He was about to pass out, and the pain in his temples was almost unbearable.
She turned to him and saw that his face was the colour of a tomato, his eyes were open wide, and his tongue was popping out of his mouth.
She looked about her and saw the knife on the floor. Then she spared a glance at Martin Vanger, who was trying to crawl away from her, one arm hanging. He would not be making any trouble for the next few seconds. She let go of the golf club and picked up the knife. It had a sharp point but a dull edge. She stood on her toes and frantically sawed at the leather strap to get it off. It took several seconds before Blomkvist sank to the floor. But the noose was pulled tighter round his neck.
Salander looked again at Martin Vanger. He was on his feet but doubled over. She tried to dig her fingers under the noose. At first she did not dare cut it, but finally she slipped the point of the knife underneath, scoring Blomkvist’s neck as she tried to expand the noose. At last it loosened and Blomkvist took several shaky, wheezing breaths.
For a moment Blomkvist had a sensation of his body and soul uniting. He had perfect vision and could make out every speck of dust in the room. He had perfect hearing and registered every breath, every rustle of clothing, as if they were entering his ears through a headset, and he was aware of the odour of Salander’s sweat and the smell of leather from her jacket. Then the illusion burst as blood began streaming to his head.
Salander turned her head just as Martin Vanger disappeared out the door. She got up, grabbed the pistol, checked the magazine and flicked off the safety. She looked around and focused on the keys to the handcuffs, which lay in plain sight on the table.
“I’m going to take him,” she said, running for the door. She grabbed the keys as she passed the table and tossed them backhanded to the floor next to Blomkvist.
He tried to shout to her to wait, but he managed only a rasping sound and by then she had vanished.
Salander had not forgotten that Martin Vanger had a rifle somewhere, and she stopped, holding the pistol ready to fire in front of her, as she came upstairs to the passageway between the garage and the kitchen. She listened, but she could hear no sound telling her where her prey was. She moved stealthily towards the kitchen, and she was almost there when she heard a car starting up in the courtyard.
From the drive she saw a pair of tail lights passing Henrik Vanger’s house and turning down to the bridge, and she ran as fast as her legs could carry her. She stuffed the pistol in her jacket pocket and did not bother with the helmet as she started her motorcycle. Seconds later she was crossing the bridge.
He had maybe a ninety-second start when she came into the roundabout at the entrance to the E4. She could not see his car. She braked and turned off the motor to listen.
The sky was filled with heavy clouds. On the horizon she saw a hint of the dawn. Then she heard the sound of an engine and caught a glimpse of tail lights on the E4, going south. Salander kicked the motorcycle, put it into gear, and raced under the viaduct. She was doing 40 miles per hour as she took the curve of the entrance ramp. She saw no traffic and accelerated to full speed and flew forward. When the road began to curve along a ridge, she was doing 90 mph, which was about the fastest her souped-up lightweight bike could manage going downhill. After two minutes she saw the lights about 650 yards ahead.
Analyse consequences. What do I do now?
She decelerated to a more reasonable seventy-five and kept pace with him. She lost sight of him for several seconds when they took several bends. Then they came on to a long straight; she was only two hundred yards behind him.
He must have seen the headlight from her motorcycle, and he sped up when they took a long curve. She accelerated again but lost ground on the bends.
She saw the headlights of a truck approaching. Martin Vanger did too. He increased his speed again and drove straight into the oncoming lane. Salander saw the truck swerve and flash its lights, but the collision was unavoidable. Martin Vanger drove straight into the truck and the sound of the crash was terrible.
Salander braked. She saw the trailer start to jackknife across her lane. At the speed she was going, it took two seconds for her to cover the distance up to the accident site. She accelerated and steered on to the hard shoulder, avoiding the hurtling back of the truck by two yards as she flew past. Out of the corner of her eye she saw flames coming from the front of the truck.
She rode on, braking and thinking, for another 150 yards before she stopped and turned around. She saw the driver of the truck climb out of his cab on the passenger side. Then she accelerated again. At Åkerby, about a mile south, she turned left and took the old road back north, parallel to the E4. She went up a hill past the scene of the crash. Two cars had stopped. Big flames were boiling out of the wreckage of Martin’s car, which was wedged underneath the truck. A man was spraying the flames with a small fire extinguisher.
