The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,186

my life for personal reasons."

"Interesting thought. Why did this come up?"

"I was... discussing the situation with someone today. I can't give you her name, but she suggested that threats from a real stalker would be different. She said a stalker would never have written the email to the girl on the culture desk. It seems completely beside the point."

Linder said: "There is something to that. You know, I never read the emails. Could I see them?"

Berger set up her laptop on the kitchen table.

Figuerola escorted Blomkvist out of police headquarters at 10.00 p.m. They stopped at the same place in Kronoberg park as the day before.

"Here we are again. Are you going to disappear to work or do you want to come to my place and come to bed with me?"

"Well..."

"You don't have to feel pressured, Mikael. If you have to work, then do it."

"Listen, Figuerola, you're worryingly habit-forming."

"And you don't want to be dependent on anything. Is that what you're saying?"

"No. That's not what I'm saying. But there's someone I have to talk to tonight and it'll take a while. You'll be asleep before I'm done."

She shrugged.

"See you."

He kissed her cheek and headed for the bus stop on Fridhemsplan.

"Blomkvist," she called.

"What?"

"I'm free tomorrow morning as well. Come and have breakfast if you can make it."

CHAPTER 21

SATURDAY, 4.VI - MONDAY, 6.VI

Salander picked up a number of ominous vibrations as she browsed the emails of the news editor, Holm. He was fifty-eight and thus fell outside the group, but Salander had included him anyway because he and Berger had been at each other's throats. He was a schemer who wrote messages to various people telling them how someone had done a rotten job.

It was obvious to Salander that Holm did not like Berger, and he certainly wasted a lot of space talking about how the bitch had said this or done that. He used the Net exclusively for work-related sites. If he had other interests, he must google them in his own time on some other machine.

She kept him as a candidate for the title of Poison Pen, but he was not a favourite. Salander spent some time thinking about why she did not believe he was the one, and arrived at the conclusion that he was so damned arrogant he did not have to go to the trouble of using anonymous email. If he wanted to call Berger a whore, he would do it openly. And he did not seem the type to go sneaking into Berger's home in the middle of the night.

At 10.00 in the evening she took a break and went into [Idiotic_Table]. She saw that Blomkvist had not come back yet. She felt slightly peeved and wondered what he was up to, and whether he had made it in time to Teleborian's meeting.

Then she went back into S.M.P.'s server.

She moved to the next name on the list, assistant sports editor Claes Lundin, twenty-nine. She had just opened his email when she stopped and bit her lip. She closed it again and went instead to Berger's.

She scrolled back in time. There was relatively little in her inbox, since her email account had been opened only on May 2. The very first message was a midday memo from Peter Fredriksson. In the course of Berger's first day several people had emailed her to welcome her to S.M.P.

Salander carefully read each message in Berger's inbox. She could see how even from day one there had been a hostile undertone in her correspondence with Holm. They seemed unable to agree on anything, and Salander saw that Holm was already trying to exasperate Berger by sending several emails about complete trivialities.

She skipped over ads, spam and news memos. She focused on any kind of personal correspondence. She read budget calculations, advertising and marketing projections, an exchange with C.F.O. Sellberg that went on for a week and was virtually a brawl over staff layoffs. Berger had received irritated messages from the head of the legal department about some temp. by the name of Johannes Frisk. She had apparently detailed him to work on some story and this had not been appreciated. Apart from the first welcome emails, it seemed as if no-one at management level could see anything positive in any of Berger's arguments or proposals.

After a while Salander scrolled back to the beginning and did a statistical calculation in her head. Of all the upper-level managers at S.M.P., only four did not engage in sniping. They were the