if there isn’t anything else…”
Modig hooked up Svensson’s computer and spent the evening cataloguing the contents of his hard drive and the disks. She sat there until 11:00 reading his book.
She came to two realizations. First, that Svensson was a brilliant writer who described the business of the sex trade with compelling objectivity. She wished he could have lectured at the police academy – his knowledge would have been a valuable addition to the curriculum. Faste, for example, could have benefited from Svensson’s insights.
The second realization was that Blomkvist’s theory about Svensson’s research providing a motive for murder was completely valid. Svensson’s planned exposure of prostitutes’ clients would have done more than merely hurt a number of men. It was a brutal revelation. Some of the prominent players, several of whom had handed down verdicts in sex-crime trials or participated in the public debate, would be annihilated.
The problem was that even if a john who risked being exposed had decided to murder Svensson, there was, as yet, no prospect of such a link to Nils Bjurman. He did not feature in Svensson’s material, and that fact not only diminished the strength of Blomkvist’s argument but also reinforced the likelihood of Salander’s being the only possible suspect.
Even if a motive for the murders of Svensson and Johansson was still unclear, Salander had been at the crime scene and her fingerprints were on the murder weapon.
The weapon was also directly linked to the murder of Bjurman. There was a personal connection and a possible motive – the decoration on Bjurman’s abdomen raised the possibility of some form of sexual assault or a sadomasochistic relationship between the two. It was impossible to imagine Bjurman having voluntarily submitted to such a bizarre and painful tattoo. Either he had found pleasure in the humiliation or Salander – if she was the one who had done the tattooing – had first made him powerless. How it had actually happened was not something Modig wanted to speculate about.
On the other hand, Teleborian had confirmed that Salander’s violence was directed at people whom she regarded as a threat or who had offended her.
He had seemed genuinely protective, as if he did not want his former patient to come to any harm. All the same, the investigation had been based largely on his analysis of her – as a sociopath on the border of psychosis.
But Blomkvist’s theory was attractive.
She chewed her lower lip as she tried to visualize some alternative scenario to Salander the killer, working alone. Finally she wrote a line in her notebook.
She had a fleeting thought that she could not quite pin down, but it was something she intended to ask Bublanski at the morning meeting. She could not explain why she suddenly felt so uncomfortable with the theory of Salander as a killer working alone.
Then she called it a night, resolutely shut down her computer, and locked the disks in her desk drawer. She put on her jacket, turned off the desk lamp, and was just about to lock the door to her office when she heard a sound further down the corridor. She frowned. She had thought she was alone in the department. She walked down the corridor to Faste’s office. His door was ajar and she heard him talking on the phone.
“It undeniably links things together,” she heard him say.
She stood undecided for a moment before she took a deep breath and knocked on the doorjamb. Faste looked up in surprise. She waved.
“Modig is still in the building,” Faste said into the phone. He listened and nodded without releasing her from his gaze. “OK, I’ll tell her.” He hung up. “Bubble,” he said in explanation. “What do you want?”
“What is it that links things together?” she asked.
He gave her a searching look. “Were you eavesdropping?”
“No, but your door was open and I heard you say that just as I knocked.”
Faste shrugged. “I called Bubble to tell him that the NFL have finally come up with something useful.”
“What’s that?”
“Svensson had a mobile with a Comviq cash card. They’ve produced a list of calls which confirms the conversation with Mikael Blomkvist at 7:30 p.m. That’s when Blomkvist was at dinner at his sister’s house.”
“Good. But I don’t think Blomkvist has anything to do with the murders.”
“Me neither. But Svensson made another call that night. At 9:34. The call lasted three minutes.”
“And?”
“He called Nils Bjurman’s home phone. In other words, there’s a link between the two murders.”
Modig sank down into Faste’s visitor’s chair.
“Sure. Have a seat, be my guest.”
She ignored him.
“OK. What does the time frame look like? At 7:30 Svensson calls Blomkvist and sets up a meeting for later that evening. At 9:30 Svensson calls Bjurman. Just before closing time at 10:00 Salander buys cigarettes at the corner shop in Enskede. Soon after 11:00 Blomkvist and his sister arrive in Enskede and at 11:11 he calls the police.”
“That seems to be correct, Miss Marple.”
“But it isn’t correct at all. According to the pathologist, Bjurman was shot between 10:00 and 11:00 that night. By which time Salander was in Enskede. We’ve been working on the assumption that Salander shot Bjurman first and then the couple in Enskede.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing. I talked with the pathologist again. We didn’t find Bjurman until the night after, almost twenty-four hours later. The pathologist says that the time of death could be plus or minus an hour.”
“But Bjurman must have been the first victim, since we found the murder weapon in Enskede. That would mean that she shot Bjurman sometime after 9:34 and then drove to Enskede, where she bought her cigarettes. Was there enough time to get from Odenplan to Enskede?”
“Yes, there was. She didn’t take public transportation as we assumed earlier. She had a car. Sonny Bohman and I test-drove the route and we had plenty of time.”
“But then she waits for an hour before she shoots Svensson and Johansson? What was she doing all that time?”
“She had coffee with them. We have her prints on the cup.”
He gave her a triumphant look. Modig sighed and sat silently for a minute.
“Hans, you’re looking at this like it’s some sort of prestige thing. You can be a fucking shithead and you drive people crazy sometimes, but I actually knocked on your door to ask you to forgive me for slapping you. I was out of line.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “Modig, you might think I’m a shithead. But I think you’re unprofessional and don’t have any business being a police officer. At least not at this level.”
Modig weighed various replies, but in the end she just shrugged and stood up.
“Well, now we know where we stand.”
“We know where we stand. And believe me, you’re not going to last long here.”
Modig closed the door behind her harder than she meant to.
Faste smiled contentedly at the closed door.
Blomkvist had just gotten home when his mobile rang.
“Hi. It’s Malin. Can you talk?”
“Sure.”
“Something struck me yesterday.”
“Tell me.”
“I was going through all the clippings we have here on the hunt for Salander, and I found that spread on her time at the psychiatric clinic. What I’m wondering is why there’s such a big gap in her biography.”
“What gap?”
“There’s plenty of stuff about the trouble she was mixed up in at school. Trouble with teachers and
