Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [171]
As the plywood was being put up, she called the duty officer at Nacka Integrated Protection, and asked why the hell their expensive burglar alarm had not gone off when someone threw a brick through her biggest window.
Someone from N.I.P. came out to look at the damage. It turned out that whoever had installed the alarm several years before had neglected to connect the leads from the windows in the living room.
Berger was furious.
The man from N.I.P. said they would fix it first thing in the morning. Berger told him not to bother. Instead she called the duty officer at Milton Security and explained her situation. She said that she wanted to have a complete alarm package installed the next morning. I know I have to sign a contract, but tell Armansky that Erika Berger called and make damn sure someone comes round in the morning.
Then, finally, she called the police. She was told that there was no car available to come and take her statement. She was advised to contact her local station in the morning. Thank you. Fuck off.
Then she sat and fumed for a long time until her adrenaline level dropped and it began to sink in that she was going to have to sleep alone in a house without an alarm while somebody was running around the neighbourhood calling her a whore and smashing her windows.
She wondered whether she ought to go into the city to spend the night at a hotel, but Berger was not the kind of person who liked to be threatened. And she liked giving in to threats even less.
But she did take some elementary safety precautions.
Blomkvist had told her once how Salander had put paid to the serial killer Martin Vanger with a golf club. So she went to the garage and spent several minutes looking for her golf bag, which she had hardly even thought about for fifteen years. She chose an iron that she thought had a certain heft to it and laid it within easy reach of her bed. She left a putter in the hall and an 8-iron in the kitchen. She took a hammer from the tool box in the basement and put that in the master bathroom too.
She put the canister of Mace from her shoulder bag on her bedside table. Finally she found a rubber doorstop and wedged it under the bedroom door. And then she almost hoped that the moron who had called her a whore and destroyed her window would be stupid enough to come back that night.
By the time she felt sufficiently entrenched it was 1.00. She had to be at S.M.P. at 8.00. She checked her diary and saw that she had four meetings, the first at 10.00. Her foot was aching badly. She undressed and crept into bed.
Then, inevitably, she lay awake and worried.
Whore.
She had received nine emails, all of which had contained the word “whore,” and they all seemed to come from sources in the media. The first had come from her own newsroom, but the source was a fake.
She got out of bed and took out the new Dell laptop that she had been given when she had started at S.M.P.
The first email – which was also the most crude and intimidating with its suggestion that she would be fucked with a screwdriver – had come on May 16, a couple of weeks ago.
Email number two had arrived two days later, on May 18.
Then a week went by before the emails started coming again, now at intervals of about twenty-four hours. Then the attack on her home. Again, whore.
During that time Carlsson on the culture pages had received an ugly email purportedly sent by Berger. And if Carlsson had received an email like that, it was entirely possible that the emailer had been busy elsewhere too – that other people had got mail apparently from her that she did not know about.
It was an unpleasant thought.
The most disturbing was the attack on her house.
Someone had taken the trouble to find out where she lived, drive out here, and throw a brick through the window. It was obviously premeditated – the attacker had brought his can of spray paint. The next moment she froze when