The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,30

love and talked for hours. Maybe it was because she had had a thing for him hundreds of years ago, like every other young female journalist at the time. But it was more likely the fact that she had been taken completely by surprise—the power of the totally unexpected. She had been certain that he despised her and wanted to score points off her, which had made her defensive and arrogant, as she often was under pressure. She had been wanting to get him out of her office when she saw something quite different in his eyes, a hunger, and then it had spiralled out of control. She had become the very antithesis of everything people believed about her, and she didn’t even care that one of her colleagues might turn up in her office at any moment. She had thrown herself at him with a passion which surprised her even now, and afterwards they had gone out and had far too much wine. Normally she never had far too much of anything.

They had arrived in Sandhamn by taxi boat late at night and tumbled into his cabin. They spent the next few days in each other’s arms in bed, or sitting in the garden, or out in the little motorboat—more of a dinghy with an outboard—he’d bought the year before. They simply watched the days go by. Yet she refused to believe that it was anything serious, and so far she had not said a single word about the one truly permanent feature of her life, the terror that never left her. She kept saying she would go home tomorrow, or maybe even that evening. But she had stayed on, and now it was ten-thirty on Monday morning. There was a wind out on the water and she looked up at the sky. A green kite swooping erratically in the wind. There was a sudden buzz next to her.

It was Blomkvist’s mobile. He was out running and she had certainly not offered to look after his phone. Nevertheless she checked the display. Fredrika Nyman. That must be the medical examiner he had been talking about, so she picked up.

“Mikael’s mobile?” she said.

“Is he there?”

“He’s out running. Can I take a message?”

“Please ask him to call me,” the doctor said. “Tell him I’ve got the results of a test back.”

“Is this about the beggar in the down jacket?”

“It is.”

“I met him, you know,” she said.

“You did?” Catrin heard the curiosity in her voice. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“I’m Catrin, a friend of Mikael’s.”

“What happened?”

“He accosted me in Mariatorget one morning, shouted at me.”

“What did he want?”

She already regretted having said anything. She recalled the feeling of something bad from the past coming back to hit her, like a chill wind.

“He wanted to talk about Johannes Forsell.”

“Forsell, the Minister of Defence?”

“He probably wanted to bad-mouth him, like everyone else does. But I got away from there as quickly as I could.”

“Did you get any sense of where he might have come from?”

Catrin thought she had a pretty good idea.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “What test results were you talking about?”

“I think I’d better discuss that with Mikael.”

“Fine, I’ll get him to call you.”

She hung up and felt the fear creep back again, and she thought of the beggar; how he had been kneeling by the statue in Mariatorget and her sense of déjà vu, and how it had taken her back to her childhood travels. Maybe she had given him a slightly nervous smile, the kind she always used to give to all the poor broken wretches back then. At any rate the man must have felt he was being acknowledged. He sprang to his feet and grabbed a stick which lay next to him, and came hobbling towards her, shouting:

“Famous lady, famous lady.”

She had been surprised to be recognized. But then he came up close and she saw the stumps of his fingers and the dark patches on his yellowish skin. There was desperation in his eyes, and she felt paralyzed. Only when he took hold of her jacket and started to shout about Johannes Forsell did she manage to tug herself free and escape.

“Can’t you remember a single thing of what he said?” Blomkvist had asked.

She had said it was the usual rubbish. But maybe it was more than that, after all. The words came back to her and now she no longer found them incomprehensible, or thought they were the sort of thing people always said