The Girl in the Spider's Web Page 15

  Zetterlund, who had turned forty-one two days earlier and was still suffering some of the after-effects of his birthday party, had never been close to taking charge of an investigation of this importance. The reason he had now been detailed to do it, if only for a matter of hours, was that there had not been very many competent people on duty during the night and his superior had chosen not to wake the National Murder Squad or any of the more experienced investigators in the Stockholm police.

  Accordingly Zetterlund found himself in the midst of this confusion, feeling less and less sure of himself, and was soon shouting out his orders. In the first place he was trying to set in motion an effective door-to-door enquiry. He wanted quickly to gather as much testimony as possible, even if he was not expecting to get very much out of it. It was night-time and dark and there was a storm blowing. The people living nearby had presumably not seen anything at all. But you never knew.

  So he had himself questioned Blomkvist, though God only knows what he was doing there. The presence of one of Sweden’s best-known journalists did not make matters any easier and for a while Zetterlund imagined that Blomkvist was examining him critically with a view to writing a tell-all. Probably that was just his insecurity. Blomkvist himself was shaken and throughout the interview he was unfailingly polite and keen to help. But he was not able to provide much in the way of information. It had all happened so quickly and that in itself was significant, the journalist told him.

  There had been something brutal and efficient about the way in which the suspect moved, and Blomkvist said it would not be too far-fetched to speculate that the man either was or had been a soldier, possibly even special forces. His way of spinning around to aim and fire his weapon had seemed practised. He had a lamp strapped to his tight-fitting black cap, but Blomkvist had not been able to make out any of his features.

  He had been too far away, he said, and had thrown himself to the ground the instant the figure had turned around. He should thank his lucky stars that he was still alive. He could only describe the body and the clothes, and that he did very well. According to the journalist, the man did not seem all that young, he could have been over forty. He was fit and taller than average, over six feet tall, powerfully built with a slim waist and broad shoulders, wearing boots and black, military-style clothes. He was carrying a backpack and looked to have a knife strapped to his right leg.

  Blomkvist thought that the man had vanished down along the water’s edge, past the neighbouring houses, and that also matched Blom and Flinck’s account. The policemen had admittedly not seen the man at all. But they had heard his footsteps and set off in vain pursuit, or so they claimed. Zetterlund had his doubts about that.

  Blom and Flinck had chickened out, he presumed, and had stood there in the darkness, fearful and doing nothing. In any event, that was the moment when the big mistake was made. Instead of identifying escape routes from the area and trying to cordon them off, nothing much seems to have happened. At that point Flinck and Blom were not yet aware that someone had been killed and as soon as they knew, they had had their hands full coping with a barefoot boy running hysterically out of the house. Certainly it could not have been easy to keep a cool head. Yet they had lost precious time and, though Blomkvist exercised restraint when describing the events, it was plain to see that even he was critical. He had twice asked the policemen if they had sounded the alarm and got a nod for an answer.

  Later on, when Blomkvist overheard a conversation between Flinck and the operations centre, he realized that the nod was most likely a no, or at best some sort of bewildered failure to grasp the enormity of what had happened. It had taken a long time for the alarm to be raised and even then things had not proceeded as they should have, probably because Flinck’s account of the situation had not been clear.

  The paralysis had spread to other levels. Zetterlund was infinitely glad he could not be blamed for that—at that point he had not yet become involved in the investigation. On the other hand he was here, and he should at least avoid making a mess of things. His personal record had not been so impressive recently and this was an opportunity to put his best foot forward.

  He was at the door to the living room and had just finished a call to Milton Security about the character who had been seen on camera earlier that night. He did not at all fit the description Mikael Blomkvist had given of the presumed murderer. He looked like a skinny old junkie, albeit one who must have possessed a high level of technical skill. Milton Security believed that the man had hacked the alarm system and put all the cameras and sensors out of action.

  That did not exactly make matters any easier. It was not only the professional planning. It was the idea of committing a murder in spite of police protection and a sophisticated alarm system. How arrogant is that? Zetterlund had been about to go down to the forensic team on the ground floor, but he stayed upstairs, deeply troubled, staring into space until his gaze fastened on Balder’s son. He was their key witness but incapable of speech, nor did he understand a word they said. In other words pretty much what one might expect in this shambles.

  The boy was holding a small, single piece of an extremely complex puzzle. Zetterlund started towards the curved staircase leading to the ground floor—then he stopped dead. He thought back to his initial impression of the child. When he arrived on the scene, not knowing very much about what had happened, the boy had seemed the same as any other child. Zetterlund would have described him as an unusually pretty but normal-looking boy with curly hair and a shocked look in his eyes. Only later did he learn that the boy was autistic and severely handicapped. That, he thought, meant that the murderer either knew him from before or else was aware of his condition. Otherwise he would hardly have let him live and risk being identified in a witness parade, would he? Although Zetterlund did not give himself time to think this through in full, the hunch excited him and he took a few hurried paces towards the boy.

  “We must question him at once,” he said, in a voice that came out louder and more urgent than he had intended.

  “For heaven’s sake, take it easy with him,” Blomkvist said.

