The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (18 page)

“That sounds likely.”

“I agree. But does she also discover something else – something that gets her to take out her rage and despair specifically on her brother? And above all: Why doesn’t she talk to the police? She had everything to gain by telling them what happened. Yet she clams up throughout her questioning and during the trial.”

“Like Lisbeth.”

“A bit like Lisbeth, but different. Faria withdraws into her wordless grief. She refuses to take any notice of the world around her and answers her accusers with a stony silence.”

“I can see why Lisbeth doesn’t like people messing with that girl,” Blomkvist said.

“I agree, and that worries me.”

“Has Lisbeth had access to a computer at Flodberga?”

“No, absolutely not,” Giannini said. “They’re inflexible on that. No computers, no mobiles. All visitors are meticulously searched. Why do you ask?”

“I get the feeling that while she’s been in there Lisbeth has discovered something more about her childhood. She might have heard it from Holger.”

“You’ll have to ask him. Remind me, when are you seeing him?”

“At 9.00.”

“He’s been trying to get in touch with me.”

“So you said.”

“I tried to call him today. But there was something wrong with his telephones.”

“His telephones, plural?”

“I called both mobile and landline. Neither was working.”

“What time did you call?” Blomkvist said.

“At about 1.00.”

Blomkvist got to his feet and, with a distracted air, said:

“Will you pick up the tab, Annika? I think I need to go.”

He vanished down into Zinkensdamm Tunnelbana station.

Through what seemed like a gathering fog, Palmgren saw how the woman picked up his mobile and the documents about Salander from the bedside table and put them in her doctor’s bag. He could hear her rummaging around in his desk drawers. But he could not move.

He was falling through a black ocean and for a moment he thought he might be lucky enough to sink forever into oblivion. Instead he was shaken by a spasm of panic, as if the air around him had been poisoned. His body arched, he could not breathe. The ocean closed over him again. He drifted down towards the bottom and thought it was all over. Yet he became dimly aware of some presence. A man, somebody familiar, was pulling at his nightshirt and tearing the plasters off his back, and then Palmgren forgot everything else. He concentrated as hard as he could and fought desperately, the way a deep-sea diver does when trying to reach the surface before it is too late. Considering all the poison in his body and his enfeebled breathing, that was an amazing achievement.

He opened his eyes and managed five words, which should ideally have been six, but were the start of an important message.

“Talk to …”

“Who? Who?” the man shouted.

“To Hilda von …”

Blomkvist had come running up the stairs to find the front door wide open. As soon as he set foot in the apartment and was hit by the stifling, stale air, he knew that something was badly wrong. He ignored the litter of documents scattered on the hall floor and burst into the bedroom. Palmgren lay on his bed in a contorted position. His right hand was close to his throat and his fingers were cramped and splayed. His face was ashen, his mouth fixed in a gaping, desperate grimace. The old man looked as though he had died a terrible death and Blomkvist stood there for an instant, bewildered and in shock. Then there was something, he thought he could see a gleam deep in the eyes, which galvanized him into calling the emergency services. He shook Palmgren and inspected his chest and mouth. Clearly the old man was having trouble breathing, so he at once pinched his nostrils tight and breathed heavily and steadily into his airways. Palmgren’s lips were blue and cold, and for a long time Blomkvist thought he was doing no good. Even so he refused to give up. He would have kept going until the ambulance arrived if the old man had not suddenly given a start and waved one of his hands.

At first Blomkvist thought it was a spasm, an instinctive movement as life and strength returned, and he felt a glimmer of hope. Then he wondered, was the hand trying to tell him something? It was gesticulating towards Palmgren’s back and Blomkvist yanked off his nightshirt. He discovered two plasters, which he tore off without hesitating. What was written on them? What the hell did it say? He tried to focus.

ACTIVE SUBSTANCE: FENTANYL.

What was that? He looked at Palmgren and wondered for a moment where to begin? He took out his mobile and Googled:
FENTANYL
, it said,
IS A POWERFUL SYNTHETIC OPIOID ANALGESIC THAT IS SIMILAR TO MORPHINE BUT 50 TO 100 TIMES MORE POTENT … NORMAL SIDE-EFFECTS ARE RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION, CRAMP IN THE MUSCLES OF THE WINDPIPE … NALOXONE IS AN ANTIDOTE.

