Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [127]
“But what is the connection with Harriet?”
“I don’t know yet. But I want to find out. I will tell you everything I would have told Henrik. You have to make the decisions for him.”
“Perhaps we ought to inform the police.”
“No. At least not without Henrik’s blessing. The statute of limitations has long since run out in the case of Rebecka, and the police investigation was closed. They’re not going to reopen an investigation fifty-four years later.”
“All right. What are you going to do?”
Blomkvist paced a lap around the kitchen.
“First, I want to follow up the photograph lead. If we could see what it was that Harriet saw…it might be the key. I need a car to go to Norsjö and follow that lead, wherever it takes me. And also, I want to research each of the Leviticus verses. We have one connection to one murder. We have four verses, possibly four other clues. To do this…I need some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I really need a research assistant with the patience to go through old newspaper archives to find ‘Magda’ and ‘Sara’ and the other names. If I’m right in thinking that Rebecka wasn’t the only victim.”
“You mean you want to let someone else in on…”
“There’s a lot of work that has to be done and in a hurry. If I were a police officer involved in an active investigation, I could divide up the hours and resources and get people to dig for me. I need a professional who knows archive work and who can be trusted.”
“I understand…. Actually I believe I know of an expert researcher,” said Frode, and before he could stop himself, he added, “She was the one who did the background investigation on you.”
“Who did what?” Blomkvist said.
“I was thinking out loud,” Frode said. “It’s nothing.” I’m getting old, he thought.
“You had someone do an investigation on me?”
“It’s nothing dramatic, Mikael. We wanted to hire you, and we just did a check on what sort of person you were.”
“So that’s why Henrik always seems to know exactly where he has me. How thorough was this investigation?”
“It was quite thorough.”
“Did it look into Millennium’s problems?”
Frode shrugged. “It had a bearing.”
Blomkvist lit a cigarette. It was his fifth of the day.
“A written report?”
“Mikael, it’s nothing to get worked up about.”
“I want to read the report,” he said.
“Oh come on, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this. We wanted to check up on you before we hired you.”
“I want to read the report,” Mikael repeated.
“I couldn’t authorise that.”
“Really? Then here’s what I say to you: either I have that report in my hands within the hour, or I quit. I’ll take the evening train back to Stockholm. Where is the report?”
The two men eyed each other for several seconds. Then Frode sighed and looked away.
“In my office, at home.”
Frode had put up a terrible fuss. It was not until 6:00 that evening that Blomkvist had Lisbeth Salander’s report in his hand. It was almost eighty pages long, plus dozens of photocopied articles, certificates, and other records of the details of his life and career.
It was a strange experience to read about himself in what was part biography and part intelligence report. He was increasingly astonished at how detailed the report was. Salander had dug up facts that he thought had been long buried in the compost of history. She had dug up his youthful relationship with a woman who had been a flaming Syndicalist and who was now a politician. Who in the world had she talked to? She had found his rock band Bootstrap, which surely no-one today would remember. She had scrutinised his finances down to the last öre. How the hell had she done it?
As a journalist, Blomkvist had spent many years hunting down information about people, and he could judge the quality of the work from a purely professional standpoint. There was no doubt that this Salander was one hell of an investigator. He doubted that even he could have produced a comparable report on any individual completely unknown to him.
It also dawned