It was pitch-black inside the room and smelled musty. She ran her hand along the wall and found a switch that lit a bare bulb in the ceiling. Salander looked around in astonishment.
The furniture in the room consisted of three beds with soiled mattresses and another three mattresses on the floor. Filthy bed linen was strewn around. To the right was a two-ring electric stove and some pots next to a rusty water tap. In a corner stood a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper.
Somebody had lived here. Several people.
Then she saw that there was no handle on the inside of the door. She felt an ice-cold shiver run down her back.
There was a large linen cupboard at the far end of the room. She opened it and found two suitcases. Inside the one on top were some clothes. She rummaged through them and held up a dress with a Russian label. She found a handbag and emptied the contents on the floor. From among the cosmetics and other bits and pieces she retrieved a passport belonging to a young, dark-haired woman. It was a Russian passport, and she sounded out the name as Valentina.
Salander walked slowly from the room. She had a feeling of déjà vu. She had done the same kind of crime scene examination in a basement in Hedeby two and a half years earlier. Women’s clothes. A prison. She stood there for a long time, thinking. It bothered her that the passport and clothes had been left behind. It did not feel right.
Then she went back to the assortment of tools and rummaged about until she found a powerful flashlight. She checked that there was life in the batteries and went downstairs into the larger workshop. The water from the puddles on the floor seeped into her boots.
The nauseating stench of rotting matter grew stronger the farther into the workshop she went; it seemed to be worst when she was in the middle of the room. She stopped next to the foundation of one of the old brick furnaces, which was filled with water almost to the brim. She shone her flashlight onto the coal-black surface of the water but could not make anything out. The surface was partly covered by algae that had formed a green slime. Nearby she found a long steel rod, which she stuck into the pool and stirred around. The water was only about twenty inches deep. Almost immediately the rod bumped into something. She manipulated it this way and that for several seconds before a body rose to the surface, face first, a grinning mask of death and decomposition. Breathing through her mouth, Salander looked at the face in the beam of the flashlight and saw that it was a woman, possibly the woman from the passport photograph. She knew nothing about the speed of decay in cold, stagnant water, but the body seemed to have been in the pool for a long time.
There was something moving on the surface of the water. Larvae of some sort.
She let the body sink back beneath the surface and poked around more with the rod. At the edge of the pool she came across something that might have been another body. She left it there and pulled out the rod, letting it fall to the floor as she stood thinking next to the pool.
Salander went back up the stairs. She used the crowbar to break open the middle door. The room was empty.
She went to the last door and slotted the crowbar in place, but before she began to force it, the door swung open a crack. It was not locked. She nudged it open with the crowbar and looked around.
The room was about a hundred feet square. It had windows at a normal height with a view of the yard in front of the brickworks. She could see the gas station on the hill. There was a bed, a table, and a sink with dishes. Then she saw a bag lying open on the floor. There were banknotes in it. Surprised, she took two steps forward before she noticed that the room was warm and saw an electric heater in the middle of the room. Then she saw that the red light was on on the coffee machine.
Someone was living here. She was not alone in the building.
She spun around and ran through the inner room, out the doors, and towards the exit in the outer workshop. She stopped five steps short of the stairwell when she saw that the exit had been closed and padlocked. She was locked in. Slowly she turned and looked around, but there was no-one.
“Hello, little sister,” came a cheerful voice from somewhere to her right.
She turned to see Niedermann’s vast form materialize from behind some packing crates.
In his hand was a large knife.
“I was hoping I’d have a chance to see you again,” Niedermann said. “Everything happened so fast the last time.”
Salander looked around.
“Don’t bother,” Niedermann said. “It’s just you and me, and there’s no way out except through the locked door behind you.”
Salander turned her eyes to her half-brother.
“How’s the hand?” she said.
Niedermann was smiling at her. He raised his right hand and showed her. His little finger was missing.
“It got infected. I had to chop it off.”
Niedermann could not feel pain. Salander had sliced his hand open with a spade at Gosseberga only seconds before Zalachenko had shot her in the head.
“I should have aimed for your skull,” Salander said in a neutral tone. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you’d left the country months ago.”
He smiled at her again.
If Niedermann had tried to answer Salander’s question as to what he was doing in the dilapidated brickworks, he probably would not have been able to explain. He could not explain it to himself.
He had left Gosseberga with a feeling of liberation. He was counting on the fact that Zalachenko was dead and that he would take over the business. He knew he was an excellent organizer.
He had changed cars in Alingsås, put the terror-stricken dental hygienist, Anita Kaspersson, in the trunk, and driven towards Borås. He had no plan. He improvised as he went. He had not reflected on Kaspersson’s fate. It made no difference to him whether she lived or died, and he assumed that he would be forced to do away with a bothersome witness. Somewhere on the outskirts of Borås it came to him that he could use her in a different way. He turned south and found a desolate forest outside Seglora. He tied her up in a barn and left her there. He reckoned that she would be able to work her way loose within a few hours and then lead the police south in their hunt for him. And if she did not manage to free herself, and starved or froze to death in the barn, it did not matter; it was no concern of his.
