Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [27]
The office was closed for the Christmas holidays and all his colleagues were gone. He was weeding through trays of papers and packing books in cartons to take away when the telephone rang.
“I’m looking for Mikael Blomkvist,” said a hopeful but unfamiliar voice on the line.
“Speaking.”
“Forgive me for bothering you like this unannounced, so to speak. My name is Dirch Frode.” Blomkvist noted the name and the time. “I’m a lawyer, and I represent a client who would very much like to have a talk with you.”
“That’s fine, please ask your client to call me.”
“I mean that he wants to meet with you in person.”
“OK, make an appointment and send him up to the office. But you’d better hurry; I’m clearing out my desk right now.”
“My client would like you to visit him in Hedestad—it’s only three hours by train.”
Blomkvist pushed a filing tray aside. The media have the ability to attract the craziest people to call in perfectly absurd tips. Every newsroom in the world gets updates from UFOlogists, graphologists, scientologists, paranoiacs, every sort of conspiracy theorist.
Blomkvist had once listened to a lecture by the writer Karl Alvar Nilsson at the ABF hall on the anniversary of the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. The lecture was serious, and in the audience were Lennart Bodström and other friends of Palme’s. But a surprising number of amateur investigators had turned up. One of them was a woman in her forties who during the Q and A had taken the proffered microphone and then lowered her voice to a barely audible whisper. This alone heralded an interesting development, and nobody was surprised when the woman began by claiming, “I know who murdered Olof Palme.” From the stage it was suggested somewhat ironically that if the woman had this information then it would be helpful if she shared it with the Palme investigation at once. She hurried to reply: “I can’t,” she said so softly it was almost impossible to hear. “It’s too dangerous!”
Blomkvist wondered whether this Frode was another one of the truth-sayers who could reveal the secret mental hospital where Säpo, the Security Police, ran experiments on thought control.
“I don’t make house calls,” he said.
“I hope I can convince you to make an exception. My client is over eighty, and for him it would be too exhausting to come down to Stockholm. If you insist, we could certainly arrange something, but to tell you the truth, it would be preferable if you would be so kind…”
“Who is your client?”
“A person whose name I suspect you have heard in your work. Henrik Vanger.”
Blomkvist leaned back in surprise. Henrik Vanger—of course he had heard of him. An industrialist and former head of the Vanger companies, once renowned in the fields of sawmills, mines, steel, metals, textiles. Vanger had been one of the really big fish in his day, with a reputation for being an honourable, old-fashioned patriarch who would not bend in a strong wind. A cornerstone of Swedish industry, one of the twenty-point stags of the old school, along with Matts Carlgren of MoDo and Hans Werthén at the old Electrolux. The backbone of industry in the welfare state, et cetera.
But the Vanger companies, still family-owned, had been racked in the past twenty-five years by reorganisations, stock-market crises, interest crises, competition from Asia, declining exports, and other nuisances which taken together had consigned the name Vanger to the backwater. The company was run today by Martin Vanger, whose name Blomkvist associated with a short, plump man with thick hair who occasionally flickered past on the TV screen. He did not know much about him. Henrik Vanger had been out of the picture for at least twenty years.
“Why does Henrik Vanger want to meet me?”
“I’ve been Herr Vanger’s lawyer for many years, but he will have to tell you himself what he wants. On the other hand, I can say that Herr Vanger would like to discuss a possible job with you.”
“Job? I don’t have the slightest intention of going to work for the Vanger company. Is it a press secretary you need?”
“Not exactly. I