The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,71

able to see where you are, and hear what’s going on around you.”

“What?! So I won’t have any private life at all?”

“You can have whatever private life you like, and I’m not going to listen in unnecessarily, at least not unless you say those words.”

“So I can go on talking crap about you?”

“What?”

“That was a joke, Lisbeth.”

“OK.”

He smiled.

Maybe she smiled too. He put his mobile away, looked at her again and said, “Thank you.”

“Keep a low profile now,” she said.

“I will. Just as well no-one knows who I am.”

“What?”

She didn’t get that joke either, and then he really did hug her.

He left the hotel and tried to melt into the life of the city. Not all that successfully. He had got only as far as Tegnérgatan when a young man asked for a selfie, and he continued to Sveavägen. He should have kept his head down, but he sat on a bench not far from the Stockholm Public Library and once more looked up Nima Rita. He ended up reading a long article in Outside magazine from August 2008.

It was the most detailed account ever given by Nima Rita. But the quotes were nothing to get excited about, at least not at first sight. Blomkvist had read it all before, dutiful or sorrowful answers to questions about Klara Engelman. But then he saw something which made him sit up, and at first it was not clear to him why. It was contained in the simple, heartbroken message:

“I really tried to take care of her. I tried. But Mamsahib just fell, and then the storm came, and the mountain was angry and we couldn’t save her. I am very, very sorry for Mamsahib.”

Mamsahib.

Of course. Mamsahib could also be “memsahib,” the feminine of “sahib,” a form of address for whites in colonial India. Why had that not occurred to him? In the course of his investigations he had read that Sherpas often referred to Western climbers in that way.

I took Forsell. And I left Mamsahib.

That is what he must have said, and he was therefore presumably talking about Klara Engelman. But what did that mean? Had Nima Rita rescued Johannes Forsell instead of her? That was inconsistent with what he had read of the sequence of events.

Klara Engelman and Johannes Forsell had been in two different places on the mountain, and Engelman was probably already dead by the time Forsell got into difficulties. And yet…had something different happened which needed to be hushed up? It could be, and it could also be nonsense. But he definitely got a boost from the feeling that he could forget about his holiday; now he was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the story. He immediately sent a text to Lisbeth:

CHAPTER 21

August 27

Paulina Müller was sitting in pyjamas on her bed in the room where she had spent her teenage years, in Bogenhausen in Munich. She was talking on the telephone and drinking hot chocolate. Her mother had been running around looking after her as if she were ten again and, all things considered, life could be worse.

That is what she wanted, to be a child again, and to have no responsibilities. She wanted to be able to cry her eyes out. What is more, she had been wrong. Her parents had known all too well what Thomas Müller was about. There had been not the slightest disbelief in their eyes when she told them what he had done to her. But now she had locked her bedroom door, saying that she did not want to be disturbed for the moment.

“So you have no idea who this woman could be,” Chief Inspector Jensen said on the phone, sounding as if she did not believe one word of what Paulina was telling her.

Not only had it been instantly obvious to Paulina who the woman with the iron was. She even saw some kind of dark logic in it, and was terrified that somehow she had sanctioned what had happened. Countless times during the trip home she had said: “I can’t see him again, I just can’t. I’d rather die.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”

“Your husband told me that you’d met a woman and fallen in love,” Jensen said.

“I only wrote that to annoy him.”

“Yet he got the impression that there was some kind of emotional connection between the perpetrator and you. It even seemed as if the message