Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [48]
During the Whitsuntide vacation the year before, Blomkvist had gone to his cabin in Sandhamn for the first time in several months, to have some peace and quiet and sit on the porch and read crime novels. On the Friday afternoon, he was on his way to the kiosk to buy some cigarettes when he ran into Harriet. She had apparently felt a need to get away from Hedestad herself and had booked a weekend at the hotel in Sandhamn. She had not been there since she was a child. She had been sixteen when she left Sweden and fifty-three when she came back. It was Blomkvist who had tracked her down.
After their surprised greetings, Harriet had lapsed into an awkward silence. Blomkvist knew her history, and she was aware that he had compromised his principles in order to cover up the Vanger family’s horrific secrets. And in part he had done it for her.
Blomkvist invited her to his cabin. He made coffee and they sat on the porch outside for several hours, talking. It was the first time they had talked at length since her return.
Blomkvist could not resist asking: “What did you do with the stuff in Martin’s basement?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I cleaned it up myself. I burned everything that would burn. I had the house torn down. I couldn’t live there, and I couldn’t sell it and let someone else live there. For me all its associations were with evil. I’m planning another house to take its place, a small cabin.”
“Didn’t people raise their eyebrows when you had the house torn down? It was quite luxurious and modern.”
She smiled. “Dirch Frode put about the story that there was so much damp in the foundation that it would be more expensive to rebuild than to take it down.” Frode was the family’s lawyer.
“How is Frode getting on?”
“He’s going to be seventy soon. I’m keeping him busy.”
They had lunch together, and Blomkvist realized that Harriet Vanger was sitting there telling him the most intimate and private details about her life. When he asked her why, she thought for a moment and said that there really was no-one else in the whole world with whom she could be so open. Besides, it was hard not to open her heart to a kid she had babysat all of forty years ago.
She had had sex with three men in her life. First her father and then her brother. She had killed her father and run away from her brother. Somehow she had survived and met a man with whom she had created a new life for herself.
“He was tender and loving. Dependable and honest. I was happy with him. We had a wonderful twenty years together before he became ill.”
“You never remarried? Why not?”
She shrugged. “I was the mother of two children in Australia and the owner of a big agricultural business. I could never get away for a romantic weekend. And I’ve never missed sex.” They sat quiet for a while. “It’s late. I should be getting back to the hotel.”
Blomkvist made no move to get up.
“Do you want to seduce me?”
“I do,” he said.
He stood up and took her hand, leading her into the cabin and up to the sleeping loft. Suddenly she stopped him. “I don’t really know how. This is not something I do every day.”
They spent the whole weekend together and then one night every three months after the magazine’s board meetings. It was not a relationship that could be sustained. She worked around the clock and was very often travelling, and every other month she was in Australia. But she had come to value her occasional rendezvous with Blomkvist.
Mimmi made coffee two hours later as Salander lay naked and sweaty on top of the bedclothes. She smoked a cigarette and watched Mimmi through the doorway. She envied Mimmi’s body. She was impressively muscled. She worked out at a gym three evenings a week, one of them doing Thai boxing or some sort of karate shit, and this had given her body an awesome shape.
She was just delicious. Not beautiful like a model, but genuinely attractive.