The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series

by David Lagercrantz

  These days Lulu was one of the highlights in his life, and the only person he had told about Salander and his visit to Flodberga. It had been a nightmare. Just seeing that high prison wall started him trembling. How could they put Salander in a place like that? She had done something fantastic, after all. She had saved a child’s life. Yet she found herself among the worst female offenders in the country. It was plain wrong. And when he saw her in the visitors’ room he was so upset that he had not watched his words as he usually did.

  He asked about her dragon tattoo. He had always wondered about it, and indeed he belonged to a generation that had no understanding of tattooing as an art form. Why embellish yourself with something that never goes away, when we constantly change and evolve?

  Salander’s answer was short and concise, and yet more than enough. He felt touched by it, and kept babbling on nervously and randomly. He must have got her thinking about her childhood, which was idiotic, especially since he himself hardly knew what he was talking about. What was the matter with him? It was not just down to his age and poor judgement. A few weeks earlier he had had an unexpected visit from a woman called Maj-Britt Torell, a bird-like elderly lady who had once been a secretary to Johannes Caldin, the head of St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic in Uppsala, at the time when Salander had been a patient there. Torell had read newspaper articles about Salander and had decided to go through the boxes of case notes she had taken responsibility for when Caldin died. She was careful to point out that she had never before breached doctor–patient confidentiality. But in this case there were special circumstances, “as you know. It was dreadful how that girl was treated, wasn’t it?” Torell was anxious to hand over the papers, to make the truth known.

  Once Palmgren had thanked Torell, said goodbye and read through the notes, despair came over him. It was the same sorry old tale: psychiatrist Peter Teleborian had strapped Salander down in his treatment room and subjected her to serious psychological abuse. There was nothing new in the documents, as far as he could tell, but he might be mistaken. It had taken only a few careless words at the prison to get Salander going. Now she knew that she had been part of a government-sponsored study. She said other children had been involved, both in the generation before her and later. But she had not managed to find the names of the people behind it all. Great efforts appeared to have been made to keep them off the internet and out of all archives.

  “Could you take another look and see if you can find anything?” she had said on the telephone. He certainly would, as soon as Lulu came to help him.

  A burst of spluttering and spitting could be heard coming from the floor, and even before she could make out any words Faria recognized them as curses and threats. She looked down at Benito. The woman lay with her arms spread wide. No part of her body was moving, not even a finger, nothing apart from her head which she raised a few centimetres off the ground, and her eyes, which stared sideways up at Salander.

  “My Keris is pointing at you!”

  The voice was so muffled and hoarse that it was barely human. In Faria’s mind, the words flowed together with the blood that trickled from Benito’s mouth.

  “The dagger’s pointing at you. You’re dead.”

  This was nothing short of a death sentence. For a moment Benito seemed to be recovering some ground, but Salander did not look at all concerned. She said, as if she had hardly been listening, “You’re the one who looks dead.”

  Then, Salander was listening out for noises in the corridor and it was as if Benito were no longer a factor. Faria heard heavy, quick steps approaching. Somebody was rushing towards her cell and the next moment voices and swearing could be heard outside, and then: “Out of the fucking way!” The door flew open and Warden Olsen stood on the threshold. He was in his usual blue guard’s shirt, short of breath. He had obviously been running.

  “My God, what the hell’s happened here?”

  He looked from Benito on the floor to Salander, and then to Faria Kazi on the bed.

  “What the hell has happened?” he said again.

  “Look there on the floor,” Salander said.

  Olsen looked down and spotted the stiletto lying in a runnel of blood just by Benito’s right hand.

  “What the fuck …?”

  “Exactly. Someone got a knife past your metal detector. So what happened is that the staff at a major prison lost control and failed to protect a prisoner under threat.”

  “But that … that …” Olsen muttered, beside himself now and pointing at Benito’s jaw.

  “It’s what you should have done a long time ago, Alvar.”

  Olsen stared at Benito’s smashed-up face.

  “My Keris is pointed at you. You’re going to die, Salander, die,” Benito spat, and at that Olsen felt true panic set in. He pressed the alarm on his belt and shouted for back-up, then turned to Salander.

  “She’s going to kill you.”

  “That’s my problem,” Salander said. “I’ve had worse jerks threaten me.”

  “There is nobody worse.”

  Footsteps could be heard in the corridor. Had those shitheads been nearby all along? It would not surprise him in the least. He felt a violent rage bubble up within him, and he thought about Vilda and the threats; in fact the entire unit, which was a disgrace. He looked at Salander again and remembered her words: what he should have done a long time ago. He knew he needed to do something. He had to recover his dignity. But there was no time. His colleagues, Harriet and Fred, crashed into the cell and stood as if paralysed. They too saw Benito lying on the floor and heard the oaths being uttered, but now it was impossible to make sense of what she was trying to say. Fragments of words, only Ke or Kri, in Benito’s evil rant.

  “Oh, shit!” Fred shouted. “Oh, shit!”

  Olsen took a step forward and cleared his throat. Only then did Fred look at him. There was fear in his eyes, sweat was beading on his forehead and cheeks.

