The Girl Who Played with Fire (22 page)

She stood next to his bed and watched him for several minutes. He had aged and seemed unkempt. The room smelled of a man who was not taking good care of his hygiene.

She did not feel a grain of sympathy. For a second a hint of merciless hatred flashed in her eyes. She noticed a glass on the nightstand and leaned over to sniff it. Whiskey.

After a while she left the bedroom. She took a short tour through the kitchen, found nothing unusual, continued through the living room, and stopped at the door of Bjurman’s office. From her jacket pocket she took a handful of small bits of crispbread, which she placed carefully on the parquet floor in the dark. If anyone tried to follow her through the living room, the crunching noise would alert her.

She sat down at Bjurman’s desk and placed the Taser in front of her. Methodically she searched the drawers and went through correspondence dealing with Bjurman’s private accounts. She noticed that he had become sloppier and more sporadic with balancing his accounts.

The bottom drawer of the desk was locked. Salander frowned. When
she had visited a year before, all the drawers had been unlocked. Her eyes remained unfocused as she visualized the drawer’s contents. It had contained a camera, a telephoto lens, a small Olympus pocket tape recorder, a leather-bound photograph album, and a little box with a necklace and a gold ring inscribed
TILDA AND JACOB BJURMAN
•
APRIL
23, 1951. Salander knew that these were the names of his parents and that both of them were dead. Presumably it was a wedding ring, now a keepsake.

So, he locks up stuff he thinks is valuable
.

She inspected the rolltop cabinet behind the desk and took out the two binders containing his reports of her guardianship. For fifteen minutes she read each one. Salander was a pleasant and conscientious young woman. Four months earlier he had written that she seemed so rational and competent that there was good reason to discuss at the next annual review whether or not she required further guardianship. It was elegantly phrased and amounted to the first building block in the revocation of her declaration of incompetence.

The binder also contained handwritten notes that showed Bjurman had been contacted by one Ulrika von Liebenstaahl at the Guardianship Agency for a general discussion of Salander’s condition. The words
necessity for psychiatric assessment
had been underlined.

Salander pouted, replaced the binders, and looked around.

She could not find anything of note. Bjurman seemed to be behaving in accordance with her instructions. She bit her lower lip. She still had a feeling that something was not right.

She got up from the chair and was about to turn off the desk lamp when she stopped. She took out the binders and looked through them again. She was perplexed. The binders should have contained more. A year ago there had been a summary of her development since childhood from the Guardianship Agency. That was missing.
Why would Bjurman remove papers from an active case?
She frowned. She could not think of any good reason. Unless he was filing additional documentation somewhere else. Her eyes swept across the shelves of the rolltop cabinet and the bottom desk drawer.

She did not have a picklock with her, so she padded back to Bjurman’s bedroom and fished his key ring out of his suit jacket, which was hanging over a wooden valet stand. The same objects were in the drawer as a year ago. But the collection had been supplemented with a flat box whose printed illustration showed a Colt .45 Magnum.

She thought through the research that she had done about Bjurman
two years ago. He liked to shoot and was a member of a shooting club. According to the public weapons registry he had a licence for a Colt .45 Magnum.

Reluctantly she came to the conclusion that it was no surprise he kept the drawer locked.

She did not like the situation, but she could not think of any immediate pretext for waking him and scaring the shit out of him.

Johansson woke at 6:30 a.m. She heard the morning TV on low volume from the living room and smelled freshly brewed coffee. She also heard the clacking of keys from Svensson’s iBook. She smiled.

She had never seen him work so hard on a story before.
Millennium
had been a good move. He was often afflicted with writer’s block, and it seemed as though hanging out with Blomkvist and Berger and the others was having a beneficial effect on him. He would come home gloomy after Blomkvist had pointed out shortcomings or shot down some of his reasoning, but then he’d work twice as hard.

She wondered whether it was the right moment to interrupt his concentration. Her period was three weeks late. She had not yet taken a pregnancy test. Perhaps it was time.

