Mikael. Important. Call Berger right away and tell her Fredriksson is Poison Pen.
The instant she sent the message she heard movement in the corridor. She polished the screen of her Palm Tungsten T3 and then switched it off and placed it in the recess behind the bedside table.
“Hello, Lisbeth.” It was Giannini in the doorway.
“Hello.”
“The police are coming for you in a while. I’ve brought you some clothes. I hope they’re the right size.”
Salander looked distrustfully at the selection of neat, dark-coloured linen trousers and pastel-coloured blouses.
Two uniformed Goteborg policewomen came to get her. Giannini was to go with them to the prison.
As they walked from her room down the corridor, Salander noticed that several of the staff were watching her with curiosity. She gave them a friendly nod, and some of them waved back. As if by chance, Jonasson was standing by the reception desk. They looked at each other and nodded. Even before they had turned the corner Salander noticed that he was heading for her room.
During the entire procedure of transporting her to the prison, Salander did not say a word to the police.
Blomkvist had closed his iBook at 7.00 on Sunday morning. He sat for a moment at Salander’s desk listless, staring into space.
Then he went to her bedroom and looked at her gigantic, king-size bed. After a while he went back to her office and flipped open his mobile to call Figuerola.
“Hi. It’s Mikael.”
“Hello there. Are you already up?”
“I’ve just finished working and I’m on my way to bed. I just wanted to call and say hello.”
“Men who just want to call and say hello generally have ulterior motives.”
He laughed.
“Blomkvist… you could come here and sleep if you like.”
“I’d be wretched company.”
“I’ll get used to it.”
He took a taxi to Pontonjargatan.
Berger spent Sunday in bed with her husband. They lay there talking and dozing. In the afternoon they got dressed and went for a walk down to the steamship dock.
“
“Don’t say that. Right now it’s tough, but you knew it would be. Things will calm down after you’ve been there a while.”
“It’s not the job. I can handle that. It’s the atmosphere.”
“I see.”
“I don’t like it there, but on the other hand I can’t walk out after a few weeks.”
She sat at the kitchen table and stared morosely into space. Beckman had never seen his wife so stymied.
Inspector Faste met Salander for the first time at 11.30 on Sunday morning when a woman police officer brought her into Erlander’s office at Goteborg police headquarters.
“You were difficult enough to catch,” Faste said.
Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.
“Inspector Gunilla Waring will accompany you to Stockholm,” Erlander said.
“Alright,” Faste said. “Then we’ll leave at once. There are quite a few people who want to have a serious talk with you, Salander.”
Erlander said goodbye to her. She ignored him.
They had decided for simplicity’s sake to do the prisoner transfer to Stockholm by car. Waring drove. At the start of the journey Hans Faste sat in the front passenger seat with his head turned towards the back as he tried to have some exchange with Salander. By the time they reached Alingsas his neck was aching and he gave up.
Salander looked at the countryside. In her mind Faste did not exist.
Every so often he glanced at Salander and tried to form an opinion of the woman he had been desperate to track down for such a long time. Even he had some doubts when he saw the skinny girl. He wondered how much she could weigh. He reminded himself that she was a lesbian and consequently not a real woman.
But it was possible that the bit about Satanism was an exaggeration. She did not look the type.
The irony was that he would have preferred to arrest her for the three murders that she was originally suspected of, but reality had caught up with his investigation. Even a skinny girl can handle a weapon. Instead she had been taken in for assaulting the top leadership of Svavelsjo M.C., and she was guilty of that crime, no question. There was forensic evidence related to the incident which she no doubt intended to refute.
Figuerola woke Blomkvist at 1.00 in the afternoon. She had been sitting on her balcony and had finished reading her book about the idea of God in antiquity, listening all the while to Blomkvist’s snores from the bedroom. It had been peaceful. When she went in to look at him it came to her, acutely, that she was more attracted to him than she had been to any other man in years.
It was a pleasant yet unsettling feeling. There he was, but he was not a stable element in her life.
They went down to Norr Malarstrand for a coffee. Then she took him home and to bed for the rest of the afternoon. He left her at 7.00. She felt a vague sense of loss a moment after he kissed her cheek and was gone.
At 8.00 on Sunday evening Linder knocked on Berger’s door. She would not be sleeping there now that Beckman was home, and this visit was not connected with her job. But during the time she had spent at Berger’s house they had both grown to enjoy the long conversations they had in the kitchen. She had discovered a great liking for Berger. She recognized in her a desperate woman who succeeded in concealing her true nature. She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.
Linder suspected that her anxiety was due not solely to Poison Pen. But Berger’s life and problems were none of her business. It was a friendly visit. She had come out here just to see Berger and to be sure that everything was alright. The couple were in the kitchen in a solemn mood. It seemed as though they had spent their Sunday working their way through one or two serious issues.
Beckman put on some coffee. Linder had been there only a few minutes when Berger’s mobile rang.
Berger had answered every call that day with a feeling of impending doom.
“Berger,” she said.
“Hello, Ricky.”
“Hi, Micke.”
“Salander was moved to the prison in Goteborg this evening, to wait for transport to Stockholm tomorrow.”
“O.K.”
“She sent you a… well, a message.”
