“Stop that!” he said roughly, and was about to lose his temper when she looked at him with such vulnerable, piteous eyes that he was thrown. For a moment he thought he had made a mistake.
“Are you cross with me?” she said, hurt.
“No, but...”
“What?”
“I don’t trust you,” he said, more bluntly than he intended.
She smiled sadly and said, “I can’t help feeling that you’re not quite yourself today, are you, Mikael? We’ll have to meet some other time instead.”
She moved to kiss his cheek so discreetly and quickly that he had no time to stop her. She gave a flirtatious wave of her fingers and walked away up the hill on high heels, so resolutely self-assured that he wondered if he should stop her and fire some probing questions. But he could not imagine that anything would come of it. Instead he decided to tail her.
It was crazy, but he saw no alternative, so he let her disappear over the brow of the hill and then set off in pursuit. He hurried up to the crossroads, sure that she could not have gone far. But there was no sign of her, or of the man either. It was as if the city had swallowed them up. The street was empty, apart from a black B.M.W. backing into a parking space some way down the street, and a man with a goatee wearing an old-fashioned Afghan coat who came walking in his direction on the opposite pavement.
Where had they gone? There were no side streets for them to slip into, no alleys. Had they ducked into a doorway? He walked on down towards Torkel Knutssonsgatan, looking left and right. Nothing. He passed what had been Samir’s Cauldron, once a favourite local of his and Berger’s; now called Tabbouli, it served Lebanese food. They might have stepped inside.
But he could not see how she would have had time to get there; he had been hot on her heels. Where the hell was she? Were she and the man standing somewhere nearby, watching him? Twice he spun around, certain that they were right behind him, and once he gave a start because of an icy feeling that someone was looking at him through a telescopic sight.
When eventually he gave up and wandered home it felt as though he had escaped a great danger. He had no idea how close to the truth that feeling was, yet his heart was beating fiercely and his throat was dry. He was not easily scared, but tonight he had been badly frightened by an empty street.
The only thing he did understand was who he needed to speak to. He had to get hold of Holger Palmgren, Salander’s old guardian. But first he would do his civic duty. If the man he had seen was the person from Balder’s security camera, and there was even a minimal chance that he could be found, the police had to be informed. So he rang Bublanski.
It was not at all easy to convince the chief inspector. It had not been easy to convince himself. But he still had some residual credibility to fall back on, however many liberties he had taken with the truth of late. Bublanski said that he would send out a unit.
“Why would he be in your part of town?”
“I have no idea, but it wouldn’t hurt to see if you can find him, would it?”
“I suppose not.”
“The best of luck to you in that case.”
“It’s damn unsatisfactory that the Balder boy is still out there somewhere,” Bublanski said reproachfully.
“And it’s damn unsatisfactory that there was a leak in your unit,” Blomkvist said.
“We’ve identified our leak.”
“You have? That’s fantastic.”
“It’s not all that fantastic, I’m afraid. We believe there may have been several leaks, most of which did minimal damage except maybe for the last.”
“Then you’ll have to make sure you put a stop to it.”
“We’re doing all we can, but we’re beginning to suspect...” And then he paused.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“O.K., you don’t have to tell me.”
“We live in a sick world, Mikael.”
“We do?”
“A world in which paranoia is a requirement.”
“You could be right about that. Good night, Chief Inspector.”
“Good night, Mikael. Don’t do anything silly now.”
“I’ll try not to.”
Blomkvist crossed over Ringvägen and went down into the Tunnelbana. He took the red line towards Norsborg and got off at Liljeholmen, where for about a year Holger Palmgren had been living in a small, modern apartment. Palmgren had sounded alarmed when he heard Blomkvist’s voice on the telephone. But as soon as he had been assured that Salander was in one piece — Blomkvist hoped he wasn’t wrong about this — he made him feel welcome.
Palmgren was a lawyer, long retired, who had been Salander’s guardian for many years, ever since the girl was thirteen and had been locked up in St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic in Uppsala. He was elderly and not in the best of health, having suffered two strokes. For some time now he had been using a Zimmer frame, and had trouble getting around even so. The left side of his face drooped and his left hand no longer functioned. But his mind was clear and his long-term memory was outstanding — especially on Salander.
No-one knew Lisbeth Salander as he did. Palmgren had succeeded where all the psychiatrists and psychologists had failed, or perhaps had not wanted to succeed. After a childhood from hell, when the girl had lost faith in all adults and in all authority, Palmgren had won her confidence and persuaded her to open up. Blomkvist saw it as a minor miracle. Salander was every therapist’s nightmare, but she had told Palmgren about the most painful parts of her childhood. That was why Blomkvist now keyed in the front-door code at Liljeholmstorget 96, took the lift to the fifth floor and rang the doorbell.
“My dear old friend,” Holger said in the doorway, “it’s so wonderful to see you. But you’re looking pale.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Not surprising, when people are shooting at you. I read about it in the paper. A dreadful story.”
“Appalling.”
“Have there been any developments?”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Blomkvist said, sitting on a yellow sofa with its back to the balcony, waiting for Palmgren to settle with difficulty into a wheelchair next to him.
Blomkvist ran through the story in broad outline. When he came to the point of his sudden inspiration, or suspicion, on the cobblestones in Bellmansgatan, he was interrupted:
“What are you saying?”
“I think it was Camilla.”
Palmgren looked stunned. “That Camilla?”
“The very same.”
“Jesus,” Palmgren said. “What happened?”
“She vanished. But afterwards I felt as if my brain were on fire.”
“I can well understand. I was sure Camilla had disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“And I had almost forgotten that there were two of them.”
“There were two of them alright, very much so: twin sisters who loathed each other.”
“I remember that,” Blomkvist said. “But I need to be reminded of as much as you can tell me, to fill the gaps in the story as I know it. I’ve been asking myself why on earth Salander got involved in this story. Why would she, the superhacker, take an interest in a simple data breach?”
“Well, you know the background, don’t you? The mother, Agneta Salander, was a cashier at Konsum Zinken and lived with her twin daughters on Lundagatan. They might have had quite a nice life together. There wasn’t much money and Agneta was very young and had had no opportunity to get an education. But she was loving and caring. She wanted to give her girls a good upbringing. It was just...”
“That the father came to visit.”
“Yes, the father, Alexander Zalachenko. He came from time to time and his visits nearly always ended in the same way. He assaulted and raped Agneta while the girls sat in the next room and heard everything. One day Lisbeth found her mother unconscious on the floor.”