  “Harriet, call the medic,” Olsen said. “Quick, quick! And you, Fred …”

  He did not know what to say. He wanted to play for time, to assert some authority, but clearly it wasn’t working for him, because Fred interrupted in the same agitated tone:

  “What a fucking disaster! What happened?”

  “Things got very ugly,” Olsen said.

  “Did you hit her?”

  Olsen did not answer, not at first. But then he remembered the chillingly accurate description of the route to Vilda’s classroom. He remembered that Benito had told him the colour of his daughter’s gumboots.

  “I …” he said.

  He hesitated. Yet he sensed that there was something both terrifying and appealing about the word “I”. He shot a look at Salander. She shook her head, as if she knew exactly what was going through his mind. But no … it was make or break. It felt right.

  “I had no choice.”

  “For Christ’s sake, this looks horrible. Benito, Benito, are you O.K.?” Fred said. And that was the final straw after months of turning a blind eye.

  “Instead of worrying about Benito, why don’t you look after Faria,” Olsen yelled. “We’ve let the whole unit go to shit. Look at the stiletto on the floor! See it? Benito’s smuggled in a goddamn murder weapon, and she was about to attack Faria when I …”

  He was groping for words. It was as if all of a sudden he realized the enormity of his lie, and almost in desperation he looked again at Salander, hoping to be rescued. But she was not about to spare him.

  “She was going to kill me,” Faria Kazi said from the bed. She pointed to a small cut on her throat and that gave Olsen renewed courage.

  “So what was I supposed to do? Just wait and see if it all turned out O.K.?” he growled at Fred. And that felt better, though he was increasingly aware of the risk he was taking.

  But it was too late to back out now. Other inmates were gathering in the doorway, some even pushing to get into the cell. The situation was going to get out of hand and there were agitated voices in the corrido
r. A few were also clapping. A great sense of relief began to spread. One woman shouted for joy and the voices became a buzz, a wall of sound which grew in strength, something like the aftermath of a bloodthirsty boxing match or bullfight.

  Yet not all the commotion was joyful. There were also threatening noises, threats to Salander rather than to him, as if a rumour about what had really happened had already got out. He knew he had to act with determination. In a loud voice he announced that the police were to be informed at once. He knew more guards would be on their way from other units, that was standard procedure when the alarm went off, and he wondered whether to lock the prisoners into their cells or if he should wait for reinforcements. He looked at Kazi and told Harriet and Fred that she should be seen by the medical orderlies and a psychologist too. Then he turned to Salander and instructed her to follow him.

  They went into the corridor, elbowing past a crowd of prisoners and guards and for a moment he thought the situation might boil over. People were shouting and pulling at them. The unit was on the verge of a riot. It was as if all the tension and exasperation which had been simmering beneath the surface for so long was about to explode. Only with the greatest effort did he manage to escort Salander into her cell and shut the door behind them. Someone started banging on it. His colleagues were shouting for order. His heart was pounding, his mouth was dry and he could not think what to say. Salander was not even looking at him. She just glanced at her desk and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “I like to take responsibility for my actions,” she said.

  “I was trying to protect you.”

  “Bullshit. You wanted to feel a little better about yourself. But that’s O.K., Alvar. You can go now.”

  He wanted to say something more. He wanted to explain himself, but he could tell it would only sound ridiculous. He turned away and heard her mumble behind his back:

  “I hit her on the windpipe.”

  The windpipe? he thought, as he locked the door. Then he fought his way through the mayhem in the corridor.

  As Palmgren waited for Lulu, he tried to remember what the documents had actually said. Could there be something new and important buried in them? He found it hard to believe he would uncover more than he already knew: that there had been plans for Salander to be put up for adoption when things were really bad with her father, including his sexual assaults against Agneta.

  Well, he would find out soon enough. On the four days of the week she worked, Lulu always arrived punctually at 9.00 p.m. He longed to see her. She would help him into bed, put on the morphine plaster and make him comfortable, and then retrieve the papers from the bottom drawer in the chest in the living room where she had put them the last time, after Maj-Britt Torell’s visit.

  Palmgren vowed to devote his utmost attention to them. This might give him the pleasure of helping Salander one last time. He groaned and felt a sharp pain in his hips. This was the worst time of day and he said a small prayer: “Dear, wonderful Lulu. I need you. Come now.” And indeed he lay there for five, perhaps ten minutes, drumming his good hand against the bed cover, when steps he thought he recognized echoed in the hallway.

  The door opened. Was she twenty minutes early? How wonderful! But there was no cheerful greeting from the front door, no “Good evening, my old friend”, only footsteps stealing into the apartment and coming towards his bedroom. This scared him, and he was not easily scared. One of the advantages of age was that he no longer had much to lose. But now he was anxious, perhaps because of those papers. He wanted to read them properly, to use them to help Salander. All of a sudden he had something to live for.

  “Hello,” he called out. “Hello?”

  “Oh – are you awake? I thought you would be asleep.”

  “But I’m never asleep when you arrive,” he said, perceptibly relieved.

  “I don’t think you realize how exhausted and run down you’ve been these last days. I thought that visit to the prison might be the end of you,” Lulu said as she came through the doorway.

