The Girl Who Played with Fire (27 page)

There they’d had to wait a long time before they were interviewed by an Inspector Nyberg at the station. She had light blond hair and looked like a teenager.

I’m getting old
, Blomkvist thought.

By 2:30 he had drunk so many cups of police canteen coffee that he was sober and feeling unwell. He had to interrupt the interview and run to the toilet, where he was violently sick. He still had the image of Johansson’s face swimming in his head. He drank three cups of water and rinsed his face over and over before returning to the interview. He tried to pull himself together to answer all of Inspector Nyberg’s questions.

“Did Dag Svensson or Mia Johansson have enemies?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“Had they received any threats?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How would you describe their relationship?”

“They gave every appearance of loving each other. Dag told me that they were thinking of having a baby after Mia got her doctorate.”

“Did they use drugs?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so, and if they did it would be nothing more than a joint at a party when they had something to celebrate.”

“Why were you visiting them so late at night?”

Blomkvist explained that they were doing last-minute work on a book, without identifying the subject.

“Wasn’t it unusual to call on people so late at night?”

“That was the first time it had ever happened.”

“How did you know them?”

“Through work.”

The questions were relentless as they tried to establish the time frame.

The shots had been heard all over the building. They had been fired less than five seconds apart. The seventy-year-old man in the dressing gown, a retired major from the coastal artillery, as it turned out, was their nearest neighbour. He was watching TV. After the second shot, he went out to the stairwell. He had a hip problem and so getting up from the sofa was a slow process. He estimated that it had taken him thirty seconds to reach the landing. Neither he nor any other neighbour had seen anybody on the stairs.

According to the neighbours, Blomkvist had arrived at the apartment less than two minutes after the second shot was fired.

Calculating that he and Annika had had a view of the street for half a minute while she found the right building, parked, and exchanged a few words before he crossed the street and went up the stairs, Blomkvist figured there was a window of thirty to forty seconds. During which time the killer had left the apartment, gone down three flights of stairs—dropping the weapon on the way—left the building, and disappeared before Annika turned into the street. They had just missed him.

For a dizzying moment Blomkvist realized that Inspector Nyberg was toying with the possibility that he himself could have been the killer, that he had only run down one flight and pretended to arrive on the scene after the neighbours had gathered. But he had an alibi in the form of his sister. His whole evening, including the telephone conversation with Svensson, could be vouched for by a dozen members of the Giannini family.

Eventually Annika put her foot down. Blomkvist had given all reasonable and conceivable help. He was visibly tired and he was not feeling well. She told the inspector that she was not only Blomkvist’s sister but also his lawyer. It was time to bring all this to a close and let him go home.

When they got out to the street they stood for a time next to Annika’s car. “Go home and get some sleep,” she said.

Blomkvist shook his head.

“I have to go to Erika’s,” he said. “She knew them too. I can’t just call and tell her, and I don’t want her to wake up and hear it on the news.”

Annika hesitated, but she knew that her brother was right.

“So, off to Saltsjöbaden,” she said.

“Can you take me?”

“What are little sisters for?”

“If you give me a lift out to Nacka I can take a taxi from there or wait for a bus.”

“Nonsense. Jump in and I’ll drive you.”

Annika Giannini was exhausted too, and Blomkvist managed to persuade her to save herself the hour-long detour round the Lännersta Sound and drop him off in Nacka. He kissed her on the cheek, thanked her for all her help, and waited until she had turned the car and driven off before he called a taxi.

It was two years since Blomkvist had been to Saltsjöbaden. He had only been to Berger’s house a few times. He supposed that was a sign of immaturity.

Exactly how her marriage with Greger Beckman functioned, he had no idea. He had known Berger since the early eighties. He planned to go on having a relationship with her until he was too old to get out of his wheelchair. They had broken it off in the late eighties when both he and Berger had met and married other people. The hiatus had lasted little more than a year.

In Blomkvist’s case the consequence of his infidelity was a divorce. For Berger it led to Beckman’s conceding that their long-term sexual passion was evidently so strong that it would be unreasonable to believe that mere convention could keep them apart. Nor did he propose to lose Berger the way that Blomkvist had lost his wife.

When Berger admitted having an affair, Beckman knocked on Blomkvist’s door. Blomkvist had been dreading his visit, but instead of punching him in the face, Beckman had suggested they go out for a drink. They hit three bars in Södermalm before they were sufficiently tipsy to have a serious conversation, which took place on a park bench in Mariatorget around sunrise.

At first Blomkvist was sceptical, but Beckman eventually convinced him that if he tried to sabotage his marriage to Berger, he could expect to see Beckman come back sober with a baseball bat, but if it was simply physical desire and the soul’s inability to rein itself in, that was OK as far as he was concerned.

So Blomkvist and Berger had taken up again, with Beckman’s blessing and without trying to hide anything from him. All Berger had to do was pick up the telephone and tell him she was spending the night with Blomkvist when the spirit moved her, which it did with some regularity.

Beckman had never uttered a word of criticism against Blomkvist. On the contrary, he seemed to regard his relationship with his wife as beneficial; and his love for her was deepened because he knew he could never take her for granted.

Blomkvist, on the other hand, had never felt entirely at ease in Beckman’s company—a dreary reminder that even liberated relationships had a price. Accordingly, he had been to Saltsjöbaden only on the few occasions when Berger had hosted parties where his absence would have been remarked on.

