Friday, May 16–Saturday, May 31 11 page

looking at the house, then peering through the kitchen window. He went up to the porch and tried the door, taking out a key. He must have discovered that they had put in a new lock. He stood still for a moment

before he turned on his heel and left the house.

Salander felt an ice-cold fear in her gut.

Martin Vanger once again left Blomkvist alone. He was still in his uncomfortable position with his hands

behind his back and his neck fastened by a thin chain to an eyelet in the floor. He fiddled with the handcuffs, but he knew that he would not be able to get them off. The cuffs were so tight that his hands

were numb.

He had no chance. He shut his eyes.

He did not know how much time had passed when he heard Martin’s footsteps again. He appeared in

Blomkvist’s field of vision. He looked worried.

“Uncomfortable?” he said.

“Very,” said Blomkvist.

“You’ve only got yourself to blame. You should have gone back to Stockholm.”

“Why do you kill, Martin?”

“It’s a choice that I made. I could discuss the moral and intellectual aspects of what I do; we could talk all night, but it wouldn’t change anything. Try to look at it this way: a human being is a shell made of skin keeping the cells, blood, and chemical components in place. Very few end up in the history books. Most

people succumb and disappear without a trace.”

“You kill women.”

“Those of us who murder for pleasure—I’m not the only one with this hobby—we live a complete life.”

“But why Harriet? Your own sister?”

In a second Martin grabbed him by the hair.

“What happened to her, you little bastard? Tell me.”

“What do you mean?” Blomkvist gasped. He tried to turn his head to lessen the pain in his scalp. The

chain tightened round his neck.

“You and Salander. What have you come up with?”

“Let go, for heaven’s sake. We’re talking.”

Martin Vanger let go of his hair and sat cross-legged in front of Blomkvist. He took a knife from his jacket and opened it. He set the point against the skin just below Blomkvist’s eye. Blomkvist forced himself to meet Martin’s gaze.

“What the hell happened to her, bastard?”

“I don’t understand. I thought you killed her.”

Martin Vanger stared at Blomkvist for a long moment. Then he relaxed. He got up and wandered around

the room, thinking. He threw the knife on the floor and laughed before he came back to face Blomkvist.

“Harriet, Harriet, always Harriet. We tried . . . to talk to her. Gottfried tried to teach her. We thought that she was one of us and that she would accept her duty, but she was just an ordinary . . . cunt. I had her under control, or so I thought, but she was planning to tell Henrik, and I realised that I couldn’t trust her.

Sooner or later she was going to tell someone about me.”

“You killed her.”

“I wanted to kill her. I thought about it, but I arrived too late. I couldn’t get over to the island.”

Blomkvist’s brain was with difficulty trying to absorb this information, but it felt as if a message had

popped up with the words INFORMATION OVERLOAD. Martin Vanger did not know what had happened to his sister.

All of a sudden Martin pulled his mobile telephone out of his pocket, glanced at the display, and put it

on the chair next to the pistol.

“It’s time to stop all this. I have to dispose of your anorexic bitch tonight too.”

He took out a narrow leather strap from a cupboard and slipped it around Blomkvist’s neck, like a noose. He loosened the chain that held him shackled to the floor, hauled him to his feet, and shoved him

towards the wall. He slipped the leather strap through a loop above Blomkvist’s head and then tightened it so that he was forced to stand on tiptoes.

“Is that too tight? Can you breathe?” He loosened it a notch and locked the other end of the strap in place, further down the wall. “I don’t want you to suffocate all at once.”

The noose was cutting so hard into Blomkvist’s throat that he was incapable of uttering a word. Martin

looked at him attentively.

Abruptly he unzipped Blomkvist’s trousers and tugged them down, along with his boxer shorts. As he

pulled them off, Blomkvist lost his foothold and dangled for a second from the noose before his toes again made contact with the floor. Martin went over to a cupboard and took out a pair of scissors. He cut off

Blomkvist’s T-shirt and tossed the bits on the floor. Then he took up a position some distance away from

Mikael and regarded his victim.

