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

by David Lagercrantz

  She passed through the gates, walked the length of the wall and along the railway line, and sat by the main road on a bench with peeling red paint to wait for bus number 113 to Örebro. It was a hot morning, and the air was still. Flies were buzzing around her. Even though she turned her face to the sun and seemed to be enjoying the weather, she did not feel any particular joy at being out of prison.

  But she was happy to have her laptop back. Sitting on the bench, her black jeans sticking to her legs, she opened it up and logged on. She checked that Giannini had sent her, as promised, the file on the police investigation into the death of Jamal Chowdhury. There it was in her inbox. Salander would be able to deal with it on the journey home.

  Giannini had a theory, a suspicion based partly on the strange fact that Faria had refused to say a word during police questioning, and partly on a short C.C.T.V. sequence from the Tunnelbana station at Hornstull. Giannini appeared to have discussed it with an imam in Botkyrka called Hassan Ferdousi, and he believed she might be on the right track. The thought now was that Salander, with her skills, should take a look as well, so she set about locating it in the file Giannini had sent her. Before examining the sequence, she looked out at the road and the yellowing fields and thought of Holger Palmgren. She had spent most of the night thinking about him. Talk to Hilda von …

  Hilda von Kanterborg was the only “Hilda von” known to Salander, dear old Hilda with her sweeping gestures, who had often sat in their kitchen at home on Lundagatan when Salander was a child, and who was one of her mother’s few friends when everything around her was falling apart. Hilda had been a rock, at least so Salander had believed. That was the reason Salander had looked her up one day, some ten years ago now. They spent a whole evening together drinking cheap rosé, because Salander had wanted to find out more about her mother. Hilda told her quite a lot, and Salander told her one or two things as well; she shared confidences with Hilda which she had kept even from Palmgren. It had been a long evening and they had raised their glasses to Agneta, and to all women whose lives had been destroyed by shits and bastards.

  But Hilda had not breathed a word about the Registry. Had she kept the most important thing to herself? Salander refused to believe it at first. She was usually good at detecting what might be hidden beneath the surface. But she might have been fooled by Hilda’s whole damaged façade. She thought back to the files she had downloaded on Olsen’s computer and remembered a pair of initials in those documents: H.K. Was it conceivable that they referred to Hilda von Kanterborg? Salander ran a search and discovered that Hilda had been a more influential psychologist than she had realized at the time. A flash of anger flared in her. But she decided to withhold judgement for the time being.

  The number 113 to Örebro was approaching in a cloud of dust and spewing gravel. She paid the driver and sat down at the back, where she had a careful look at the C.C.T.V. sequence showing the ticket barrier at Hornstull station just after midnight on October 24 nearly two years ago. Gradually she focused in on one detail, an irregularity in the movement of the suspect’s hand. Could it be relevant? She was not sure.

  She knew that movement recognition as a technology was still in its infancy. She had no doubt that all human gestures carry a mathematical fingerprint. It is still difficult to read, however. Every little movement is made up of thousands of pieces of information and is in itself not wholly conclusive. Every time we scratch our heads there is a difference. Our gestures are always similar, but never exactly the same. One needs sensors, signal processors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, motion-plotting algorithms, Fourier analyses and frequency and distance gauges to be able to describe and compare movements with precision. There were some programs available for download from the internet. But that was not an option, it would take too long. She had another idea.

  She thought of her friends in Hacker Republic and the deep neural network which Plague and Trinity had been working on for so long. Could that be optimized and used? It was not out of the question. It would require her to find a more comprehensive index of hand movements for the algorithms to study and learn from, but it would not be impossible.

  She worked hard on the train from Örebro back to Stockholm and in the end had a wild thought. The Prison Service would not think much of it, especially not on her first day of freedom. But that was irrelevant. She got off the train at Central Station and took a taxi home to Fiskargatan, where she continued to work.

  Dan Brody laid his guitar – a newly purchased Ramirez – on the coffee table and went into the kitchen to make himself a double espresso, which he drank so quickly it burned his tongue. It was 9.10 a.m. He had not noticed the time go by. He had lost himself in “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” and was now late for work. Not that it mattered much to anyone, but he did not want to give the impression that he did not take his work seriously. So he went into his bedroom and picked out a white shirt, dark suit and black Church’s shoes. Then he hurried down to the street to discover that it was already oppressively hot. Summer, to his dismay, was in full swing.

  His suit felt wrong for the time of year – severe and inappropriate in the sunshine – and after only a few metres his back and his armpits were damp with sweat. It only added to his sense of alienation. He looked at the gardeners working in Humlegården – the noise of the lawnmowers pained him. He continued at high speed towards Stureplan, and even though he still felt uncomfortable he noted with some satisfaction that other suited men also had sweaty, miserable faces. The heat had come suddenly, after a long period of rain. There was an ambulance standing further down on Birger Jarlsgatan and he thought about his mother.

