The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle

by Stieg Larsson

  Salander stopped Bland and grabbed his collar. She pulled his head to her mouth and yelled in his ear.

  “We found her on the beach. We didn’t see the husband. Understood?”

  He nodded.

  They carried Geraldine Forbes down the cellar stairs and Salander kicked at the door. McBain opened it and stared at them. Then he pulled them in and shut the door again.

  The noise from the storm dropped in a second from an intolerable roar to a creaking and rumbling in the background. Salander took a deep breath.

  Ella poured hot coffee into a mug. Salander was so shattered she could scarcely raise her arm to take it. She sat passively on the floor, leaning against the wall. Someone had wrapped blankets around both her and the boy. She was soaked through and bleeding badly from a gash below her kneecap. There was a rip about four inches long in her jeans and she had no memory of it happening. She watched numbly as McBain and two hotel guests worked on Geraldine Forbes, wrapping bandages around her head. She caught words here and there and understood that someone in the group was a doctor. She noticed that the cellar was packed and that the hotel guests had been joined by people from outside who had come looking for shelter.

  After a while McBain came over to Salander and squatted down.

  “She’ll live.”

  Salander said nothing.

  “What happened?”

  “We found her beyond the wall on the beach.”

  “I was missing three people when I counted the guests down here in the cellar. You and the Forbes couple. Ella said that you ran off like a crazy person just as the storm got here.”

  “I went to get my friend George.” Salander nodded at Bland. “He lives down the road in a shack that can’t possibly still be standing.”

  “That was very brave but awfully stupid,” McBain said, glancing at Bland. “Did either of you two see the husband?”

  “No,” Salander said with a neutral expression. Bland glanced at her and shook his head.

  Ella tilted her head and gave Salander a sharp look. Salander looked back at her with expressionless eyes.

  Geraldine Forbes came to at around 3:00 a.m. By that time Salander had fallen asleep with her head on Bland’s shoulder.

  In some miraculous way, Grenada survived the night. McBain allowed the guests out of the cellar, and when dawn broke the storm had died away, replaced by the most torrential rain Salander had ever seen.

  The Keys Hotel would be needing a major overhaul. The devastation at the hotel, and all along the coast, was extensive. Ella’s bar beside the pool was gone altogether, and one veranda had been demolished. Windows had peeled off along the facade, and the roof of a projecting section of the hotel had bent in two. The lobby was a chaos of debris.

  Salander took Bland with her and staggered up to her room. She hung a blanket over the empty window frame to keep out the rain. Bland met her gaze.

  “There’ll be less to explain if we didn’t see her husband,” Salander said before he could ask any questions.

  He nodded. She pulled off her clothes, dropped them on the floor, and patted the edge of the bed next to her. He nodded again and undressed and crawled in beside her. They were asleep almost at once.

  When she awoke at midday, the sun was shining through cracks in the clouds. Every muscle in her body ached, and her knee was so swollen that she could hardly bend it. She slipped out of bed and got into the shower. The green lizard was back on the wall. She put on shorts and a top and stumbled out of the room without waking Bland.

  Ella was still on her feet. She looked dog-tired, but she had gotten the bar in the lobby up and running. Salander ordered coffee and a sandwich. Through the blown-out windows by the entrance she saw a police car. Just as her coffee arrived, McBain came out of his office by the front desk, followed by a uniformed policeman. McBain caught sight of her and said something to the policeman before they came over to Salander’s table.

  “This is Constable Ferguson. He’d like to ask you some questions.”

  Salander greeted him politely. Constable Ferguson had obviously had a long night, too. He took out a notebook and pen and wrote down Salander’s name.

  “Ms. Salander, I understand that you and a friend discovered Mrs. Richard Forbes during the hurricane last night.”

  Salander nodded.

  “Where did you find her?”

  “On the beach just below the gate,” Salander said. “We almost tripped over her.”

  Ferguson wrote that down.

  “Did she say anything?”

  Salander shook her head.

  “She was unconscious?”

  Salander nodded sensibly.

  “She had a nasty wound on her head.”

  Salander nodded again.

  “You don’t know how she was injured?”

  Salander shook her head. Ferguson muttered in irritation at her lack of response.

