Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [179]
She rode on, braking and thinking, for another 150 yards before she stopped and turned around. She saw the driver of the truck climb out of his cab on the passenger side. Then she accelerated again. At Åkerby, about a mile south, she turned left and took the old road back north, parallel to the E4. She went up a hill past the scene of the crash. Two cars had stopped. Big flames were boiling out of the wreckage of Martin’s car, which was wedged underneath the truck. A man was spraying the flames with a small fire extinguisher.
She was soon rolling across the bridge at a low speed. She parked outside the cottage and walked back to Martin Vanger’s house.
Mikael was still fumbling with the handcuffs. His hands were so numb that he could not get a grip on the key. Salander unlocked the cuffs for him and held him tight as the blood began to circulate in his hands again.
“Martin?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Dead. He drove slap into the front of a truck a couple of miles south on the E4.”
Blomkvist stared at her. She had only been gone a few minutes.
“We have to…call the police,” he whispered. He began coughing hard.
“Why?” Salander said.
For ten minutes Blomkvist was incapable of standing up. He was still on the floor, naked, leaning against the wall. He massaged his neck and lifted the water bottle with clumsy fingers. Salander waited patiently until his sense of touch started to return. She spent the time thinking.
“Put your trousers on.”
She used Blomkvist’s cut-up T-shirt to wipe fingerprints from the handcuffs, the knife, and the golf club. She picked up her PET bottle.
“What are you doing?”
“Get dressed and hurry up. It’s getting light outside.”
Blomkvist stood on shaky legs and managed to pull on his boxers and jeans. He slipped on his trainers. Salander stuffed his socks into her jacket pocket and then stopped him.
“What exactly did you touch down here?”
Blomkvist looked around. He tried to remember. At last he said that he had touched nothing except the door and the keys. Salander found the keys in Martin Vanger’s jacket, which he had hung over the chair. She wiped the door handle and the switch and turned off the light. She helped Blomkvist up the basement stairs and told him to wait in the passageway while she put the golf club back in its proper place. When she came back she was carrying a dark T-shirt that belonged to Martin Vanger.
“Put this on. I don’t want anyone to see you scampering about with a bare chest tonight.”
Blomkvist realised that he was in a state of shock. Salander had taken charge, and passively he obeyed her instructions. She led him out of Martin’s house. She held on to him the whole time. As soon as they stepped inside the cottage, she stopped him.
“If anyone sees us and asks what we were doing outside tonight, you and I went out to the point for a nighttime walk, and we had sex out there.”
“Lisbeth, I can’t…”
“Get in the shower. Now.”
She helped him off with his clothes and propelled him to the bathroom. Then she put on water for coffee and made half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles. She sat down at the kitchen table and was thinking hard when he came limping back into the room. She studied the bruises and scrapes on his body. The noose had been so tight that he had a dark red mark around his neck, and the knife had made a bloody gash in his skin on the left side.
“Get into bed,” she said.
She improvised bandages and covered the wound with a makeshift compress. Then she poured the coffee and handed him a sandwich.
“I’m really not hungry,” he said.
“I don’t give a damn if you’re hungry. Just eat,” Salander commanded, taking a big bite of her own cheese sandwich.
Blomkvist closed his eyes for a moment, then he sat up and took a bite. His throat hurt so much that he could scarcely swallow.
Salander took off her leather jacket and from