The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

“So the rumours might be true after all.”

Blomkvist smiled.

Eriksson worked at her kitchen table at home in Arsta until the small hours. She sat bent over spreadsheets of Millennium’s budget and was so engrossed that Anton, her boyfriend, eventually gave up trying to have a conversation with her. He washed the dishes, made a late snack, and put on some coffee. Then he left her in peace and sat down to watch a repeat of C.S.I.

Malin had never before had to cope with anything more complex than a household budget, but she had worked alongside Berger balancing the monthly books, and she understood the principles. Now she was suddenly editor-in-chief, and with that role came responsibility for the budget. Sometime after midnight she decided that, whatever happened, she was going to have to get an accountant to help her. Ingela Oscarsson, who did the bookkeeping one day a week, had no responsibility for the budget and was not at all helpful when it came to making decisions about how much a freelancer should be paid or whether they could afford to buy a new laser printer that was not already included in the sum earmarked for capital investments or I.T. upgrades. In practice it was a ridiculous situation – Millennium was making a profit, but that was because Berger had always managed to balance an extremely tight budget. Instead of investing in something as fundamental as a new colour laser printer for 45,000 kronor, they would have to settle for a black-and-white printer for 8,000 instead.

For a moment she envied Berger. At S.M.P. she had a budget in which such a cost would be considered pin money.

Millennium’s financial situation had been healthy at the last annual general meeting, but the surplus in the budget was primarily made up of the profits from Blomkvist’s book about the Wennerstrom affair. The revenue that had been set aside for investment was shrinking alarmingly fast. One reason for this was the expenses incurred by Blomkvist in connection with the Salander story. Millennium did not have the resources to keep any employee on an open-ended budget with all sorts of expenses in the form of rental cars, hotel rooms, taxis, purchase of research material, new mobile telephones and the like.

Eriksson signed an invoice from Daniel Olsson in Goteborg. She sighed. Blomkvist had approved a sum of 14,000 kronor for a week’s research on a story that was not now going to be published. Payment to an Idris Ghidi went into the budget under fees to sources who could not be named, which meant that the accountant would remonstrate about the lack of an invoice or receipt and insist that the matter have the board’s approval. Millennium had paid a fee to Advokat Giannini which was supposed to come out of the general fund, but she had also invoiced Millennium for train tickets and other costs.

She put down her pen and looked at the totals. Blomkvist had blown 150,000 kronor on the Salander story, way beyond their budget. Things could not go on this way.

She was going to have to have a talk with him.

Berger spent the evening not on her sofa watching T.V., but in A.&E. at Nacka hospital. The shard of glass had penetrated so deeply that the bleeding would not stop. It turned out that one piece had broken off and was still in her heel, and would have to be removed. She was given a local anaesthetic and afterwards the wound was sewn up with three stitches.

Berger cursed the whole time she was at the hospital, and she kept trying to call her husband or Blomkvist. Neither chose to answer the telephone. By 10.00 she had her foot wrapped in a thick bandage. She was given crutches and took a taxi home.

She spent a while limping around the living room, sweeping up the floor. She called Emergency Glass to order a new window. She was in luck. It had been a quiet evening and they arrived within twenty minutes. But the living-room window was so big that they did not have the glass in stock. The glazier offered to board up the window with plywood for the time being, and she accepted gratefully.

As the plywood was being put up, she called the duty officer at Nacka Integrated Protection, and asked why the hell their expensive burglar alarm had not gone off when someone threw a brick through her biggest window.

Someone from N.I.P. came out to look at the damage. It turned out that whoever had installed the alarm several years before had neglected to connect the leads from the windows in the living room.

Berger was furious.

The man from N.I.P. said they would fix it first thing in the morning. Berger told him not to bother. Instead she called the duty officer at Milton Security and explained her situation. She said that she wanted to have a complete alarm package installed the next morning. I know I have to sign a contract, but tell Armansky that Erika Berger called and make damn sure someone comes round in the morning.

Then, finally, she called the police. She was told that there was no car available to come and take her statement. She was advised to contact her local station in the morning. Thank you. Fuck off.

Then she sat and fumed for a long time until her adrenaline level dropped and it began to sink in that she was going to have to sleep alone in a house without an alarm while somebody was running around the neighbourhood calling her a whore and smashing her windows.

She wondered whether she ought to go into the city to spend the night at a hotel, but Berger was not the kind of person who liked to be threatened. And she liked giving in to threats even less.

But she did take some elementary safety precautions.

Blomkvist had told her once how Salander had put paid to the serial killer Martin Vanger with a golf club. So she went to the garage and spent several minutes looking for her golf bag, which she had hardly even thought about for fifteen years. She chose an iron that she thought had a certain heft to it and laid it within easy reach of her bed. She left a putter in the hall and an 8-iron in the kitchen. She took a hammer from the tool box in the basement and put that in the master bathroom too.

She put the canister of Mace from her shoulder bag on her bedside table. Finally she found a rubber doorstop and wedged it under the bedroom door. And then she almost hoped that the moron who had called her a whore and destroyed her window would be stupid enough to come back that night.

By the time she felt sufficiently entrenched it was 1.00. She had to be at S.M.P. at 8.00. She checked her diary and saw that she had four meetings, the first at 10.00. Her foot was aching badly. She undressed and crept into bed.

Then, inevitably, she lay awake and worried.

Whore.

She had received nine emails, all of which had contained the word “whore,” and they all seemed to come from sources in the media. The first had come from her own newsroom, but the source was a fake.

She got out of bed and took out the new Dell laptop that she had been given when she had started at S.M.P.

The first email – which was also the most crude and intimidating with its suggestion that she would be fucked with a screwdriver – had come on May 16, a couple of weeks ago.

Email number two had arrived two days later, on May 18.

Then a week went by before the emails started coming again, now at intervals of about twenty-four hours. Then the attack on her home. Again, whore.

During that time Carlsson on the culture pages had received an ugly email purportedly sent by Berger. And if Carlsson had received an email like that, it was entirely possible that the emailer had been busy elsewhere too – that other people had got mail apparently from her that she did not know about.

It was an unpleasant thought.

The most disturbing was the attack on her house.

Someone had taken the trouble to find out where she lived, drive out here, and throw a brick through the window. It was obviously premeditated – the attacker had brought his can of spray paint. The next moment she froze when she realized that she could add another attack to the list. All four of her tyres had been slashed when she spent the night with Blomkvist at the Slussen Hilton.

The conclusion was just as unpleasant as it was obvious. She was being stalked.