After three minutes it went back the way it came. Blomkvist caught a glimpse of Isabella Vanger in the back seat.
Around 7:00 he had dozed off in the garden chair when Frode woke him up.
“How’s it going with Henrik and Harriet?” he said.
“This unhappy cloud has its silver lining,” Frode said with a restrained smile. “Isabella, would you believe, came rushing into Henrik’s hospital room. She’d obviously seen that you’d come back and was completely beside herself. She screamed at him that there had to be an end to this outrageous fuss about her Harriet, adding that you were the one who drove her son to his death with your snooping.”
“Well, she’s right, in a way.”
“She commanded Henrik to dismiss you forthwith and run you off the property for good. And would he, once and for all, stop searching for ghosts.”
“Wow!”
“She didn’t even glance at the woman sitting beside the bed talking to Henrik. She must have thought it was one of the staff. I will never forget the moment when Harriet stood up and said, ‘Hello, Mamma.’”
“What happened?”
“We had to call a doctor to check Isabella’s vital signs. Right now she’s refusing to believe that it’s Harriet. You are accused of dragging in an impostor.”
Frode was on his way to visit Cecilia and Alexander to give them the news that Harriet had risen from the dead. He hurried away, leaving Blomkvist to his solitary musings.
Salander stopped and filled her tank at a petrol station north of Uppsala. She had been riding doggedly, staring straight ahead. She paid quickly and got back on her bike. She started it up and rode to the exit, where she stopped, undecided.
She was still in a terrible mood. She was furious when she left Hedeby, but her rage had slowly dissolved during the ride. She could not make up her mind why she was so angry with Blomkvist, or even if he was the one she was angry with.
She thought of Martin Vanger and Harriet Fucking Vanger and Dirch Fucking Frode and the whole damned Vanger clan sitting in Hedestad reigning over their little empire and plotting against each other. They had needed her help. Normally they wouldn’t even have said hello to her in the street, let alone entrust her with their repellent secrets.
Fucking riff-raff.
She took a deep breath and thought about her mother, whom she had consigned to ashes that very morning. She would never be able to mend things. Her mother’s death meant that the wound would never heal, since she would never now get an answer to the questions she had wanted to ask.
She thought about Armansky standing behind her at the crematorium. She should have said something to him. At least given him some sign that she knew he was there. But if she did that, he would have taken it as a pretext for trying to structure her life. If she gave him her little finger he’d take her whole arm. And he would never understand.
She thought about the lawyer, Bjurman, who was still her guardian and who, at least for the time being, had been neutralised and was doing as he was told.
She felt an implacable hatred and clenched her teeth.
And she thought about Mikael Blomkvist and wondered what he would say when he found out that she was a ward of the court and that her entire life was a fucking rats’ nest.
It came to her that she really was not angry with him. He was just the person on whom she had vented her anger when what she had wanted most of all was to murder somebody, several people. Being angry with him was pointless.
She felt strangely ambivalent towards him.
He stuck his nose in other people’s business and poked around in her life and…but…she had also enjoyed working with him. Even that was an odd feeling—to work with somebody. She wasn’t used to that, but it had been unexpectedly painless. He did not mess with her. He did not try to tell her how to live her life.
She was the one who had seduced him, not vice versa.
And besides, it had been satisfying.
So why did she feel as if she wanted to kick him in the face?
She sighed and unhappily raised her eyes to see an inter-continental roar past on the E4.
Blomkvist was still in the garden at 8:00 when he was roused by the rattle of the motorcycle crossing the bridge and saw Salander riding towards the cottage. She put her bike on its