The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (24 page)

“Nothing really. Except that she was clearly upset by it.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“I don’t actually know anything more. I’ve never been bothered to dig into it, and Hilda never said a word about it, however much I pressed her. But you can draw the same conclusions from the article as I did.”

“Thanks. I’ll follow it up.”

“Promise not to write anything too nasty about her.”

“I think there are bigger crooks than Hilda in this story,” he said.

They said goodbye and Blomkvist paid for his drinks before leaving the hotel. He crossed over to Götgatan and then continued up towards Medborgarplatsen and St Paulsgatan. He waved aside both acquaintances and strangers who wanted to talk to him; the last thing he felt like was socializing. He only wanted to read the article, but he waited until he was home before looking it up on his computer.

He went through it three times, and afterwards read a number of other essays on the same topic and made a couple of calls. He kept going until 12.30 a.m. He then poured himself a glass of Barolo and speculated that he might be beginning to understand a little of what had happened, even if he had not yet worked out what part Salander had played in the story.

He had to speak to her, he thought, whatever the prison management might say.

A minor sixth chord consists of a keynote, a third, a fifth and a sixth from the melodic minor scale.

In American jazz and pop music, the minor seventh is the most common minor chord. It is considered elegant and beautiful.

The minor sixth is rarely used. The tone may be regarded as harsh and ominous.

Salander had left the maximum security unit for the last time. She was now standing in the guard-box of Flodberga Prison, being scrutinized from head to toe by a crew-cut young man with angry red skin and small arrogant eyes.

“A Mikael Blomkvist called, looking for you,” he said.

Salander ignored this information. She did not even look up. It was 9.30 in the morning and she just wanted to get out of there. She was irritated by the paperwork she still had to deal with and scribbled illegibly on the forms required to take receipt of her laptop and her mobile. Olsen had not needed much persuading to see to it that they were both fully charged. After that, they let her go.

She passed through the gates, walked the length of the wall and along the railway line, and sat by the main road on a bench with peeling red paint to wait for bus number 113 to Örebro. It was a hot morning, and the air was still. Flies were buzzing around her. Even though she turned her face to the sun and seemed to be enjoying the weather, she did not feel any particular joy at being out of prison.

But she was happy to have her laptop back. Sitting on the bench, her black jeans sticking to her legs, she opened it up and logged on. She checked that Giannini had sent her, as promised, the file on the police investigation into the death of Jamal Chowdhury. There it was in her inbox. Salander would be able to deal with it on the journey home.

Giannini had a theory, a suspicion based partly on the strange fact that Faria had refused to say a word during police questioning, and partly on a short C.C.T.V. sequence from the Tunnelbana station at Hornstull. Giannini appeared to have discussed it with an imam in Botkyrka called Hassan Ferdousi, and he believed she might be on the right track. The thought now was that Salander, with her skills, should take a look as well, so she set about locating it in the file Giannini had sent her. Before examining the sequence, she looked out at the road and the yellowing fields and thought of Holger Palmgren. She had spent most of the night thinking about him.
Talk to Hilda von …

Hilda von Kanterborg was the only “Hilda von” known to Salander, dear old Hilda with her sweeping gestures, who had often sat in their kitchen at home on Lundagatan when Salander was a child, and who was one of her mother’s few friends when everything around her was falling apart. Hilda had been a rock, at least so Salander had believed. That was the reason Salander had looked her up one day, some ten years ago now. They spent a whole evening together drinking cheap rosé, because Salander had wanted to find out more about her mother. Hilda told her quite a lot, and Salander told her one or two things as well; she shared confidences with Hilda which she had kept even from Palmgren. It had been a long evening and they had raised their glasses to Agneta, and to all women whose lives had been destroyed by shits and bastards.

But Hilda had not breathed a word about the Registry. Had she kept the most important thing to herself? Salander refused to believe it at first. She was usually good at detecting what might be hidden beneath the surface. But she might have been fooled by Hilda’s whole damaged façade. She thought back to the files she had downloaded on Olsen’s computer and remembered a pair of initials in those documents: H.K. Was it conceivable that they referred to Hilda von Kanterborg? Salander ran a search and discovered that Hilda had been a more influential psychologist than she had realized at the time. A flash of anger flared in her. But she decided to withhold judgement for the time being.

