go on," Modig said. "But why did he ditch the weapon? If he had taken it with him - or if he had flung it away some distance from the building - we wouldn't have found it for a while."
It was a question that no-one could answer.
"What should we think about Blomkvist?" Faste said.
"No question he was in shock," Mårtensson said. "But he acted sensibly. He seemed clearheaded, and I thought he was trustworthy. His sister, a lawyer, confirmed the phone call and the drive there by car. I don't think he was involved."
"He's a celebrity journalist," Modig said.
"So this is going to turn into a media circus," Bublanski said. "All the more reason to wrap it up as fast as we can. OK... Jerker, you'll deal with the crime scene, of course, and the neighbours. Faste, you and Curt investigate the victims. Who were they, what were they working on, who was in their circle of friends, who might have had a motive to kill them? Sonja, you and I will go over the witness statements from that night. Then you'll make a schedule of what Svensson and Johansson were doing all day yesterday before they were killed. We'll meet here at 2:00 this afternoon."
Blomkvist began his working day at Svensson's desk. He sat quite still for a long while, as if he did not feel up to taking on the task.
Svensson had his own laptop and had initially worked mostly from home. He had usually spent two days a week in the office; more in the last weeks. At Millennium he had access to an older PowerMac G3, a computer that lived on his desk and could be used by any of the staff. Blomkvist turned on the G3 and found much of the material Svensson had been working on. He had primarily used the G3 to search the Net, but there were various folders that he had copied over from his laptop. He also had a complete backup on two disks that he kept locked in the desk drawer. Usually he had backed up new and updated material every day, but since he had not been in the office for a few days, the latest copy was from Sunday night. Three days were missing.
Blomkvist made a copy of the Zip disk and locked it in the safe in his office. Then he spent forty-five minutes going through the contents of the original disk. It contained around thirty folders and countless sub-folders. Four years of Svensson's research on trafficking. He read the document names and looked for ones that might contain the most sensitive material - the names of sources that Svensson was protecting. He had clearly been very careful with his sources - all such material was in a folder labelled. The folder contained 134 documents, most of them quite small. Blomkvist highlighted all the documents and deleted them. He dragged them to an icon for the Burn programme, which did not simply delete the documents but eradicated them byte by byte.
Then he tackled Svensson's email. He had been given his own email address at Millennium, which he used both at the office and on his laptop. He had his own password, but that did not present a problem, since Blomkvist had administrator rights and was able to access the entire mail server. He downloaded a copy of Svensson's email and burned it to a CD.
Finally he turned his attention to the mountain of paper made up of reference material, notes, press clippings, court judgments, and all the correspondence that Svensson had accumulated. He played it safe and made copies of everything that looked important. That came to two thousand pages and took him three hours.
He set to one side all the material that might in any way be connected to a confidential source. It was a stack of about forty pages, mainly notes from two A4 pads that Svensson had locked in his desk. Blomkvist put this material in an envelope and took it into his office. Then he carried all the other material that was part of Svensson's project to his desk.
When he was finished he took a deep breath and went down to the 7-Eleven, where he had a coffee and a slice of pizza. He mistakenly assumed that the police would arrive at any moment to go through Svensson's desk.
Bublanski had an unexpected breakthrough in the investigation just after 10:00 a.m., when he was called by Lennart Granlund of the National Forensics