The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,48
hill to Hantverkargatan, and his thoughts turned again to Forsell and his wife, Rebecka, a charming woman whom he had met at the Jewish Community Centre.
She was tall, certainly more than six feet, fine-limbed with light, elegant steps and large, dark eyes which shone with warmth and vitality. He could understand why this couple attracted so much animosity.
Of course people resented those who exude such boundless energy. They make the rest of us feel small and feeble in comparison.
CHAPTER 14
August 25
Blomkvist read Salander’s message and got up from his desk to look out across the water. It was five in the afternoon, and it was becoming increasingly windy out there. A yacht was racing along in the storm further out in the bay. A Sherpa, he thought, a Sherpa. There must be something to that, surely?
Not that he had really believed it was anything to do with the Minister of Defence. But still…one could not ignore the fact that Forsell had climbed Mount Everest in 2008. Blomkvist resolved to get to the bottom of the story. There was no shortage of material about the drama, and that, as he had already concluded, was chiefly down to Klara Engelman.
Engelman was glamour personified, God’s gift to gossip columnists, with her dyed-blond hair and surgically enhanced lips and breasts. She was married to a notorious tycoon, Stan Engelman, who owned hotels and other properties in New York, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Klara was not a society girl but rather a Hungarian former model who had travelled to the United States in her youth and won a Miss Bikini contest in Las Vegas. There she met Stan, a member of the judges’ panel—a detail the tabloids loved.
But in 2008 she was thirty-six years old and mother to the couple’s then twelve-year-old daughter, Juliette. She had a degree in Public Relations from St. Joseph’s College in New York and seemed to want to show that she could accomplish something on her own. Today, more than ten years after the tragedy, it was difficult to understand the indignation she aroused at Base Camp. Her blog for Vogue admittedly featured a number of ridiculously styled photographs of her wearing the latest fashions. But with the benefit of hindsight it was clear that the coverage she got was patronizing and sexist. The reporters made her out to be nothing more than a bimbo, and held her up as the very antithesis to the mountains and an affront to the local population. She was the vulgarity of the wealthy West contrasted with the purity of the mountain’s wide-open spaces.
Klara Engelman was on the same expedition as Johannes Forsell and his friend Svante Lindberg, who was now his parliamentary undersecretary. All three had paid seventy-five thousand dollars to be guided to the summit, and that of course added insult to injury. Everest was said to have become a haunt for the rich, who were there only to boost their egos. The leader of the expedition and owner of the guiding company was Viktor Grankin, a Russian, and in addition to him there were three guides, a Base Camp manager, a doctor and fourteen Sherpas—and the ten clients. This many people were needed to get them to the top.
Could the beggar have been one of those Sherpas? The thought had occurred to Blomkvist right away, and before he looked into the tragedy any further he tried to find out more about them. Was it possible that one of them had ended up in Sweden, or had a special relationship with Forsell? For many of them he drew a complete blank, but for a young Sherpa, Jangbu Chiri, there seemed to be a connection.
He and Forsell met again in Chamonix three years later, and had a beer together. It was perfectly possible that they could have become sworn enemies after that. But in the picture online, they were giving a thumbs-up and looked absurdly happy. As far as Blomkvist could discover, none of the Sherpas on the expedition had a bad word to say about Forsell. There were anonymous accusations—these had surfaced in the current disinformation campaign—that Forsell had contributed to Klara Engelman’s death by delaying or holding back the group on the mountain. But according to many eyewitness accounts, the opposite was the case: It was Engelman herself who slowed the expedition down, and by the time disaster struck, Forsell and Svante Lindberg had already left the others behind and gone on to the summit on their own.