“I’ve never had a boy in here,” Martin said in a serious voice. “I’ve never touched another man, as a

matter of fact . . . except for my father. That was my duty.”

Blomkvist’s temples were pounding. He could not put his weight on his feet without being strangled.

He tried to use his fingers to get a grip on the concrete wall behind him, but there was nothing to hold on to.

“It’s time,” Martin Vanger said.

He put his hand on the strap and pulled down. Blomkvist instantly felt the noose cutting into his neck.

“I’ve always wondered how a man tastes.”

He increased the pressure on the noose and leaned forward to kiss Blomkvist on the lips at the same

time that a cold voice cut through the room.

“Hey, you fucking creep, in this shithole I’ve got a monopoly on that one.”

Blomkvist heard Salander’s voice through a red fog. He managed to focus his eyes enough to see her standing in the doorway. She was looking at Martin Vanger without expression.

“No . . . run,” he croaked.

He could not see the look on Martin’s face, but he could almost physically feel the shock when he turned around. For a second, time stood still. Then Martin reached for the pistol he had left on the chair.

Salander took three swift strides forward and swung a golf club she had hidden at her side. The iron

flew in a wide arc and hit Martin on the collarbone near his shoulder. The blow had a terrible force, and

Blomkvist heard something snap. Martin howled.

“Do you like pain, creep?” Salander said.

Her voice was as rough as sandpaper. As long as Blomkvist lived, he would never forget her face as

she went on the attack. Her teeth were bared like a beast of prey. Her eyes were glittering, black as coal.

She moved with the lightning speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focused on her prey as she swung the

club again, striking Martin in the ribs.

He stumbled over the chair and fell. The pistol tumbled to the floor at Salander’s feet. She kicked it away.

Then she struck for the third time, just as Martin Vanger was trying to get to his feet. She hit him with a loud smack on the hip. A horrible cry issued from Martin’s throat. The fourth blow struck him from behind, between the shoulder blades.

“Lis . . . uuth . . .” Blomkvist gasped.

He was about to pass out, and the pain in his temples was almost unbearable.

She turned to him and saw that his face was the colour of a tomato, his eyes were open wide, and his

tongue was popping out of his mouth.

She looked about her and saw the knife on the floor. Then she spared a glance at Martin Vanger, who

was trying to crawl away from her, one arm hanging. He would not be making any trouble for the next few

seconds. She let go of the golf club and picked up the knife. It had a sharp point but a dull edge. She stood

on her toes and frantically sawed at the leather strap to get it off. It took several seconds before Blomkvist sank to the floor. But the noose was pulled tighter round his neck.

Salander looked again at Martin Vanger. He was on his feet but doubled over. She tried to dig her fingers under the noose. At first she did not dare cut it, but finally she slipped the point of the knife underneath, scoring Blomkvist’s neck as she tried to expand the noose. At last it loosened and Blomkvist

took several shaky, wheezing breaths.

For a moment Blomkvist had a sensation of his body and soul uniting. He had perfect vision and could

make out every speck of dust in the room. He had perfect hearing and registered every breath, every rustle of clothing, as if they were entering his ears through a headset, and he was aware of the odour of Salander’s sweat and the smell of leather from her jacket. Then the illusion burst as blood began streaming to his head.

Salander turned her head just as Martin Vanger disappeared out the door. She got up, grabbed the pistol, checked the magazine and flicked off the safety. She looked around and focused on the keys to the

handcuffs, which lay in plain sight on the table.

“I’m going to take him,” she said, running for the door. She grabbed the keys as she passed the table and

tossed them backhanded to the floor next to Blomkvist.

He tried to shout to her to wait, but he managed only a rasping sound and by then she had vanished.

Salander had not forgotten that Martin Vanger had a rifle somewhere, and she stopped, holding the pistol

ready to fire in front of her, as she came upstairs to the passageway between the garage and the kitchen.