“Shit, shit!”

He rang emergency services again, gave his name and said he had called moments earlier. He almost shouted:

“You’ve got to bring naloxone, do you hear? He has to have naloxone injections. He’s in deep respiratory distress.”

He hung up and was about to go on with his artificial respiration when Palmgren tried to say something.

“Later,” Blomkvist hushed him. “Save your strength.”

Palmgren shook his head and gave a hoarse whisper. It was impossible to understand what he was saying. It was a low, almost soundless croaking, terrible to hear. Blomkvist bit his lip and was about to start breathing more air into the old man when he thought he could make out something he was saying, two words:

“Talk to …”

“Who? Who?” And then with his last reserves of strength Palmgren wheezed something which sounded like “Hilda from…”

“Hilda from what?”

“To Hilda von …”

It had to be something important, something crucial.

“Von
who
? Von Essen? Von Rosen?”

Palmgren gave him a desperate look. Then something happened to his eyes. The pupils widened. His jaw dropped open. He looked dramatically worse, and Blomkvist did everything in his power – artificial respiration, C.P.R., everything – and for a split second he thought it was working again. Palmgren raised his hand. There was something majestic about the movement, the crooked fingers clenched, a knotted fist held up as if in defiance a few centimetres above the bed. Then the hand fell back against the blanket. Palmgren’s eyelids opened wide. His body convulsed, and then it was all over.

Blomkvist could tell, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he did not let up. He pressed down harder on Palmgren’s chest and steadily blew air into his windpipe. He gently slapped his cheeks and yelled at him to live and breathe. Eventually he had to accept that it was to no avail. There was no pulse, no breathing, nothing. He banged his fist on the bedside table so hard that the pillbox fell off and pills rolled all over the floor. He looked out towards Liljeholmen. It was 8.43 p.m. Outside in the square a couple of teenage girls were laughing. There was a faint smell of cooking in the air.

Blomkvist closed the old man’s eyes, smoothed the covers and looked at his face. There was nothing positive you could say about any one of his features. They were crooked and twisted and withered. Yet there was a profound dignity there, that’s how it seemed to him. It was as if the world had all of a sudden become a little poorer. Blomkvist felt his throat catch, and he thought about Salander and how Palmgren had gone all the way to visit her. He thought of everything and nothing.

And then the ambulance crew arrived, two men in their thirties. Blomkvist gave as factual an account of events as he could. He told them about the Fentanyl. He said that Palmgren had probably had an overdose, that there could be suspicious circumstances and that the police should be called. He was met by a resigned indifference which made him want to scream. But he kept his mouth shut and only nodded stiffly when the men laid a sheet over Palmgren and left the body lying on the bed, to wait for a doctor to come and issue a death certificate. Blomkvist stayed in the apartment. He picked the pills up off the floor and opened the windows and the balcony door, and sat down in the black armchair next to the bed and tried to think clearly. There was far too much buzzing around in his head. Then he remembered the documents which had been scattered in a mess on the hall floor when he rushed into the apartment.

He went to pick them up and read them while standing by the front door. At first he did not understand the context, but he did spot one name which he latched on to immediately. Peter Teleborian. Teleborian was the psychiatrist who had fabricated the report on Salander after she threw a firebomb at her father when she was twelve years old. It was he who had claimed to want to treat and cure Salander, to restore her to a normal life, but who had in fact systematically tormented her day in and day out, strapping her to her bed and subjecting her to extreme psychological torment. Why on earth were there papers about that man lying in Holger Palmgren’s hall?

A quick look through the documents was enough to tell Blomkvist that there was nothing new there. They looked like photocopies of the same grimly dry case notes which later led to Teleborian being found guilty of gross dereliction of duty and stripped of his right to practise medicine. But it was also clear that the pages of the documents, which were not numbered, were not in a complete sequence. Some pages ended in the middle of a sentence and others began in a different context. Were the missing papers in the apartment? Had they been taken away?