  She was wearing eye make-up and lipstick and a brightly coloured African dress.

  “Has it been that bad?”

  “You have been almost impossible to talk to.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try and do better.”

  “You’re my number one, you know that. Your only flaw is that you keep saying sorry.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You see?”

  “What’s with you today, Lulu? You’re looking particularly lovely.”

  “I’m going out with a Swedish guy from Västerhaninge. Can you imagine? He’s an engineer and owns a house and a new Volvo.”

  “He’s smitten with you, of course?”

  “I hope so,” she said. She straightened out his legs and hips, making sure he was lying properly on the pillow and raised the backrest into a sitting position. As the bed moved with a soft buzzing sound she chattered on about the man from Västerhaninge who was called Robert, or possibly Rolf. Palmgren was not listening, and Lulu laid a hand on his forehead.

  “You’re in a cold sweat, silly. I should shower you.”

  No-one could call him silly with as much tenderness as Lulu. Usually he enjoyed this banter, but today he was impatient. He looked down at his lifeless left hand, which seemed more pitiful than ever.

  “I’m sorry, Lulu. Could you do something for me first?”

  “Always your service.”

  “Always at your service,” he corrected her. “You know those papers you put away in the chest last time? Can you fetch them? I need to read them again.”

  “But you said it was awful to read them.”

  “It was. But I have to take another look.”

  She hurried off and reappeared a minute or two later with a larger sheaf than he remembered having looked through in the first place. Maybe she had grabbed more than one file. He began to fret. Either there would be nothing of significance in the papers, or else there would be, in which case who could predict what Lisbeth would get up to.

  “You seem chirpier today. But you’re not a hundred per cent, are you? Is it that Salander woman you’re thinking about?” Lulu said, setting down the bundle of papers on the bedside table next to his pill boxes and books.

  “I’m afraid so. It was awful to see her in that prison. Can you fetch my toothbrush and put on my morphine plasters? Move my legs a little bit over to the left please. It feels as if the whole lower part of my body has—”

  “—knives sticking in it?” she said.

  “Exactly, knives. Do I say that all the time?”

  “Yes, all the time.”

  “You see, I’m going senile. But I’ll read these papers, and you can disappear off to see your Roger.”

  “Rolf,” she corrected him.

  “Right, Rolf. I hope he’s nice. Being nice is the most important thing.”

  “Is it really? Did you choose your lovers based on their niceness?”

  “I certainly should have.”

  “That’s what all men say, and then they go chasing after the first beautiful woman they see.”

  “What? No, I never did.”

  His mind was drifting. He asked Lulu to put the files on the bed beside him, but he barely managed to lift one even with his good arm. As Lulu unbuttoned his shirt and put on his morphine plasters, he began to read. Every now and then as Lulu got on with her work he broke off to say something kind and encouraging. He wished her an especially fond farewell and good luck with her Rolf or Roger.

  Just as he had recalled, the papers mostly consisted of observations by the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian: medication protocols, notes on pills the patient had refused to take and accounts of treatment regimens during which she silently dug in her heels, decisions to use coercive measures, re-evaluations, second opinions, decisions to use even more coercive measures, clear indications of sadism, even if expressed in dry, clinical terms – all the things which had so tormented Palmgren.

  But he could find none of the
information Salander was looking for even though he had read very carefully. He began to go through it all once more, and to be on the safe side he would use his magnifying glass this time. He studied each page closely, and eventually he did pick up something, though not much: two minor confidential notes made by Teleborian soon after Salander had been admitted to the clinic in Uppsala. But they gave Palmgren precisely what he had been asked to find: names.

  The first note read:

  Already known from the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment (R.G.S.E.). Took part in Project 9. (Finding: Unsatisfactory.)

  Placement in foster home decided by Professor of Sociology Martin Steinberg. Impossible to enforce. Liable to run away.

  Fertile imagination. Serious incident with G. in apartment on Lundagatan – ran away at the age of six.

  Ran away at the age of six? Was that the incident Salander had referred to during his visit to the prison? It must have been, which might make G. the woman with the birthmark on her throat. But there was nothing more about it in the documents and so he could not be sure. Palmgren thought hard. Then he had another look at Teleborian’s note and smiled a little. “Fertile imagination”, the man had written. It was the only positive comment that bastard had ever made about Salander. Even a donkey can sometimes … But this was no joke. The note confirmed that Salander had been on the verge of being sent away as a child. Palmgren read on:

  Mother, Agneta Salander, severely brain-damaged by blow to the head. Admitted to Äppelviken nursing home. Had previously been seen by psychologist Hilda von Kanterborg – who is believed to have broken confidentiality and disclosed information about the Registry. Should not be given any opportunity to contact the patient. Further measures planned by Professor Steinberg and G.

  Professor Steinberg, he thought. Martin Steinberg. Somehow the name seemed familiar. With difficulty – it was the same with everything these days – Palmgren Googled the man on his mobile, and he recognized him at once. How could he have missed it? Not that he and Martin had been close. But they had met about twenty-five years ago. Steinberg was an expert witness at a trial in which Palmgren had defended an underprivileged young man who had been charged with assaulting his father.