The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (26 page)

Hilda observed that science always loses its way when guided by ideology or wishful thinking. There was a note of anxiety in her introductory passage, as if she were about to propose something shocking. But the article was balanced: it held that we are affected by genetics and social environment to the same degree, which was more or less what Blomkvist had expected.

One thing did surprise him, however. The environmental factors said to be most influential in shaping us were not those he had predicted. The essay suggested that mothers and fathers are often convinced they have a decisive influence over their children’s development, but they “flatter themselves”.

Hilda argued that our fate is more likely determined by what she called our “unique environment” – the one we do not share with anyone, not even our siblings. It is the environment we seek out and create for ourselves, for example when we find something which delights and fascinates us, and drives us in a certain direction. Rather like Blomkvist’s reaction as a young boy, perhaps, when he saw the film “All the President’s Men” and was struck by a strong urge to become a journalist.

Heredity and environment interact constantly, Hilda wrote. We seek out occurrences and activities which stimulate our genes and make them flourish, and we avoid things which frighten us or make us uncomfortable.

She based her conclusions on a series of studies, among others Mi.S.T.R.A., the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, and investigations by the Swedish Twin Registry at the Karolinska Institute. Identical twins, or so-called monozygotic twins, with their essentially indistinguishable sets of genes, are ideal subjects. Thousands of twins, both identical and fraternal, grow up apart from each other, either because one or both have been adopted, or, more rarely, as the result of some unfortunate mix-up in a maternity ward. Many of these cases are heart-rending, but they also provide scientists with crucial test cases. The studies come to more or less the same conclusion: hereditary factors in conjunction with our unique environment are the primary factors in shaping our personality.

Blomkvist had no trouble coming up with hypotheses to challenge Hilda’s findings, and he could also identify problems with how the research material was to be interpreted. Yet he found that the article made for interesting reading. He learned about some extraordinary cases of identical twins who had grown up in different families and only met as adults, but were strikingly similar, not just in appearance but also in behaviour. There were the so-called “Jim Twins” of Ohio, U.S.A.: unaware of each other’s existence, yet both became chain-smokers of Salem cigarettes, bit their fingernails, suffered from bad headaches, had carpentry workbenches in their garage, named their dogs Toy, got married twice to women with the same name, had sons they christened James Allan and James Alan, and God knows what else.

Blomkvist could see why the gutter press had become excited, but he himself was not all that impressed. He knew how easy it was to become fixated by similarities and coincidences – how the sensational always sticks in the mind and stands out at the expense of the ordinary, which – maybe precisely because it is so ordinary – tells us something more significant about the real world.

But Blomkvist did see that all these studies on twins resulted in a paradigm shift for epidemiological science. The research community began to believe more in the power that genes have over us, and in their intricate interplay with environmental factors. Earlier, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, more weight had been given to the impact of social considerations. There was a prevailing notion that to grow up in a certain environment or to be raised in a particular way would inevitably produce a specific type of individual. Many scientists dreamed of being able to prove this, in order perhaps to determine how to produce better, happier people. It was one of the reasons why so many research projects with twins were initiated at that time, some of which Hilda, in evasive terms, described as “tendentious and radical”.

It was there that Blomkvist suddenly sat up and continued his research with renewed energy. He had no idea whether he was on the right track, yet he kept digging, including by searching combinations of the words “tendentious and radical” in the context of twins research. That is how he came across the name Roger Stafford.

Stafford was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who had been a professor at Yale. He had worked closely with Freud’s daughter, Anna, and was said to be charismatic and charming. There were pictures of him with Jane Fonda, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, and he looked a little like a film star himself.

But his main claim to fame was less flattering. “Tendentious and radical” was precisely the point. In September 1989, the
Washington Post
disclosed that, in the late 1960s, Stafford had established close relationships with the female managers of five adoption agencies in New York and Boston. Two of the women had affairs with him, and there may have been promises of marriage. Not that he was reliant on that. Stafford was quite an authority at the time. In one of his books,
The Egoistic Child
, he claimed that identical twins thrive better and become more independent if they grow up apart. This conclusion was later debunked, but by then it had become established among therapists on the East Coast.

It was agreed that these women would contact Stafford as soon as twins were referred to them for adoption. The children were then placed in consultation with him. A total of forty-six babies were involved, twenty-eight identical and eighteen fraternal twins. None of the families was informed that their adopted son or daughter was a twin, or even that they had a sibling. The adoptive parents, on the other hand, were required to allow Stafford and his team to examine the children once a year and make them undertake a series of personality tests.

Before long one of the managers – a woman by the name of Rita Bernard – noticed that Stafford insisted on placing twins with sets of parents who were utterly different from each other in terms of status, education, religious affiliation, temperament, personality, ethnicity and in their methods of child-rearing. Instead of putting the twins’ interests first, Stafford seemed bent on pursuing research into heredity and environment, she said.

Stafford did not deny that he was engaged in scientific work. He saw it as an excellent opportunity to improve our understanding of how we are formed as individuals. He said that his research would become an “inestimable scientific resource”. He vehemently denied that he was not prioritizing the interests of the child, but for “reasons of integrity” he refused to make his material public. He donated it to the Yale Child Study Center, with the proviso that researchers and the public should have access to it only in 2078, when all those involved would be long dead. He did not, he said, want to exploit the fate of those twins.