Now he stood at the door of their substantial villa. Despite his uneasiness about bringing bad news, he resolutely put his finger on the doorbell and held it there for about forty seconds until he heard footsteps. Beckman opened the door with a towel wrapped around his waist and his face full of bleary anger that changed to astonishment when he saw his wife’s lover.

“Hi, Greger,” Blomkvist said.

“Good morning, Blomkvist. What the hell time is it?”

Beckman was blond and thin. He had a lot of hair on his chest and hardly any on his head. He had a week’s growth of beard and a prominent scar over his right eyebrow, the result of a sailing accident some years before.

“Just after 5:00,” Blomkvist said. “Could you wake Erika? I have to talk to her.”

Beckman took it that since Blomkvist had all of a sudden overcome his reluctance to visit Saltsjöbaden—and at that hour—something out of the ordinary must have happened. Besides, the man looked as if he badly needed a drink, or at least a bed so that he could sleep off whatever it was. Beckman held the door open and let him in.

“What happened?”

Before Blomkvist could reply, Berger appeared at the top of the stairs,
tying the sash of a white terry-cloth bathrobe. She stopped halfway down when she saw Blomkvist in the hall.

“What?”

“Dag and Mia,” Blomkvist said.

His face instantly revealed the news he had come to give her.

“No.” She put a hand to her mouth.

“They were murdered last night. I just came from the police station.”

“Murdered?” Berger and Beckman said at the same time.

“Somebody got into their apartment in Enskede and shot them. I was the one who found them.”

Berger sat down on the stairs.

“I didn’t want you to have to hear it on the morning news,” Blomkvist said.

It was 6:59 a.m. on Maundy Thursday as Blomkvist and Berger let themselves into the
Millennium
offices. Berger had woken Malm and Eriksson with the news that Svensson and Johansson had been killed the night before. They lived much closer and had already arrived for the meeting. The coffeemaker was going in the kitchenette.

“What the hell is happening?” Malm wanted to know.

Eriksson shushed him and turned up the volume on the 7:00 a.m. news.

“That was pretty succinct,” Eriksson said and turned the volume down. Then she started to cry. Berger put an arm around her shoulders. “Jesus Christ,” Malm said to no-one in particular. “Sit down, everyone,” Berger said in a firm voice. “Mikael…” Blomkvist told them what he knew of what had happened. He spoke
in a dull monotone and sounded like the radio reporter when he described how he had found Svensson and Johansson.

“Jesus Christ,” Malm said again. “This is crazy.”

Eriksson was once more overwhelmed by emotion. She began weeping again and made no attempt to hide her tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I feel the same way,” said Malm.

Blomkvist wondered why he could not cry. He felt only a huge emptiness, almost as if he were anesthetized.

“What we know this morning doesn’t amount to very much,” Berger said. “We have to discuss two things: first, we’re three weeks from going to press with Dag’s material; should we still publish it? Can we publish it? That’s one thing. The other is a question that Mikael and I discussed on the way here.”

“We don’t know the motive for the murders,” Blomkvist said. “It could be something to do with Dag and Mia’s private life, or it could be a purely senseless act, but we can’t rule out that it may have had something to do with what they were working on.”

A long silence settled around the table.

At last Blomkvist cleared his throat. “As I said, we’re about to publish a story in which we name people who are extremely anxious not to be identified in this connection. Dag started with the confrontations several weeks ago. I’m thinking that if one of them—”

“Wait,” Eriksson said. “We’re exposing three policemen, at least one of whom works for Säpo and another on the vice squad. Then there are several lawyers, one prosecutor, one judge, and a couple of dirty-old-men journalists. Could one of them have killed two people to prevent the publication?”

“Well, I don’t know the answer to that,” Blomkvist said. “They all have a hell of a lot to lose, but they’re damn stupid if they thought they could quash a story like this by murdering a journalist. But we’re also exposing a number of pimps, and even if we use fictitious names it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who they are. Some of them already have records for violent crimes.”

“OK,” Malm said. “But you’re making the murders out to be executions. If I’m reading Svensson’s story correctly, we’re not talking about very bright people. Are they up to pulling off a double murder and getting away with it?”

“How bright do you have to be to fire two shots?” Eriksson said.

“We’re speculating here about something we know practically nothing
about,” Berger broke in. “But we do have to ask the question. If suppressing Dag’s articles—or Mia’s dissertation, for that matter—was the motive for the murders, then we have to beef up security here in the office.”

“And a third question,” Eriksson said. “Should we go to the police with the names? What did you tell the police last night, Mikael?”

“I told them what Dag was working on, but they didn’t ask for details and I didn’t give any names.”

“We probably should,” Berger said.

“It’s not quite that simple,” Blomkvist said. “We could give them a list of names, but what do we do if the police start asking questions about how we got hold of them? We can’t reveal any source who wants to remain anonymous. And that’s certainly true of several of the girls Mia talked to.”

“What a fucking mess,” Berger said. “We’re back to the original question—should we publish?”

Blomkvist held up his hand. “Wait. We could take a vote on this, but I happen to be the publisher who’s responsible, and for the first time I think I’ll make a decision all on my own. The answer is no. We can’t publish this material in the next issue. It’s unreasonable for us simply to go ahead according to plan.”

Silence descended over the table.

“I really want to publish, obviously, but we are going to have to rewrite quite a bit. It was Dag and Mia who had the documentation, and the story was based on the fact that Mia intended to file a police report against the people we were going to name. She had expert knowledge. Have we got any information on this?”

The front door slammed and Cortez stood in the doorway.

“Is it Dag and Mia?” he asked, out of breath.