The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (14 page)

The boy’s body was too immobile, and his face radiated wonder rather than fear, as if he had no understanding of what was happening. His look was too blank and glassy to register anything properly.

Holtser recalled something he had read during his research. Balder did have a severely retarded son. Both the press and the court papers had said that the professor did not have custody of the boy. But this must surely be the boy and Holtser neither could nor needed to shoot him. It would be pointless and a breach of his own professional ethics, and this recognition came to him as a huge relief, which should have made him suspicious had he been more aware of himself at that moment.

Now he just lowered the pistol, picked up the computer and the mobile from the bedside table and stuffed them into his rucksack. Then he ran into the night along the escape route he had staked out for himself. But he did not get far. He heard a voice behind him and turned around. Up by the road stood a man who was neither of the policemen but a new figure in a fur coat and fur hat and with quite a different aura of authority. Perhaps this was why Holtser raised his pistol again. He sensed danger.

The man who charged past was athletic and dressed in black, with a headlamp on his cap, and in some way Blomkvist could not quite explain he had the feeling that the figure was part of a coordinated operation. He half expected more figures to appear out of the darkness, and that made him very uncomfortable. He called out, “Hey, you, stop!”

That was a mistake. Blomkvist understood it the instant the man’s body stiffened, like that of a soldier in combat, and that was doubtless why he reacted so quickly. By the time the man drew a weapon and fired a shot as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Blomkvist had already ducked down by the corner of the house. The shot could hardly be heard, but when something smacked into Balder’s letterbox there was no doubt what had happened. The taller of the policemen abruptly ended his call, but did not move a muscle. The only person who said anything was the drunk.

“What the fuck’s going on here? What’s happening?” he roared in a voice which sounded oddly familiar, and only then did the policemen start talking to each other in nervous, low tones:

“Is someone shooting?”

“I think so.”

“What should we do?”

“Call for reinforcements.”

“But he’s getting away.”

“Then we’d better take a look,” the taller one said, and with slow, hesitant movements, they drew their weapons and went down to the water.

A dog could be heard barking in the winter darkness, a small, bad-tempered dog, and the wind was blowing hard from the sea. The snow was whirling about and the ground was slippery. The shorter of the two policemen nearly fell over, and started flailing his arms like a clown. With a bit of luck they might avoid running into the man with the weapon. Blomkvist sensed that the figure would have no trouble at all in getting rid of those two. The quick and efficient way in which he had turned and raised his weapon suggested that he was trained for situations like this, and Blomkvist wondered what he himself should do.

He had nothing with which to defend himself. Yet he got to his feet, brushed the snow from his coat and looked down the slope again. The policemen were working their way along the water’s edge towards the neighbour’s house. There was no sign of the black-clad man with the gun. Blomkvist made his way down too, and as he came around to the front of the house he saw that a window had been smashed in.

There was a large gaping hole in the house and he wondered if he should summon the policemen. He never got that far. He heard something, a strange, low whimpering sound, and so he stepped through the shattered window into a corridor with a fine oak floor whose pale glow could be seen in the darkness. He walked slowly towards a doorway where the sound was coming from.

“Balder,” he called out, “it’s me, Mikael Blomkvist. Is everything alright?”

There was no answer. But the whimpering grew louder. He took a deep breath, walked into the room – and froze, paralysed with shock. Afterwards he could not say what he had noticed first, or even what had frightened him most. It was not necessarily the body on the floor, despite the blood and the empty, rigid expression on its face.

It could have been the scene on the large double bed next to Balder, though it was difficult to make sense of it. There was a small child, perhaps seven, eight years old, a boy with fine features and dishevelled, dark-blonde hair, wearing blue-checked pyjamas, who was banging his body against the headboard and the wall, methodically and with force. The boy’s wailing did not sound like that of a crying child, more like someone trying to hurt himself as much as he could. Before Blomkvist had time to think straight he hurried over to him, but the boy was kicking wildly.

