more closely now. She had a certain class, didn’t she? But there was nothing classy about her hair. Or her eyebrows for that matter – they were the wrong colour and style, and they looked as if they’d been stuck on in a hurry. Palmgren thought how strange his day had been and recalled the conversation of the day before. He looked at the woman’s polo neck. What was it that bothered him about it? He could not think straight, the air was too close and hot. Without really being conscious of it, his hand moved towards his personal alarm.

“Could you please open a window?” he asked.

She did not answer. She stroked his neck with soft, deliberate movements. Then she removed the cord with the alarm from around his neck and with a smile said:

“The windows will have to stay closed.”

“Eh?”

Her response was so unpleasant in its austerity that he could hardly take it in. He stared at her in astonishment and wondered what to do. His options were limited. She had taken away his alarm. He was lying down and she had her medical bag and all her professional efficiency. And it was odd, the woman looked blurred, as if she were moving in and out of focus. Suddenly he understood: everything in the room was becoming hazy. He was drifting away.

He slid into unconsciousness, fighting against it with all his strength. He shook his head, waved his good hand, gasped for air. All the woman did was to smile, as if in triumph, and put another plaster on his back. Then she put his nightshirt back on, straightened his pillow and lowered his bed. She gave him a few gentle pats, as if she wanted to be especially nice to him in some sort of perverse compensation.

“Now you’re going to die, Holger Palmgren,” she said. “It’s about time, isn’t it?”

Giannini and Blomkvist sipped their wine and were silent for a little while as they looked up towards Skinnarviksberget.

“Faria was probably more afraid for her own life than for Jamal’s,” Giannini said. “But the days passed and nothing happened. We don’t know a great deal about what went on in the apartment in Sickla. Her father and brothers gave such a consistent and embellished account that it can only have been false. But we can be sure that they felt under pressure. There was talk in the neighbourhood and reports were made to the police. They may have been having a tough time keeping Faria under control.

“Two things we know for sure,” Giannini went on. “We know that just before 7.00 p.m. the day after Jamal has fallen in front of the Tunnelbana, Ahmed, the oldest brother, is standing in the living room by the big windows four storeys up. Faria comes over to him. There’s a brief exchange, according to the middle brother, and then, out of the blue, she goes crazy. She throws herself at Ahmed and pushes him out of the window. Why? Because he tells her that Jamal is dead?”