when she wakes up. Have you heard how she's doing?"
"She looks about the same as I do. She has a concussion, several cracked ribs, a broken nose, and damage to her kidneys."
Blomkvist bent forward and put his hand on Paolo Roberto's good knee. "If you ever need me to do anything... " he said.
Paolo Roberto smiled. "Blomkvist - if you ever need a favour again... "
"Yes?"
"... ask Sebastian Lujan to do it for you."
CHAPTER 26
Wednesday, April 6
Inspector Bublanski was in a dismal mood when he met Modig in the parking lot outside the hospital just before 7:00. Blomkvist had woken him up, and he in turn called Modig and woke her up. They met Blomkvist by the entrance and went with him to Paolo Roberto's room.
Bublanski could hardly grasp the bewildering details, but what was eventually clear was that Wu had been kidnapped and that the boxer had beaten up the kidnapper. Except that to judge by his face, it was far from obvious who had beaten up whom. As far as Bublanski was concerned, the night's events had lifted the investigation of Lisbeth Salander to a whole new level of complication. Nothing in this infernal case seemed to be normal.
How had Paolo Roberto even gotten involved in the affair?
"I'm a good friend of Lisbeth Salander's," he told them.
Bublanski and Modig looked at each other, surprised and sceptical.
"She sparred with me at the gym."
Bublanski fixed his gaze somewhere on the wall behind Paolo Roberto. Modig could not help laughing out loud. After a while they had written down all the details he could give them.
"I'd like to make a few points," Blomkvist said dryly.
They turned to him.
"First of all, Paolo's description of the man who drove away from the warehouse in the van matches the one I gave of the person who attacked Salander at the same spot on Lundagatan. A tall guy with a light brown ponytail and a beer belly. OK?"
Bublanski nodded.
"Second, the point of the kidnapping was to force Miriam Wu to reveal where Lisbeth Salander is hiding. So these two thugs have been looking for Salander since at least a week before the murders. Agreed?"
Modig murmured a "yes."
"Third, it looks less likely that Salander is the lone nutcase she has been portrayed as. And neither of these maniacs seems, on the face of it, to be a member of a lesbian Satanist gang."
Neither Bublanski nor Modig said a word.
"And finally, number four. I think this story has something to do with a man called Zala. Dag Svensson did a lot of work on him in his last two weeks. All the relevant information is in his computer. Dag linked him to the murder of a prostitute named Irina Petrova in Sodertalje. The autopsy recorded that she was very severely beaten. So severely that any one of three of the worst blows would have been fatal on its own. Her injuries sound very like the ones that Miriam Wu and Paolo Roberto have been subjected to. In both cases the instruments of this extraordinary violence could be the hands of a gigantic thug."
"And Bjurman?" Bublanski said. "Let's suppose that someone had a reason to silence Svensson. Who would have had a motive to murder Salander's guardian?"
"All the pieces of the puzzle aren't in place yet, but there's a connection between Bjurman and Zala. That's the only credible solution. Could you agree to start thinking along new lines? I think that these crimes have something to do with the sex trade. And Salander would sooner die than be involved in something like that. I told you she's a damned moralist."
"So what was her role? What was she doing at Svensson and Johansson's apartment?"
"I don't know. Witness? Opponent? Maybe she was there to warn Dag and Mia that their lives were in danger."
Bublanski set the wheels in motion. He called the Sodertalje police and gave them Paolo Roberto's directions to a dilapidated warehouse southwest of Lake Yngern. Then he called Holmberg - he lived in Flemingsberg and was closest of the team to Sodertalje - and asked him to join up with the Sodertalje police as soon as he possibly could to assist with the crime scene investigation.
Holmberg called back an hour later. He had arrived at the crime scene. The Sodertalje police had had no difficulty finding the warehouse. Along with two smaller storage sheds it had burned to the ground, and the fire department was there now, mopping up. There were two discarded gasoline cans