The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

had helped Bjorck on his way.

“He was under a lot of pressure,” Bublanski said. “He knew that the whole Zalachenko affair was in danger of being exposed and that he risked a prison sentence for sex-trade crimes, plus being hung out to dry in the media. I wonder which scared him more. He was sick, had been suffering chronic pain for a long time… I don’t know. I wish he had left a letter.”

“Many suicides don’t.”

“I know. O.K. We’ll put Bjorck to one side for now. We have no choice.”

Berger could not bring herself to sit at Morander’s desk right away, or to move his belongings aside. She arranged for Magnusson to talk to Morander’s family so that the widow could come herself when it was convenient, or send someone to sort out his things.

Instead she had an area cleared off the central desk in the heart of the newsroom, and there she set up her laptop and took command. It was chaotic. But three hours after she had taken the helm of S.M.P. in such appalling circumstances, the front page went to press. Magnusson had put together a four-column article about Morander’s life and career. The page was designed around a black- bordered portrait, almost all of it above the fold, with his unfinished editorial to the left and a frieze of photographs along the bottom edge. The layout was not perfect, but it had a strong moral and emotional impact.

Just before 6.00, as Berger was going through the headlines on page two and discussing the texts with the head of revisions, Borgsjo approached and touched her shoulder. She looked up.

“Could I have a word?”

They went together to the coffee machine in the canteen.

“I just wanted to say that I’m really very pleased with the way you took control today. I think you surprised us all.”

“I didn’t have much choice. But I may stumble a bit before I really get going.”

“We understand that.”

“We?”

“I mean the staff and the board. The board especially. But after what happened today I’m more than ever persuaded that you were the ideal choice. You came here in the nick of time, and you took charge in a very difficult situation.”

Berger almost blushed. But she had not done that since she was fourteen.

“Could I give you a piece of advice?”

“Of course.”

“I heard that you had a disagreement about a headline with Anders Holm.”

“We didn’t agree on the angle in the article about the government’s tax proposal. He inserted an opinion into the headline in the news section, which is supposed to be neutral. Opinions should be reserved for the editorial page. And while I’m on this topic… I’ll be writing editorials from time to time, but as I told you I’m not active in any political party, so we have to solve the problem of who’s going to be in charge of the editorial section.”

“Magnusson can take over for the time being,” said Borgsjo.

Erika shrugged. “It makes no difference to me who you appoint. But it should be somebody who clearly stands for the newspaper’s views. That’s where they should be aired… not in the news section.”

“Quite right. What I wanted to say was that you’ll probably have to give Holm some concessions. He’s worked at S.M.P. a long time and he’s been news chief for fifteen years. He knows what he’s doing. He can be surly sometimes, but he’s irreplaceable.”

“I know. Morander told me. But when it comes to policy he’s going to have to toe the line. I’m the one you hired to run the paper.”

Borgsjo thought for a moment and said: “We’re going to have to solve these problems as they come up.”

Giannini was both tired and irritated on Wednesday evening as she boarded the X2000 at Goteborg Central Station. She felt as if she had been living on the X2000 for a month. She bought a coffee in the restaurant car, went to her seat, and opened the folder of notes from her last conversation with Salander. Who was also the reason why she was feeling tired and irritated.

She’s hiding something. That little fool is not telling me the truth. And Micke is hiding something too. God knows what they’re playing at.

She also decided that since her brother and her client had not so far communicated with each other, the conspiracy – if it was one – had to be a tacit agreement that had developed naturally. She did not understand what it was about, but it had to be something that her brother considered important enough to conceal.

She was afraid that it was a moral issue, and that was one of his weaknesses. He was Salander’s friend. She knew her brother. She knew that he was loyal to the point of foolhardiness once he had made someone a friend, even if the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also knew that he could accept any number of idiocies from his friends, but that there was a boundary and it could not be infringed. Where exactly this boundary was seemed to vary from one person to another, but she knew he had broken completely with people who had previously been close friends because they had done something that he regarded as beyond the pale. And he was inflexible. The break was for ever.

Giannini understood what went on in her brother’s head. But she had no idea what Salander was up to. Sometimes she thought that there was nothing going on in there at all.

She had gathered that Salander could be moody and withdrawn. Until she met her in person, Giannini had supposed it must be some phase, and that it was a question of gaining her trust. But after a month of conversations – ignoring the fact that the first two weeks had been wasted time because Salander was hardly able to speak – their communication was still distinctly one-sided.

Salander seemed at times to be in a deep depression and had not the slightest interest in dealing with her situation or her future. She simply did not grasp or did not care that the only way Giannini could provide her with an effective defence would be if she had access to all the facts. There was no way in the world she was going to be able to work in the dark.

Salander was sulky and often just silent. When she did say something, she took a long time to think and she chose her words carefully. Often she did not reply at all, and sometimes she would answer a question that Giannini had asked several days earlier. During the police interviews, Salander had sat in utter silence, staring straight ahead. With rare exceptions, she had refused to say a single word to the police. The exceptions were on those occasions when Inspector Erlander had asked her what she knew about Niedermann. Then she looked up at him and answered every question in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. As soon as he changed the subject, she lost interest.

On principle, she knew, Salander never talked to the authorities. In this case, that was an advantage. Despite the fact that she kept urging her client to answer questions from the police, deep inside she was pleased with Salander’s silence. The reason was simple. It was a consistent silence. It contained no lies that could entangle her, no contradictory reasoning that would look bad in court.

But she was astonished at how imperturbable Salander was. When they were alone she had asked her why she so provocatively refused to talk to the police.

“They’ll twist what I say and use it against me.”

“But if you don’t explain yourself, you risk being convicted anyway.”

“Then that’s how it’ll have to be. I didn’t make all this mess. And if they want to convict me, it’s not my problem.”

Salander had in the end described to her lawyer almost everything that had happened at Stallarholmen. All except for one thing. She would not explain how Magge Lundin had ended up with a bullet in his foot. No matter how much she asked and nagged, Salander would just stare at her and smile her crooked smile.

She had also told Giannini what happened in Gosseberga. But she had not said anything about why she had run her father to ground. Did she go there expressly to murder him – as the prosecutor claimed – or was it to make him listen to reason?

When Giannini raised the subject of her former guardian, Nils Bjurman, Salander said only that she was not