The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,68

mouth shut.

“What did you remember?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“I remembered my family.”

“What about them?”

Leave it, she thought. Just leave it.

“I remembered…” she began, as if she could not help herself, or as if something inside her was determined to put this into words.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Mamma knew that Camilla was stealing from us and lying to the police to protect Zala. She knew that Camilla said terrible things about us to the social welfare authorities and made the situation at home even more of a living hell.”

“I know all this,” he said. “Holger told me.”

“But did you also know…”

“What?”

Should she just drop it? She spat it out:

“That in the end Mamma had enough and threatened to throw Camilla out?”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But Camilla was only a child.”

“She was twelve.”

“Still…”

“Maybe she was just exasperated and didn’t really mean it. But she was always on my side, I know that. She didn’t like Camilla.”

“That can happen in any family. One of the children becomes the favourite.”

“But in this case there were consequences. It blinded us.”

“To what?”

“To what was going on.”

“What was that?”

Stop, she thought. Stop.

She wanted to scream and run away. But she continued, as if driven by a force she could no longer control:

“We thought that Camilla had Zala. That it was two against two in our war, Mamma and me against Zala and Camilla. But that’s not how it was. Camilla was on her own.”

“You were all on your own.”

“It was worse for Camilla.”

“In what way?”

She looked away.

“Zala would sometimes come into our room at night,” she said. “At the time I was too young to understand why. But I didn’t give it much thought either. He was evil and did whatever he wanted. That’s just how it was, and at the time I only had one thing on my mind.”

“You wanted to stop your mother being abused.”

“I wanted to kill Zala, and of course I knew that Camilla had ganged up with him. I had no reason to worry about her.”

“I can see that.”

“But obviously I should have asked myself why Zala had changed.”

“In what way had he changed?”

“He was staying the night more and more often, and somehow that didn’t fit. He was used to luxury and having people running around after him. And now our apartment was suddenly good enough for him. That must have been because there was a new pawn in the game. On Tverskoy Boulevard the penny dropped. He was attracted to Camilla, like all other men.”

“So it was her he was coming for at night.”

“He always asked her to follow him to the living room, and listening to their voices it just sounded to me as if they were planning something against Mamma and me. But maybe I also heard something else, something I wasn’t able to get my head around at the time. They often went off in the car.”

“He abused her.”

“He ruined her.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that,” he said.

She wanted to scream.

“I was just answering your question. I realized that neither Mamma nor I lifted a finger to help her. That’s what made me hesitate.”

Blomkvist sat in silence on the bed, trying to absorb what he had heard. Then he put a hand on her shoulder. She pushed it away and looked out of the window.

“Do you know what I think?” he said.

She did not reply.

“I think you’re just not the sort of the person who shoots people like that.”

“That’s crap.”

“I don’t think you are, Lisbeth. I never have.”

She took a croissant from the tray, and more to herself than to him she muttered:

“But I should have killed her. Now she’s coming after all of us.”

CHAPTER 20

August 27

Bublanski had a bottle of Grant’s twelve-year-old scotch with him. It had been standing around at home for years, and doing this was clearly against his principles. But since the witness had asked him for whisky, he was not going to make an issue of it. Ever since yesterday, he had been focusing exclusively on Nima Rita’s death, so he had spared no effort to get hold of the last witness known to have seen the Sherpa alive. In the end he had tracked him down here in Haninge, to a small apartment in a yellow block on Klockarleden.

Bublanski had seen worse hangouts, but this was not the coziest he had seen either. The place smelled bad, and was littered with bottles and ashtrays and the remains of food. But the witness himself exuded a sort of bohemian elegance. He wore a