The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,79
he was in, and in any event he could not get hold of either him, or Rebecka Forsell, or even his press secretary, Niklas Keller. In the end he decided to take a break to organize somewhere to stay. He had to find a place where he could work and sleep and not endanger his host. Then he could continue. But just then his mobile rang.
It was Nyman, saying that she had discovered something interesting. He asked her to hang up, and sent a text message telling her to install the Signal app, which would allow them to talk on a secure line.
she answered.
she wrote.
There was a pause and he sipped his Guinness and kept an eye on the street where two women passed with prams, and he let his thoughts drift until he got a text in a new language.
He decided to show what a techie he was and sent a selfie of him giving a thumbs-up.
he answered, and got a smiley back. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this after all, he thought, careful not to send a red heart this time. That would land him on the Expressen breaking-news posters. Instead he began to explain to the girl, the one called Amanda, what she needed to do. Fifteen minutes later, Nyman called on the app, and he went out into the street to speak to her.
“I’ve just gone way up in my daughters’ estimation,” she said.
“Well, at least I’ve done one useful thing today. What did you want to tell me?”
* * *
—
Nyman poured herself a glass of white wine and told Blomkvist what she had discovered.
“So nobody has yet said how or why he ended up there in the first place,” he said.
“There’s some kind of confidentiality around the whole thing. Military secrecy, I think.”
“As if it had something to do with national security?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or else it’s designed to protect certain individuals, rather than the country.”
“It could be that,” Nyman said.
“Isn’t it all a bit strange?”
“Certainly is,” she answered slowly, “and a huge scandal too. He seems to have been locked up in a small room there for several years, without even seeing a dentist, or anybody else as far as I can tell. I’m not sure if you know the place.”
“I read Gustav Stavsjö’s manifesto once upon a time,” he said.
“It all sounded great, didn’t it? The sickest of us would get the best care. The dignity of a society is defined by the way it looks after its weakest members.”
“He felt very strongly about his cause, didn’t he?”
“But those were different times, and his faith in dialogue and therapy was naïve, at least for patients with such severe symptoms, and psychiatry generally was also moving in a different direction, wasn’t it, towards more medication and coercive measures. The clinic, which is so beautifully located by the water and looks like some sort of mansion, became more and more of a depository for hopeless cases, especially refugees traumatized by war, and it grew increasingly difficult to recruit people to work there. The clinic got a lousy reputation.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
“There were ambitious plans to close it down and integrate the patients into the county council’s health-care system. But the sons who ran the Gustav Stavsjö Foundation managed to prevent it by persuading Professor Alm, who had a good reputation, to take over. He began to modernize the clinic and rebuild the organization, and it was in that context that he and his colleague became aware of Nima, or Nihar Rawal, as he was known in his medical records.”
“At least he got to keep his initials.”
“He did. But there’s something fishy about it. There was a particular contact person for him, whose identity the clinic has refused to disclose, who was supposed to have direct access to all information about him before anyone else. I don’t know, but I got the impression it’s a big name, someone important who the staff were in awe of.”