“Who the hell are you?” Flinck bellowed with surprising aggression — he had been scared too — and the man looked at them in confusion and terror.
He was not wearing a hat, he had hoarfrost in his hair and in the stubble on his chin and you could tell that he was cold and in pretty bad shape. But above all there was something extraordinarily familiar about his face.
For a few seconds Blom thought that they had arrested a known and wanted criminal and he swelled with pride.
Balder had gone back to the bedroom and tucked August in again, perhaps to hide him under the blanket if anything should happen. Then he had a completely crazy thought, prompted by the sense of foreboding he had just felt, which was accentuated by his conversation with Warburton. Probably his mind was just clouded by panic and fear.
He realized it was not a new idea but something which had been developing in his subconscious during many sleepless nights in California. So he got out his laptop, his own little supercomputer connected to a series of other machines for sufficient capacity, and opened the A.I. program to which he had dedicated his life, and then...
He deleted the file and all of the back-up. He barely thought it through. He was like an evil God snuffing out a life, and perhaps that was exactly what he was doing. Nobody knew, not even he himself, and he sat there for a little while, wondering if he would be floored by remorse and regret. It was incomprehensible, wasn’t it? His life’s work was gone, with just a few taps of a key.
But oddly enough it made him calmer, as if at least one aspect of his life was now protected. He got to his feet and once more looked out into the night and the storm. Then the telephone rang. It was Flinck, the second policeman.
“I just wanted to say that we apprehended the man you saw,” the policeman said. “In other words, you can relax. We have the situation under control.”
“Who is it?” Balder said.
“I couldn’t say. He’s very drunk and we have to get him to quieten down. I just wanted to let you know. We’ll get back to you.”
Balder put the mobile down on the bedside table, next to his laptop, and tried to congratulate himself. Now the man was under arrest, and his research would not fall into the wrong hands. Yet he was not reassured. At first he did not understand why. Then it hit him: the man who had run along the trees had been anything but drunk.
It took a full minute or more before Blom realized that they had not in fact arrested a notorious criminal but rather the actor Lasse Westman, who did often enough play bandits and hit men on screen, but who was not himself wanted for any crime. The realization did not make Blom feel any calmer. Not just because he suspected it had been a mistake to leave the area of the trees and the bins down there, but because this whole episode could lead to scandal and headlines in the press.
He knew enough about Westman to be aware that whatever that man did all too often ended up in the evening papers, and you could not say that the actor was looking particularly happy. He puffed and swore as he scrambled to get to his feet and Blom tried to work out what on earth the man was doing out here in the middle of the night.
“Do you live in the area?” he said.
“I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing,” Westman hissed, and Blom turned to Flinck in an attempt to understand how the whole drama had begun.
But Flinck was already standing a little way off talking into his mobile, apparently with Balder. He probably wanted to show how efficient he was by passing on the news that they had seized the suspect, if indeed he was the suspect.
“Have you been snooping around Professor Balder’s property?” Blom said.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m not telling you a fucking thing. What the hell, here I am strolling around perfectly peacefully and along comes that maniac waving his pistol. It’s scandalous. Don’t you know who I am?”
“I know who you are, and if we have overreacted then I apologize. I’m sure we’ll have a chance to talk about it again. But right now we’re in the middle of a tense situation and I demand that you tell me at once what brought you here to Professor Balder — oh no, don’t you try to run away now!”
Westman was probably not trying to escape at all. He was only having trouble keeping his balance. Then he cleared his throat rather dramatically and spat right out into the air. The phlegm did not get far but flew back like a projectile and froze to ice on his cheek.
“Do you know something?” he said, wiping his face.
“No?”
“I’m not the bad guy in this story.”
Blom looked nervously down towards the water and the avenue of trees and wondered yet again what he had seen there. And still he remained standing where he was, paralysed by the absurdity of the situation.
“Well then, who is?”
“Balder.”
“How so?”
“He’s taken my girlfriend’s son.”
“Why would he have done that?”
“You shouldn’t bloody well be asking me! Ask the computer genius in there! That bastard has absolutely no right to him,” Westman said, and fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat.
“He doesn’t have a child in the house, if that’s what you think,” Blom said.
“He sure as hell does.”
“Really?”
“Really!”
“So you thought you’d come along here in the middle of the night, pissed as a newt, and fetch the child,” Blom said, and he was about to make another crushing comment when he was interrupted by a sound, a soft clinking sound coming up from the water’s edge.
“What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” answered Flinck, who was standing next to him and did not seem to have heard anything at all. It was true that the sound had not been all that loud, at least not up here.
Yet it still made Blom shudder. He was just about to go down to investigate when he hesitated again. As he looked around anxiously he could hear another car approaching.
It was a taxi which drove past and stopped at Balder’s front door, and that gave Blom an excuse to stay up on the road. While the driver and the passenger settled up he cast yet another worried look down to the water and thought that he could hear something more, and this sound was no more reassuring.
He did not know for sure, and now the car door opened and a man climbed out whom Blom, after a moment’s confusion, recognized as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, though God only knew why the hell all these celebrities had to congregate out here in the middle of the night.
Chapter 10
Balder was standing in the bedroom next to his computer and his mobile, looking at August, who was whimpering uneasily in the bed. He wondered what the boy was dreaming. Was it about a world which he could even understand? Balder wanted to know. He felt that he wanted to start living, no longer bury himself in quantum algorithms and source codes and paranoia.
He wanted to be happy, not tormented by that constant weight in his body; he wanted instead to launch himself into something wild and magnificent, a romance even. For a few intense seconds he thought about the women who had fascinated him: Gabriella, Farah, others too.
He also thought about the woman who it turned out was called Salander. He had been spellbound by her, and as he now remembered her he saw something new in her, something both familiar and strange: she reminded him of August. That was absurd, of course. August was a small autistic boy, and while Salander was not that old either, and there may have been something boyish about her, otherwise she was his polar opposite. Dressed in black, a bit of a punk, totally uncompromising. Still it occurred to him now that her eyes had that same strange shine as August’s when he had been staring at the traffic light on Hornsgatan.