Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [133]
Both uttered cries of delight. He received kisses on the cheek and pats on the back. At once they asked him if he was returning to work. No, he had just stopped by to say hello and have a word with the boss.
Berger was glad to see him. She asked about Vanger’s condition. Blomkvist knew no more than what Frode could tell him: his condition was inescapably serious.
“So what are you doing in the city?”
Blomkvist was embarrassed. He had been at Milton Security, only a few streets away, and he had decided on sheer impulse to come in. It seemed too complicated to explain that he had been there to hire a research assistant who was a security consultant who had hacked into his computer. Instead he shrugged and said he had come to Stockholm on Vanger-related business, and he would have to go back north at once. He asked how things were going at the magazine.
“Apart from the good news on the advertising and the subscription fronts, there is one cloud on the horizon.”
“Which is?”
“Janne Dahlman.”
“Of course.”
“I had a talk with him in April, after we released the news that Henrik had become a partner. I don’t know if it’s just Janne’s nature to be negative or if there’s something more serious going on, if he’s playing some sort of game.”
“What happened?”
“It’s nothing I can put a finger on, rather that I no longer trust him. After we signed the agreement with Vanger, Christer and I had to decide whether to inform the whole staff that we were no longer at risk of going under this autumn, or…”
“Or to tell just a chosen few.”
“Exactly. I may be paranoid, but I didn’t want to risk having Dahlman leak the story. So we decided to inform the whole staff on the same day the agreement was made public. Which meant that we kept the lid on it for over a month.”
“And?”
“Well, that was the first piece of good news they’d had in a year. Everyone cheered except for Dahlman. I mean—we don’t have the world’s biggest editorial staff. There were three people cheering, plus the intern, and one person who got his nose out of joint because we hadn’t told everybody earlier.”
“He had a point…”
“I know. But the thing is, he kept on bitching about the issue day after day, and morale in the office was affected. After two weeks of this shit I called him into my office and told him to his face that my reason for not having informed the staff earlier was that I didn’t trust him to keep the news secret.”
“How did he take it?”
“He was terribly upset, of course. I stood my ground and gave him an ultimatum—either he had to pull himself together or start looking for another job.”
“And?”
“He pulled himself together. But he keeps to himself, and there’s a tension between him and the others. Christer can’t stand him, and he doesn’t hide it.”
“What do you suspect Dahlman of doing?”
“I don’t know. We hired him a year ago, when we were first talking about trouble with Wennerström. I can’t prove a thing, but I have a nasty feeling that he’s not working for us.”
“Trust your instincts.”
“Maybe he’s just a square peg in a round hole who just happens to be poisoning the atmosphere.”
“It’s possible. But I agree that we made a mistake when we hired him.”
Half an hour later he was on his way north across the locks at Slussen in the car he had borrowed from Frode’s wife. It was a ten-year-old Volvo she never used. Blomkvist had been given leave to borrow it whenever he liked.
It was the tiny details that he could easily have missed if he had not been alert: some papers not as evenly stacked as he remembered; a binder not quite flush on the shelf; his desk drawer closed all the way—he was positive that it was an inch open when he left.
Someone had been inside his cottage.
He had locked the door, but it was an ordinary old lock that almost anyone could pick with a screwdriver, and who knew how many keys were in circulation. He systematically searched