“There,” Blomkvist said. “There, there,” and wrapped his arms around him.

The boy twisted and turned with astonishing strength and managed – possibly because Blomkvist did not want to hold him too tightly – to tear himself from his embrace and rush through the door out into the corridor, barefoot over the glass shards towards the shattered window, with Blomkvist racing after him shouting “No, no.”

That was when he ran into the two policemen. They were standing out in the snow with expressions of total bewilderment.

21.xi

Afterwards it was said that the police had a problem with their procedures, and that nothing had been done to cordon off the area until it was too late. The man who shot Professor Balder must have had all the time in the world to make good his escape, and the first policemen on the scene, Detectives Blom and Flinck, known rather scornfully at the station as “the Casanovas”, had taken their time before raising the alarm, or at least had not done so with the necessary urgency or authority.

The forensic technicians and investigators from the Violent Crimes Division arrived only at 3.40, at the same time as a young woman who introduced herself as Gabriella Grane and who was assumed to be a relative because she was so upset. Later they came to understand that she was an analyst from Säpo, sent by the chief of that agency herself. That did not help Grane; thanks to the collective misogyny within the force, or possibly to underline the fact that she was regarded as an outsider, she was given the task of taking care of the child.

“You look as if you know how to handle this sort of thing,” Erik Zetterlund said. He was the leader of the duty investigating team that night. He had watched Grane bending to examine the cuts in the boy’s feet, and even though she snapped at him and declared that she had other priorities, she gave in when she looked into the boy’s eyes.

August – as he was called – was paralysed by fear and for a long time he sat on the floor at the top of the house, wrapped in a duvet, mechanically moving his hand across a red Persian carpet. Blom, who in other respects had not proved to be very enterprising, managed to find a pair of socks and put sticking plasters on the boy’s feet. They noticed too that he had bruises all over his body and a split lip. According to the journalist Mikael Blomkvist – whose presence created a palpable nervousness in the house – the boy had been throwing himself against the bed and the wall downstairs and had run in bare feet across the broken glass on the ground floor.

Grane, who for some reason was reluctant to introduce herself to Blomkvist, realized at once that August was a witness, but she was not able to establish any sort of rapport with him, nor was she able to give him comfort. Hugs and tenderness of the usual kind were clearly not the right approach. August was at his calmest when Grane simply sat beside him, a little way away, doing her own thing, and only once did he appear to be paying attention. This was when she was speaking on her mobile to Kraft and referred to the house number, 79. She did not give it much thought at the time, and soon after that she reached an agitated Hanna Balder.

Hanna wanted to have her son back at once and told Grane, to her surprise, that she should get out some jigsaw puzzles, particularly the one of the warship
Vasa
, which she said the boy’s father would have had lying around somewhere. She did not describe her ex-husband as having taken the boy unlawfully, but she had no answer when asked why Westman had been out at the house demanding to have the boy back. It certainly did not seem to be concern for the child that had brought him here.

The fact of the boy’s presence did, however, shed light on some of Grane’s earlier questions. She now understood why Balder had been evasive about certain things, and why he had not wanted to have a guard dog. In the early morning Grane arranged for a psychologist and a doctor to take August to his mother in Vasastan, unless it turned out that he needed more urgent medical attention. Then she was struck by a different thought.

It occurred to her that the motive for murder might not have been to silence Balder. The killer could as easily have been wanting to rob him – not of something as obvious as money, but of his research. Grane had no idea what Balder had been working on during the last year of his life. Perhaps no-one knew. But it was not difficult to imagine what it might have been: most probably a development of his A.I. program, which was already regarded as revolutionary when it was stolen the first time.

His colleagues at Solifon had done everything they could to get a look at it and according to what Balder had once let slip he guarded it as a mother guards her baby, which must mean, Grane thought, that he kept it next to him while he was asleep. So she told Blom to keep an eye on August and went down to the bedroom on the ground floor where, in freezing conditions, the forensic team were working.

