Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [131]
Life had been unfair to Hedström. He was good-looking, he was young, and he was clever too. But he was forever denied the possibility of becoming what he had always wanted to be—a policeman. His Achilles heel was a microscopic hole in his pericardium that caused a heart murmur and meant that the wall of one chamber was compromised. He had had an operation and the problem was fixed, but having a heart condition meant that he was once and for all deprived of a place on the police force. He was relegated to second-class.
When he was given the chance to work for Milton Security he accepted, but without the slightest enthusiasm. Milton was a dump for has-beens—police officers who were too old and couldn’t cut it anymore. He too had been turned down by the police—but in his case through no fault of his own.
When he started at Milton one of his first assignments had been to work with the operations unit on a personal protection analysis for a famous female singer. She had been frightened by an over-enthusiastic admirer, who also happened to be a mental patient on the run. The singer lived alone in a villa in Södertörn, and Milton had installed surveillance equipment and alarms and provided an on-site bodyguard.
Over a two-week period Hedström had regularly visited the villa in Södertörn along with other Milton employees. He thought the singer was a snobbish and standoffish old bitch. She gave him only a bewildered look when he turned on the charm, but she ought to have been grateful that any fan remembered her at all.
He hated the way Milton’s staff sprang to do her bidding. But of course he didn’t say a word about how he felt.
One afternoon, the singer and two of the Milton staff were by her pool while he was in the house taking photographs of windows and doors that might need reinforcing. He had gone from room to room, and when he came to her bedroom he could not resist the temptation to open her desk. He found a dozen photograph albums from when she was a big star in the seventies and eighties and had toured the world. He also found a box with some very private pictures of the singer. The pictures were relatively innocent, but with a little imagination they might be viewed as “erotic studies.” God, what a stupid cow she was. He stole five of the most risqué images, which had obviously been taken by some lover.
He photographed the images there and then and put the originals back. He waited several months before he sold them to a British tabloid. He was paid 9,000 pounds for the photographs and they gave rise to sensational headlines.
He still did not know how Salander had managed it, but after the photographs were published, he had a visit from her. She knew that he was the one who had sold them. She was going to expose him to Armansky if he ever did anything like that again. She would have exposed him immediately if she could have proved it—but she obviously could not. From that day on he had felt her watching him. He had seen her little piggy eyes every time he turned around.
He felt stressed and frustrated. The only way to get back at her was to undermine her credibility by adding his contributions to the gossip about her in the canteen. But not even that had been very successful. He did not dare draw attention to himself, since for some unknown reason she was under Armansky’s protection. He wondered what sort of hold she had over Milton’s CEO, or if it was possible that the old bastard was fucking her in secret. But even though nobody at Milton was especially enamoured of Salander, the staff had great respect for Armansky and so they accepted her peculiar presence. It was a monumental relief to him when she began to play less of a role and finally stopped working at Milton altogether.
Now an opportunity had presented itself for him to get even. And it was risk-free. She could accuse him of anything she liked—nobody would believe her. Not even Armansky would