Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the Right to Free Speech (R.F.S.). This guarantees the inalienable right to say aloud, think and believe anything whatsoever. This right embraces all Swedish citizens, from the crazy neo-Nazi living in the woods to the rock-throwing anarchist – and everyone in between.
Every other basic right, such as the Formation of Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On this law democracy stands or falls.
All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the R.F.S. are set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (F.P.). This defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to publish child pornography and the depiction of certain violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or exhort someone to crime. It is forbidden to defame or slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the persecution of an ethnic group.
Press freedom has also been enshrined by parliament and is based on the socially and democratically acceptable restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of the legislation has it that no person has the right to harass or humiliate another person.
Since R.F.S. and F. P. are laws, some sort of authority is needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.
The first is the office of the Prosecutor General, assigned to prosecute crimes against F. P. This did not please Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the Prosecutor General was too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view, direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The Prosecutor General usually replied that the principle of democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This attitude, however, had come under question more and more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hardh, the general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, had submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor General’s want of initiative over a number of years. The report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and convict anyone under the law of persecution against an ethnic group.
The second institution was the Security Police division for Constitutional Protection, and Superintendent Edklinth took on this responsibility with the utmost seriousness. He thought that it was the most important post a Swedish policeman could hold, and he would not exchange his appointment for any other position in the entire Swedish legal system or police force. He was the only policeman in Sweden whose official job description was to function as a political police officer. It was a delicate task requiring great wisdom and judicial restraint, since experience from far too many countries has shown that a political police department could easily transform itself into the principal threat to democracy.
The media and the public assumed for the most part that the main function of the Constitutional Protection Unit was to keep track of Nazis and militant vegans. These types of group did attract interest from the Constitutional Protection Unit, but a great many institutions and phenomena also fell within the bailiwick of the division. If the king, for example, or the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took it into their hearts that parliamentary government had outlived its role and that parliament should be replaced by a dictatorship, the king or the commander-in-chief would very swiftly come under observation by the Constitutional Protection Unit. Or, to give a second example, if a group of police officers decided to stretch the laws so that an individual’s constitutionally guaranteed rights were infringed, then it was the Constitutional Protection Unit’s duty to react. In such serious instances the investigation was also assumed to come under the authority of the Prosecutor General.
The problem, of course, was that the Constitutional Protection Unit had only an analytical and investigative function, and no operations arm. That was why it was generally either the regular police or other divisions within the Security Police who stepped in when Nazis were to be arrested.
In Edklinth’s opinion, this state of affairs was deeply unsatisfactory. Almost every democratic country maintains an independent constitutional court in some form, with a mandate to see to it that authorities do not ride roughshod over the democratic process. In Sweden the task is that of the Prosecutor General or the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who, however, can only pursue recommendations forwarded to them by other departments. If Sweden had a constitutional court, then Salander’s lawyer could instantly charge the Swedish government with violation of her constitutional rights. The court could then order all the documents on the table and summon anyone it pleased, including the Prime Minister, to testify until the matter was resolved. As the situation now stood, the most her lawyer could do was to file a report with the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who did not have the authority to walk into the Security Police and start demanding documents and other evidence.
Over the years Edklinth had been an impassioned advocate of the establishment of a constitutional court. He could then more easily have acted upon the information he had been given by Armansky: by initiating a police report and handing the documentation to the court. With that an inexorable process would have been set in motion.
As things stood, Edklinth lacked the legal authority to initiate a preliminary investigation.
He took a pinch of snuff.
If Armansky’s information was correct, Security Police officers in senior positions had looked the other way when a series of savage assaults were committed against a Swedish woman. Then her daughter was locked up in a mental hospital on the basis of a fabricated diagnosis. Finally, they had given
It was a mess, and Edklinth did not welcome the necessity to get mixed up in it. Unfortunately, from the moment Armansky invited him to dinner, he had become involved.
How now to handle the situation? Technically, that answer was simple. If Armansky’s account was true, Lisbeth Salander had at the very least been deprived of the opportunity
Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name, was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth century. She was a woman who people usually paid attention to, and for several reasons. She was thirty-six, blue eyed, and one metre eighty-four tall. She had short, light-blonde, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And she was exceptionally fit.
She had been an outstanding gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics, but she still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it tough for her if she had to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.
Her intelligence, too, intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top marks, studied to become a police officer at twenty, and then served for nine years in Uppsala police and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.
When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the Violent Crime Division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter- Espionage, but was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know Figuerola’s father and had followed her career over the years.
When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on Armansky’s information, he called Figuerola into
