The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,39
called themselves “Wasp”:
Bloody insolent tone. And not even a sign-off. Why don’t you go sequence yourself, she thought. She could not stand that type of charmless, geeky researcher. Her husband had been the same, utterly hopeless now that she thought about it. Then she read the e-mail again and calmed down. It was rude and bossy, but it was exactly what she had been thinking, and she had in fact sent a blood sample to Uppsala Genome Center a few days earlier and asked them for exactly that, for the whole genetic make-up to be sequenced.
She had pressed them hard and urged the bioinformaticians to flag any unusual mutations and variations. She was expecting an answer any time now, so she wrote to them rather than the pushy researcher, having decided to adopt the same sort of tone herself while she was at it:
she wrote.
She hoped they would also be favourably impressed by the hour of writing. It was not yet five in the morning and even the swans on the lake looked to be out of sorts. And not so bloody smug about being a couple, after all.
* * *
—
Kurt Widmark Electronics on Hornsgatan had not yet opened. But Inspector Sonja Modig saw an elderly, stooped gentleman inside and knocked on the door, and he shuffled over wearing a forced smile.
“You’re early. But do come on in anyway,” he said.
Modig introduced herself and explained why she had come, whereupon the man stiffened and looked irritated, and huffed and grumbled for a while. He was pale, had a slightly crooked face and a long comb-over across his bald pate. There was a hint of bitterness around his mouth.
“Things are bad enough as it is in my line of business,” he said. “Competition from online companies and department stores.”
Modig smiled and tried to appear sympathetic. She had spent the early part of the morning walking around at random, making enquiries, and a young man in the hairdressers next door had told her that the beggar Bublanski had been talking about had quite often stood at the window of the electrical shop, glaring at the television screens inside.
“When did you first see him?” she said.
“He came marching in here a few weeks ago and stood in front of one of my sets,” Kurt Widmark said.
“What was on?”
“The news, and a rather tough interview with Johannes Forsell about the stock market crash and total defence.”
“Why do you think the beggar would have been interested in that?”
“How the hell should I know? I was mostly trying to get him out of the shop. I wasn’t being unfriendly. I don’t care what people look like, but I did tell him that he was alarming my customers.”
“In what way?”
“He stood there muttering to himself, and he smelled pretty bad. He seemed to me to have a screw loose.”
“Did you hear what he was saying?”
“Oh yes, he asked me very clearly in English if Forsell was a famous man now. I was somewhat taken aback, but I told him yes, he certainly is. He’s the Minister of Defence—and he’s very rich.”
“Did it seem as though he knew of Forsell before he became famous?”
“I couldn’t say. But I do remember him saying, ‘Problem, now he has problem?’ He put the question as if he wanted the answer to be yes.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him yes, absolutely, he has big problems. He’s been up to all sorts of hanky-panky and tricks with his shares, and he’s pulled off some palace coups behind the scenes.”
“But surely those are no more than idle rumours?”
“Well, the stories have been doing the rounds.”
“And what happened to the beggar then?” Modig said.
“He started shouting and kicking up a fuss, so I took him by the arm and tried to lead him outside. But he was strong and pointed at his face. ‘Look at me,’ he shouted. ‘See what happened to me! And I took him. And I took him.’ Or something like that. He looked absolutely desperate, so I let him stay there for a while, and after the Forsell interview there was a piece about schools in Sweden, and that prim little upper-class witch came on and pontificated.”