Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [237]
Blomkvist heard Bublanski pull up a chair and sit down.
“I think it would be best if you came in and made a formal statement.”
“I don’t have time for that. I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not in Stockholm at the moment. But I’ll send word as soon as I find Zalachenko.”
“Blomkvist… You don’t have to prove anything. I have doubts about Salander’s guilt too.”
“But I’m just a simple private investigator who doesn’t know the first thing about police work.”
It was childish, he knew, but he disconnected without waiting for Bublanski’s reply. Instead he called Annika Giannini.
“Hi, Sis.”
“Hi. Anything new?”
“I might be needing a good lawyer tomorrow.”
“What have you done?”
“Nothing too serious yet, but I might be arrested for obstructing a police investigation. But that’s not why I called. You couldn’t represent me anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to take on the defence of Lisbeth Salander, and you can’t look after both of us.”
Blomkvist gave her a rapid rundown of the story. Giannini was ominously silent. Finally she said, “And you have documentation of all this…”
“I do.”
“I’d have to think it over. Lisbeth really needs a criminal lawyer.”
“You’d be perfect.”
“Micke…”
“Listen, you were the one who was furious with me because I didn’t ask for help when I needed it.”
When they’d finished their conversation, Blomkvist sat thinking. Then he picked up his mobile and called Holger Palmgren. He didn’t have any particular reason for doing so, but he wanted to tell him that he was following up one or two leads, and that he hoped the whole story would be resolved within the next few hours.
The problem was that Salander had leads too.
• • •
Salander reached for an apple in her backpack without taking her eyes off the farm. She lay stretched out at the edge of the woods with a floor mat from the Corolla as a groundsheet. She had taken off her wig and changed into green tracksuit pants with pockets, a thick sweater, and a midlength windbreaker with a thermal lining.
Gosseberga Farm lay about four hundred yards from the road. There were four buildings. The main building was about a hundred and twenty yards in front of her, an ordinary white-frame house on two floors, with a shed and a barn seventy yards beyond the farmhouse. Through the barn door she could see the front of a white car. She thought it was a Volvo, but it was too far away for her to be sure.
Between her and the main building there was a muddy field that extended to the right about two hundred yards down towards a pond. The driveway cut through the field and disappeared into a small stand of trees towards the road. Next to the road there was another farmhouse that looked to be abandoned; the windows were covered with plastic sheeting. Beyond the main building was a grove of trees that served to block the view of the nearest neighbour, a clump of buildings almost six hundred yards away. So the farm in front of her was relatively isolated.
She was close to Lake Anten in an area of rounded glacial moraines where fields alternated with small communities and dense woodland. The road map gave no detail, but she had followed the black Renault from Göteborg along the E20 and turned west towards Sollebrunn in Alingsås district. After about forty minutes the car made a sharp turn onto a forest road at a sign that said GOSSEBERGA. She had driven on and parked behind a barn in a clump of trees about a hundred yards north of the access road, then returned on foot.
She had never heard of Gosseberga, but as far as she could tell the name referred to the house and barn in front of her. She had passed the mailbox on the road. Painted on it was P.O. BOX 192—?. A. BODIN. The name meant nothing to her.
She had made a wide circuit of the buildings and finally selected her lookout spot. She had the afternoon sun at her back. Since she’d gotten into position at around 3:30, only one thing had happened. At 4:00 the driver of the Renault came out of the house. He exchanged some words in the doorway with