The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (34 page)

“It was Rakel and Benjamin, which was not much better. They solemnly announced that under the terms of such and such a law, they had come to fetch Lisbeth, for her own protection. Then things turned nasty.”

“In what way?”

“Lisbeth must have felt terribly betrayed. She was only a little girl, after all, and when Rakel had first come and set her different tests to do, she had also given her hope. Say what you will about Rakel, but she does have an aura of authority about her. She’s even a bit regal, with her straight back and that fiery birthmark on her throat. I think Lisbeth had dreamed that she would be able to help them keep her father away from their home. But that evening she realized that Rakel was like all the rest—”

“Another person who did nothing to stop the abuse and the violence.”

“And now on top of it all Rakel was going to take Lisbeth away for
her
own safety.
Her
safety! Rakel even had a syringe filled with Stesolid. She meant to sedate the girl and carry her off. Lisbeth went crazy. She bit Rakel’s finger, climbed on a table in the living room, managed to open the window and just threw herself out. They were only one floor up, but it was still a two and a half metre drop to the ground and Lisbeth was a skinny little thing. She had no shoes, just socks, jeans and some sort of sweater, and there was a full-blown storm raging outside. She landed in a crouch, fell forward and banged her head, but she jumped to her feet and ran off into the darkness. She ran and ran, all the way down towards Slussen and into Gamla Stan, until she got to Mynttorget and the Royal Palace, frozen and soaked through. I think she slept in a stairwell that night. She stayed away for two days.” Hilda fell silent. “Could I ask you …”

“What?”

“I’m feeling so miserable today. Could you run down to reception and bring back some cold beers? I need something cooler than this dishwater,” she said, pointing at the bottles.

Blomkvist looked at her with concern. But he nodded and went down to reception. To his surprise, he not only bought six cold bottles of Carlsberg. He also sent off an encrypted message, which may not have been such a good idea. But he felt that he owed it to her.

Then he carried the beers up to Hilda and listened to the rest of the story.

Salander was in the Opera Bar, trying to celebrate her release from prison. It was not going well. A group of silly, giggling girls with wreaths in their hair, probably a hen party, were at a table behind her. Their laughter cut right through her as she looked out at Kungsträdgården. A man walked by outside with a black dog.

She had chosen the place because of their cocktails, and maybe also for the atmosphere and bustle, but it was not really doing it for her. Occasionally her eyes scanned the faces in the room; maybe she could bring someone back to her place, could be a man, possibly a woman.

All sorts of things went through her mind, and she kept looking at her mobile. She had had an e-mail from Hanna Balder, August’s mother. August, the autistic boy with the photographic memory who had witnessed the murder of his father, was now back in the country, after a long stay abroad, and according to Hanna was “doing well, all things considered”. That sounded promising, although Salander could not help thinking about his gaze, those glazed eyes which had not only seen much more than they should, they also seemed to be retreating into a shell. She reflected, not without pain, that certain things are seared into your brain. You can never shake them off, you have to live with them. She remembered how, when they were hiding in that small house in Ingarö, the boy had banged his head over and over on the dining table in a fit of wild frustration. For a fleeting moment she felt like doing the same: smashing her head against the bar counter. But all she did was clench her jaws.

She noticed a man coming her way. Dressed in a blue suit, and with slicked-back dark-blonde hair, he sat down next to her and looked with exaggerated concern at her split lip and bruised face: “My God, who did you manage to upset?” He risked at least a withering look, but at that moment her mobile buzzed. Blomkvist sent her an encrypted message which set her even more on edge. She got up, tossed some hundred-kronor notes onto the bar and gave the man a shove on her way out.

The city was shimmering and music was playing in the distance. It was a glorious summer’s evening for anyone in the mood for it. Salander noticed none of that. She looked ready to kill. She searched the name she had been given on her mobile and soon realized that Rakel Greitz had protected identity status. That in itself was not a problem. We all leave traces, like when we buy things online and are careless about giving out our addresses. But as she crossed Strömbron on her way to Gamla Stan, she was unable to do anything, not even hack a site where Rakel Greitz might have bought a book. Instead, she thought about dragons.

