Zalachenko. Those fucking pigs. He closed his eyes.
"What is it?" Palmgren said.
"I think I know what happened. And someone is going to pay for this. But go on with the story."
"Zalachenko was gone for several months. Lisbeth waited for him and made her preparations. She had played truant from school every single day to watch out for her mother. She was scared to death that Zalachenko would really hurt her. She was twelve and felt responsible for her mother, who did not dare to go to the police and couldn't break it off with Zalachenko, or who perhaps did not understand the seriousness of the situation. But on the day Zalachenko finally turned up, Lisbeth was at school. She came home just as he was leaving the apartment. He didn't say a word. He just laughed at her. Lisbeth went in and found her mother unconscious on the kitchen floor."
"But Zalachenko didn't touch Lisbeth?"
"No. She caught up with him just as he was getting into his car. He rolled down the window, possibly to say something. Lisbeth was ready. She threw a milk carton she had filled with gasoline into the car. Then she threw in a burning match."
"Good God."
"She tried to kill her father twice. This time there were consequences. A man sitting in a car on Lundagatan burning like a beacon could hardly go unnoticed."
"But he survived."
"He suffered horribly. One of his feet had to be amputated. His face and other parts of his body suffered serious burns. And Lisbeth ended up at St.Stefan's Psychiatric Clinic for Children."
Despite the fact that she already knew every word by heart, Salander once again read through the material about herself that she had found in Bjurman's files. She sat in the window seat and opened the cigarette case Miriam Wu had given her. She lit a cigarette and looked out towards Djurgården. She had discovered some things about her life that she had never known before.
In fact so much fell into place that she turned quite cold. Above all she was interested in the report filed by Bjorck in March 1991. She wasn't certain which one of the many grown-ups who had talked to her was Bjorck, but she thought she knew. He had introduced himself with another name. Sven Jansson. She remembered every feature of his face, every word he said, and every gesture he made on the three occasions she had encountered him.
The whole thing was a disaster.
Zalachenko had burned like fury inside the car. He had managed to push open the door and roll out onto the pavement, but his leg got caught inside by the seat belt. People had come rushing up to smother the flames. A fire engine arrived and put out the fire. An ambulance arrived and Lisbeth had tried to get the medics to ignore Zalachenko and come and see to her mother. They had shoved her aside. The police arrived, and there were witnesses who pointed to her. She tried to explain what had happened, but it felt as if nobody was listening to her, and suddenly she was sitting in the backseat of a police car and it took minutes and minutes and minutes and finally almost an hour before the police went into the apartment and found her mother.
Agneta Sofia Salander was unconscious. She had brain damage. The first in a long series of small cerebral haemorrhages had been triggered by the beating. She would never recover.
Salander now understood why nobody had read the police report, why Palmgren had failed in his attempt to have it released, and why even today Prosecutor Ekstrom, who was leading the search for her, did not have access to it. It had not been written by the regular police. It had been put together by some creep in the Security Police. It had rubber stamps on it saying that the report was classified as top secret according to the law of national security.
Zalachenko had worked for Sapo.
It was no report. It was a cover-up. Zalachenko was more important than Agneta Salander. He could not be identified or exposed. Zalachenko did not exist.
It was not Zalachenko who was the problem - it was Lisbeth Salander, the crazy kid who threatened to crack one of the country's most crucial secrets wide open.
A secret that she had not known anything about. She brooded. Zalachenko had met her mother very soon after he had arrived in Sweden. He had introduced himself using his real name. Perhaps at that time