  “Don’t you interfere,” Zetterlund snapped. “He may have known the killer. We have to get out some pictures and show them to him. Somehow we must…”

  The boy interrupted him by slamming the puzzle with his hand in a sudden sweeping movement. Zetterlund muttered an apology and went downstairs to join his forensic team.

  —

  Blomkvist remained there, looking at the boy. It felt as if something else was about to happen with him, perhaps a new outburst, and the last thing he wanted was for the child to hurt himself again. The boy stiffened and began to make furiously rapid circular movements over the rug with his right hand.

  Then he stopped and looked up pleadingly. Though Blomkvist asked himself what that might mean, he dropped the thought when the policeman whose name he now knew to be Blom sat down with the boy and tried to get him to do the puzzle again. Blomkvist went into the kitchen to get some peace and quiet. He was exhausted and wanted to go home. But apparently he first had to look at some pictures from a surveillance camera. He had no idea when that was going to happen. It was all taking a long time and seemed disorganized and Blomkvist was longing for his bed.

  He had spoken to Berger twice by then and told her what had happened. They agreed that Blomkvist should write a longer piece about the murder for the next issue. Not just because the crime itself was obviously major and Professor Balder’s life was worth describing, but Blomkvist had a personal connection to the story and that would raise its quality and give him an advantage over the competition. The dramatic telephone call alone, in the middle of the night, which had gotten him here in the first place, would give his article an edge.

  The Serner situation and the crisis at the magazine were implicit in their conversation. Berger had already planned for their temp Andrei Zander to do the preliminary research while Blomkvist got some sleep. She had said rather firmly—like someon
e halfway between a loving mother and an authoritative editor-in-chief—that she refused to have her star reporter dead from exhaustion before the work had even begun.

  Blomkvist accepted without protest. Zander was ambitious and pleasant and it would be nice to wake up and find all the spadework done, ideally also with lists of people close to Balder whom he should be interviewing. For a little while Blomkvist welcomed the distraction of reflecting on Zander’s persistent problems with women, which had been confided to him during evening sessions at the Kvarnen beer hall. Zander was young, intelligent, and handsome. He ought to be a catch. But because there was something soft and needy in his character, he was time and again being dropped, and that was painful for him. Zander was an incorrigible romantic, forever dreaming about love with a capital L and the big scoop.

  Blomkvist sat down at Balder’s kitchen table and looked out at the darkness. In front of him, next to a matchbox, a copy of New Scientist, and a pad of paper with some incomprehensible equations on it, lay a beautiful but slightly ominous drawing of a street crossing. A man with watery, squinting eyes and thin lips was standing next to a traffic light. He was caught in a fleeting moment and yet you could see every wrinkle in his face and the folds in his quilted jacket and trousers. He did not look pleasant. He had a heart-shaped mole on his chin.

  But the striking thing about the drawing was the traffic light. It shone with an eloquent, troubling glow, and was skilfully executed according to some sort of mathematical technique. You could almost see the underlying geometrical lines. Balder must have enjoyed doing drawings on the side. Blomkvist wondered, though, about the unconventional choice of subject. On the other hand, why would a person like Balder draw sunsets and ships? A traffic light was probably just as interesting to him as anything else. Blomkvist was intrigued by the fact that the drawing looked like a snapshot. Even if Balder had sat and studied the traffic light, he could hardly have asked the man to cross the street over and over again. Maybe he was imagined, or Balder had a photographic memory, just like…Blomkvist grew thoughtful. He picked up his mobile and for the third time called Berger.

  “Are you on your way home?” she asked.

  “Not yet, unfortunately. There are couple of things I still need to look at. But I’d like you to do me a favour.”

  “What else am I here for?”

  “Could you go to my computer and log in. You know my password, don’t you?”

  “I know everything about you.”

  “Then go into Documents and open a file called [Lisbeth stuff].”

  “I think I have an idea where this is going.”

  “Oh? Here’s what I’d like you to write…”

  “Wait a second, I have to open it first. OK, now…Hold on, there are already a few things here.”

  “Ignore them. This is what I want, right at the top. Are you with me?”

  “Yes, I’m with you.”

  “Write: ‘Lisbeth, maybe you already know, but Frans Balder is dead, shot in the head. Can you find out why someone wanted to kill him?’ ”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, it’s rather a lot considering that we haven’t been in touch for ages. She’ll probably think it’s cheeky of me to ask. But I don’t think it would hurt to have her help.”

  “A little illegal hacking wouldn’t go amiss, you mean?”

  “I didn’t hear that. I’ll see you soon I hope.”

  “I hope so.”

  —

  Salander had managed to go back to sleep, and woke again at 7:30. She was not in top form—she had a headache and she felt nauseated. Yet she felt better than she had during the night. She bandaged her hand, had a quick breakfast of two microwaved meat piroshki and a large glass of Coca-Cola, then she stuffed some workout clothes into a sports bag and left the apartment. The storm had subsided, leaving trash and newspapers lying all over the city. She walked down from Mosebacke torg and along Götgatan, muttering to herself.