“Was there a computer in here?” she said.

The technicians shook their heads and Grane got out her mobile and called Kraft again.

It was soon established that Westman had disappeared. He must have left the scene amid the general turmoil, and that made Zetterlund swear and shout, the more so when it transpired that Westman was not to be found at his home either.

Zetterlund considered putting out a search bulletin, which prompted his young colleague Axel Andersson to enquire whether Westman should be treated as dangerous. Maybe Andersson was unable to tell Westman himself apart from the characters he played on screen. But to give the man his due, the situation was looking increasingly messy.

The murder was evidently no ordinary settling of scores within the family, no booze-up gone wrong, no crime committed in a fit of passion. It was a cold-blooded, well-planned assault. Matters did not improve when the chief of provincial police, Jan-Henrik Rolf, weighed in with his assessment that the killing must be treated as an attack on Swedish industrial interests. Zetterlund was finding himself at the heart of an incident of major domestic political importance and even if he were not the brightest mind in the force he realized that what he did now would have a significant long-term impact.

Zetterlund, who had turned forty-one two days earlier and was still suffering some of the after-effects of his birthday party, had never been close to taking charge of an investigation of this importance. The reason he had now been detailed to do it, if only for a matter of hours, was that there had not been so many competent people on duty during the night and his superior had chosen not to wake the National Murder Squad or any of the more experienced investigators in the Stockholm police.

Accordingly Zetterlund found himself in the midst of this confusion, feeling less and less sure of himself, and was soon shouting out his orders. To begin with he was trying to set in train an effective door-to-door enquiry. He wanted rapidly to gather as much testimony as possible, even if he was not expecting to get very much out of it. It was night-time, and dark, and there was a storm blowing. The people living nearby had most likely not seen anything at all. But you never knew. So he had himself questioned Blomkvist, though God only knew what he was doing there.

The presence of one of Sweden’s best-known journalists did not make matters any easier and for a while Zetterlund imagined that Blomkvist was examining him critically with a view to writing a tell-all. Probably that was just his insecurity. Blomkvist himself was shaken and throughout the interview he was unfailingly polite and keen to help. But he was not able to provide much in the way of information. It had all happened so quickly and that in itself was significant, the journalist told him.

There had been something brutal and efficient about the way in which the suspect moved, and Blomkvist said that it would not be too far-fetched to speculate that the man either was or had been a soldier, possibly even special forces. His way of spinning around to aim and fire his weapon had seemed practised. He had a lamp strapped to his tight-fitting black cap, and Blomkvist had not been able to make out any of his features.

He had been too far away, he said, and had thrown himself to the ground in the instant the figure had turned around. He should thank his lucky stars that he was still alive. He could only describe the body and the clothes, and that he did very well. According to the journalist, the man did not seem all that young, he could have been over forty. He was fit and taller than average, between 185 and 195 centimetres, powerfully built with a slim waist and broad shoulders, wearing boots and black, military-style clothes. He was carrying a rucksack and looked to have a knife strapped to his right leg.

Blomkvist thought that the man had vanished down to and along the water’s edge, past the neighbouring houses, and that also matched Blom’s and Flinck’s accounts. The policemen had admittedly not seen the man at all. But they had heard his footsteps disappearing down along the sea and set off in vain pursuit, or so they claimed. Zetterlund had his doubts about that.

He presumed Blom and Flinck had chickened out, and had stood there in the darkness, fearful and doing nothing. In any event, that was the moment when the big mistake was made. Instead of identifying escape routes from the area and trying to cordon it off, nothing much seems to have happened. At that point Flinck and Blom were not yet aware that someone had been killed and as soon as they knew they had had their hands full coping with a barefoot boy running hysterically out of the house. Certainly it cannot have been easy to keep a cool head. Yet they had lost precious time and, though Blomkvist exercised restraint when describing the events, it was plain to see that even he was critical. He had twice asked the policemen if they had sounded the alarm and got a nod for an answer.