She listened, but she could hear no sound telling her where her prey was. She moved stealthily towards

the kitchen, and she was almost there when she heard a car starting up in the courtyard.

From the drive she saw a pair of tail lights passing Henrik Vanger’s house and turning down to the bridge, and she ran as fast as her legs could carry her. She stuffed the pistol in her jacket pocket and did not bother with the helmet as she started her motorcycle. Seconds later she was crossing the bridge.

He had maybe a ninety-second start when she came into the roundabout at the entrance to the E4. She

could not see his car. She braked and turned off the motor to listen.

The sky was filled with heavy clouds. On the horizon she saw a hint of the dawn. Then she heard the

sound of an engine and caught a glimpse of tail lights on the E4, going south. Salander kicked the motorcycle, put it into gear, and raced under the viaduct. She was doing 40 miles per hour as she took the curve of the entrance ramp. She saw no traffic and accelerated to full speed and flew forward. When the

road began to curve along a ridge, she was doing 90 mph, which was about the fastest her souped-up lightweight bike could manage going downhill. After two minutes she saw the lights about 650 yards ahead.

Analyse consequences. What do I do now?

She decelerated to a more reasonable seventy-five and kept pace with him. She lost sight of him for several seconds when they took several bends. Then they came on to a long straight; she was only two hundred yards behind him.

He must have seen the headlight from her motorcycle, and he sped up when they took a long curve. She

accelerated again but lost ground on the bends.

She saw the headlights of a truck approaching. Martin Vanger did too. He increased his speed again and

drove straight into the oncoming lane. Salander saw the truck swerve and flash its lights, but the collision was unavoidable. Martin Vanger drove straight into the truck and the sound of the crash was terrible.

Salander braked. She saw the trailer start to jackknife across her lane. At the speed she was going, it

took two seconds for her to cover the distance up to the accident site. She accelerated and steered on to

the hard shoulder, avoiding the hurtling back of the truck by two yards as she flew past. Out of the corner of her eye she saw flames coming from the front of the truck.

She rode on, braking and thinking, for another 150 yards before she stopped and turned around. She saw the driver of the truck climb out of his cab on the passenger side. Then she accelerated again. At Åkerby, about a mile south, she turned left and took the old road back north, parallel to the E4. She went up a hill past the scene of the crash. Two cars had stopped. Big flames were boiling out of the wreckage

of Martin’s car, which was wedged underneath the truck. A man was spraying the flames with a small fire

extinguisher.

She was soon rolling across the bridge at a low speed. She parked outside the cottage and walked back

to Martin Vanger’s house.

Mikael was still fumbling with the handcuffs. His hands were so numb that he could not get a grip on the

key. Salander unlocked the cuffs for him and held him tight as the blood began to circulate in his hands

again.

“Martin?” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Dead. He drove slap into the front of a truck a couple of miles south on the E4.”

Blomkvist stared at her. She had only been gone a few minutes.

“We have to . . . call the police,” he whispered. He began coughing hard.

“Why?” Salander said.

For ten minutes Blomkvist was incapable of standing up. He was still on the floor, naked, leaning against

the wall. He massaged his neck and lifted the water bottle with clumsy fingers. Salander waited patiently

until his sense of touch started to return. She spent the time thinking.

“Put your trousers on.”

She used Blomkvist’s cut-up T-shirt to wipe fingerprints from the handcuffs, the knife, and the golf club.

She picked up her PET bottle.

“What are you doing?”

“Get dressed and hurry up. It’s getting light outside.”

Blomkvist stood on shaky legs and managed to pull on his boxers and jeans. He slipped on his trainers.

Salander stuffed his socks into her jacket pocket and then stopped him.

“What exactly did you touch down here?”

Blomkvist looked around. He tried to remember. At last he said that he had touched nothing except the

door and the keys. Salander found the keys in Martin Vanger’s jacket, which he had hung over the chair.

