Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [96]
She called each of the four clients, introducing herself as a social welfare secretary working on a study about how children hitherto under the care of a trustee fared later in life compared to other children. Yes, naturally, everyone will be anonymous. She had put together a questionnaire with ten questions, which she asked on the telephone. Several of the questions were designed to get the respondents to give their views on how well the trusteeship had functioned—if they had any opinions about their own trustee, Advokat Bjurman wasn’t it? No-one had anything bad to say about him.
When Salander completed her ferreting, she gathered up the documents in a bag from Ica and put it out with the twenty bags of old newspapers out the hall. Bjurman was apparently beyond reproach. There was nothing in his past that she could use. She knew beyond a doubt that he was a creep and a pig, but she could find nothing to prove it.
It was time to consider another option. After all the analyses were done, one possibility remained that started to look more and more attractive—or at least seemed to be a truly realistic alternative. The easiest thing would be for Bjurman simply to disappear from her life. A quick heart attack. End of problem. The catch was that not even disgusting fifty-three-year-old men had heart attacks at her beck and call.
But that sort of thing could be arranged.
Blomkvist carried on his affair with Headmistress Cecilia Vanger with the greatest discretion. She had three rules: she didn’t want anyone to know they were meeting; she wanted him to come over only when she called and was in the mood; and she didn’t want him to stay all night.
Her passion surprised and astonished him. When he ran into her at Susanne’s, she was friendly but cool and distant. When they met in her bedroom, she was wildly passionate.
Blomkvist did not want to pry into her personal life, but he had been hired to pry into the personal lives of everyone in the Vanger family. He felt torn and at the same time curious. One day he asked Vanger whom she had been married to and what had happened. He asked the question while they were discussing the background of Alexander and Birger.
“Cecilia? I don’t think she had anything to do with Harriet.”
“Tell me about her background.”
“She moved back here after graduating and started working as a teacher. She met a man by the name of Jerry Karlsson, who unfortunately worked for the Vanger Corporation. They married. I thought the marriage was a happy one—anyway in the beginning. But after a couple of years I began to see that things were not as they should be. He mistreated her. It was the usual story—he beat her and she loyally defended him. Finally he hit her one time too many. She was seriously hurt and ended up in the hospital. I offered my help. She moved out here to Hedeby Island and has refused to see her husband since. I made sure he was fired.”
“But they are still married?”
“It’s a question of how you define it. I don’t know why she hasn’t filed for divorce. But she has never wanted to remarry, so I suppose it hasn’t made any difference.”
“This Karlsson, did he have anything to do with…”
“…with Harriet? No, he wasn’t in Hedestad in 1966, and he wasn’t yet working for the firm.”
“OK.”
“Mikael, I’m fond of Cecilia. She can be tricky to deal with, but she’s one of the good people in my family.”
Salander devoted a week to planning Nils Bjurman’s demise. She considered—and rejected—various methods until she had narrowed it down to a few realistic scenarios from which to choose. No acting on impulse.
Only one condition had to be fulfilled. Bjurman had to die in such a way that she herself could never be linked to the crime. The fact that she would be included in any eventual police investigation she took for granted; sooner or later her name would show up when