  “There was a lot of stuff flying through the air,” she said helpfully. “I was almost hit in the head by a plank.”

  “You injured your leg?” Ferguson pointed at her bandage. “What happened?”

  “I didn’t notice it until I got down to the cellar.”

  “You were with a young man.”

  “George Bland.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “In a shack behind the Coconut, on the road to the airport. If the shack is still standing, that is.”

  Salander did not add that Bland was at that moment asleep in her bed three floors above them.

  “Did either of you see her husband, Richard Forbes?”

  Salander shook her head.

  Constable Ferguson could not, it seemed, think of any other questions to ask, and he closed his notebook.

  “Thank you, Ms. Salander. I’ll have to write up a report on the death.”

  “Did she die?”

  “Mrs. Forbes? No, she’s in hospital in St. George’s. Apparently she has you and your friend to thank for the fact that she’s alive. But her husband is dead. His body was found in a parking lot at the airport two hours ago.”

  Six hundred yards further south.

  “He was pretty badly knocked about,” Ferguson said.

  “How unfortunate,” Salander said without any great sign of shock.

  When McBain and Constable Ferguson had gone, Ella came and sat at Salander’s table. She set down two shot glasses of rum. Salander gave her a quizzical look.

  “After a night like that you need something to rebuild your strength. I’m buying. I’m buying the whole breakfast.”

  The two women looked at each other. Then they clinked glasses and said, “Cheers.”

  For a long time to come, Matilda would be the object of scientific studies and discussions at meteorological institutes in the Caribbean and across the United States. Tornadoes of Matilda’s scale were almost unknown in the region. Gradually the experts agreed that a particularly rare constellation of weather fronts had combined to create a “pseudo-tornado”—something that was not actually a tornado but looked like one.

  Salander did not care about the theoretical discussion. She knew what she had seen, and she decided to try to avoid getting in the way of any of Matilda’s siblings in the future.

  Many people on the island had been injured during the night. Only one person died.

  No-one would ever know what had induced Richard Forbes to go out in the midst of a full-fledged hurricane, save possibly that sheer ignorance which seemed common to American tourists. Geraldine Forbes was not able to offer any explanation. She had suffered a severe concussion and had only incoherent memories of the events of that night.

  On the other hand, she was inconsolable to have been left a widow.

  PART 2

  From Russia with Love

  JANUARY 10–MARCH 23

  An equation commonly contains one or more so-called unknowns, often represented by x, y, z, etc. Values given to the unknowns which yield equality between both sides of the equation are said to satisfy t
he equation and constitute a solution.

  Example: 3x + 4 = 6x − 2 (x = 2)

  CHAPTER 4

  Monday, January 10–Tuesday, January 11

  Salander landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport at noon. In addition to the flying time, she had spent nine hours at Grantley Adams Airport on Barbados. British Airways had refused to let the aircraft take off until a passenger who looked vaguely Arabic had been taken away for questioning and a possible terrorist threat had been snuffed out. By the time she landed at Gatwick in London, she had missed her connecting flight to Sweden and had had to wait overnight before she could be rebooked.

  Salander felt like a bag of bananas that had been left too long in the sun. All she had with her was a carry-on bag containing her PowerBook, Dimensions, and a change of clothes. She passed unchecked through the green gate at Customs. When she got outside to the airport shuttle buses she was welcomed home by a blast of freezing sleet.

  She hesitated. All her life she had had to choose the cheapest option, and she was not yet used to the idea that she had more than three billion kronor, which she had stolen by means of an Internet coup combined with good old-fashioned fraud. After a few moments of getting cold and wet, she said to hell with the rule book and waved for a taxi. She gave the driver her address on Lundagatan and fell asleep in the backseat.

  It was not until the taxi drew up on Lundagatan and the driver shook her awake that she realized she had given him her old address. She told him she had changed her mind and asked him to continue on to Götgatsbacken. She gave him a big tip in dollars and swore as she stepped into a puddle in the gutter. She was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a thin cloth jacket. She wore sandals and short cotton socks. She walked gingerly over to the 7-Eleven, where she bought some shampoo, toothpaste, soap, kefir, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, frozen cinnamon rolls, coffee, Lipton’s tea bags, a jar of pickles, apples, a large package of Billy’s Pan Pizza, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. She paid with a Visa card.