She wiped the door handle and the switch and turned off the light. She helped Blomkvist up the basement

stairs and told him to wait in the passageway while she put the golf club back in its proper place. When

she came back she was carrying a dark T-shirt that belonged to Martin Vanger.

“Put this on. I don’t want anyone to see you scampering about with a bare chest tonight.”

Blomkvist realised that he was in a state of shock. Salander had taken charge, and passively he obeyed

her instructions. She led him out of Martin’s house. She held on to him the whole time. As soon as they

stepped inside the cottage, she stopped him.

“If anyone sees us and asks what we were doing outside tonight, you and I went out to the point for a

nighttime walk, and we had sex out there.”

“Lisbeth, I can’t . . .”

“Get in the shower. Now.”

She helped him off with his clothes and propelled him to the bathroom. Then she put on water for coffee and made half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles. She sat down at the kitchen table and was thinking hard when he came limping back into the room. She studied the bruises and scrapes on his body. The noose had been so tight that he had a dark red

mark around his neck, and the knife had made a bloody gash in his skin on the left side.

“Get into bed,” she said.

She improvised bandages and covered the wound with a makeshift compress. Then she poured the coffee and handed him a sandwich.

“I’m really not hungry,” he said.

“I don’t give a damn if you’re hungry. Just eat,” Salander commanded, taking a big bite of her own cheese sandwich.

Blomkvist closed his eyes for a moment, then he sat up and took a bite. His throat hurt so much that he

could scarcely swallow.

Salander took off her leather jacket and from the bathroom brought a jar of Tiger Balm from her sponge

bag.

“Let the coffee cool for a while. Lie face down.”

She spent five minutes massaging his back and rubbing him with the liniment. Then she turned him over

and gave him the same treatment on the front.

“You’re going to have some serious bruises for a while.”

“Lisbeth, we have to call the police.”

“No,” she replied with such vehemence that Blomkvist opened his eyes in surprise. “If you call the police, I’m leaving. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. Martin Vanger is dead. He died in a car accident. He was alone in the car. There are witnesses. Let the police or someone else discover that fucking torture chamber. You and I are just as ignorant about its existence as everyone else in this village.”

“Why?”

She ignored him and started massaging his aching thighs.

“Lisbeth, we can’t just . . .”

“If you go on nagging, I’ll drag you back to Martin’s grotto and chain you up again.”

As she said this, Blomkvist fell asleep, as suddenly as if he had fainted.

CHAPTER 25

Saturday, July 12–

Monday, July 14

Blomkvist woke with a start at 5:00 in the morning, scrabbling at his neck to get rid of the noose. Salander came in and took hold of his hands, keeping him still. He opened his eyes and looked at her blearily.

“I didn’t know that you played golf,” he said, closing his eyes again. She sat with him for a couple of

minutes until she was sure he was asleep. While he slept, Salander had gone back to Martin Vanger’s basement to examine and photograph the crime scene. In addition to the torture instruments, she had found

a collection of violent pornographic magazines and a large number of Polaroid photographs pasted into

albums.

There was no diary. On the other hand, she did find two A4 binders with passport photographs and handwritten notes about the women. She put the binders in a nylon bag along with Martin’s Dell PC

laptop, which she found on the hall table upstairs. While Blomkvist slept she continued her examination of Martin’s computer and binders. It was after 6:00 by the time she turned off the computer. She lit a cigarette.

Together with Mikael Blomkvist she had taken up the hunt for what they thought was a serial killer from

the past. They had found something appallingly different. She could hardly imagine the horrors that must

have played out in Martin Vanger’s basement, in the midst of this well-ordered, idyllic spot.

She tried to understand.

Martin Vanger had been killing women since the sixties, during the past fifteen years one or two victims

per year. The killing had been done so discreetly and was so well planned that no-one was even aware

that a serial killer was at work. How was that possible?

The binders provided a partial answer.

His victims were often new arrivals, immigrant girls who had no friends or social contacts in Sweden.

There were also prostitutes and social outcasts, with drug abuse or other problems in their background.