  She had died in childbirth. His father was a travelling musician who never paid any attention to him and had died young, from cirrhosis of the liver, after many years of heavy drinking. Dan – who was born Daniel Brolin – grew up in an orphanage in Gävle and later, from the age of six, as one of four foster children on a farm to the north of Hudiksvall. He had to work extremely hard there with the animals and the harvest, mucking out the stables and slaughtering and butchering the pigs. The farmer, his foster father Sten, made no secret of the fact that he had taken on his foster children – all of them boys – because he needed extra hands. When the boys came to live with him, Sten was married to a red-haired, thick-set woman called Kristina. But she had pretty soon taken off and had not been heard of since. She was said to have gone to Norway, and people who met Sten were hardly surprised that she had tired of him. He was tall and imposing and by no means ugly, with a carefully groomed beard which was beginning to turn grey, but there was something grim about his mouth and forehead which frightened people. He seldom smiled. He did not like socializing or small talk, and he hated pretension and refinement.

  He was always saying: “Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t think you’re anything special.” When the boys in their high spirits declared that they wanted to become professional footballers when they grew up, or lawyers or millionaires, he would always snap back: “One should know one’s place!” He was stingy when it came to praise and encouragement, and certainly when it came to money. He distilled his own spirits, ate the meat of animals which he himself had shot or slaughtered, and the farm was as good as self-sufficient. Nothing was ever bought unless heavily discounted or in a clearance sale. He got his furniture at the flea market or it was passed on by neighbours and relatives. His house was painted a strident yellow, and nobody knew why until it transpired that Sten had got the paint free, from surplus stock.

  Sten had no appreciation of beauty and he never read books or newspapers. That did not trouble Daniel since there was a library at the school. But he was bothered by the fact that Sten disliked all music unless it was jolly and Swedish. All Daniel had inherited from his biological father was his surname and a nylon-stringed Levin guitar, which had been abandoned in the attic of the farmhouse until Daniel picked it up one day, and which he came to love. It was not only that the instrument seemed to have been waiting for hi
m. He felt that he was born to play it.

  He soon learned the basic chords and harmonies and realized that he could copy tunes from the radio having heard them only once. For a long time, he played the usual repertoire of a boy of his generation: ZZ-Top’s “Tush”, the Scorpions’ ballad “Still Loving You”, Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and several other rock classics. But then something happened.

  One cold, autumn day he stole out of the cowshed. He was fourteen years old and school was a nightmare. He was quick to learn, but found it difficult to listen to the teachers. He was disturbed by the racket around him and yearned to get back to the silence and calm of the farm, even though he hated the work and the long days. He escaped whenever he could, to find time for himself.

  On this particular day, just after 5.30 p.m., he came into the kitchen and turned on the radio, which was playing something corny and dull. He fiddled with the dial and tuned to P2. He knew very little about the station, he had thought it was mostly oldies, and what he heard only confirmed his prejudice. It was a clarinet solo and the sound jarred on his nerves, like the buzzing of a bee or an alarm going off.

  But he kept listening, and then the sound of a guitar came in, a tentative, playful guitar. He shivered. There was a new feeling in the room, a sense of reverence and concentration, and he felt himself come alive. He heard nothing else, not the other boys swearing and arguing, nor the birds or tractors or distant cars, or even the sound of approaching footsteps. He just stood there, cocooned in an unexpected joy, and tried to understand what made these notes different from everything he had ever heard before. Why did they affect him so much? Then suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his scalp and neck.

  “You lazy little shit, you think I don’t see how you’re always sneaking off?”

  Sten was pulling Daniel’s hair, shouting and swearing. But Daniel barely noticed. He was focusing only on one thing: listening to the end of the tune. The music seemed to be showing him something unknown, something richer and greater than the life he had so far been living. Although he did not manage to hear who had been playing, he glanced up at the old kitchen clock above the tiled stove as Sten dragged him out of the room. He knew that the exact time was important.

  The next day he used one of the school telephones to ring Radio Sweden. He had never done anything like it before. He did not possess that kind of resourcefulness and self-confidence. He never put his hand up in the classroom even when he knew the answer, and he had always felt inferior to city folk, especially if they worked in as glamorous a profession as radio or television. But he made the call anyway and was put through to Kjell Brander, from jazz programming. In a voice which almost failed him, he asked which tune had been playing at just after 5.30 p.m. the day before. To be on the safe side, he hummed a bit of the tune. Kjell Brander recognized it immediately.

  “Cool! You like it? You’ve got good taste, young man. That was Django Reinhardt’s ‘Nuages’.”

  No-one had ever called Daniel “young man” before. He asked how to spell the name of the song and added, even more nervously:

  “Who is he?”

  “One of the best guitarists in the world, I’d say. And yet he played his solos with just two fingers.”

  Daniel could not subsequently remember what Kjell Brander had told him and what he later found out for himself. But gradually he learned that there was a story behind the man, and this made what he had heard only more precious. Django grew up in poverty in Liberchies in Belgium, sometimes stealing chickens just to survive. He began to play the guitar and violin at an early age and was considered very promising. But when he was eighteen, he knocked over a candle in his caravan, setting alight the paper flowers his wife sold to earn a living, and the blaze spread. Django suffered serious burns, and for a long time it was thought that he would never play again, especially not when it turned out that he had lost the use of two fingers of his left hand. Yet with the help of a new technique he was able to keep on developing his playing, and he soon became world famous and a cult figure.

