The Girl Who Played with Fire (9 page)

Salander shook her head.

Constable Ferguson could not, it seemed, think of any other questions to ask, and he closed his notebook.

“Thank you, Ms. Salander. I’ll have to write up a report on the death.”

“Did she
die?”

“Mrs. Forbes? No, she’s in hospital in St. George’s. Apparently she has you and your friend to thank for the fact that she’s alive. But her husband is dead. His body was found in a parking lot at the airport two hours ago.”

Six hundred yards further south.

“He was pretty badly knocked about,” Ferguson said.

“How unfortunate,” Salander said without any great sign of shock.

When McBain and Constable Ferguson had gone, Ella came and sat at Salander’s table. She set down two shot glasses of rum. Salander gave her a quizzical look.

“After a night like that you need something to rebuild your strength. I’m buying. I’m buying the whole breakfast.”

The two women looked at each other. Then they clinked glasses and said, “Cheers.”

For a long time to come, Matilda would be the object of scientific studies and discussions at meteorological institutes in the Caribbean and across the United States. Tornadoes of Matilda’s scale were almost unknown in the region. Gradually the experts agreed that a particularly rare constellation of weather fronts had combined to create a “pseudo-tornado”—something that was not actually a tornado but looked like one.

Salander did not care about the theoretical discussion. She knew what she had seen, and she decided to try to avoid getting in the way of any of Matilda’s siblings in the future.

Many people on the island had been injured during the night. Only one person died.

No-one would ever know what had induced Richard Forbes to go out in the midst of a full-fledged hurricane, save possibly that sheer ignorance which seemed common to American tourists. Geraldine Forbes was not able to offer any explanation. She had suffered a severe concussion and had only incoherent memories of the events of that night.

On the other hand, she was inconsolable to have been left a widow.

An equation commonly contains one or more so-called unknowns, often represented by
x, y, z
, etc. Values given to the unknowns which yield equality between both sides of the equation are said to satisfy the equation and constitute a solution.

Example: 3
x
+ 4 =
6x −
2
(x =
2)

Salander landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport at noon. In addition to the flying time, she had spent nine hours at Grantley Adams Airport on Barbados. British Airways had refused to let the aircraft take off until a passenger who looked vaguely Arabic had been taken away for questioning and a possible terrorist threat had been snuffed out. By the time she landed at Gatwick in London, she had missed her connecting flight to Sweden and had had to wait overnight before she could be rebooked.

Salander felt like a bag of bananas that had been left too long in the sun. All she had with her was a carry-on bag containing her PowerBook,
Dimensions
, and a change of clothes. She passed unchecked through the green gate at Customs. When she got outside to the airport shuttle buses she was welcomed home by a blast of freezing sleet.

She hesitated. All her life she had had to choose the cheapest option, and she was not yet used to the idea that she had more than three billion kronor, which she had stolen by means of an Internet coup combined with good old-fashioned fraud. After a few moments of getting cold and wet, she said to hell with the rule book and waved for a taxi. She gave the driver her address on Lundagatan and fell asleep in the backseat.

It was not until the taxi drew up on Lundagatan and the driver shook her awake that she realized she had given him her old address. She told him she had changed her mind and asked him to continue on to Götgatsbacken. She gave him a big tip in dollars and swore as she stepped into a puddle in the gutter. She was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a thin cloth jacket. She wore sandals and short cotton socks. She walked gingerly over to the 7-Eleven, where she bought some shampoo, toothpaste, soap, kefir,
milk, cheese, eggs, bread, frozen cinnamon rolls, coffee, Lipton’s tea bags, a jar of pickles, apples, a large package of Billy’s Pan Pizza, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. She paid with a Visa card.

When she came back out on the street she hesitated about which way to go. She could walk up Svartensgatan or down Hökens Gata towards Slussen. The drawback with Hökens Gata was that then she would have to walk right past the door of the
Millennium
offices, running the risk of bumping into Blomkvist. In the end she decided not to go out of her way to avoid him. She walked towards Slussen, although it was a bit longer that way, and turned off to the right by way of Hökens Gata up to Mosebacke Torg. She cut across the square past the statue of the Sisters in front of Södra Theatre and took the steps up the hill to Fiskargatan. She stopped and looked up at the apartment building pensively. It did not really feel like “home.”