From her own studies of the psychology of sexual sadism, Salander had learned that this type of murderer usually collected souvenirs from his victims. These souvenirs functioned as reminders that the

killer could use to re-create some of the pleasure he had experienced. Martin Vanger had developed this

peculiarity by keeping a “death book.” He had catalogued and graded his victims. He had described their

suffering. He had documented his killings with videotapes and photographs.

The violence and the killing were the goal, but Salander concluded that it was the hunt that was Martin

Vanger’s primary interest. In his laptop he had created a database with a list of more than a hundred women. There were employees from the Vanger Corporation, waitresses in restaurants where he regularly

ate, reception staff in hotels, clerks at the social security office, the secretaries of business associates, and many other women. It seemed as if Martin had pigeonholed practically every woman he had ever come

into contact with.

He had killed only a fraction of these women, but every woman anywhere near him was a potential victim. The cataloguing had the mark of a passionate hobby, and he must have devoted countless hours to

it.

Is she married or single? Does she have children and family? Where does she work? Where does she

live? What kind of car does she drive? What sort of education does she have? Hair colour? Skin colour? Figure?

The gathering of personal information about potential victims must have been a significant part of Martin Vanger’s sexual fantasies. He was first of all a stalker, and second a murderer.

When she had finished reading, she discovered a small envelope in one of the binders. She pulled out

two much handled and faded Polaroid pictures. In the first picture a dark-haired girl was sitting at a table.

The girl had on dark jeans and had a bare torso with tiny, pointed breasts. She had turned her face away

from the camera and was in the process of lifting one arm in a gesture of defence, almost as if the photographer had surprised her. In the second picture she was completely naked. She was lying on her stomach on a blue bedspread. Her face was still turned away from the camera.

Salander stuffed the envelope with the pictures into her jacket pocket. After that she carried the binders over to the woodstove and struck a match. When she was done with the fire, she stirred the ashes. It was

pouring down with rain when she took a short walk and, kneeling as if to tie a shoelace, discreetly dropped Martin Vanger’s laptop into the water under the bridge.

When Frode marched through the open door at 7:30 that morning, Salander was at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Frode’s face was ashen, and he looked as if he had had a cruel

awakening.

“Where’s Mikael?” he said.

“He’s still asleep.”

Frode sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Salander poured coffee and pushed the cup over to him.

“Martin . . . I just found out that Martin was killed in a car accident last night.”

“That’s sad,” Salander said, taking a sip of her own coffee.

Frode looked up. At first he stared at her, uncomprehending. Then his eyes opened wide.

“What . . . ?”

“He crashed. How annoying.”

“What do you know about this?”

“He drove his car right into the front of a truck. He committed suicide. The press, the stress, a floundering financial empire, dot, dot, dot, too much for him. At least that’s what I suppose it will say on the placards.”

Frode looked as if he were about to have a cerebral haemorrhage. He stood up swiftly and walked unsteadily to the bedroom.

“Let him sleep,” Salander snapped.

Frode looked at the sleeping figure. He saw the black and blue marks on Blomkvist’s face and the contusions on his chest. Then he saw the flaming line where the noose had been. Salander touched his arm

and closed the door. Frode backed out and sank on to the kitchen bench.

Lisbeth Salander told him succinctly what had happened during the night. She told him what Martin Vanger’s chamber of horrors looked like and how she had found Mikael with a noose around his neck and

the CEO of the Vanger Corporation standing in front of his naked body. She told him what she had found in

the company’s archives the day before and how she had established a possible link between Martin’s father and the murders of at least seven women.

Frode interrupted her recitation only once. When she stopped talking, he sat mutely for several minutes

before he took a deep breath and said: “What are we going to do?”

“That’s not for me to say,” Salander said.

“But . . .”

“As I see it, I’ve never set foot in Hedestad.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Under no circumstances do I want my name in any police report. I don’t exist in connection with any

of this. If my name is mentioned in connection with this story, I’ll deny that I’ve ever been here, and I’ll refuse to answer a single question.”

