he'd laid eyes on Salander in December two years earlier, he had not been able to resist her. The laws, the most basic moral code, and his responsibility as her guardian - none of it mattered at all.
She was a strange girl - fully grown but with an appearance that made her easily mistaken for a child. He had control over her life; she was his to command.
She had a record that robbed her of credibility if she ever had a mind to protest. Nor was it a rape of some innocent - her file confirmed that she had had many sexual encounters, could even be regarded as promiscuous. One social worker's report had raised the possibility that Salander had solicited sexual services for payment when she was seventeen. A police patrol had observed a drunken older man sitting with a young girl on a park bench in Tantolunden. The police had confronted the pair; the girl had refused to answer their questions, and the man was too intoxicated to give them any sensible information.
In Bjurman's eyes the conclusion was straightforward: Salander was a whore at the bottom of the social scale. It was risk-free. If she dared to protest to the Guardianship Agency, no-one was going to believe her word against his.
She was the ideal plaything - grown-up, promiscuous, socially incompetent, and at his mercy.
It was the first time he had exploited one of his clients. Previously it had never occurred to him to make advances to anyone with whom he had a professional relationship. To satisfy his sexual needs, he had always turned to prostitutes. He had been discreet and he paid well; the problem was that prostitutes were not serious, they were only pretending. It was a service he bought from a woman who moaned and rolled her eyes; she played her part, but it was as phony as street theatre.
He had tried to dominate his wife in the years that he was married, but she had merely gone along with it, and that too was a game.
Salander had been the perfect solution. She was defenceless. She had no family, no friends: a true victim, ripe for plundering. The opportunity makes the thief.
And then out of the blue she had destroyed him. She had struck back with a power and determination that he had not dreamed she possessed. She had humiliated him. She had tortured him. She had all but demolished him.
During the almost two years since then, Bjurman's life had changed dramatically. After Salander's nighttime visit to his apartment he had felt paralyzed - virtually incapable of clear thought or decisive action. He had locked himself in, did not answer the telephone, and was unable even to keep up contact with his regular clients. After two weeks he went on sick leave. His secretary was deputized to deal with his correspondence at the office, cancelling all his meetings and trying to keep irritated clients at bay.
Every day he was confronted by the tattoo on his body. Finally he took down the mirror from the bathroom door.
He returned to his office at the beginning of summer. He had handed over most of his clients to his colleagues. The only ones he kept for himself were companies for whom he dealt with legal business correspondence without being involved in meetings. His only active client now was Salander - each month he wrote up a balance sheet and a report for the Guardianship Agency. He did very precisely what she had demanded: the reports had not a grain of truth in them and made plain that she no longer needed a guardian. Each report was an excruciating reminder of her existence, but he had no choice.
Bjurman had spent the summer and the autumn in helpless, furious brooding. And then, in December, he pulled himself together and went on a vacation to France. While there, he consulted a specialist at a clinic for cosmetic surgery outside Marseilles about how best to remove the tattoo.
The specialist had examined his abdomen with ill-concealed astonishment. At last he recommended a course of action. One way would be laser treatment, he said, but the tattoo was so extensive and the needle had penetrated so deeply that he was afraid the only realistic solution was a series of skin grafts. It would be expensive and would take time.
In the past two years Bjurman had seen Salander on only one occasion.
On the night she attacked him and established control over his life, she had taken the