Blomkvist considered searching through the drawers and cupboards. He decided not to interfere in the police investigation which would no doubt ensue, and instead he called Chief Inspector Jan Bublanski to tell him what had happened. Then he rang the maximum security unit at Flodberga Prison. A man answered, identifying himself as Fred. He spoke in an arrogant drawl and Blomkvist almost lost his temper, especially as he looked over at the bed and saw the contours of Palmgren’s body beneath the white sheet. But he mustered all his authority and explained that there had been a death in Salander’s family, and at last he was allowed to talk to her.

It was a conversation he could have done without.

Salander hung up and was escorted by two guards down the long corridor back to her cell. She did not pick up the deep hostility in the face of the guard, Fred Strömmer. She did not take in anything going on around her, and her face betrayed nothing of her emotions. She ignored the question “Has somebody died?” She didn’t even look up. She just walked and heard her own footsteps and her breathing and nothing else, and she had no idea why the guards followed her into her cell. Except that they wanted to mess with her. Since Benito had been floored they took every opportunity to poison her life. Now it seemed they wanted to search her cell again, not because they thought they would find anything, but because it was an excellent excuse to turn the place upside down and throw her mattress onto the floor. Perhaps they were hoping for an outburst from her, so that they could have a proper fight. They almost succeeded. But Salander gritted her teeth and did not even look up at them as they left.

Afterwards she picked up the mattress, sat on the corner of the bed and focused on what Blomkvist had said. She thought about the morphine plasters he had ripped off Palmgren’s back, and the papers that had been lying about on the hall floor. And the words “Hilda von …” She concentrated especially hard on them, but it didn’t make sense. She stood up and banged her fist on the desk, then kicked the clothes cupboard and the washbasin.

For one dizzying second she looked as if she could kill. But then she pulled herself together and tried to focus on one thing at a time. First you find out the truth. Then you take revenge.

Chief Inspector Jan Bublanski had a tendency to deliver lengthy philosophical discourses, but just now he said nothing.

It was 3.20 p.m. and his team had been working hard all day long. It was stuffy and hot in the meeting room on the fifth floor of police headquarters on Bergsgatan.

Given his age, Bublanski was afraid of many things. But perhaps he feared the absence of doubt most of all. He was a man of faith who was uncomfortable in the face of convictions too strongly held or over-simplified explanations. He was forever producing counter-arguments and contrary hypotheses. Nothing was so certain that it could not be challenged one more time. While this behaviour slowed him down, it also prevented him from making too many mistakes. His goal right now was to persuade his colleagues to come to their senses. He did not know where to begin.

In many ways, Bublanski was a lucky man. He had a new woman in his life, Professor Farah Sharif, who – so he said – was more beautiful and intelligent than he deserved. The couple had just moved into a three-room apartment near Nytorget and they had acquired a Labrador. They often ate out and went regularly to art exhibitions. But the world had gone mad, in his opinion. Lies and stupidity were more widespread than ever before. Demagogues and psychopaths dominated the political scene, and prejudice and intolerance were poisoning everything, sometimes even penetrating the discussions within his own, otherwise sensible team.

Sonja Modig, his closest colleague, was rumoured to be in love and radiated sunshine. But that simply annoyed Jerker Holmberg and Curt Svensson, who were constantly interrupting her and arguing with her. When Amanda Flod, the youngest member of the group, sided with Modig – and generally she had clever ideas to contribute – the situation was only exacerbated. Maybe Svensson and Holmberg felt that their positions as senior figures were under threat. Bublanski tried to give them an encouraging smile.

“Basically …” Holmberg began.

“Basically is a good start,” Bublanski said.

“Basically, I can’t see why anyone would go to that much trouble to kill a ninety-year-old man,” Holmberg said.

“An eighty-nine-year-old man,” Bublanski corrected him.

“Right. An eighty-nine-year-old man who hardly leaves his apartment and who seems to have been at death’s door anyway.”

“Yet that’s what it looks like, doesn’t it? Sonja, can you please sum up what we have so far?”