pleased, including the Prime Minister, to testify until the matter was resolved. As the situation now stood, the most her lawyer could do was to file a report with the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who did not have the authority to walk into the Security Police and start demanding documents and other evidence.
Over the years Edklinth had been an impassioned advocate of the establishment of a constitutional court. He could then more easily have acted upon the information he had been given by Armansky: by initiating a police report and handing the documentation to the court. With that an inexorable process would have been set in motion.
As things stood, Edklinth lacked the legal authority to initiate a preliminary investigation.
He took a pinch of snuff.
If Armansky's information was correct, Security Police officers in senior positions had looked the other way when a series of savage assaults were committed against a Swedish woman. Then her daughter was locked up in a mental hospital on the basis of a fabricated diagnosis. Finally, they had given carte blanche to a former Soviet intelligence officer to commit crimes involving weapons, narcotics and sex trafficking. Edklinth grimaced. He did not even want to begin to estimate how many counts of illegal activity must have taken place. Not to mention the burglary at Blomkvist's apartment, the attack on Salander's lawyer - which Edklinth could not bring himself to accept was a part of the same pattern - and possible involvement in the murder of Zalachenko.
It was a mess, and Edklinth did not welcome the necessity to get mixed up in it. Unfortunately, from the moment Armansky invited him to dinner, he had become involved.
How now to handle the situation? Technically, that answer was simple. If Armansky's account was true, Lisbeth Salander had at the very least been deprived of the opportunity to exercise her constitutionally protected rights and liberties. From a constitutional standpoint, this was the first can of worms. Decision-making political bodies had been induced to take decisions in a certain direction. This too touched on the core of the responsibility delegated to the Constitutional Protection Unit. Edklinth, a policeman, had knowledge of a crime and thus he had the obligation to submit a report to a prosecutor. In real life, the answer was not so simple. It was, on the contrary and to put it mildly, decidedly unsimple.
Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name, was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth century. She was a woman who people usually paid attention to, and for several reasons. She was thirty-six, blue eyed, and one metre eighty-four tall. She had short, light-blonde, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And she was exceptionally fit.
She had been an outstanding gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics, but she still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it tough for her if she had to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.
Her intelligence, too, intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top marks, studied to become a police officer at twenty, and then served for nine years in Uppsala police and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.
When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the Violent Crime Division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know Figuerola's father and had followed