She was soon rolling across the bridge at a low speed. She parked outside the cottage and walked back to Martin Vanger’s house.
Mikael was still fumbling with the handcuffs. His hands were so numb that he could not get a grip on the key. Salander unlocked the cuffs for him and held him tight as the blood began to circulate in his hands again.
“Martin?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Dead. He drove slap into the front of a truck a couple of miles south on the E4.”
Blomkvist stared at her. She had only been gone a few minutes.
“We have to…call the police,” he whispered. He began coughing hard.
“Why?” Salander said.
For ten minutes Blomkvist was incapable of standing up. He was still on the floor, naked, leaning against the wall. He massaged his neck and lifted the water bottle with clumsy fingers. Salander waited patiently until his sense of touch started to return. She spent the time thinking.
“Put your trousers on.”
She used Blomkvist’s cut-up T-shirt to wipe fingerprints from the handcuffs, the knife, and the golf club. She picked up her PET bottle.
“What are you doing?”
“Get dressed and hurry up. It’s getting light outside.”
Blomkvist stood on shaky legs and managed to pull on his boxers and jeans. He slipped on his trainers. Salander stuffed his socks into her jacket pocket and then stopped him.
“What exactly did you touch down here?”
Blomkvist looked around. He tried to remember. At last he said that he had touched nothing except the door and the keys. Salander found the keys in Martin Vanger’s jacket, which he had hung over the chair. She wiped the door handle and the switch and turned off the light. She helped Blomkvist up the basement stairs and told him to wait in the passageway while she put the golf club back in its proper place. When she came back she was carrying a dark T-shirt that belonged to Martin Vanger.
“Put this on. I don’t want anyone to see you scampering about with a bare chest tonight.”
Blomkvist realised that he was in a state of shock. Salander had taken charge, and passively he obeyed her instructions. She led him out of Martin’s house. She held on to him the whole time. As soon as they stepped inside the cottage, she stopped him.
“If anyone sees us and asks what we were doing outside tonight, you and I went out to the point for a nighttime walk, and we had sex out there.”
“Lisbeth, I can’t…”
“Get in the shower. Now.”
She helped him off with his clothes and propelled him to the bathroom. Then she put on water for coffee and made half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles. She sat down at the kitchen table and was thinking hard when he came limping back into the room. She studied the bruises and scrapes on his body. The noose had been so tight that he had a dark red mark around his neck, and the knife had made a bloody gash in his skin on the left side.
“Get into bed,” she said.
She improvised bandages and covered the wound with a makeshift compress. Then she poured the coffee and handed him a sandwich.
“I’m really not hungry,” he said.
“I don’t give a damn if you’re hungry. Just eat,” Salander commanded, taking a big bite of her own cheese sandwich.
Blomkvist closed his eyes for a moment, then he sat up and took a bite. His throat hurt so much that he could scarcely swallow.
Salander took off her leather jacket and from the bathroom brought a jar of Tiger Balm from her sponge bag.
“Let the coffee cool for a while. Lie face down.”
She spent five minutes massaging his back and rubbing him with the liniment. Then she turned him over and gave him the same treatment on the front.
“You’re going to have some serious bruises for a while.”
“Lisbeth, we have to call the police.”
“No,” she replied with such vehemence that Blomkvist opened his eyes in surprise. “If you call the police, I’m leaving. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. Martin Vanger is dead. He died in a car accident. He was alone in the car. There are witnesses. Let the police or someone else discover that fucking torture chamber. You and I are just as ignorant about its existence as everyone else in this village.”
“Why?”
She ignored him and started massaging his aching thighs.
“Lisbeth, we can’t just…”
“If you go on nagging, I’ll drag you back to Martin’s grotto and chain you up again.”
As she said this, Blomkvist fell asleep, as suddenly as if he had fainted.
CHAPTER 25
Saturday, July 12–Monday, July 14
Blomkvist woke with a start at 5:00 in the morning, scrabbling at his neck to get rid of the noose. Salander came in and took hold of his hands, keeping him still. He opened his eyes and looked at her blearily.
