The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (22 page)

Blomkvist could not understand what Malin was telling him. He was so focused on trying to get hold of Hilda von Kanterborg that he was barely listening. He was in a taxi crossing Västerbron on his way to Rutger Fuchsgatan in Skanstull. People were sunbathing in the park below. Motorboats cruised out on Riddarfjärden.

“Now listen, Micke,” she said. “Please concentrate. You’re the one who dragged me into this whole mess.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I have to pull myself together. Let’s take it from the top. It’s this thing about Leo sitting and writing something in his office, is that right?”

“Exactly, there was something odd about it.”

“You thought he was writing a will.”

“It wasn’t
what
he was writing. It was
how
.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was writing with his left hand, Mikael. Leo was always left-handed – suddenly I remembered it very clearly. He always wrote with his left hand. He caught apples, oranges, anything at all, with his left hand. But now he’s right-handed.”

“Sounds a bit weird.”

“It’s true all the same. Must have been already there in my sub-conscious, ever since I saw Leo on T.V. a while back. He was making a PowerPoint presentation and holding the remote in his right hand.”

“Sorry Malin, but that’s not enough to persuade me.”

“I’m not done yet. I didn’t attach too much importance to it either. I hadn’t even really taken it on board. But there was something nagging at me and so I observed Leo very carefully at Fotografiska. We were quite close towards the end of my time at Alfred Ögren, so I was very familiar with his gestures.”

“O.K.”

“The movements were exactly the same when he gave his talk at Fotografiska, only the opposite way round. Like all right-handers, he picked up the water bottle with his right hand, transferred it to his left and unscrewed the top with his right, and then also held the glass with his right hand. That was when I realized. Afterwards, I went to talk to him.”

“Not a successful conversation.”

“I could tell he just wanted to be rid of me, and then at the bar he was holding his wine glass with his right hand. It actually gave me the shivers.”

“Could it be something neurological?”

“That’s more or less what he said himself.”

“What? You confronted him about it?”

“Not me, but afterwards I refused to believe my own eyes. I watched all the T.V. clips of Leo I could find on the net. I even called and spoke to my old colleagues, but none of them had noticed a thing. Nobody ever seems to notice anything. Then I spoke to Nina West. She’s a Forex trader and pretty sharp, and she’d noticed the change. You can imagine how relieved I was to hear that. She’s the one who asked him about it.”

“And what did he say?”

“He was embarrassed and started muttering. He said he was ambidextrous, that he decided to change hands after his mother died, as a part of his liberation. That he was looking for a new way of living.”

“Isn’t that a good enough explanation?”

“Both hyperacoustic
and
ambidextrous? That seems a bit much to me.”

Blomkvist looked out at Zinkensdamm.

“Maybe, but it’s not impossible. But …” He reflected for a while longer. “You’re right in saying something doesn’t feel right about this story. Let’s get together again soon.”

“Absolutely,” she said.

They ended the call and he continued in the direction of Skanstull and Hilda von Kanterborg.

Over the years, Bublanski had taken quite a liking to Salander, but he still did not feel at ease in her presence. He knew that she disliked authority, and even though he could sympathize, given her background, he hated generalizations.

“Eventually you’ll have to start trusting people, Lisbeth, even the police. Otherwise you’ll have a hard time of it,” he said.

“I’ll do my best,” she said drily.

He was sitting facing her in the visitors’ section in H Block, fidgeting. She looked oddly young, he thought.

“Let me begin by expressing my deepest sympathies at the death of Holger Palmgren. It must have been a big blow. I remember when I lost my wife—”

“Skip it,” she said.

“O.K., let’s get to the point. Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kill Palmgren?”

Salander raised her hand to her shoulder, just above the chest, where she had an old bullet wound. She started to speak with a strange coldness which made Bublanski feel quite uncomfortable, but what she said did at least have the advantage of being concise and accurate – an interrogator’s dream, in a way.

