the revenue is deposited in an account for your sister, and I'll suggest some suitable recipients for the rest."
"Right," Salander said and hung up without further discussion.
She sat in her window seat, lit a cigarette, and looked out towards Saltsjon.
Salander spent the next week helping Armansky with an urgent matter. She had to help track down and identify a person suspected of being hired to kidnap a child in a custody battle resulting from a Swedish woman divorcing her Lebanese husband. Salander's job amounted to checking the email of the person who was presumed to have hired the kidnapper. Milton Security's role was discontinued when the parties reached a legal solution.
On December 18, the Sunday before Christmas, Salander woke at 6.00 and remembered that she had to buy a Christmas present for Palmgren. For a moment she wondered whether there was anyone else she should buy presents for - Giannini perhaps. She got up and took a shower in no particular hurry, and ate a breakfast of toast with cheese and marmalade and a coffee.
She had nothing special planned for the day and spent a while clearing papers and magazines from her desk. Then her gaze fell on the folder with the estate inventory. She opened it and reread the page about the title registration for the site in Norrtalje. She sighed. O.K. I have to find out what the hell he had going on there.
She put on warm clothes and boots. It was 8.30 when she drove her burgundy Honda out of the garage beneath Fiskargatan 9. It was icy cold but beautiful, sunshine and a pastel-blue sky. She took the road via Slussen and Klarabergsleden and wound her way on to the E18 going north, heading for Norrtalje. She was in no hurry. At 10.00 she turned into an O.K. petrol station and shop a few miles outside Skederid to ask the way to the old brickworks. No sooner had she parked than she realized that she did not even need to ask.
She was on a hillside with a good view across the valley on the other side of the road. To the left towards Norrtalje she could see a paint warehouse, some sort of builder's yard, and another yard with bulldozers. To the right, at the edge of the industrial area, about four hundred metres from the road was a dismal brick building with a crumbling chimney-stack. The factory stood like a last outpost of the industrial area, somewhat isolated beyond a road and a narrow stream. She surveyed the building thoughtfully and asked herself what on earth had possessed her to drive all the way up to Norrtalje.
She turned and glanced at the O.K. station, where a long-distance truck and trailer with the emblem of the International Road Transport Union had just pulled in. She remembered that she was on the main road from the ferry terminal at Kapellskar, through which a good deal of the freight traffic between Sweden and the Baltic countries passed.
She started the car and drove out on to the road towards the old brickworks. She parked in the middle of the yard and got out. It was below freezing outside, and she put on a black knitted cap and leather gloves.
The main building was on two floors. On the ground floor all the windows had been boarded up with plywood, and she could see that on the floor above many of them had been broken. The factory was a much bigger building than she had imagined, and it was incredibly dilapidated. She could see no evidence of repairs. There was no trace of a living soul, but she saw that someone had discarded a used condom in the yard, and that graffiti artists had attacked part of the facade.
Why had Zalachenko owned this building?
She walked around the factory and found the ramshackle north building to the rear. She saw that the doors to the main building were locked. In frustration she studied a door at one end of the building. All the other doors had padlocks attached with iron bolts and galvanized security strips, but the lock on the gable end seemed weaker and was in fact attached only with rough spikes. Damn it, it's my building. She looked about and found a narrow iron pipe in a pile of rubbish. She used it to lever open the fastening of the padlock.
She entered a stairwell with a doorway on to the ground floor area. The boarded-up windows meant that