  When she came back out on the street she hesitated about which way to go. She could walk up Svartensgatan or down Hökens Gata towards Slussen. The drawback with Hökens Gata was that then she would have to walk right past the door of the Millennium offices, running the risk of bumping into Blomkvist. In the end she decided not to go out of her way to avoid him. She walked towards Slussen, although it was a bit longer that way, and turned off to the right by way of Hökens Gata up to Mosebacke Torg. She cut across the square past the statue of the Sisters in front of Södra Theatre and took the steps up the hill to Fiskargatan. She stopped and looked up at the apartment building pensively. It did not really feel like “home.”

  She looked around. It was an out-of-the-way spot in the middle of Södermalm Island. There was no through traffic, which was fine with her. It was easy to observe who was moving about the area. It was apparently popular with walkers in the summertime, but in the winter the only ones there were those who had business in the neighbourhood. There was hardly a soul to be seen now—certainly not anyone she recognized, or who might reasonably be expected to recognize her. Salander set down her shopping bag in the slush to dig out her keys. She took the elevator to the top floor and unlocked the door with the nameplate V. KULLA.

  One of the first things Salander had done after she came into a very large sum of money and thereby became financially independent for the rest of her life (or for as long as three billion kronor could be expected to last) was to look around for an apartment. The property market had been a new experience for her. She had never before invested money in anything more substantial than occasional useful items which she could either pay for with cash or buy on a reasonable payment plan. The biggest outlays had previously been various computers and her lightweight Kawasaki motorcycle. She had bought the bike for 7,000 kronor—a real bargain. She had spent about as much on spare parts and devoted several months to taking the motorcycle apart and overhauling it. She had wanted a car, but she had been wary of buying one, since she did not know how she would have fit it into her budget.

  Buying an apartment, she realized, was a deal of a different order. She had started by reading the classified ads in the online edition of Dagens Nyheter, which was a science all to itself, she discovered:

  1 bdrm + living/dining, fantastic loc. nr Södra Station, 2.7m kr or highest bid. S/ch 5510 p/m.

  3 rms + kitchen, park view, Högalid, 2.9m kr.

  2? rms, 47 sq. m., renov. bath, new plumbing 1998. Gotlandsgat. 1.8m kr. S/ch 2200 p/m.

  She had telephoned some of the numbers haphazardly, but she had no idea what questions to ask. Soon she felt so idiotic that she stopped even trying. Instead she went out on the first Sunday in January and visited two apartment open houses. One was on Vindragarvägen way out on Reimersholme, and the other on Heleneborgsgatan near Hornstull. The apartment on Reimers was a bright four-room place in a tower block with a view of Långholmen and Essingen. There she could be content. The apartment on Heleneborgsgatan was a dump with a view of the building next door.

  The problem was that she could not decide which part of town she wanted to live in, how her apartment should look, or what sort of questions she should be asking of her new home. She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square feet on Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted possession of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.

  The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable facade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.

  The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.

  She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbours higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have to have a balcony.

  What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She had liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was a third point on her list of requirements.

  For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was a 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.

  Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.

  Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:

  “Well, young lady, do your parents know that you’re thinking of moving away from home?”

  Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.

  “I want an apartme
nt,” she said.

  He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.

  “I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?”

  “I think I’d like an apartment in Söder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle.”

  The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.

  “A motorcycle?” the thin-haired man said.

  Salander nodded.

  “May I know … uh, your name?”

  Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim Persson.

  “The thing is, it’s rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in Stockholm …”

  Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer; the information that it cost money was irrelevant.

  “What line of work are you in?”

  Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.

  “I’m not working at anything at the moment,” she said.

  “Well then … I presume you’re still at school.”

  “No, I’m not at school.”

  Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander’s shoulders, escorting her towards the door.

  “Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we’d be happy to welcome you back in a few years’ time, but you’d have to bring along a little more money than what’s in your piggy bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won’t really cover this.” He pinched her good-naturedly on the cheek. “So drop in again, and we’ll see about finding you a little pad.”

  Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted up her PowerBook.