Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [183]
Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.
So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist’s plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist’s reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.
The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the whole truth. She had no intention of doing that.
She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.
She felt a niggling irritation that she could not identify. She reached for a notebook, given to her by Giannini and hardly used. She turned to the first page, where she had written:
She had spent several weeks in the Caribbean last winter working herself into a frenzy over Fermat’s theorem. When she came back to Sweden, before she got mixed up in the hunt for Zalachenko, she had kept on playing with the equations. What was maddening was that she had the feeling she had seen a solution … that she had discovered a solution.
But she could not remember what it was.
Not being able to remember something was a phenomenon unknown to Salander. She had tested herself by going on the Net and picking out random H.T.M.L. codes that she glanced at, memorized, and reproduced exactly.
She had not lost her photographic memory, which she had always considered a curse.
Everything was running as usual in her head.
Save for the fact that she thought she recalled seeing a solution to Fermat’s theorem, but she could not remember how, when, or where.
The worst thing was that she did not have the least interest in it. Fermat’s theorem no longer fascinated her. That was ominous. That was just the way she usually functioned. She would be fascinated by a problem, but as soon as she had solved it, she lost interest.
That was how she felt about Fermat. He was no longer a demon riding on her shoulder, demanding her attention and vexing her intellect. It was an ordinary formula, some squiggles on a piece of paper, and she felt no desire at all to engage with it.
This bothered her. She put down the notebook.
She should get some sleep.
Instead she took out her Palm again and went on the Net. She thought for a moment and then went into Armansky’s hard drive, which she had not done since she got the hand-held. Armansky was working with Blomkvist, but she had not had any particular need to read what he was up to.
Absentmindedly she read his email.
She found the assessment Rosin had carried out of Berger’s house. She could scarcely believe what she was reading.
Erika Berger has a stalker.
She found a message from Susanne Linder, who had evidently stayed at Berger’s house the night before and who had emailed a report late that night. She looked at the time of the message. It had been sent just before 3.00 in the morning and reported Berger’s discovery that diaries, letters and photographs, along with a video of a personal nature, had been stolen from a chest of drawers in her bedroom.
After discussing the matter with Fru Berger, we determined that the theft must have occurred during the time she was at Nacka hospital. That left a period of c. 2.5 hours when the house was empty, and the defective alarm from N.I.P. was not switched on. At all other times either Berger or David were in the house until the theft was discovered.
Conclusion: Berger’s stalker remained in her area and was able to observe that she was picked up by a taxi, also possibly that she was injured. The stalker then took the