Frode gave her a searching look.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand.”

“Then what should I do?”

“You’ll have to work that out for yourself. Only leave me and Mikael out of it.”

Frode was deathly pale.

“Look at it this way: the only thing you know is that Martin Vanger died in a traffic accident. You have

no idea that he was also an insane, nauseating serial killer, and you’ve never heard about the room in his basement.”

She put the key on the table between them.

“You’ve got time—before anyone is going to clean out Martin’s house and discover the basement.”

“We have to go to the police about this.”

“Not we. You can go to the police if you like. It’s your decision.”

“This can’t be brushed under a carpet.”

“I’m not suggesting that it should be brushed anywhere, just that you leave me and Mikael out of it.

When you discover the room, you draw your own conclusions and decide for yourself who you want to

tell.”

“If what you say is true, it means that Martin has kidnapped and murdered women . . . there must be

families that are desperate because they don’t know where their children are. We can’t just . . .”

“That’s right. But there’s just one problem. The bodies are gone. Maybe you’ll find passports or ID

cards in some drawer. Maybe some of the victims can be identified from the videotapes. But you don’t

need to decide today. Think it over.”

Frode looked panic-stricken.

“Oh, dear God. This will be the death blow for the company. Think of how many families will lose their livelihood if it gets out that Martin . . .”

Frode rocked back and forth, juggling with a moral dilemma.

“That’s one issue. If Isabella Vanger is to inherit, you may think it would be inappropriate if she were

the first one to light upon her son’s hobby.”

“I have to go and see . . .”

“I think you should stay away from that room today,” Salander said sharply. “You have a lot of things to

take care of. You have to go and tell Henrik, and you have to call a special meeting of the board and do all those things you chaps do when your CEO dies.”

Frode thought about what she was saying. His heart was thumping. He was the old attorney and problem-solver who was expected to have a plan ready to meet any eventuality, yet he felt powerless to

act. It suddenly dawned on him that here he was, taking orders from a child. She had somehow seized control of the situation and given him the guidelines that he himself was unable to formulate.

“And Harriet . . . ?”

“Mikael and I are not finished yet. But you can tell Herr Vanger that I think now that we’re going to solve it.”

Martin Vanger’s unexpected demise was the top story on the 9:00 news on the radio when Blomkvist woke up. Nothing was reported about the night’s events other than to say that the industrialist had inexplicably and at high speed crossed to the wrong side of the E4, travelling south. He had been alone in the car.

The local radio ran a story that dealt with concern for the future of the Vanger Corporation and the consequences that this death would inevitably have for the company.

A hastily composed lunchtime update from the TT wire service had the headline A TOWN IN SHOCK, and it summed up the problems of the Vanger Corporation. It escaped no-one’s notice that in Hedestad alone more than 3,000 of the town’s 21,000 inhabitants were employed by the Vanger Corporation or were otherwise dependent on the prosperity of the company. The firm’s CEO was dead, and the former CEO

was seriously ill after a heart attack. There was no natural heir. All this at a time considered to be among the most critical in the company’s history.

Blomkvist had had the option of going to the police in Hedestad and telling them what had happened that

night, but Salander had already set a certain process in motion. Since he had not immediately called the

police, it became harder to do so with each hour that passed. He spent the morning in gloomy silence, sitting on the kitchen bench, watching the rain outside. Around 10:00 there was another cloudburst, but by lunchtime the rain had stopped and the wind had died down a bit. He went out and wiped off the garden

furniture and then sat there with a mug of coffee. He was wearing a shirt with the collar turned up.

Martin’s death cast a shadow, of course, over the daily life of Hedeby. Cars began parking outside Isabella Vanger’s house as the clan gathered to offer condolences. Salander observed the procession without emotion.

“How are you feeling?” she said at last.

“I think I’m still in shock,” he said. “I was helpless. For several hours I was convinced that I was going to die. I felt the fear of death and there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 713