“I didn’t know that you played golf,” he said, closing his eyes again. She sat with him for a couple of minutes until she was sure he was asleep. While he slept, Salander had gone back to Martin Vanger’s basement to examine and photograph the crime scene. In addition to the torture instruments, she had found a collection of violent pornographic magazines and a large number of Polaroid photographs pasted into albums.
There was no diary. On the other hand, she did find two A4 binders with passport photographs and handwritten notes about the women. She put the binders in a nylon bag along with Martin’s Dell PC laptop, which she found on the hall table upstairs. While Blomkvist slept she continued her examination of Martin’s computer and binders. It was after 6:00 by the time she turned off the computer. She lit a cigarette.
Together with Mikael Blomkvist she had taken up the hunt for what they thought was a serial killer from the past. They had found something appallingly different. She could hardly imagine the horrors that must have played out in Martin Vanger’s basement, in the midst of this well-ordered, idyllic spot.
She tried to understand.
Martin Vanger had been killing women since the sixties, during the past fifteen years one or two victims per year. The killing had been done so discreetly and was so well planned that no-one was even aware that a serial killer was at work. How was that possible?
The binders provided a partial answer.
His victims were often new arrivals, immigrant girls who had no friends or social contacts in Sweden. There were also prostitutes and social outcasts, with drug abuse or other problems in their background.
From her own studies of the psychology of sexual sadism, Salander had learned that this type of murderer usually collected souvenirs from his victims. These souvenirs functioned as reminders that the killer could use to re-create some of the pleasure he had experienced. Martin Vanger had developed this peculiarity by keeping a “death book.” He had catalogued and graded his victims. He had described their suffering. He had documented his killings with videotapes and photographs.
The violence and the killing were the goal, but Salander concluded that it was the hunt that was Martin Vanger’s primary interest. In his laptop he had created a database with a list of more than a hundred women. There were employees from the Vanger Corporation, waitresses in restaurants where he regularly ate, reception staff in hotels, clerks at the social security office, the secretaries of business associates, and many other women. It seemed as if Martin had pigeonholed practically every woman he had ever come into contact with.
He had killed only a fraction of these women, but every woman anywhere near him was a potential victim. The cataloguing had the mark of a passionate hobby, and he must have devoted countless hours to it.
Is she married or single? Does she have children and family? Where does she work? Where does she live? What kind of car does she drive? What sort of education does she have? Hair colour? Skin colour? Figure?
The gathering of personal information about potential victims must have been a significant part of Martin Vanger’s sexual fantasies. He was first of all a stalker, and second a murderer.
When she had finished reading, she discovered a small envelope in one of the binders. She pulled out two much handled and faded Polaroid pictures. In the first picture a dark-haired girl was sitting at a table. The girl had on dark jeans and had a bare torso with tiny, pointed breasts. She had turned her face away from the camera and was in the process of lifting one arm in a gesture of defence, almost as if the photographer had surprised her. In the second picture she was completely naked. She was lying on her stomach on a blue bedspread. Her face was still turned away from the camera.
Salander stuffed the envelope with the pictures into her jacket pocket. After that she carried the binders over to the woodstove and struck a match. When she was done with the fire, she stirred the ashes. It was pouring down with rain when she took a short walk and, kneeling as if to tie a shoelace, discreetly dropped Martin Vanger’s laptop into the water under the bridge.
When Frode marched through the open door at 7:30 that morning, Salander was at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Frode’s face was ashen, and he looked as if he had had a cruel awakening.
“Where’s Mikael?” he said.
“He’s still asleep.”
Frode sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Salander poured coffee and pushed the cup over to him.
“Martin…I just found out that Martin was killed in a car accident last night.”
“That’s sad,” Salander said, taking a sip of her own coffee.
Frode looked up. At first he stared at her, uncomprehending. Then his eyes opened wide.
“What…?”
“He crashed. How annoying.”
“What do you know about this?”
“He drove his car right into the front of a truck. He committed suicide. The press, the stress, a floundering financial empire, dot, dot, dot, too much for him. At least that’s what I suppose it will say on the placards.”
