The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,37

touch on the meaning of life and everything else while we’re at it?”

“Next time, Mikael. Next time.”

He wanted to persuade her, he wanted to beg and plead. But he felt pathetic, so he just wished her a nice evening and hung up. He got up and took a beer from the fridge and wondered what to do with himself. The sensible thing would be to stop thinking about both Catrin and the beggar. None of that was going to get him anywhere. He should go back to his article about troll factories and the stock market crash or, better still, actually take a proper holiday.

But he was as he was: obstinate, and perhaps a little dumb too. He could not let go of things, and when he’d done the dishes and tidied up the kitchen corner, and stood for a few moments gazing at the ever-changing sea, he looked up Mats Sabin and found himself reading a lengthy obituary in Norrländska Socialdemokraten.

Sabin grew up in Luleå and became an officer in the coastal artillery—he was involved in the hunt for foreign submarines in the ’80s—but alongside that he also studied history and took leave for a while from the military in order to get a doctorate from Uppsala University. His thesis was on Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He became a lecturer at Försvarshögskolan, but, as Blomkvist knew, he also published popular histories about the Second World War. He was a long-time advocate of Swedish membership of NATO. He was certain that what he had been chasing in the Baltic were none other than Russian submarines. Yet in his final years he became a friend of Russia and defended their intervention in Ukraine and the Crimea. He had also applauded Russia as a force for peace in Syria.

It was never clear why he had altered his point of view, though he had been quoted as saying that “opinions are there to be changed as we grow older and wiser.” Mats Sabin was reputed to have been a good cross-country runner and a diver. Soon after his wife died, he walked the classic trail between Abisko and Nikkaluokta, and according to the obituary he was “in good shape.” It was the beginning of May and the forecast had been good, yet the weather turned to freezing towards the evening of the third. The temperature dropped to minus eight degrees, and Sabin seemed to have suffered a stroke and collapsed not far from the Abiskojåkka River. He never reached any of the mountain huts dotted along the track. He was found dead on the morning of the fourth by a group of hikers from Sundbyberg. There was no suggestion of suspicious circumstances, nor any sign of violence. He was sixty-seven years old.

Blomkvist tried to find out where Johannes Forsell—another keen outdoor sportsman—would have been at the time, but the internet yielded nothing here. This was May 2016, almost one and a half years before Forsell became Minister of Defence, and not even the press at his home in Östersund was monitoring his movements. But Blomkvist did manage to establish that Forsell had business interests in the area. It was not inconceivable that he might have been in Abisko at the time.

Yet it was all far too uncertain and speculative. Blomkvist got up and browsed his bookshelf in the bedroom. Most of the books there were detective novels, and he had read them all, so he tried to call Pernilla, his daughter, and Erika, without reaching either of them. Increasingly restless now, he set off to have dinner at Seglarhotellet by the harbour. When he came home late that evening, he felt completely deflated.

* * *

—

Paulina was asleep. Salander was staring at the ceiling. It was the usual state of affairs; either that, or both of them lying awake. Neither was getting enough rest, and they did not feel particularly well. But that evening they had managed to comfort each other quite satisfactorily with champagne and beer and sex, and had quickly fallen asleep, although that provided little solace when Salander woke with a start a while later, with the memories and questions from Lundagatan and her childhood sweeping over her like an icy wind. What was wrong with them all?

Even before Salander began to take an interest in science, she would say there was a genetic flaw in her family. For a long time she meant simply that many of them had extreme traits in one way or another,