She would soon turn thirty. In less than a month she had to defend her dissertation. Dr. Johansson. She smiled again and decided not to say anything to Svensson before she was sure. Maybe she would wait until he was finished with his book and she was giving a party after she got her doctorate.

She dozed for ten more minutes before she got up and went into the living room with a sheet wrapped around her. He looked up.

“It’s not 7:00 yet,” she said.

“Blomkvist is acting superior again.”

“Has he been mean to you? Serves you right. You like him, don’t you?”

Svensson leaned back in the living-room sofa and met her eyes. After a moment he nodded.

“Millennium
is a great place to work. I talked to Mikael at Kvarnen before you picked me up last night. He was wondering what I was going to be doing after this project was finished.”

“Aha. And what did you say?”

“That I didn’t know. I’ve hung around as a freelancer for so many years now. I’d be glad of something more steady.”

“Millennium.”

He nodded.

“Mikael has tested the waters, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in a part-time job. Same contract as Henry Cortez and Lotta Karim are on. I’d get a desk and a retainer from
Millennium
and could take in the rest on the side.”

“Do you want to do that?”

“If they come up with a concrete offer, I’ll say yes.”

“OK, but it’s not 7:00 yet and it’s Saturday.”

“I know. I just thought I’d polish it up a bit here and there.”

“I think you should come back to bed and polish something else.”

She smiled at him and turned up a corner of the sheet. He put the computer on standby.

Salander spent a good deal of time over the next few days doing research on her PowerBook. Her search extended in many different directions, and she was not always sure what she was looking for.

Some of the fact collecting was simple. From the Media Archive she put together a history of Svavelsjö MC. The club appeared in newspaper stories going by the name Tälje Hog Riders. Police had raided the clubhouse, at that time located in an abandoned schoolhouse outside Södertälje, when neighbours reported shots fired. The police turned up in astonishing force and broke up a beer-drenched party that had degenerated into a shooting contest with an AK-4, which later turned out to have been stolen from the disbanded I20 regiment in Västerbotten in the early 1980s.

According to one evening paper, Svavelsjö MC had six or seven members and a dozen hangers-on. All the full members had been in jail. Two stood out. The club leader was Carl-Magnus “Magge” Lundin, who was pictured in
Aftonbladet
when the police raided the premises in 2001. He had been convicted on five charges of theft, receiving stolen goods, and for drug offences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the sentences—for a crime which involved grievous bodily harm—put him away for eighteen months. He was released in 1995 and soon afterwards became president of Tälje Hog Riders, now Svavelsjö MC.

According to the police gang unit, the club’s number two was Sonny Nieminen, now thirty-seven years old, who had run up no fewer than twenty-three convictions. He had started his career at the age of sixteen when he was put on probation and in institutional care for assault and battery and theft. Over the next ten years he was convicted on five counts
of theft, one of aggravated theft, two of unlawful intimidation, two narcotics offences, extortion, assault on a civil servant, two counts of possessing an illegal weapon, one criminal weapons charge, driving under the influence, and six counts of assault. He had been sentenced according to a scale that was incomprehensible to Salander: probation, fines, and repeated stints of thirty to sixty days in jail, until 1989 when he was put away for ten months for aggravated assault and robbery. He was out a few months later and kept his nose clean until October 1990. Then he got into a fight in a bar in Södertälje and ended up with a conviction for manslaughter and a six-year prison sentence. He was out by 1995.

In 1996 he was arrested as an accessory to an armed robbery. He had provided three of the robbers with weapons. He was sentenced to four years and released in 1999. According to a newspaper article from 2001 in which Nieminen was not named—but where the details of the suspect were such that he was effectively identified—he looked more than likely to have played his part in the murder of a member of a rival gang.

Salander downloaded the mug shots of Nieminen and Lundin. Nieminen had a photogenic face with dark curly hair and dangerous eyes. Lundin just looked like a complete idiot, and was without doubt the man who had met the giant at Blomberg’s Café. Nieminen was the man waiting in McDonald’s.