  She looked angry and at least two people were alarmed enough to get out of her way. But Salander was merely determined. She was not looking forward to working out, she just wanted to stick to her routine and drive the toxins out of her body. So she continued down to Hornsgatan, and right before Hornsgatspuckeln she turned into Zero boxing club, which was in the basement down one flight of stairs. It seemed more run-down than ever that morning.

  The place could have used a coat of paint and some general freshening up. It seemed as if no improvements had been made since the ’70s. Posters of Ali and Foreman were still on the walls. It still looked like the day after that legendary bout in Kinshasa, possibly due to the fact that Obinze, the man in charge of the premises, had seen the fight live as a small boy and had afterwards run around in the liberating monsoon rain shouting “Ali Bomaye!” That double-time canter was not just his happiest memory, it also marked what he called the last moment of “the days of innocence.”

  Not long after that he and his family had been forced to flee Mobutu’s terror and nothing had ever been the same again. Maybe it was not so strange that he wanted to preserve that moment in history, carry it with him to this godforsaken boxing hall in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. Obinze was still constantly talking about the fight. But then he was always constantly talking about something or other.

  He was tall and mighty and bald-headed, a chatterbox of epic proportions and one of many in the gym who quite fancied Salander, even if like many others he thought she was more or less crazy. Periodically she would train harder than anyone else in there and go at the punch-balls, punch-bags, and her sparring partners like a madwoman. She possessed a kind of primitive, furious energy which Obinze had seldom come across.

  Once, before he got to know her, he had suggested that she take up competitive boxing. The derisive snort he got in response stopped him from asking again, though he had never understood why she trained so hard. Not that he really needed to know—one could train hard for no reason at all. It was better than drinking hard. It was better than lots of things.

  Maybe it was true, as she said to him late one evening about a year ago, that she wanted to be physically prepared in case she ever ended up in difficulties again. He knew that there had been trouble before. He had read every single word about her online and understood what it meant to be prepared in case some evil shadow from the past turned up. Both his parents had been murdered by Mobutu’s thugs.

  What he did not understand was why, at regular intervals, Salander gave up training altogether, not exercising at all, eating nothing but junk food. When she came into the gym that morning—as demonstratively dressed in black and pierced as ever—he had not seen her for two weeks.

  “Hello, gorgeous. Where have you been?”

  “Doing something highly illegal.”

  “I can only imagine. Beating the crap out of some motorbike gang or something.”

  But she did not even rise to the jest. She just marched angrily in towards the changing room and he did something he knew she would hate: he stepped in front of her and looked her straight in the face.

  “Your eyes are bright red.”

  “I’ve got the mother of all hangovers. Out of my way!”

  “In that case I don’t want to see you in here, you know that.”

  “Skip the crap. I want you to drive the shit out of me,” she spat, and ducked past him to get changed. When she emerged wearing her outsized boxing shorts and white T-shirt with the black skull on the chest, he saw nothing for it but to go ahead and let her have it.

  He pushed her until she threw up three times in his wastepaper bin. He gave her as much grief as he could. She gave him plenty of lip back. Then she went off and changed and left the gym without even a goodbye. As so often at such moments Obinze was overcome by a feeling of emptiness. Maybe he was even a little in love. He was certainly stirred—how could one not be by a girl who boxed like that?

  The last he saw of her was her calves disappearing up the stairs, so he could not know that the gro
und swayed beneath her feet as she came out onto Hornsgatan. Salander braced herself against the wall of the building and breathed heavily. Then she set off in the direction of her apartment on Fiskargatan. Once home she drank another large glass of Coca-Cola and half a litre of juice, then she crashed onto her bed and looked at the ceiling for ten, fifteen minutes, thinking about this and that, about singularities and event horizons and certain special aspects of Schrödinger’s equation, and Ed Needham.

  She waited for the world to regain its usual colours before she got up and went to her computer. However reluctant she might be, she was drawn to it by a force which had not grown weaker since her childhood. But this morning she was not in the mood for any wild escapades. She hacked into Mikael Blomkvist’s computer. In the next moment she froze. They had been joking about Balder and now Blomkvist wrote that he had been murdered, shot in the head.

  “Jesus,” she muttered, and had a look at the online evening papers.

  There was no explicit mention of Balder, but it was not difficult to work out that he was the “Swedish academic shot at his home in Saltsjöbaden.” For the time being, the police were being tight-lipped and journalists had not managed to turn up a great deal, no doubt because they had not yet cottoned on to how big the story was. Other events from the night took precedence: the storm and the power outage right across the country and the scandalous delays on the railways. There was also the odd celebrity news item which Salander could not be bothered to try to understand.

  The only facts reported on the murder were that it had taken place around 3:00 in the morning and that the police were seeking witnesses in the neighbourhood, for reports of anything untoward. So far, there were no suspects, but apparently witnesses had spotted unknown and suspicious persons on the property. The police were looking for more information on them. At the end of the articles it said that a press conference was going to be held later that day, led by Chief Inspector Jan Bublanski. Salander gave a wistful smile. She had a fair bit of history with Bublanski—or Officer Bubble, as he was sometimes called—and she thought that so long as they didn’t put any idiots onto his team the investigation would turn out to be reasonably effective.