“A few weeks ago, Holger had a visit from an elderly woman named Maj-Britt Torell, a former secretary to Professor Johannes Caldin who was once head of St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala.”

“Where you were a patient?”

“She had read about me in the newspapers, and left him a bunch of documents. At first Holger didn’t think they contained anything new, but in the end, they turned out to have serious implications. There had been plans to have me adopted when I was little and I’d always thought it was a misguided attempt to help deal with the problems linked to my bastard of a father. But these documents prove it was actually part of a scientific experiment set up by an authority called the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment. Its existence is a secret and I was annoyed that I couldn’t find the names of the people in charge of it. So I called Holger and asked him to take a closer look at those documents. I have no idea what he found. All I know is that Mikael Blomkvist called to tell me that Holger was dead, that he might have been murdered. So my advice is that you contact Maj-Britt Torell. She lives in Aspudden. She may have copies of the documents or they may be backed up somewhere. It might also be a good idea to check that she’s O.K. from time to time.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That is helpful. What exactly did this authority do?”

“The name ought to give you a clue.”

“Names can be misleading.”

“There’s a creep called Teleborian.”

“We’ve questioned him already.”

“Do it again.”

“What should we be looking for?”

“You could try grilling the heads of the genetics centre at Uppsala. But I doubt you’ll get very far.”

“Could you be a bit more specific, Lisbeth. What’s all this about?”

“About science – or rather pseudo-science – and about some idiots who imagined you could study the impact of social environment and heredity by sending children away for adoption.”

“Doesn’t sound too good.”

“Full marks for insight,” she said.

“Any other clues?”

“No.”

Bublanski did not believe her.

“I’m sure you know that Holger’s last words were ‘Talk to Hilda von …’ Does that ring any bells?”

It certainly did. It had rung a bell when Blomkvist called the day before, too. But for the time being she kept that to herself. She had her reasons. Neither did she mention anything about Leo Mannheimer or the woman with the birthmark. She gave only brusque answers to the rest of Bublanski’s questions. Then she said goodbye and was taken back to her cell. At 9.00 a.m. the following morning she would be leaving Flodberga. She supposed that Fager was eager to be rid of her.

Rakel Greitz was, as usual, unhappy about the job the cleaners had done. She should have given firmer instructions. Now she had to do the mopping and drying herself, and water her house plants and tidy up the books, the glasses, the cups. No matter that she was feeling sick and that her hair was coming out in tufts. She gritted her teeth. She had a lot to do.

She read one more time through the documents she had taken from Holger Palmgren. It was not hard to see which were the references that had prompted his telephone call. The notes in themselves were not so much of a problem, especially since Teleborian had been good enough to refer to her using only her initial. There was no detailed description of the actual research being done, and no other children had been named. In any case, that is not what made her very uncomfortable. What upset her was the fact that Palmgren had been reading them now, after all these years.

It could have been a coincidence. Martin Steinberg believed so. Maybe Palmgren had had the papers for ages and decided on a whim to look through them, which then got him thinking about the information without attaching too much importance to it. If that is how it was, then her recent actions would have been a disastrous mistake. But Greitz did not believe in coincidence, not now that so much was teetering on the brink of disaster.

Plus she knew that Palmgren had recently been to see Salander at Flodberga women’s prison. Greitz was not going to underestimate Salander again, especially not with Hilda von Kanterborg’s name in the documents. Hilda was the only connection Greitz could think of that might lead Salander to her. She was pretty certain that Hilda had not been indiscreet again, not since her unfortunate friendship with Agneta Salander. But you could never be sure about anything and it was possible that there were copies of the documents out there, which was why it was crucial for Greitz to find out how Palmgren had got hold of them. Had it been in the context of the Teleborian investigation, or had he got them later – and, if so, from whom? Greitz had been convinced they had removed all the sensitive material from St Stefan’s, but maybe … she was deep in thought when an idea struck her: Johannes Caldin, the head of the clinic. He had always been a thorn in their side. Could he have handed over the papers before he died? Or had someone close to him done so – such as his …?