Via the national vehicle register she traced the white Volvo to the car rental firm Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. She dialled their number and spoke to a Refik Alba:

“My name is Gunilla Hansson. My dog was run over yesterday by someone who just drove off. The bastard was driving a car from your firm—I could tell from the licence plate. A white Volvo.” She gave the number.

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s not enough, I’m afraid. I want the name of the driver so that I can sue him.”

“Have you reported the matter to the police?”

“No, I’d like to settle it directly.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give out the names of our clients unless a police report has been filed.”

Salander’s voice darkened. She asked whether it was good practice to oblige her to report the company’s clients to the police force instead of resolving matters with much less trouble. Refik Alba apologized once more and repeated that he was powerless to circumvent company rules.

•  •  •

The name Zala was another dead end. With two breaks for Billy’s Pan Pizza, Salander spent most of the day at her computer with only a big bottle of Coca-Cola for company.

She found hundreds of Zalas—from an Italian athlete to a composer in Argentina. But she did not find the one she was looking for.

She tried Zalachenko, but that was a dead end too.

Frustrated, she stumbled into bed and slept for twelve hours straight. When she woke it was 11:00 a.m. She put on some coffee and ran a bath in the Jacuzzi. She poured in bubble bath and brought coffee and sandwiches for breakfast. She wished that she had Mimmi to keep her company, but she still had not even told her where she lived.

At noon she got out of the bath, towelled herself dry, and put on a bathrobe. She turned on the computer again.

The names Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson yielded better results. Via Google’s search engine she was able to quickly put together a brief summary of what they had been up to in recent years. She downloaded copies of some of Svensson’s articles and found a photographic byline of him. No great surprise that he was the man she had seen with Blomkvist at Kvarnen. The name had been given a face, and vice versa.

She found several texts about or by Mia Johansson. She had first come to the media’s attention with a report on the different treatment received by men and women at the hands of the law. There had been a number of editorials and articles in women’s organizations’ newsletters. Johansson herself had written several more articles. Salander read attentively. Some feminists found Johansson’s conclusions significant, others criticized her for “spreading bourgeois illusions.”

At 2:00 in the afternoon she went into Asphyxia 1.3, but instead of
MikBlom/laptop
she selected
MikBlom/office
, Blomkvist’s desktop computer at
Millennium
. She knew from experience that his office computer contained hardly anything of interest. Apart from the fact that he sometimes used it to surf the Net, he worked almost exclusively on his iBook. But he did have administrator rights for the whole
Millennium
office. She quickly found what she was looking for: the password for
Millennium’s
internal network.

To get into other computers at
Millennium
, the mirrored hard drive on the server in Holland was not sufficient. The original of
MikBlom/office
also had to be on and connected to the internal computer
network. She was in luck. Blomkvist was apparently at work and had his desktop on. She waited ten minutes but could not see any sign of activity, which she took to indicate that he had turned on the computer when he came into the office and had possibly used it to surf the Net, then left it on while he did something else or used his laptop.

This had to be done carefully During the next hour Salander hacked cautiously from one computer to another and downloaded email from Berger, Malm, and an employee whose name she did not recognize, Malin Eriksson. Finally she located Svensson’s desktop. According to the system information it was an older Macintosh PowerPC with a hard disk of only 750 MB, so it must be a leftover that was probably only used for word processing by occasional freelancers. It was linked to the computer network, which meant that Svensson was in
Millennium’s
editorial offices right now. She downloaded his email and searched his hard drive. She found a folder with the short but sweet name
.

The blond giant had just picked up 203,000 kronor in cash, which was an unexpectedly large sum for the three kilos of methamphetamine he had delivered to Lundin in late January. It was a tidy profit for a few hours of practical work—collecting the meth from the courier, storing it for a while, making delivery to Lundin, and then taking 50 percent of the profit. Svavelsjö MC could turn over that amount every month, and Lundin’s gang was only one of three such operations—the other two were around Göteborg and Malmö. Together the gangs brought him roughly half a million kronor in profit every month.