"christ almighty."

"exactly. it was so sadistic. poor torstensson was the first detective on the scene after she was found. and the murder remained unsolved, even though experts were called in from stockholm. he could never let go of that case."

"i can understand that."

"my rebecka case was harriet. in this instance we don't even know how she died. we can't even prove that a murder was committed. but i have never been able to let it go." he paused to think for a moment. "being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. the friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. for the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over their grieving and despair. life has to go on; it does go on. but the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there's only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it's the officer who's left with the investigation."

three other people in the vanger family lived on hedeby island. alexander vanger, son of greger, born in 1946, lived in a renovated wooden house. vanger told blomkvist that alexander was presently in the west indies, where he gave himself over to his favourite pastimes: sailing and whiling away the time, not doing a scrap of work. alexander had been twenty and he had been there on that day.

alexander shared the house with his mother, gerda, eighty years old and widow of greger vanger. blomkvist had never seen her; she was mostly bedridden.

the third family member was harald vanger. during his first month blomkvist had not managed even a glimpse of him. harald's house, the one closest to blomkvist's cabin, looked gloomy and ominous with its blackout curtains drawn across all the windows. blomkvist sometimes thought he saw a ripple in the curtains as he passed, and once when he was about to go to bed late, he noticed a glimmer of light coming from a room upstairs. there was a gap in the curtains. for more than twenty minutes he stood in the dark at his own kitchen window and watched the light before he got fed up and, shivering, went to bed. in the morning the curtains were back in place.

harald seemed to be an invisible but ever-present spirit who affected life in the village by his absence. in blomkvist's imagination, harald increasingly took on the form of an evil gollum who spied on his surroundings from behind the curtains and devoted himself to no-one-knew-what matters in his barricaded cavern.

harald was visited once a day by the home-help service (usually an elderly woman) from the other side of the bridge. she would bring bags of groceries, trudging through the snowdrifts up to his door. nilsson shook his head when blomkvist asked about harald. he had offered to do the shovelling, he said, but harald did not want anyone to set foot on his property. only once, during the first winter after harald had returned to hedeby island, did nilsson drive the tractor up there to clear the snow from the courtyard, just as he did for all the other driveways. harald had come out of his house at a startling pace, yelling and gesticulating until nilsson went away.

unfortunately, nilsson was unable to clear blomkvist's yard because the gate was too narrow for the tractor. a snow shovel and manual labour were still the only way to do it.

in the middle of january blomkvist asked his lawyer to find out when he was going to be expected to serve his three months in prison. he was anxious to take care of the matter as quickly as possible. getting into prison turned out to be easier than he had expected. after a very few weeks of discussion, it was decreed that blomkvist present himself on march 17 at the rullaker prison outside ostersund, a minimum-security prison. the lawyer advised him that the sentence would very likely be shortened.

"fine," blomkvist said, without much enthusiasm.

he sat at the kitchen table and petted the cat, who now arrived every few days to spend the night with blomkvist. from the nilssons he had learned that the cat's name was tjorven. it did not belong to anyone in particular, it just made the rounds of all the houses.

blomkvist met his employer almost every afternoon. sometimes they would have a brief conversation; sometimes they would sit together for hours.

the conversation often consisted of blomkvist putting up a theory that vanger would then shoot down. blomkvist tried to maintain a certain distance from his assignment, but there were moments when he found himself hopelessly fascinated by the enigma of the girl's disappearance.

blomkvist had assured berger that he would also formulate a strategy for taking up the battle with wennerstrom, but after a month in hedestad he had not yet opened the files which had brought him to the dock in the district court. on the contrary, he had deliberately pushed the matter aside because every time he thought about wennerstrom and his own situation, he would sink into depression and listlessness. he wondered whether he was going crazy like the old man. his professional reputation had imploded, and his means of recovering was to hide himself away in a tiny town in the deep country, chasing ghosts.

vanger could tell that blomkvist was on some days a bit off balance. by the end of january, the old man made a decision that surprised even himself. he picked up the telephone and called stockholm. the conversation lasted twenty minutes and dealt largely with mikael blomkvist.

it had taken almost that whole month for berger's fury to subside. at 9:30 in the evening, on one of the last days in january, she called him.

"are you really intending to stay up there?" she began. the call was such a surprise that blomkvist could not at first reply. then he smiled and wrapped the blanket tighter around him.

"hi, ricky. you should try it yourself."

"why would i? what is so charming about living in the back of beyond?"

"i just brushed my teeth with ice water. it makes my fillings hurt."

"you have only yourself to blame. but it's cold as hell down here in stockholm too."

"let's hear the worst."

"we've lost two-thirds of our regular advertisers. no-one wants to come right out and say it, but..."

"i know. make a list of the ones that jump ship. someday we'll do a good story on them."

"micke... i've run the numbers, and if we don't rope in some new advertisers, we'll be bust by the autumn. it's as simple as that."

"things will turn around."

she laughed wearily on the other end of the line.

"that's not something you can say, nestling up there in laplander hell."

"erika, i'm..."

"i know. a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and all that crap. you don't have to say anything. i'm sorry i was such a bitch and didn't answer your messages. can we start again? do i dare come up there to see you?"

"whenever you like."

"do i need to bring along a rifle with wolf-shot?"

"not at all. we'll have our own lapps, dog teams and all the gear. when are you coming?"

