Millennium 03 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Page 47

  “And who the hell are you?”

  Linder relaxed and leaned against the door jamb. “Greger Beckman, I presume. Hello. I’m Susanne Linder.”

  “I see. Are you going to hit me over the head or would you like a glass of juice?”

  “Yes, please,” Linder said, putting down her baton. “Juice, that is.”

  Beckman reached for a glass from the draining board and poured some for her.

  “I work for Milton Security,” Linder said. “I think it’s probably best if your wife explains what I’m doing here.”

  Beckman stood up. “Has something happened to Erika?”

  “Your wife is fine. But there’s been some trouble. We tried to get hold of you in Paris.”

  “Paris? Why Paris? I’ve been in Helsinki, for God’s sake.”

  “Alright. I’m sorry, but your wife thought you were in Paris.”

  “That’s next month,” said Beckman on his way out of the door.

  “The bedroom is locked. You need a code to open the door,” Linder said.

  “I beg your pardon … what code?”

  She told him the three numbers he had to punch in to open the bedroom door. He ran up the stairs.

  At 10.00 on Sunday morning Jonasson came into Salander’s room.

  “Hello, Lisbeth.”

  “Hello.”

  “Just thought I’d warn you: the police are coming at lunchtime.”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t seem worried.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I have a present for you.”

  “A present? What for?”

  “You’ve been one of my most interesting patients in a long time.”

  “You don’t say,” Salander said sceptically.

  “I heard that you’re fascinated by D.N.A. and genetics.”

  “Who’s been gossiping? That psychologist lady, I bet.”

  Jonasson nodded. “If you get bored in prison … this is the latest thing on D.N.A. research.”

  He handed her a brick of a book entitled Spirals – Mysteries of DNA, by Professor Yoshito Takamura of Tokyo University. Salander opened it and studied the table of contents.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  “Someday I’d be interested to hear how it is that you can read academic texts that even I can’t understand.”

  As soon as Jonasson had left the room, she took out her Palm. Last chance. From S.M.P.’s personnel department Salander had learned that Fredriksson had worked at the paper for six years. During that time he had been off sick for two extended periods: two months in 2003 and three months in 2004. From the personnel files she concluded that the reason in both instances was burnout. Berger’s predecessor Morander had on one occasion questioned whether Fredriksson should indeed stay on as assistant editor.

  Yak, yak, yak. Nothing concrete to go on.

  At 11.45 Plague pinged her.

  Salander logged off from I.C.Q. She glanced at the clock and realized that it would soon be lunchtime. She rapidly composed a message that she addressed to the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]:

  Mikael. Important. Call Berger right away and tell her Fredriksson is Poison Pen.

  The instant she sent the message she heard movement in the corridor. She polished the screen of her Palm Tungsten T3 and then switched it off and placed it in the recess behind the bedside table.

  “Hello, Lisbeth.” It was Giannini in the doorway.

  “Hello.”

  “The police are coming for you in a while. I’ve brought you some clothes. I hope they’re the right size.”

  Salander looked distrustfully at the selection of neat, dark-coloured linen trousers and pastel-coloured blouses.

  Two uniformed Göteborg policewomen came to get her. Giannini was to go with them to the prison.

  As they walked from her room down the corridor, Salander noticed that several of the staff were watching her with curiosity. She gave them a friendly nod, and some of them waved back. As if by chance, Jonasson was standing by the reception desk. They looked at each other and nodded. Even before they had turned the corner Salander noticed that he was heading for her room.

  During the entire procedure of transporting her to the prison, Salander did not say a word to the police.

  Blomkvist had closed his iBook at 7.00 on Sunday morning. He sat for a moment at Salander’s desk listless, staring into space.

  Then he went to her bedroom and looked at her gigantic, king-size bed. After a while he went back to her office and flipped open his mobile to call Figuerola.

  “Hi. It’s Mikael.”

  “Hello there. Are you already up?”

  “I’ve just finished working and I’m on my way to bed. I just wanted to call and say hello.”

  “Men who just want to call and say hello generally have ulterior motives.”

  He laughed.

  “Blomkvist … you could come here and sleep if you like.”

  “I’d be wretched company.”

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  He took a taxi to Pontonjärgatan.

  Berger spent Sunday in bed with her husband. They lay there talking and dozing. In the afternoon they got dressed and went for a walk down to the steamship dock.

  “S.M.P. was a mistake,” Berger said when they got home.

  “Don’t say that. Right now it’s tough, but you knew it would be. Things will calm down after you’ve been there a while.”

  “It’s not the job. I can handle that. It’s the atmosphere.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t like it there, but on the other hand I can’t walk out after a few weeks.”

  She sat at the kitchen table and stared morosely into space. Beckman had never seen his wife so stymied.

  Inspector Faste met Salander for the first time at 11.30 on Sunday morning when a woman police officer brought her into Erlander’s office at Göteborg police headquarters.

  “You were difficult enough to catch,” Faste said.

  Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.

  “Inspector Gunilla Wäring will accompany you to Stockholm,” Erlander said.