Then he drove back to Borås and from there east towards Stockholm. He had driven straight to Svavelsjö, but he avoided the clubhouse itself. It was a drag that Lundin was in prison. He went instead to the home of the club’s sergeant-at-arms, Hans-Åke Waltari. He said he was looking for a place to hide, which Waltari sorted out by sending him to Göransson, the club’s treasurer. But he had stayed there only a few hours.
Niedermann had, theoretically, no money worries. He had left behind almost 200,000 kronor in Gosseberga, but he had access to considerably larger sums that had been deposited abroad. His problem was that he was short of actual cash. Göransson was responsible for Svavelsjö MC’s finances, and it had not been difficult for Niedermann to persuade him to take him to the cabinet in the barn where the cash was kept. Niedermann was in luck. He had been able to help himself to 800,000 kronor.
He seemed to remember that there had been a woman in the house too, but he had forgotten what he had done with her.
Göransson had also provided a car that the police were not yet looking for. Niedermann went north. He had a vague plan to make it onto one of the ferries at Kapellskär that would take him to Tallinn.
When he got to Kapellskär he sat in the parking lot for half an hour, studying the area. It was crawling with policemen.
He drove on aimlessly. He needed a place where he could lie low for a while. When he passed Norrtälje he remembered the old brickworks. He had not even thought about the place in more than a year, since the time when repairs had been under way. The brothers Harry and Atho Ranta were using the brickworks as a depot for goods moving to and from the Baltic ports, but they had both been out of the country for several weeks, ever since th
at journalist Svensson had started snooping around the whore trade. The brickworks would be empty.
He had driven Göransson’s Saab into a shed behind the factory and gone inside. He had had to break open a door on the ground floor, and one of the first things he did was to create an emergency exit through a loose plywood board at one end of the ground floor. He later replaced the broken padlock. Then he had made himself at home in a cosy room on the upper floor.
A whole afternoon had passed before he heard the sounds coming through the walls. At first he thought these were his familiar phantoms. He sat alert and listened for almost an hour before he got up and went out to the workshop to listen more closely. At first he heard nothing, but he stood there patiently until he heard more scraping noises.
He found the key next to the sink.
Niedermann had seldom been as amazed as when he opened the door and found the two Russian whores. They were skin and bones. They seemed to have had no food for several weeks and had been living on tea and water since the last packet of rice had run out.
One of the girls was so exhausted that she could not get up from the bed. The other was in better shape. She spoke only Russian, but he knew enough of the language to understand that she was thanking God and him for saving them. She fell on her knees and threw her arms around his legs. He pushed her away, then left the room and locked the door behind him.
He had not known what to do with the whores. He heated up some soup from the cans he found in the kitchen and gave it to them while he thought. The weaker woman on the bed seemed to be getting some of her strength back. He spent the evening questioning them. It was a while before he understood that the two women were not whores at all, but students who had paid the Ranta brothers to get them into Sweden. They had been promised visas and work permits. They had come from Kapellskär in February and were taken straight to the warehouse, and there they were locked up.
Niedermann’s face had darkened with anger. Those bastard Ranta brothers were collecting an income that they had not told Zalachenko about. Then they had completely forgotten about the women, or maybe had knowingly left them to their fate when they fled Sweden in such a hurry.
The question was: what was he supposed to do with them? He had no reason to harm them, and yet he could not really let them go, considering that they would probably lead the police to the brickworks. It was that simple. He could not send them back to Russia, because that would mean he would have to drive them down to Kapellskär. That seemed too difficult. The dark-haired woman, whose name was Valentina, had offered him sex if he helped them. He was not the least bit interested in having sex with the girls, but the offer had turned her into a whore too. All women were whores. It was that simple.
After three days he had tired of their incessant pleading, nagging, and knocking on the wall. He could see no other way out. So he unlocked the door one last time and swiftly solved the problem. He asked Valentina to forgive him before he reached out and in one movement broke her neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Then he went over to the blond girl on the bed whose name he did not know. She lay there passively, did not put up any resistance. He carried the bodies downstairs and put them in one of the flooded pits. At last he could feel some sort of peace.
Niedermann had not intended to stay long at the brickworks. He thought he would have to lie low only until the initial police manhunt had died down. He shaved his head and let his beard grow to half an inch, and that altered his appearance. He found a pair of overalls belonging to one of the workers from NorrBygg which were almost big enough to fit him. He put on a Beckers Paints baseball cap and stuffed a folding ruler into a leg pocket. At dusk he drove to the gas station shop on the hill and bought supplies. He had all the cash he needed from Svavelsjö MC’s piggy bank. He looked like any workman stopping on his way home, and nobody seemed to pay him any attention. He shopped once or twice a week at the same time of day. At the shop they were always perfectly friendly to him.