Greitz swore to herself. “Of course, that bloody woman.”

She went into the kitchen and swallowed two painkillers with a glass of lemonade. Then she called Steinberg – that wimp could get off his backside and make himself useful – and told him to get in touch with Maj-Britt Tourette, as Greitz liked to call her.

“Right away,” she said. “Now!”

Then she made herself a rocket salad with walnuts and tomatoes and cleaned the bathroom. It was 5.30 p.m. She felt warm, even though the balcony door was open. She longed to be able to take off her polo neck and put on a linen shirt, but resisted the temptation and again thought of Hilda. She had nothing but contempt for the woman. Hilda was a lush and a slut. Yet there had been a time when Greitz envied her. Men flocked around her, women and children too, for that matter. She had an open and generous mind in the good old days, when they had all had such high hopes.

Their project was not the only one of its kind. Their source of inspiration had been in New York, though she and Steinberg had driven their project further. Even though they had sometimes been surprised or disappointed by their findings, she had never thought the broader costs, taken as a whole, were too high. Admittedly, some of the children were worse off than others. But that was the lottery of life.

Project 9 was fundamentally worthy and important – that was how she saw it. It would show the world how to produce stronger and better-balanced individuals, and that is why it was such a tragedy that two of their subjects had jeopardized everything and forced her to take such extreme measures. She was not particularly troubled by her transgressions – and sometimes that surprised her. She did not after all lack self-knowledge and she knew that she was not much inclined to remorse. But she did worry about consequences.

Distant shouting and laughter could be heard out on Karlbergsvägen. Her apartment smelled of detergent and surgical spirit. She looked at her watch again, got up from her desk and took out another doctor’s bag – this one was black and more modern – and a new, discreet wig, new sunglasses, a few syringes and ampoules and a small bottle containing bright-blue liquid. Then she retrieved a walking stick with a silver handle from the closet and a grey hat from the shelf in the hall, and she went down to wait for Benjamin to pick her up and take her to Skanstull.

Hilda von Kanterborg poured herself a glass of white wine and drank it slowly. She was without question an alcoholic, even if she did not drink as much as was widely believed. But she did drink too much, just as she over-indulged in her other vices. Contrary to what people thought, Hilda was not some grand noblewoman fallen on hard times. Nor was she someone who just drifted around and got drunk. She was still publishing articles on psychology under the pseudonym Leonard Bark.

Her father, Wilmer Karlsson, had been a contractor and a conman until he was convicted of gross fraud by Sundsvall district court. Later, he came across the name of one Johan Fredrik Kanterberg, a young lieutenant in the Royal Life Guard Dragoons who died in a duel in 1787, the last of his line. Thanks to some negotiating and one or two tricks, and despite the strict rules of the Swedish House of Nobility, Wilmer Karlsson managed to change his name – not to Kanterberg but to Kanterborg – and on his own initiative he added a “von”, which in due course found its way into official records.

Hilda found the name clumsy and affected, particularly after her father abandoned the family and moved into a dismal two-room apartment in central Timrå. The name von Kanterborg sounded as out of place in those surroundings as she herself would have felt at the House of Nobility. Maybe a part of her personality was shaped in defiance of the name. During her teenage years she experimented with drugs and hung out with teddy boys in the town centre.

But she did well at school and went on to study psychology at Stockholm University. She spent much of her early years there partying, but the teachers began to take notice of her. She was attractive and intelligent and an original thinker. She also had high moral standards, though not in the way that was expected of girls in those days. She was no prude, nor some quiet, pretty little thing. She abhorred injustice and she never let anyone down.

Just after she had defended her thesis, she happened to see sociology professor Martin Steinberg in a restaurant on Rörstrandsgatan in Vasastan. All doctoral students knew Steinberg. He was tall and handsome with a well-groomed moustache, and he looked a bit like David Niven. He was married to a stocky woman called Gertrud who was occasionally taken for his mother. She was fourteen years older and quite plain beside her charismatic husband.