is to press the attack alarm. That's all. I don't want you underfoot if there's any trouble."
Berger went to bed at 11.00. She heard the click of the lock as she closed her bedroom door. Deep in thought, she undressed and climbed into bed.
She had been told not to feel obliged to entertain her "guest," but she had spent two hours with Linder at the kitchen table. She discovered that they got along famously. They had discussed the psychology that causes certain men to stalk women. Linder told her that she did not hold with psychological mumbo-jumbo. She thought the most important thing was simply to stop the bastards, and she enjoyed her job at Milton Security a great deal, since her assignments were largely to act as a counter-force to raging lunatics.
"So why did you resign from the police force?" Berger said.
"A better question would be why did I become a police officer in the first place."
"Why did you become a police officer?"
"Because when I was seventeen a close friend of mine was mugged and raped in a car by three utter bastards. I became a police officer because I thought, rather idealistically, that the police existed to prevent crimes like that."
"Well - "
"I couldn't prevent shit. As a policewoman I invariably arrived on the scene after a crime had been committed. I couldn't cope with the arrogant lingo on the squad. And I soon found out that some crimes are never even investigated. You're a typical example. Did you try to call the police about what happened?"
"Yes."
"And did they bother to come out here?"
"Not really. I was told to file a report at the local station."
"So now you know. I work for Armansky, and I come into the picture before a crime is committed."
"Mostly to do with women who are threatened?"
"I work with all kinds of things. Security assessments, bodyguard protection, surveillance and so on. But the work is often to do with people who have been threatened. I get on considerably better at Milton than on the force, although there's a drawback."
"What's that?"
"We are only there for clients who can pay."
As she lay in bed Berger thought about what Linder had said. Not everyone can afford security. She herself had accepted Rosin's proposal for several new doors, engineers, back-up alarm systems and everything else without blinking. The cost of all that work would be almost 50,000 kronor. But she could afford it.
She pondered for a moment her suspicion that the person threatening her had something to do with S.M.P. Whoever it was had known that she had hurt her foot. She thought of Holm. She did not like him, which added to her mistrust of him, but the news that she had been injured had spread fast from the second she appeared in the newsroom on crutches.
And she had the Borgsjo problem.
She suddenly sat up in bed and frowned, looking around the bedroom. She wondered where she had put Cortez's file on Borgsjo and Vitavara Inc.
She got up, put on her dressing gown and leaned on a crutch. She went to her study and turned on the light. No, she had not been in her study since... since she had read through the file in the bath the night before. She had put it on the windowsill.
She looked in the bathroom. It was not on the windowsill.
She stood there for a while, worrying.
She had no memory of seeing the folder that morning. She had not moved it anywhere else.
She turned ice-cold and spent the next five minutes searching the bathroom and going through the stacks of papers and newspapers in the kitchen and bedroom. In the end she had to admit that the folder was gone.
Between the time when she had stepped on the shard of glass and Rosin's arrival that morning, somebody had gone into her bathroom and taken Millennium's material about Vitavara Inc.
Then it occurred to her that she had other secrets in the house. She limped back to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the chest by her bed. Her heart sank like a stone. Everyone has secrets. She kept hers in the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Berger did not regularly write a diary, but there were periods when she had. There were also old love letters which she had kept from her teenage years.
There was an envelope with photographs that had been cool at the time, but... When Berger was twenty-five she had been involved in Club Xtreme,