The number 113 to Örebro was approaching in a cloud of dust and spewing gravel. She paid the driver and sat down at the back, where she had a careful look at the C.C.T.V. sequence showing the ticket barrier at Hornstull station just after midnight on October 24 nearly two years ago. Gradually she focused in on one detail, an irregularity in the movement of the suspect’s hand. Could it be relevant? She was not sure.

She knew that movement recognition as a technology was still in its infancy. She had no doubt that all human gestures carry a mathematical fingerprint. It is still difficult to read, however. Every little movement is made up of thousands of pieces of information and is in itself not wholly conclusive. Every time we scratch our heads there is a difference. Our gestures are always similar, but never exactly the same. One needs sensors, signal processors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, motion-plotting algorithms, Fourier analyses and frequency and distance gauges to be able to describe and compare movements with precision. There were some programs available for download from the internet. But that was not an option, it would take too long. She had another idea.

She thought of her friends in Hacker Republic and the deep neural network which Plague and Trinity had been working on for so long. Could that be optimized and used? It was not out of the question. It would require her to find a more comprehensive index of hand movements for the algorithms to study and learn from, but it would not be impossible.

She worked hard on the train from Örebro back to Stockholm and in the end had a wild thought. The Prison Service would not think much of it, especially not on her first day of freedom. But that was irrelevant. She got off the train at Central Station and took a taxi home to Fiskargatan, where she continued to work.

Dan Brody laid his guitar – a newly purchased Ramirez – on the coffee table and went into the kitchen to make himself a double espresso, which he drank so quickly it burned his tongue. It was 9.10 a.m. He had not noticed the time go by. He had lost himself in “
Recuerdos de la Alhambra
” and was now late for work. Not that it mattered much to anyone, but he did not want to give the impression that he did not take his work seriously. So he went into his bedroom and picked out a white shirt, dark suit and black Church’s shoes. Then he hurried down to the street to discover that it was already oppressively hot. Summer, to his dismay, was in full swing.

His suit felt wrong for the time of year – severe and inappropriate in the sunshine – and after only a few metres his back and his armpits were damp with sweat. It only added to his sense of alienation. He looked at the gardeners working in Humlegården – the noise of the lawnmowers pained him. He continued at high speed towards Stureplan, and even though he still felt uncomfortable he noted with some satisfaction that other suited men also had sweaty, miserable faces. The heat had come suddenly, after a long period of rain. There was an ambulance standing further down on Birger Jarlsgatan and he thought about his mother.

She had died in childbirth. His father was a travelling musician who never paid any attention to him and had died young, from cirrhosis of the liver, after many years of heavy drinking. Dan – who was born Daniel Brolin – grew up in an orphanage in Gävle and later, from the age of six, as one of four foster children on a farm to the north of Hudiksvall. He had to work extremely hard there with the animals and the harvest, mucking out the stables and slaughtering and butchering the pigs. The farmer, his foster father Sten, made no secret of the fact that he had taken on his foster children – all of them boys – because he needed extra hands. When the boys came to live with him, Sten was married to a red-haired, thick-set woman called Kristina. But she had pretty soon taken off and had not been heard of since. She was said to have gone to Norway, and people who met Sten were hardly surprised that she had tired of him. He was tall and imposing and by no means ugly, with a carefully groomed beard which was beginning to turn grey, but there was something grim about his mouth and forehead which frightened people. He seldom smiled. He did not like socializing or small talk, and he hated pretension and refinement.

He was always saying: “Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t think you’re anything special.” When the boys in their high spirits declared that they wanted to become professional footballers when they grew up, or lawyers or millionaires, he would always snap back: “One should know one’s place!” He was stingy when it came to praise and encouragement, and certainly when it came to money. He distilled his own spirits, ate the meat of animals which he himself had shot or slaughtered, and the farm was as good as self-sufficient. Nothing was ever bought unless heavily discounted or in a clearance sale. He got his furniture at the flea market or it was passed on by neighbours and relatives. His house was painted a strident yellow, and nobody knew why until it transpired that Sten had got the paint free, from surplus stock.

