The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,60

of interfering with the Swedish electoral process and suddenly he’s hated by everybody and up to his neck in lies, and driven to the depths of despair. Then, hey presto, a dead Sherpa appears from nowhere and the finger points straight at Forsell. I have the feeling someone’s trying to set him up.”

“It doesn’t sound great when you put it like that.”

“No,” he said. “Do we still not know how the beggar got into the country?”

“The Migration Agency has reiterated that he’s not in any of their records.”

“Odd.”

“He should have cropped up in our databases.”

“Maybe the intelligence services have put a lid on that too,” he muttered.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Are we not allowed to talk to Forsell’s wife either?”

Modig shook her head.

“We’ll need to question her soon, I’m sure they understand that. They can’t stop us doing our job,” he said.

“I have a bad feeling that’s precisely what they think they can do.”

“Are they scared of something too?”

“Almost seems like it.”

“Well, we’ll just have to accept it, and make do with what we have. But what a mess,” Bublanski said, and he couldn’t stop himself from having another look at the news sites.

Johannes Forsell’s condition remained critical.

* * *

—

Thomas Müller was late home from work, back in his large loft apartment on Østerbrogade in Copenhagen. He took a beer from the refrigerator and saw that the sink was dirty and the breakfast dishes had not been put in the dishwasher. He walked through all the rooms. None of them had been cleaned.

The cleaners had simply not bothered. As if he didn’t have enough trouble already. Nothing but grief and moaning at work. His secretary was brain-dead. Today he had yelled at her so much that it had given him a headache, and then, of course, right in the middle of everything else, there was Paulina. He had had enough of it now. How could she! After all he had done. She had been a little nothing when they first met, a worthless journalist on a local paper. He had given her everything—everything apart from a signed prenuptial agreement, which had been a big mistake. Bloody dyke.

When she came back to him like a wet rag, he would pretend to be nice. Then he’d let her have it. No way would he ever forgive her, especially not after that message. it had said. That was all, and he had smashed his mobile to bits, and a crystal vase…No, he didn’t want to think about it.

He took off his jacket, settled onto the sofa with his beer and wondered whether to ring Fredrike, his mistress. But he was bored with her too. He turned on the TV and heard that the Swedish Minister of Defence was hovering between life and death. He could not have cared less. That buffoon was a PC idiot, everyone knew that, and a hypocrite and a cheat too. He switched over to Bloomberg and the financial news and let his thoughts wander, and he must have flipped channels at least a dozen times when the doorbell rang. Fuck. Who the hell turns up at ten at night? He was tempted to ignore it.

Then it struck him that it could be Paulina, so he hauled himself to his feet and yanked open the door. But it was not his wife. A stroppy-looking, black-haired girl in jeans and a hoodie was standing in the corridor, holding a bag and looking down at the hall floor.

“I don’t need anything,” he said.

“It’s about the cleaning,” she said.

“You can tell your boss from me that she can go to hell,” he said. “I have no time for people who don’t do their job properly.”

“It’s not the cleaning company’s fault,” the woman said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m the one who cancelled the service.”

“You did what?”

“I cancelled it, and I’ll take care of things myself.”

“Don’t you get it? I don’t want any more cleaning. Piss off,” he spat, slamming the door.

But the woman put her foot in the way and stepped over the threshold, and only then did he notice that there was something odd about her. She walked in a funny way, without moving her arms or upper body and with her head slightly tilted to one side, as if she were looking at a remote point over by the windows. Perhaps she was a criminal or had some mental problem. Her eyes were icy and expressionless, as if she were not