  “Alright,” Faste said. “Then we’ll leave at once. There are quite a few people who want to have a serious talk with you, Salander.”

  Erlander said goodbye to her. She ignored him.

  They had decided for simplicity’s sake to do the prisoner transfer to Stockholm by car. Wäring drove. At the start of the journey Hans Faste sat in the front passenger seat with his head turned towards the back as he tried to have some exchange with Salander. By the time they reached Alingsås his neck was aching and he gave up.

  Salander looked at the countryside. In her mind Faste did not exist.

  Teleborian was right. She’s fucking retarded, Faste thought. We’ll see about changing that attitude when we get to Stockholm.

  Every so often he glanced at Salander and tried to form an opinion of the woman he had been desperate to track down for such a long time. Even he had some doubts when he saw the skinny girl. He wondered how much she could weigh. He reminded himself that she was a lesbian and consequently not a real woman.

  But it was possible that the bit about Satanism was an exaggeration. She did not look the type.

  The irony was that he would have preferred to arrest her for the three murders that she was originally suspected of, but reality had caught up with his investigation. Even a skinny girl can handle a weapon. Instead she had been taken in for assaulting the top leadership of Svavelsjö M.C., and she was guilty of that crime, no question. There was forensic evidence related to the incident which she no doubt intended to refute.

  Figuerola woke Blomkvist at 1.00 in the afternoon. She had been sitting on her balcony and had finished reading her book about the idea of God in antiquity, listening all the while to Blomkvist’s snores from the bedroom. It had been peaceful. When she went
in to look at him it came to her, acutely, that she was more attracted to him than she had been to any other man in years.

  It was a pleasant yet unsettling feeling. There he was, but he was not a stable element in her life.

  They went down to Norr Mälarstrand for a coffee. Then she took him home and to bed for the rest of the afternoon. He left her at 7.00. She felt a vague sense of loss a moment after he kissed her cheek and was gone.

  At 8.00 on Sunday evening Linder knocked on Berger’s door. She would not be sleeping there now that Beckman was home, and this visit was not connected with her job. But during the time she had spent at Berger’s house they had both grown to enjoy the long conversations they had in the kitchen. She had discovered a great liking for Berger. She recognized in her a desperate woman who succeeded in concealing her true nature. She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.

  Linder suspected that her anxiety was due not solely to Poison Pen. But Berger’s life and problems were none of her business. It was a friendly visit. She had come out here just to see Berger and to be sure that everything was alright. The couple were in the kitchen in a solemn mood. It seemed as though they had spent their Sunday working their way through one or two serious issues.

  Beckman put on some coffee. Linder had been there only a few minutes when Berger’s mobile rang.

  Berger had answered every call that day with a feeling of impending doom.

  “Berger,” she said.

  “Hello, Ricky.”

  Blomkvist. Shit. I haven’t told him the Borgsjö file has disappeared.

  “Hi, Micke.”

  “Salander was moved to the prison in Göteborg this evening, to wait for transport to Stockholm tomorrow.”

  “O.K.”

  “She sent you a … well, a message.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s pretty cryptic.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She says: ‘Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.’”

  Erika sat for ten seconds in silence while thoughts rushed through her head. Impossible. Peter isn’t like that. Salander has to be wrong.

  “Was that all?”

  “That’s the whole message. Do you know what it’s about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ricky … what are you and that girl up to? She rang you to tip me off about Teleborian and—”

  “Thanks, Micke. We’ll talk later.”

  She turned off her mobile and looked at Linder with an expression of absolute astonishment.

  “Tell me,” Linder said.

  Linder was in two minds. Berger had been told that her assistant editor was the one sending the vicious emails. She talked non-stop. Then Linder had asked her how she knew Fredriksson was her stalker. Then Berger was silent. Linder noticed her eyes and saw that something had changed in her attitude. She was all of a sudden totally confused.

  “I can’t tell you …”

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me?”

  “Susanne, I just know that Fredriksson is responsible. But I can’t tell you how I got that information. What can I do?”

  “If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me.”

  “I … I can’t. You don’t understand.”

  Berger got up and stood at the kitchen window with her back to Linder. Finally she turned.

  “I’m going to his house.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’re not going anywhere, least of all to the home of somebody who obviously hates you.”

  Berger looked torn.

  “Sit down. Tell me what happened. It was Blomkvist calling you, right?”

  Berger nodded.

  “I … today I asked a hacker to go through the home computers of the staff.”

  “Aha. So you’ve probably by extension committed a serious computer crime. And you don’t want to tell me who your hacker is?”

  “I promised I would never tell anyone … Other people are involved. Something that Mikael is working on.”

  “Does Blomkvist know about the emails and the break-in here?”

  “No, he was just passing on a message.”

  Linder cocked her head to one side, and all of a sudden a chain of associations formed in her mind.

  Erika Berger. Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium. Rogue policemen who broke in and bugged Blomkvist’s apartment. Linder watching the watchers. Blomkvist working like a madman on a story about Lisbeth Salander.