  But first and foremost, Django was a traveller – or Roma, as people now said. Daniel was also Roma. He had learned this the hard way – through the pain of being excluded, and being called a “gyppo” and worse. It had never crossed his mind that this was anything other than deeply shameful. Now Django allowed him to look upon his origins with a new pride. If Django could become the world’s best with a severely damaged hand, Daniel too could become something special.

  He borrowed some money from a girl in his class, bought a compilation record of Reinhardt’s tunes and taught himself all the classics – “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology” and many more – and in no time at all he changed the way he played the guitar. He abandoned his blues scales and instead played minor sixth arpeggios and solos with diminished major and minor seventh scales, and with each day his passion grew. He practised until he had leathery callouses on his fingertips. His fervour never dimmed – not even when he slept. He played in his dreams. He thought of nothing else, and whenever he had the chance he would make for the forest, sit on a rock or a tree stump and improvise for hours on end. Hungrily he absorbed new skills and new influences, not just from Django but also from John Scofield, Pat Metheny and Mike Stern, all the modern jazz guitar greats.

  At the same time, his relationship with Sten deteriorated. “You think you’re special, don’t you? You’re just a little shit,” his foster father would often snarl, adding that Daniel always walked around with his nose in the air. Daniel could not understand it, he who had always felt inferior and inadequate. He tried his best to oblige, even though he neither wanted to, nor could, stop his playing. Before long Sten began to beat him around the ears and punch him, and sometimes his foster brothers joined in. They hit him in the stomach and on his arms, and punished him with loud noises, metal scraping against metal or saucepan lids clashed together. Daniel now hated the work in the fields, especially in summer when there was no escape from the muck-spreading, ploughing, harrowing and sowing.

  During the summer months the boys would work from morning until late at night. Daniel tried hard to be liked and accepted again, and sometimes he succeeded. In the evenings he was happy to play requests for his brothers, and occasionally he won applause and a certain appreciation. Yet he knew that he was a burden and made himself scarce whenever he could.

  One afternoon, as the sun beat down on the back of his neck, he heard a blackbird singing far away. He was sixteen and already dreaming of his eighteenth birthday, when he would come of age and could leave this place far behind. He was planning to apply to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, or get a job as a jazz musician, putting so much effort and ambition into his work that one day he would get a record contract. Dreams spun around in his head day and night. At times, as happened now, nature fed him a sound which he developed into a riff.

  He whistled back at the blackbird, a variation on its song which became a melody. His fingers moved as if over an imaginary guitar, and he shuddered. Later, as an adult, he would think back to those moments when he believed something would be irretrievably lost if he did not sit down straight away to compose, and nothing in the world would stop him from sneaking off to get his guitar. Daniel could still recall the illicit thrill in his chest as he raced down to the water at Blackåstjärnen in his bare feet, overalls flapping and guitar in hand, and settled on the dilapidated jetty to pick out the melody he had been whistling and give it an accompaniment. It was a wonderful time, that is how he would remember it.

  But it did not last long. One of the other boys must have seen him go and ratted on him. Sten soon appeared bare-chested and in his shorts, and furious, and Daniel, who did not know whether to apologize or simply disappear, hesitated a second too long. Sten managed to grab hold of the guitar and yanked it away with such violence that he fell over backwards. It was not a bad fall, it just looked ridiculous. But something in Sten snapped. He got to his feet, his face puce, and smashed
the guitar against the jetty. Afterwards he looked shocked – as if he did not quite understand what he had done. But it made no difference.

  Daniel felt as if a vital organ had been torn from his body. He yelled “idiot” and “bastard”, words he had never before uttered in front of Sten. He ran across the fields, burst into the house, stuffed his records and some clothes into a rucksack, and left the farm for good.

  He made for the E4 motorway and walked for hours, until he picked up a lift in an articulated lorry as far as Gävle. Then he continued south, sleeping in the forest, stealing apples and plums and eating berries he found along the way. An old lady who drove him to Södertälje gave him a ham sandwich. A young man who took him to Jönköping bought him lunch, and late in the evening on July 22 he arrived in Göteborg. Within a few days he had got himself some low-paid, cash-in-hand work down at the docks. Six weeks later, living on virtually nothing and having occasionally slept in stairwells, he bought himself a new guitar, not a Selmer Maccaferri – Django’s guitar, which he dreamed of owning – but a second-hand Ibanez.

  He decided to make his way to New York. But it was not as easy as people said. He had neither a passport nor a visa and you could no longer earn passage on a ship, not even as a cleaner. Early one evening, when he had finished his work in the harbour, a woman was waiting for him at the dockside. Her name was Ann-Catrine Lidholm. She was overweight and dressed in pink, and she had kind eyes. She told him she was a social worker, and that someone had called her about him. That was when he found out that people were searching for him, that he had been reported as missing, and he followed her reluctantly to the social welfare agency on Järntorget.