did. She was reading an article, and as usual Paulina could not keep up. She had never met a person who read so fast. The sentences flashed by on the screen. But she did catch the words “…Denisovan genome and that of certain South Asian…” and then she immediately became interested. At Geo she had done some pieces on the origins of Homo sapiens and the species’ kinship with the Neanderthals and the Denisovan hominids.
“I’ve written about that,” she said.
Salander did not answer, and that made Paulina furious. Salander took care of everything, and protected her, it was true, but she often felt alone and excluded. She could not bear Salander’s silence or her endless hours in front of the computer. Especially at night, that drove her mad, and the nights were bad enough as it was. That was when all the awful things Thomas had done raged inside her, and she dreamed of revenge and retribution. Those were the hours when she really needed Lisbeth.
But Salander was dealing with her own private hell. Sometimes her body was so tense that Paulina did not dare to press up close, and how was it possible for someone to sleep so little? Whenever Paulina woke up, Salander was lying next to her with her eyes open, listening for sounds in the corridor, or she was sitting at the desk looking at footage from surveillance cameras and satellite images. Paulina felt that she could no longer bear to be kept out of it all, not when they were living so closely together, and she wanted to scream: Who’s out to get you? What are you up to?
“What are you doing?” she said.
There was no answer this time either. But Salander did at least turn and give her a look, and it felt a little like an outstretched hand. There was a new, softer light in her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she said again.
“I’m trying to discover the identity of a man,” Salander said.
“A man?”
“A Sherpa, a little over fifty years old, dead now, probably from the Khumbu Valley in northeastern Nepal, and although he could also be from Sikkim or Darjeeling in India, the signs mostly point to Nepal, and the area around Namche Bazaar. His family originates from eastern Tibet. As a child he seems to have had a fat-deficient diet.” Coming from Lisbeth that was like an entire lecture, and Paulina’s face lit up as she sat down on a chair beside her.
“Anything else?”
“I have his DNA and an autopsy report. With the injuries he has, I’m pretty sure he was a porter or guide on high-altitude climbing expeditions. He must have been very good at it.”
“What makes you say so?”
“He was unusually well endowed with type 1 muscle fibres and was probably able to carry heavy loads without consuming very much energy. But the main reason is the gene in his body which regulated the haemoglobin in his blood. He must have possessed great strength and endurance in low-oxygen environments. I suspect that he had some terrible experiences. He suffered severe frostbite and torn muscles. Several of his toes and fingers had been amputated.”
“Do you have his Y data?”
“I’ve got the whole of his genome.”
“Shouldn’t you check with YFull in that case?”
YFull was a Russian company—Paulina had written about them only a year or so ago—which was run by a team of mathematicians, biologists and programmers who collected Y chromosome DNA from people all over the world. It came either from subjects who had enrolled in academic studies or from people who had taken their own DNA samples to find out more about their origins.
“I was thinking of checking with Familytree and Ancestry, but YFull, you say?”
“I think they’re the best. The company’s run by people like you, a bunch of out-and-out nerds.”
“OK,” Salander said. “But I think it’ll be difficult.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My guess is the man belongs to a group that doesn’t have its DNA analyzed all that often.”
“There might be material from relatives of his in scientific reports? I happen to know there’s been a fair amount of research into why Sherpas are such effective climbers at high altitude,” Paulina said, proud to be actually involved.
“That’s true,” Salander said, no longer quite there.
“And it’s a pretty small population, isn’t it?”
“There are only a little over twenty thousand Sherpas in the entire world.”
“Well, then?” she said, perhaps hoping that they could have a go at it together.
But Salander opened another link on her laptop