Sten had no appreciation of beauty and he never read books or newspapers. That did not trouble Daniel since there was a library at the school. But he was bothered by the fact that Sten disliked all music unless it was jolly and Swedish. All Daniel had inherited from his biological father was his surname and a nylon-stringed Levin guitar, which had been abandoned in the attic of the farmhouse until Daniel picked it up one day, and which he came to love. It was not only that the instrument seemed to have been waiting for him. He felt that he was born to play it.

He soon learned the basic chords and harmonies and realized that he could copy tunes from the radio having heard them only once. For a long time, he played the usual repertoire of a boy of his generation: ZZ-Top’s “Tush”, the Scorpions’ ballad “Still Loving You”, Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and several other rock classics. But then something happened.

One cold, autumn day he stole out of the cowshed. He was fourteen years old and school was a nightmare. He was quick to learn, but found it difficult to listen to the teachers. He was disturbed by the racket around him and yearned to get back to the silence and calm of the farm, even though he hated the work and the long days. He escaped whenever he could, to find time for himself.

On this particular day, just after 5.30 p.m., he came into the kitchen and turned on the radio, which was playing something corny and dull. He fiddled with the dial and tuned to P2. He knew very little about the station, he had thought it was mostly oldies, and what he heard only confirmed his prejudice. It was a clarinet solo and the sound jarred on his nerves, like the buzzing of a bee or an alarm going off.

But he kept listening, and then the sound of a guitar came in, a tentative, playful guitar. He shivered. There was a new feeling in the room, a sense of reverence and concentration, and he felt himself come alive. He heard nothing else, not the other boys swearing and arguing, nor the birds or tractors or distant cars, or even the sound of approaching footsteps. He just stood there, cocooned in an unexpected joy, and tried to understand what made these notes different from everything he had ever heard before. Why did they affect him so much? Then suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his scalp and neck.

“You lazy little shit, you think I don’t see how you’re always sneaking off?”

Sten was pulling Daniel’s hair, shouting and swearing. But Daniel barely noticed. He was focusing only on one thing: listening to the end of the tune. The music seemed to be showing him something unknown, something richer and greater than the life he had so far been living. Although he did not manage to hear who had been playing, he glanced up at the old kitchen clock above the tiled stove as Sten dragged him out of the room. He knew that the exact time was important.

The next day he used one of the school telephones to ring Radio Sweden. He had never done anything like it before. He did not possess that kind of resourcefulness and self-confidence. He never put his hand up in the classroom even when he knew the answer, and he had always felt inferior to city folk, especially if they worked in as glamorous a profession as radio or television. But he made the call anyway and was put through to Kjell Brander, from jazz programming. In a voice which almost failed him, he asked which tune had been playing at just after 5.30 p.m. the day before. To be on the safe side, he hummed a bit of the tune. Kjell Brander recognized it immediately.

“Cool! You like it? You’ve got good taste, young man. That was Django Reinhardt’s ‘Nuages’.”

No-one had ever called Daniel “young man” before. He asked how to spell the name of the song and added, even more nervously:

“Who is he?”

“One of the best guitarists in the world, I’d say. And yet he played his solos with just two fingers.”

Daniel could not subsequently remember what Kjell Brander had told him and what he later found out for himself. But gradually he learned that there was a story behind the man, and this made what he had heard only more precious. Django grew up in poverty in Liberchies in Belgium, sometimes stealing chickens just to survive. He began to play the guitar and violin at an early age and was considered very promising. But when he was eighteen, he knocked over a candle in his caravan, setting alight the paper flowers his wife sold to earn a living, and the blaze spread. Django suffered serious burns, and for a long time it was thought that he would never play again, especially not when it turned out that he had lost the use of two fingers of his left hand. Yet with the help of a new technique he was able to keep on developing his playing, and he soon became world famous and a cult figure.