She thought about how, as a little girl, she had run shoeless through Stockholm until she got to the Royal Palace and hurried past a tall pillar towards a cathedral which was lit up in the darkness. That was Storkyrkan. She knew nothing about it then, she was simply drawn to it. She was freezing cold, her socks were soaked through and she needed to get some rest and warmth. She ran into an inner courtyard and walked through the side doors of the cathedral. The ceiling was so high that it seemed to reach to the sky. She remembered how she had gone further in so that people would stop staring at her. And that’s when she saw the statue. Only later did she realize that it was famous, said to represent St George killing a dragon and rescuing a damsel in distress. But that was not something Salander knew then or would even have cared about. She saw something entirely different in the statue that evening – an assault. The dragon – she still remembered it so clearly – was on its back with a spear through its body, while a man with an indifferent, blank expression struck the animal with his sword. The dragon was defenceless and alone, and that had made Salander think of her mother.

She saw her mother in the dragon, and with every muscle in her body she felt that she wanted to save her. Or better still, she wanted to be the dragon herself and fight back, and breathe fire, and pull the rider down from his horse and kill him. Because the knight was clearly none other than Zala, her father. He was the evil destroying their lives.

But that was not all. There was another figure depicted in the statue, a woman one could easily miss because she was standing to one side. She wore a crown on her head and was holding out her hands, as if reading a book. The strangest thing was that she was so calm, as if she were looking out over a meadow or an ocean rather than a slaughter. At the time, Salander could not recognize the woman as the maiden being rescued. In her eyes, the woman was ice cold and indifferent. She looked exactly like the woman with the birthmark from whom she had just escaped and who, like all the others, was allowing the violence and the abuse to continue at her home.

That was how she saw it. Not only were her mother and the dragon being tormented, but the world was looking on heartlessly. Salander felt a deep revulsion for the knight and the woman in the statue, and she had run back out into the rain and the storm, shaking with cold and fury. It was all so long ago and yet remarkably present. Now, many years later, as she crossed the bridge to Gamla Stan on her way home, she muttered the name to herself:
Rakel Greitz
.

This was her link to the Registry. She had been looking for it ever since Palmgren came to visit her at Flodberga.

Hilda opened a beer. By now her left eye was wandering a little. At times she lost her train of thought and seemed gripped by remorse, at others she was astonishingly focused, as if the alcohol had merely sharpened her wits.

“I don’t know what Lisbeth did after she ran out of Storkyrkan, only that she managed to beg some money at Central Station the next day and pinched a pair of over-sized shoes and a down jacket at Åhléns. Agneta was beside herself with worry, of course, and I … I was furious and told Rakel that she would jeopardize the whole project if she went through with her plan. In the end, she gave in. She left Lisbeth alone. But she never stopped hating her. I think she was involved when Lisbeth was locked up at St Stefan’s.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because her good friend Peter Teleborian worked at the clinic.”

“They were
friends
?”

“Rakel was Teleborian’s psychoanalyst. They shared a belief in repressed memory and other similarly ridiculous theories, and he was very loyal to her. But the interesting thing is that Rakel not only hated Lisbeth, she also became more and more frightened of her. I believe she recognized, long before anyone else did, just what Lisbeth was capable of.”

“Do you think Rakel had anything to do with Holger Palmgren’s death?”

Hilda glanced down at her shoes. Voices could be heard outside on the quay.

“She’s merciless. I can vouch for that more than anyone. The rumour mill she set in motion when I decided to leave the Registry just about did me in. But murder? I’m not sure. I would find that hard to believe. At least I’d rather not believe it, still less …”

Hilda pulled a face. Blomkvist waited for her to continue.