From the very first day he had spent a considerable amount of time fending off the creatures that inhabited the building. They lived in the walls and came out at night. He could hear them wandering around the workshop.
He barricaded himself in his room. After several days he had had enough. He armed himself with a large knife which he had found in a kitchen drawer and went out to confront the monsters. It had to end.
All of a sudden he discovered that they were retreating. For the first time in his life he had been able to dominate his phantoms. They shrank back when he approached. He could see their deformed bodies and their tails slinking off behind the packing crates and cabinets. He howled at them. They fled.
Relieved, he went back to his room and sat up all night, waiting for them to return. They mounted a renewed attack at dawn and he faced them down once more. They fled.
He was teetering between panic and euphoria.
All his life he had been haunted by these creatures in the dark, and for the very first time he felt that he was in control of the situation. He did nothing. He slept. He ate. He thought. It was peaceful.
The days turned into weeks and spring turned to summer. From his transistor radio and the evening papers he could tell that the hunt for the killer Ronald Niedermann was winding down. He read with interest the reports of the murder of Zalachenko. What a laugh. A psycho put an end to Zalachenko. In July his interest was again aroused when he followed the reports of Salander’s trial. He was appalled when she was acquitted and released. It did not feel right. She was free while he was forced to hide.
He bought the Millennium special issue at the gas station shop and read all about Salander and Zalachenko and Niedermann. A journalist named Blomkvist had described Niedermann as a pathological murderer and a psychopath. He frowned.
Fall came suddenly, and still he had not made a move. When it got colder he bought an electric heater at the shop. He did not know what kept him from leaving the brickworks.
Occasionally some young people drove into the yard and parked there, but no-one had disturbed him or tried to break into the building. In September a car drove up and a man in a blue Windbreaker tried the doors and snooped around the property. Niedermann had watched him from the window on the upper floor. The man kept writing in his notebook. He had stayed for twenty minutes before he looked around one last time and got in his car and drove away. Niedermann breathed a sigh of relief. He had no idea who the man was or what business had brought him there, but he appeared to be doing a survey of the property. It did not occur to Niedermann that Zalachenko’s death had prompted an inventory of his estate.
He thought a lot about Salander. He had never expected to see her again, but she fascinated and frightened him. He was not afraid of any living person. But his sister—his half-sister—had made a particular impression on him. No-one else had ever defeated him the way she had. She had come back to life, even though he had buried her. She had come back and hunted him down. He dreamed about her every night. He would wake up in a cold sweat, and he recognized that she had replaced his usual phantoms.
In October he made a decision. He was not going to leave Sweden before he had found his sister and destroyed her. He did not have a plan, but at least his life now had a purpose. He did not know where she was or how he would trace her. He just sat in his room on the upper floor of the brickworks, staring out the window, day after day, week after week.
Until one day a burgundy Honda parked outside the building and, to his complete astonishment, he saw Salander get out of the car. God is merciful, he thought. Salander would join the two women in the pool downstairs. His wait was over, and he could at last get on with his life.
Salander assessed the situation and saw that it was anything but under control. Her brain was working at high speed. Click, click, click. She still held the crowbar in her hand but she knew that it was a feeble weapon against a man who could not feel pain. She was locked inside an area of about 10,000 square feet with a murderous robot from hell.
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br /> When Niedermann suddenly moved towards her she threw the crowbar at him. He dodged it easily. Salander moved fast. She stepped onto a pallet, swung herself up onto a packing crate and kept climbing, like a monkey, up two more crates. She stopped and looked down at Niedermann, now thirteen feet below her. He was looking up at her and waiting.
“Come down,” he said patiently. “You can’t escape. The end is inevitable.”
She wondered if he had a gun of some sort. Now, that would be a problem.
He bent down and picked up a chair and threw it at her. She ducked.
Niedermann was getting annoyed. He put his foot on the pallet and started climbing up after her. She waited until he was almost at the top before she took a running start of two quick steps and jumped across an aisle to land on top of another crate. She swung down to the floor and grabbed the crowbar.
Niedermann was not actually clumsy, but he knew that he could not risk jumping from the stack of crates and perhaps breaking a bone in his foot. He had to climb down carefully and set his feet on the floor. He always had to move slowly and methodically, and he had spent a lifetime mastering his body. He had almost reached the floor when he heard footsteps behind him and turned just in time to block a blow from the crowbar with his shoulder. He lost his grip on the knife.
Salander dropped the crowbar just as she delivered the blow. She did not have time to pick up the knife, but she kicked it away from him along the pallets, dodging a backhand blow from his huge fist and retreating back up onto the packing crates on the other side of the aisle. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Niedermann reach for her. Quick as lightning she pulled up her feet. The crates stood in two rows, stacked up three high next to the centre aisle and two high along the outside. She swung down onto the two crates and braced herself, using all the strength in her legs and pushing her back against the crate next to her. It must have weighed more than 400 pounds. She felt it begin to move and then tumble down towards the centre aisle.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle Page 176