Later on, when Blomkvist overheard a conversation between Flinck and the operations centre, he realized that the nod was most likely a no, or at best some sort of bewildered failure to grasp the enormity of what had happened. It had taken a long time for the alarm to be raised and even then things had not proceeded as they should have, probably because Flinck’s account of the situation had not been clear.

The paralysis had spread to other levels. Zetterlund was infinitely glad he could not be blamed for that – at that point he had not yet become involved in the investigation. On the other hand he was here, and he should at least try to avoid making a mess of things. His personal record had not been so impressive recently and this was an opportunity to put his best foot forward.

He was at the door to the living room and had just finished a call to Milton Security about the character who had been seen on the security camera earlier that night. He did not at all fit the description Mikael Blomkvist had given of the presumed murderer. He looked like a skinny old junkie, albeit one who must have possessed a high level of technical skill. Milton Security believed that the man had hacked the alarm system and put all the cameras and sensors out of action.

That certainly did not make matters any easier. It was not only the professional planning. It was the idea of committing a murder in spite of police protection and a sophisticated alarm system. How arrogant is that? Zetterlund had been about to go down to the forensic team on the ground floor, but he stayed upstairs, deeply troubled, staring into space until his gaze fastened on Balder’s son. He was their key witness but incapable of speech, nor did he understand a word they said. In other words pretty much what one might expect in this shambles.

The boy was holding a small, single piece of an extremely complex puzzle. Zetterlund started towards the curved staircase leading to the ground floor – then he stopped dead. He thought back to his initial impression of the child. When he arrived on the scene, not knowing very much about what had happened, the boy had seemed the same as any other child. Zetterlund would have described him as an unusually pretty but normal-looking boy with curly hair and a shocked look in his eyes. Only later did he learn that the boy was autistic and severely handicapped. That, he thought, meant that the murderer either knew him from before or else was aware of his condition. Otherwise he would hardly have let him live and risk being identified in a witness parade, would he? Although Zetterlund did not give himself time to think this through in full, the hunch excited him and he took a few hurried paces towards the boy.

“We must question him at once,” he said, in a voice that came out louder and more urgent than he had intended.

“For heaven’s sake, take it easy with him,” Blomkvist said.

“Don’t you interfere,” Zetterlund snapped. “He may have known the killer. We have to get out some pictures and show them to him. Somehow we must …”

The boy interrupted him by slamming the puzzle with his hand in a sudden sweeping movement. Zetterlund muttered an apology and went downstairs to join his forensic team.

Blomkvist remained there, looking at the boy. It felt as if something else was about to happen with him, perhaps a new outburst, and the last thing he wanted was for the child to hurt himself again. The boy stiffened and began to make furiously rapid circular movements over the rug with his right hand.

Then he stopped and looked up pleadingly. Though Blomkvist asked himself what that might mean, he dropped the thought when the policeman whose name he now knew to be Blom sat down with the boy and tried to get him to do the puzzle again. Blomkvist went into the kitchen to get some peace and quiet. He was exhausted and wanted to go home. But apparently he first had to look at some pictures from a surveillance camera. He had no idea when that was going to happen. It was all taking a long time and seemed disorganized, and Blomkvist was longing for his bed.

He had spoken to Berger twice by then and told her what had happened. They agreed that Blomkvist should write a longer piece about the murder for the next issue. Not just because the crime itself was obviously a major drama and Professor Balder’s life was worth describing, but Blomkvist had a personal connection to the story and that would raise its quality and give him an advantage over the competition. The dramatic telephone call alone, in the middle of the night, which had got him here in the first place, would give his article an edge.

The Serner situation and the crisis at the magazine were implicit in their conversation. Berger had already planned for their temp Andrei Zander to do the preliminary research while Blomkvist got some sleep. She had said rather firmly – like someone halfway between a loving mother and an authoritative editor-in-chief – that she refused to have her star reporter dead from exhaustion before the work had even begun.