  The fact that Salander was a wizard at computers was widely known at Milton Security. No-one knew how she had come by her skills, and Linder had never heard any rumours that Salander might be a hacker. But Armansky had once said something about Salander delivering quite incredible reports when she was doing personal investigations. A hacker …

  But Salander is under guard on a ward in Göteborg.

  It was absurd.

  “Is it Salander we’re talking about?” Linder said.

  Berger looked as though she had touched a live wire.

  “I can’t discuss where the information came from. Not one word.”

  Linder laughed aloud.

  It was Salander. Berger’s confirmation of it could not have been clearer. She was completely off balance.

  Yet it’s impossible.

  Under guard as she was, Salander had nevertheless taken on the job of finding out who Poison Pen was. Sheer madness.

  Linder thought hard.

  She could not understand the whole Salander story. She had met her maybe five times during the years she had worked at Milton Security and had never had so much as a single conversation with her. She regarded Salander as a sullen and asocial individual with a skin like a rhino. She had heard that Armansky himself had taken Salander on and since she respected Armansky she assumed that he had good reason for his endless patience towards the sullen girl.

  Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.

  Could she be right? What was the proof?

  Linder then spent a long time questioning Erika on everything she knew about Fredriksson, what his role was at S.M.P., and how their relationship had been. The answers did not help her at all.

  Berger had displayed a frustrating indecision. She had wavered between a determination to drive out to Fredriksson’s place and confront him, and an unwillingness to believe that it could really be true. Finally Linder convinced her that she could not storm into Fredriksson’s apartment and launch into an accusation – if he was innocent, she would make an utter fool of herself.

  So Linder had promised to look into the matter. It was a promise she regretted as soon as she made it, because she did not have the faintest idea how she was going to proceed.

  She parked her Fiat Strada as close to Fredriksson’s apartment building in Fisksätra as she could. She locked the car and looked about her. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she supposed she would have to knock on his door and somehow get him to answer a number of questions. She was acutely aware that this was a job that lay well outside her remit at Milton, and she knew Armansky would be furious if he found out what she was doing.

  It was not a good plan, and in any case it fell apart before she had managed to put it into practice. She had reached the courtyard and was approaching Fredriksson’s apartment when the door opened. Linder recognized him at once from the photograph in his personnel file which she had studied on Berger’s computer. She kept walking and they passed each other. He disappeared in the direction of the garage. It was just before 11.00 and Fredriksson was on his way somewhere. Linder turned and ran back to her car.

  Blomkvist sat for a long time looking at his mobile after Berger hung up. He wondered what was going on. In frustration he looked at Salander’s computer. By now she had been moved to the prison in Göteborg, and he had no chance of asking her anything.

  He opened his Ericsson T10 and called Idris Ghidi in Angered.

  “Hello. Mikael Blomkvist.”

  “Hello,” Ghidi said.

  “Just to tell you that yo
u can stop that job you were doing for me.”

  Ghidi had already worked out that Blomkvist would call since Salander had been taken from the hospital.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “You can keep the mobile as we agreed. I’ll send you the final payment this week.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m the one who should thank you for your help.”

  Blomkvist opened his iBook. The events of the past twenty-four hours meant that a significant part of the manuscript had to be revised and that in all probability a whole new section would have to be added.

  He sighed and got to work.

  At 11.15 Fredriksson parked three streets away from Berger’s house. Linder had already guessed where he was going and had stopped trying to keep him in sight. She drove past his car fully two minutes after he parked. The car was empty. She went on a short distance past Berger’s house and stopped well out of sight. Her palms were sweating.

  She opened her tin of Catch Dry snuff and tucked a teenage-sized portion inside her upper lip.

  Then she opened her car door and looked around. As soon as she could tell that Fredriksson was on his way to Saltsjöbaden, she knew that Salander’s information must be correct. And obviously he had not come all this way for fun. Trouble was brewing. Which was fine by her, so long as she could catch him red-handed.

  She took her telescopic baton from the side pocket of her car door and weighed it in her hand for a moment. She pressed the lock in the handle and out shot a heavy, spring-loaded steel cable. She clenched her teeth.

  That was why she had left the Södermalm force.

  She had had one mad outbreak of rage when for the third time in as many days the squad car had driven to an address in Hägersten after the same woman had called the police and screamed for help because her husband had abused her. And just as on the first two occasions, the situation had resolved itself before they arrived.

  They had detained the husband on the staircase while the woman was questioned. No, she did not want to file a police report. No, it was all a mistake. No, he was fine … it was actually all her fault. She had provoked him…

  And the whole time the bastard had stood there grinning, looking Linder straight in the eye.

  She could not explain why she did it. But suddenly something had snapped in her, and she took out her baton and slammed it across his face. The first blow had lacked power. She had only given him a fat lip and forced him on to his knees. In the next ten seconds – until her colleagues grabbed her and half dragged, half carried her out of the halfway – she had let the blows rain down on his back, kidneys, hips and shoulders.