in Sodermalm, not so far from Millennium's offices, or from Milton Security for that matter, where Salander had worked, and Lundagatan, where she had lived. It was also within walking distance of the synagogue on St.Paulsgatan. On Saturday afternoon he walked to all of these places.
His wife Agnes accompanied him for the first part of the walk. They had been married for twenty-three years, and in all that time he had never strayed.
They stopped at the synagogue for a while and talked to the rabbi. Bublanski was a Polish Jew, while Agnes' family - the few who had survived Auschwitz - were originally from Hungary.
After visiting the synagogue they parted - Agnes to go shopping, Bublanski to keep walking. He needed to be alone, to think about the investigation. He went back over the measures he had taken since the job had landed on his desk on the morning of Maundy Thursday, and he could identify only a couple of mistakes.
One was that he hadn't immediately sent someone to go through Svensson's desk at Millennium. When eventually he remembered to do it - and he had done it himself - Blomkvist had already cleaned out God knows what.
Another mistake was missing the fact that Salander had bought a car. But Holmberg had reported that the car contained nothing of interest.
Apart from these two errors, the investigation had been as thorough as could have been expected.
He stopped at a kiosk near Zinkensdamm and stared at a newspaper headline. The passport photograph of Salander had been cropped to a small but easily recognizable size and the focus had shifted to a more sensational line of news:
POLICE TRACKING
LESBIAN SATANIST CULT
He bought a copy and found the spread, which was dominated by a photograph of five girls in their late teens dressed in black leather jackets with rivets, torn black jeans, and tight T-shirts. One of the girls was holding up a flag with a pentagram and another was making a sign with her index and little fingers. The caption read: Lisbeth Salander hung out with a death-metal band that played in small clubs. In 1996 the group paid homage to the Church of Satan and had a hit with "Etiquette of Evil."
The name Evil Fingers was not mentioned, and the newspaper had blacked out their eyes, but friends of the rock group would certainly recognize the girls.
The story was mainly about Miriam Wu and was illustrated with a picture taken from a show at Bern's in which she had performed. She was topless and wearing a Russian army officer's cap. Her eyes were blacked out too.
SALANDER'S GIRLFRIEND WROTE ABOUT LESBIAN S&M SEX
The 31-year-old woman is well known in Stockholm's trendy nightspots. She makes no secret that she picks up women and likes to dominate her partner.
The reporter had even found a girl he called Sara who, according to her own testimony, had been the object of the woman's pickup attempts. Her boyfriend had been "disturbed" by the incident. The article went on to say that the band was an obscure and elitist feminist variant on the fringes of the gay movement, and that it had acquired a certain fame for hosting a "bondage workshop" at the Gay Pride Festival. The rest of the article was based on a deliberately provocative piece Wu had written six years earlier for a feminist fanzine. Bublanski scanned the text and then tossed the paper into a trash can.
He brooded over Faste and Modig, both competent detectives. But Faste was a problem; he got on people's nerves. He would have to have a talk with the man, but he didn't think he was the source of the leaks.
When Bublanski got his bearings again he was standing on Lundagatan staring at the front door of Salander's building. It had not been a conscious decision to walk there.
He walked up the steps to upper Lundagatan, where he stood for a long time thinking about Blomkvist's story of Salander's attack. That didn't lead anywhere either. There was no police report, no names of persons involved, and not even an adequate description of the attacker. Blomkvist had claimed that he could not read the licence plate of the van that drove away from the scene.
Assuming any of it had happened at all.
Another dead end.
Bublanski looked down Lundagatan at the burgundy Honda that was still parked in the street, and at that moment Blomkvist walked up to the front door.
Miriam Wu awoke late in the day, tangled in the sheets. She sat up