Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [139]
The public register listed eighteen Susanne Linders in Stockholm county, three of them around thirty-five years old. One lived in Norrtälje, one in Stockholm, and one in Nacka. She requisitioned their passport photographs and identified at once the woman she had followed from Bellmansgatan as the Susanne Linder who lived in Nacka.
She set out her day’s work in a memo and went in to see Edklinth.
Blomkvist closed Cortez’s research folder and pushed it away with distaste. Malm put down the printout of his article, which he had read four times. Cortez sat on the sofa in Eriksson’s office looking guilty.
“Coffee,” Eriksson said, getting up. She came back with four mugs and the coffee pot.
“This is a great sleazy story,” Blomkvist said. “First-class research. Documentation to the hilt. Perfect dramaturgy with a bad guy who swindles Swedish tenants through the system – which is legal – but who is so greedy and so bloody stupid that he outsources to this company in Vietnam.”
“Very well written too,” Malm said. “The day after we publish this, Borgsjö is going to be persona non grata. T. V. is going to pick this up. He’s going to be right up there with the directors of Skandia. A genuine scoop for Millennium. Well done, Henry.”
“But this thing with Erika is a real fly in the ointment,” Blomkvist said.
“Why should that be a problem?” Eriksson said. “Erika isn’t the villain. We have to be free to examine any chairman of the board, even if he happens to be her boss.”
“It’s a hell of a dilemma,” Blomkvist said.
“Erika hasn’t altogether left here,” Malm said. “She owns 30 per cent of Millennium and sits on our board. In fact, she’s chairman of the board until we can elect Harriet Vanger at the next board meeting, and that won’t be until August. Plus Erika is working at S.M.P., where she also sits on the board, and you’re about to expose her chairman.”
Glum silence.
“So what the hell are we going to do?” Cortez said. “Do we kill the article?”
Blomkvist looked Cortez straight in the eye. “No, Henry. We’re not going to kill the article. That’s not the way we do things at Millennium.
But this is going to take some legwork. We can’t just dump it on Erika’s desk as a newspaper billboard.”
Malm waved a finger in the air. “We’re really putting Erika on the spot. She’ll have to choose between selling her share of Millennium and leaving our board … or in the worst case, she could get fired by S.M.P. Either way she would have a fearful conflict of interest. Honestly, Henry … I agree with Mikael that we should publish the story, but we may have to postpone it for a month.”
“Because we’re facing a conflict of loyalties too,” Blomkvist said.
“Should I call her?”
“No, Christer,” Blomkvist said. “I’ll call her and arrange to meet. Say for tonight.”
Figuerola gave a summary of the circus that had sprung up around Blomkvist’s building on Bellmansgatan. Edklinth felt the floor sway slightly beneath his chair.
“An employee of S.I.S. goes into Blomkvist’s building with an ex-safebreaker, now retrained as a locksmith.”
“Correct.”
“What do you think they did in the stairwell?”
“I don’t know. But they were in there for forty-nine minutes. My guess is that Faulsson opened the door and Mårtensson spent the time in Blomkvist’s apartment.”
“And what did they do there?”
“It couldn’t have been to plant bugs, because that takes only a minute or so. Mårtensson must have been looking through Blomkvist’s papers or whatever else he keeps at his place.”
“But Blomkvist has already been warned … they stole Björck’s report from there.”
“Quite right. He knows he’s being watched, and he’s watching the ones who are watching him. He’s calculating.”
“Calculating what?”
“I mean, he has a plan. He’s gathering information and is going to expose Mårtensson. That’s the only reasonable explanation.”
“And then this Linder woman?”
“Susanne Linder, former police officer.”
“Police officer?”
“She graduated from the police academy