That sounded noble, but there were critics who claimed that he declared the material confidential because it had fallen short of his expectations. Most agreed that the experiment was deeply unethical, and that Stafford had deprived siblings of the joy of growing up together. A fellow psychiatrist from Harvard even compared his activities with Joseph Mengele’s experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Stafford retaliated, wildly and proudly, with two or three lawyers, and the debate came to an end not long after. When Stafford died in 2001, he was buried with a certain amount of pomp and circumstance and in the presence of a number of celebrities. Some fine obituaries were published in the specialist press and newspapers. The experiment did not tarnish his memory to any significant extent, perhaps because the children who had been so brutally separated from each other had all come from the lower strata of society.

That was nothing unusual in those days, as Blomkvist knew only too well. One could inflict abuses on ethnic and other minorities in the name of science and for the good of society and get away with it. For that reason Blomkvist was unwilling to dismiss Stafford’s experiment as an isolated episode and looked further into the history. He noted that Stafford had been to Sweden in the 1970s and ’80s. There were pictures of him with Lars Malm, Birgitta Edberg, Liselotte Ceder and Martin Steinberg, the leading psychoanalysts and sociologists of the day.

At the time, nothing was known about Stafford’s experiments with twins, and he may have had other reasons for visiting Sweden. But Blomkvist kept digging, thinking of Salander all along. She too was a twin, a fraternal twin to a nightmare sister called Camilla. He knew the authorities had attempted to examine her when she was little and she had hated it. He also thought about Leo Mannheimer and his high I.Q. score, and about Ellenor Hjort’s suggestion that he might have been born into the traveller community. What Malin said about Leo no longer being left-handed was actually beginning to seem plausible.

He looked up medical phenomena which might explain the change, and became absorbed by an article in
Nature
magazine which explained how one fertilized egg splits in the womb and results in identical twins. Then he got up from his desk and stood motionless for a minute or two, muttering to himself. He rang Lotta von Kanterborg again and told her what he suspected. In fact he took a chance and presented his new, wild theory as fact.

“That sounds completely crazy,” she said.

“I know. But will you tell Hilda, if she gets in touch? Tell her that the situation is critical.”

“I will,” Lotta said.

Blomkvist went to bed with his mobile next to him on the bedside table. But no-one called. Even so he hardly slept, and now, a day later, he was back at his computer. He was looking into the people Stafford had met on his trips to Sweden, and to his surprise he came across Holger Palmgren’s name. Palmgren and sociology professor Martin Steinberg had been working together on a criminal case more than two decades ago. Blomkvist hardly thought that this was significant – Stockholm is a small place, after all. People are always running into each other.

Still, he made a note of Steinberg’s telephone number and address in Lidingö, and carried on searching into his background. But his concentration was drifting. He was of two minds: Should he send an encrypted message to Salander and tell her what he had found? Should he confront Mannheimer, to see if he was on the right track? He had another espresso and suddenly missed Malin. In no time at all she had found her way back into his life, like a force of nature.

He went into the bathroom and stepped on the scale. He had gained weight, he needed to do something about that. And he should get his hair cut. It was sticking out in all directions and he tried to smooth it down. But then he said out loud “To hell with it” and went back to his desk to call, e-mail and text Salander. In the end he wrote into their shared file on his computer:

Something about his message did not feel quite right: the word “think”. Salander was not keen on half measures. He corrected it:

, and hoped it was true. Then he went to his wardrobe, put on a newly ironed cotton shirt and went out, down Bellmansgatan to the Tunnelbana station on Mariatorget.

On the platform he took out his notes from the night before and went through them one more time. He looked at his question marks and speculations. Was he going mad? He looked at the digital display above him and saw that a train was about to arrive. At that moment his mobile rang. It was Lotta von Kanterborg and she was breathing hard:

“She called,” she said.

“Hilda?”

“She told me that what you said about Leo Mannheimer sounded crazy. That it couldn’t possibly be right.”

“I see.”

“But she wants to meet you,” she said. “She’d like to tell you what she
does
know. Right now she’s—”

“Don’t tell me over the phone.”

Blomkvist suggested that they meet right away at Kaffebar on St Paulsgatan, and hurried back up the station steps.

Bublanski was in an apartment in Aspudden, surrounded by old-fashioned furniture and talking to Maj-Britt Torell, the woman who, according to Salander, had visited Palmgren a few weeks before. The old lady probably had the best of intentions, Bublanski thought, but there was something odd about her. Not only was she fiddling nervously with the Danish pastries on the coffee table, she also seemed surprisingly forgetful and disorganized for someone who had spent so many years working as a medical secretary.

“I’m not quite sure what I gave him,” she said. “I’d just heard so much about the girl, and thought it was time he got the full story – about how appallingly she was treated.”

“So you gave Palmgren the original papers?”

“I suppose I did. The professor’s practice has been closed for ages and I have no idea what became of all the medical records. But I had some papers given to me unofficially by Professor Caldin.”

“Secretly, you mean?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Important documents, then?”

“I suppose so.”

“Wouldn’t you have kept copies, or scanned them into a computer?”

“You would think so, but I …”

Bublanski said nothing. It seemed like the right moment to keep quiet. But Torell did not finish her sentence and went on picking even more nervously at her pastries.

“You haven’t by any chance …” Bublanski said.

“What?”

“… had a visit from someone, or a telephone call about these papers? Is that maybe what’s making you a bit anxious right now?”

“Absolutely not,” Torell said a little too fast and a little too nervously.

Bublanski got to his feet. It was high time now. He looked at her with his most wistful smile, which he was well aware could make a deep impression on people who were wrestling with their conscience.

“In that case I’ll leave you in peace,” he said.

“Oh, really?”

“Just to be on the safe side, I’ll call a taxi and have you taken to a nice café in town. This is so important and serious that I believe you need a bit of time to think, don’t you agree, Fru Torell?”