"friday evening, ok?"

apart from the narrow shovelled path to the door, there was about three feet of snow covering the property. blomkvist gave the shovel a long, critical look and then went over to nilsson's house to ask whether berger could park her bmw there. that was no problem; they had room in the double garage, and they even had engine heaters.

berger drove through the afternoon and arrived around 6:00. they stared at each other warily for several seconds and then hugged each other for much longer.

there was not much to see in the darkness except for the illuminated church, and both konsum and susanne's bridge cafe were closing up. so they hurried home. blomkvist cooked dinner while berger poked around in his house, making remarks about the issues of rekordmagasinet from the fifties that were still there, and getting engrossed in his files in the office.

they had lamb cutlets with potatoes in cream sauce and drank red wine. blomkvist tried to take up the thread of their earlier conversation, but berger was in no mood to discuss millennium. instead they talked for two hours about what blomkvist was doing up there and how he and vanger were getting on. later they went to see if the bed was big enough to hold both of them.

her third meeting with advokat nils bjurman was rescheduled, and finally set for 5:00 on that same friday afternoon. at the previous meetings, salander was greeted by a middle-aged woman who smelled of musk and worked as his secretary. this time she had left for the day, and bjurman smelled faintly of drink. he waved salander to a visitor's chair and leafed distractedly through the documents on his desk until he seemed suddenly to become aware of her presence.

it turned out to be another interrogation. this time he asked salander about her sex life - which she had no intention of discussing with anyone.

after the meeting she knew that she had handled it badly. at first she refused to answer his questions. his interpretation of this was that she was shy, retarded, or had something to hide, and he pressed her for answers. salander realised that he was not going to give up, so she started giving him brief, colourless answers of the sort she assumed would fit with her psychological profile. she mentioned "magnus" - who, according to her description, was a nerdy computer programmer her own age who treated her like a gentleman should, took her to the cinema, and sometimes shared her bed. "magnus" was fiction; she made him up as she went along, but bjurman took her account as a pretext for meticulously mapping out her sex life. how often do you have sex? occasionally. who takes the initiative - you or him? i do. do you use condoms? of course - she knew about hiv. what's your favourite position? hmm, usually on my back. do you enjoy oral sex? er, wait a second... have you ever had anal sex?

"no, it's not particularly nice to be fucked in the arse - but what the hell business is it of yours?"

that was the only time she lost her temper. she had kept her eyes on the floor so they would not betray her exasperation. when she looked at him again, he was grinning at her from across the desk. she left his office with a feeling of disgust. palmgren would never have dreamed of asking such questions. on the other hand, he had always been there if she had wanted to discuss anything. not that she did.

bjurman was on his way to being a major problem.

chapter 11

saturday, february 1 - tuesday, february 18

during the brief hours of daylight on saturday, blomkvist and berger took a walk past the small-boat harbour along the road to ostergarden. he had been living on hedeby island for a month, but he had never taken a walk inland; the freezing temperatures and regular snowstorms had deterred him. but saturday was sunny and pleasant. it was as if berger had brought with her a hint of spring. the road was lined with snow, ploughed three feet high. as soon as they left the summer-cabin area they were walking in dense fir forest. blomkvist was surprised by how much higher and more inaccessible soderberget, the hill across from the cabins, was than it appeared from the village. he thought about how many times harriet vanger must have played here as a child, but then he pushed all thoughts of her out of his mind. after about a mile the woods ended at a fence where the ostergarden farmland began. they could see a white wooden structure and red farm buildings arranged in a square. they turned to head back the same way.

as they passed the driveway to the estate house, vanger knocked on the upstairs window and gestured firmly for them to come up. blomkvist and berger looked at each other.

"would you like to meet a corporate legend?" blomkvist said.

"does he bite?"

"not on saturdays."

vanger received them at the door to his office.

"you must be froken berger, i recognise you." he said. "mikael didn't say a word about your coming to hedeby."

one of berger's outstanding talents was her ability to instantly get on friendly terms with the most unlikely individuals. blomkvist had seen her turn on the charm for five-year-old boys, who within ten minutes were fully prepared to abandon their mothers. men over eighty seemed not to be an exception. after two minutes berger and henrik vanger were ignoring blomkvist as they chattered on. it was as if they had known each other since childhood - well, since erika's childhood, at any rate.

berger started off quite boldly by scolding vanger for luring her publisher away into the sticks. the old man replied that as far as he could tell - from assorted press reports - she had in fact fired him. and had she not done so, then now might be high time to get rid of excess ballast in the editorial offices. and in that case, vanger said, a period of rustic life would do young blomkvist some good.

for five minutes they discussed blomkvist's shortcomings in the most irritating terms. blomkvist leaned back and pretended to be insulted, but he frowned when berger made some cryptic remarks that might allude to his failings as a journalist but might also have applied to sexual prowess. vanger tilted his head back and roared with laughter.

blomkvist was astonished. he had never seen vanger so natural and relaxed. he could suddenly see that vanger, fifty years younger - or even thirty years - must have been quite a charming, attractive ladies' man. he had never remarried. there must have been women who crossed his path, yet for nearly half a century he had remained a bachelor.

blomkvist took a sip of coffee and pricked up his ears again when he realised that the conversation had suddenly turned serious and had to do with millennium.

"mikael has told me that you're having problems at the magazine." berger glanced at blomkvist. "no, he hasn't discussed your internal operations, but a person would have to be deaf and blind not to see that your magazine, just like the vanger corporation, is in difficulties."

"i'm confident that we can repair the situation," berger said.

"i doubt it," vanger said.

"why is that?"

"let's see - how many employees do you have? six? a monthly magazine with a print run of 21,000, manufacturing costs, salaries, distribution, offices... you need revenues of about 10 million. i think we know what percentage of that amount has to come from advertising revenue."