“Call for reinforcements.”
“But he’s getting away.”
“Then we’d better take a look,” the taller one said, and with slow, hesitant movements, they drew their weapons and went down to the water.
A dog could be heard barking in the winter darkness, a small, bad-tempered dog, and the wind was blowing hard from the sea. The snow was whirling about and the ground was slippery. The shorter of the two policemen nearly fell over, and started flailing his arms like a clown. With a bit of luck they might avoid running into the man with the weapon. Blomkvist sensed that the figure would have no trouble at all in getting rid of those two. The quick and efficient way in which he had turned and raised his weapon suggested that he was trained for situations like this, and Blomkvist wondered what he himself should do.
He had nothing with which to defend himself. Yet he got to his feet, brushed the snow from his coat and looked down the slope again. The policemen were working their way along the water’s edge towards the neighbour’s house. There was no sign of the black-clad man with the gun. Blomkvist made his way down too, and as he came around to the front of the house he saw that a window had been smashed in.
There was a large gaping hole in the house and he wondered if he should summon the policemen. He never got that far. He heard something, a strange, low whimpering sound, and so he stepped through the shattered window into a corridor with a fine oak floor whose pale glow could be seen in the darkness. He walked slowly towards a doorway where the sound was coming from.
“Balder,” he called out, “it’s me, Mikael Blomkvist. Is everything alright?”
There was no answer. But the whimpering grew louder. He took a deep breath, walked into the room — and froze, paralysed with shock. Afterwards he could not say what he had noticed first, or even what had frightened him most. It was not necessarily the body on the floor, despite the blood and the empty, rigid expression on its face.
It could have been the scene on the large double bed next to Balder, though it was difficult to make sense of it. There was a small child, perhaps seven, eight years old, a boy with fine features and dishevelled, dark-blonde hair, wearing blue-checked pyjamas, who was banging his body against the headboard and the wall, methodically and with force. The boy’s wailing did not sound like that of a crying child, more like someone trying to hurt himself as much as he could. Before Blomkvist had time to think straight he hurried over to him, but the boy was kicking wildly.
“There,” Blomkvist said. “There, there,” and wrapped his arms around him.
The boy twisted and turned with astonishing strength and managed — possibly because Blomkvist did not want to hold him too tightly — to tear himself from his embrace and rush through the door out into the corridor, barefoot over the glass shards towards the shattered window, with Blomkvist racing after him shouting “No, no.”
That was when he ran into the two policemen. They were standing out in the snow with expressions of total bewilderment.
Chapter 11
Afterwards it was said that the police had a problem with their procedures, and that nothing had been done to cordon off the area until it was too late. The man who shot Professor Balder must have had all the time in the world to make good his escape, and the first policemen on the scene, Detectives Blom and Flinck, known rather scornfully at the station as “the Casanovas”, had taken their time before raising the alarm, or at least had not done so with the necessary urgency or authority.
The forensic technicians and investigators from the Violent Crimes Division arrived only at 3.40, at the same time as a young woman who introduced herself as Gabriella Grane and who was assumed to be a relative because she was so upset. Later they came to understand that she was an analyst from Säpo, sent by the chief of that agency herself. That did not help Grane; thanks to the collective misogyny within the force, or possibly to underline the fact that she was regarded as an outsider, she was given the task of taking care of the child.
“You look as if you know how to handle this sort of thing,” Erik Zetterlund said. He was the leader of the duty investigating team that night. He had watched Grane bending to examine the cuts in the boy’s feet, and even though she snapped at him and declared that she had other priorities, she gave in when she looked into the boy’s eyes.
August — as he was called — was paralysed by fear and for a long time he sat on the floor at the top of the house, wrapped in a duvet, mechanically moving his hand across a red Persian carpet. Blom, who in other respects had not proved to be very enterprising, managed to find a pair of socks and put sticking plasters on the boy’s feet. They noticed too that he had bruises all over his body and a split lip. According to the journalist Mikael Blomkvist — whose presence created a palpable nervousness in the house — the boy had been throwing himself against the bed and the wall downstairs and had run in bare feet across the broken glass on the ground floor.
Grane, who for some reason was reluctant to introduce herself to Blomkvist, realized at once that August was a witness, but she was not able to establish any sort of rapport with him, nor was she able to give him comfort. Hugs and tenderness of the usual kind were clearly not the right approach. August was at his calmest when Grane simply sat beside him, a little way away, doing her own thing, and only once did he appear to be paying attention. This was when she was speaking on her mobile to Kraft and referred to the house number, 79. She did not give it much thought at the time, and soon after that she reached an agitated Hanna Balder.
Hanna wanted to have her son back at once and told Grane, to her surprise, that she should get out some jigsaw puzzles, particularly the one of the warship Vasa, which she said the boy’s father would have had lying around somewhere. She did not describe her ex-husband as having taken the boy unlawfully, but she had no answer when asked why Westman had been out at the house demanding to have the boy back. It certainly did not seem to be concern for the child that had brought him here.
The fact of the boy’s presence did, however, shed light on some of Grane’s earlier questions. She now understood why Balder had been evasive about certain things, and why he had not wanted to have a guard dog. In the early morning Grane arranged for a psychologist and a doctor to take August to his mother in Vasastan, unless it turned out that he needed more urgent medical attention. Then she was struck by a different thought.
It occurred to her that the motive for murder might not have been to silence Balder. The killer could as easily have been wanting to rob him — not of something as obvious as money, but of his research. Grane had no idea what Balder had been working on during the last year of his life. Perhaps no-one knew. But it was not difficult to imagine what it might have been: most probably a development of his A.I. program, which was already regarded as revolutionary when it was stolen the first time.
His colleagues at Solifon had done everything they could to get a look at it and according to what Balder had once let slip he guarded it as a mother guards her baby, which must mean, Grane thought, that he kept it next to him while he was asleep. So she told Blom to keep an eye on August and went down to the bedroom on the ground floor where, in freezing conditions, the forensic team were working.
“Was there a computer in here?” she said.
The technicians shook their heads and Grane got out her mobile and called Kraft again.
It was soon established that Westman had disappeared. He must have left the scene amid the general turmoil, and that made Zetterlund swear and shout, the more so when it transpired that Westman was not to be found at his home either.