She looked around. It was an out-of-the-way spot in the middle of Södermalm Island. There was no through traffic, which was fine with her. It was easy to observe who was moving about the area. It was apparently popular with walkers in the summertime, but in the winter the only ones there were those who had business in the neighbourhood. There was hardly a soul to be seen now—certainly not anyone she recognized, or who might reasonably be expected to recognize her. Salander set down her shopping bag in the slush to dig out her keys. She took the elevator to the top floor and unlocked the door with the nameplate
V. KULLA
.

One of the first things Salander had done after she came into a very large sum of money and thereby became financially independent for the rest of her life (or for as long as three billion kronor could be expected to last) was to look around for an apartment. The property market had been a new experience for her. She had never before invested money in anything more substantial than occasional useful items which she could either pay for with cash or buy on a reasonable payment plan. The biggest outlays had previously been various computers and her lightweight Kawasaki motorcycle. She had bought the bike for 7,000 kronor—a real bargain. She had spent about as much on spare parts and devoted several months to taking the motorcycle apart and overhauling it. She had wanted a car, but she had been wary of buying one, since she did not know how she would have fit it into her budget.

Buying an apartment, she realized, was a deal of a different order. She
had started by reading the classified ads in the online edition of
Dagens Nyheter
, which was a science all to itself, she discovered:

She had telephoned some of the numbers haphazardly, but she had no idea what questions to ask. Soon she felt so idiotic that she stopped even trying. Instead she went out on the first Sunday in January and visited two apartment open houses. One was on Vindragarvägen way out on Reimersholme, and the other on Heleneborgsgatan near Hornstull. The apartment on Reimers was a bright four-room place in a tower block with a view of Långholmen and Essingen. There she could be content. The apartment on Heleneborgsgatan was a dump with a view of the building next door.

The problem was that she could not decide which part of town she wanted to live in, how her apartment should look, or what sort of questions she should be asking of her new home. She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square feet on Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted possession of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.

The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable facade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.

The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.

She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbours higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have to have a balcony.

What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She had liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was a third point on her list of requirements.

For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was a 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.

Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.

Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:

“Well, young lady, do your parents know that you’re thinking of moving away from home?”

Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.

“I want an apartment,” she said.

He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.

“I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?”

“I think I’d like an apartment in Söder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle.”

The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.

“A motorcycle?” the thin-haired man said.

Salander nodded.

“May I know … uh, your name?”

Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim Persson.

“The thing is, it’s rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in Stockholm …”

Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer; the information that it cost money was irrelevant.

“What line of work are you in?”

Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.

“I’m not working at anything at the moment,” she said.

“Well then … I presume you’re still at school.”

“No, I’m not at school.”

Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander’s shoulders, escorting her towards the door.

“Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we’d be happy to welcome you back in a few years’ time, but you’d have to bring along a little more money than what’s in your piggy bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won’t really cover this.” He pinched her good-naturedly on the cheek. “So drop in again, and we’ll see about finding you a little pad.”

Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted up her PowerBook.

It took her ten minutes to hack into Nobel Estates’ internal computer network using the passwords she happened to notice the woman behind the counter type in before she started uploading photographs. It took three minutes to find out that the computer the woman was working on was in fact also the company’s Net server—
how dim can you get?
—and another three minutes to gain access to all fourteen computers on the network. After about two hours she had gone through Persson’s records and discovered that there were some 750,000 kronor in under-the-table income that he had not reported to the tax authorities over the past two years.

She downloaded all the necessary files and emailed them to the tax authorities from an anonymous email account on a server in the USA. Then she put Master Persson out of her mind.

She spent the rest of the day going through Nobel Estates’ listed properties. The most expensive one was a small palace outside Mariefred, where she had no desire to live. Out of sheer perversity she chose the next most expensive, a huge apartment just off Mosebacke Torg.

She scrutinized the photographs and floor plan, and in the end decided that it more than fulfilled her requirements. It had previously been owned by a director of the Asea Brown Boveri power company, who slipped into obscurity after he got himself a much-discussed and much-criticized golden parachute of several billion kronor.