“… still less can I believe it about Daniel Brolin. He’s such a vulnerable, gifted boy. He would never harm anyone, least of all his twin brother. They were made to be together.”

Blomkvist was about to answer that this is exactly what people say when their friends or acquaintances commit the most heinous crimes. “We just don’t understand”, “It’s not possible”, “Not him/not her, surely?” And yet it happens. We have the highest opinion of someone and then that person is blinded by rage and the unthinkable happens. He said nothing and tried not to jump to conclusions. There were any number of possible scenarios. They talked for a while longer and then ran through a few practical details including how they would communicate over the coming days. He urged her to take every care and to look after herself, and then he checked his mobile to see if there was a late train back to Stockholm. He had fifteen minutes. He packed away his voice recorder, gave her a hug and rushed off. On his way to the station he tried once more to reach Salander. He both needed to see her, and he wanted to. It had been too long.

In the train he looked at a shaky video his sister had sent him, in which a furious Bashir Kazi appeared to confess to being behind the murder of Jamal Chowdhury.

Not only had the video gone viral, it had also triggered a flurry of activity in police headquarters on Bergsgatan. This was intensified when, soon after, two sophisticated hand movement analyses were sent to Bublanski on the murder squad of the Violent Crimes Division. Those analyses were also the reason why a young man with a runner’s physique and a lost look in his eyes was slumped in one of the interview rooms on the seventh floor, together with his imam, Hassan Ferdousi.

Bublanski had known Ferdousi reasonably well for some time now. Ferdousi and Bublanski’s fiancée, Farah Sharif, had been students together. He was also one of those leaders who worked to encourage closer interaction between the various religious communities in the face of the country’s rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Bublanski did not always see eye to eye with Ferdousi, especially over the question of Israel, but he had great respect for him, and he had greeted the imam with a reverential bow.

He heard that Ferdousi had helped to bring about a breakthrough in the investigation into Jamal Chowdhury’s death, and he was grateful but also dejected. It revealed the extent of his colleagues’ incompetence and Bublanski was overloaded with work as it was. Fru Torell at last got in touch to say that someone had indeed come to see her in connection with the papers she had handed over to Holger Palmgren. A certain Professor Martin Steinberg – a respected citizen, apparently, who had worked for both the social services and the government. Steinberg had told her that some individuals had already got themselves into difficulties because of those papers, and made her swear before God and the late Professor Caldin that she would never again talk about them, nor should she mention Steinberg’s visit, “for the safety and well-being of our former patients”.

Steinberg had taken away her back-up, a U.S.B. stick. Torell did not remember what had been on it, other than the medical notes on Salander. But Bublanski was uneasy about it, especially since he had not been able to get in touch with Steinberg. Bublanski wanted to spend more time trying to unravel the mystery, but he would have to simply forget about it all for a while. He had been asked to handle this interview, even though he hardly had the time for it.

He looked at his watch. It was 8.45 a.m. Another glorious day that would mostly pass him by. He looked at the young man sitting quietly next to the imam, waiting for his court-appointed defence lawyer. His name was Khalil Kazi and he had apparently confessed to murdering Jamal Chowdhury out of love for his sister. Out of
love
? It was incomprehensible. But that was Bublanski’s unhappy lot in life. People did terrible things and it was his responsibility to understand why and to bring them to justice. He looked at the imam and the young man, and for some reason he thought of the ocean.

Blomkvist woke up in Salander’s double bed on Fiskargatan. It had not exactly been his plan, but it was his own fault. He had turned up on her doorstep and had been let in with a silent nod. Admittedly, at first they had just worked and shared information. But for both of them it had been a very eventful day, and in the end Blomkvist could no longer keep his mind on what they were doing. He wiped the dried blood from her lip and asked about the dragon in Storkyrkan. It was 1.30 in the morning and the summer sky was already brightening as they sat on her sofa.

“Was that the reason you had the dragon tattooed on your back?”