Salander was back in Mosebacke just after noon. She put her mother’s box unopened in a hall closet and left the apartment again.

As she opened the front door a police car drove slowly past. Salander warily observed the presence of the authorities outside her building, but when they showed no sign of interest in her she put them out of her mind.

She went shopping at H &M and KappAhl department stores and bought herself a new wardrobe. She picked up a large assortment of basic clothes in the form of pants, jeans, tops, and socks. She had no interest in expensive designer clothing, but she did enjoy being able to buy half a dozen pairs of jeans at one time without a second thought. Her most extravagant purchases were from Twilfit, where she chose a drawerful of panties and bras. This was basic clothing again, but after half an hour of embarrassed searching she also settled on a set that she thought was sexy, even erotic, and which she would never have dreamed of buying before. When she tried them on that night she felt incredibly foolish. What she saw in the mirror was a thin, tattooed girl in grotesque underwear. She took them off and threw them in the trash.

She also bought herself some winter shoes and two pairs of lighter indoor shoes. Then she bought a pair of black boots with high heels that made her a couple of inches taller. She also found a good winter jacket in brown suede.

She made coffee and a sandwich before she drove the rental car back to its garage near Ringen. She walked home and sat in the dark all evening on her window seat, watching the water in Saltsjön.

Mia Johansson cut the cheesecake and decorated each slice with a scoop of raspberry ice cream. She served Berger and Blomkvist first before she put down plates for Svensson and herself. Eriksson had resolutely resisted dessert and was content with black coffee in an old-fashioned flowered porcelain cup.

“It was my grandmother’s china service,” said Mia when she saw Eriksson examining the cup.

“She’s scared to death that a cup is going to break,” Svensson said. “She takes it out only when we have really important guests.”

Johansson smiled. “I spent several years with my grandmother when I was a child, and the china is almost all I have left of her.”

“They’re really beautiful,” Eriksson said. “My kitchen is one hundred percent IKEA.”

Blomkvist didn’t give a damn about flowered coffee cups and instead cast an appraising eye on the plate with the cheesecake. He pondered letting his belt out a notch. Berger apparently shared his feelings.

“Good God, I should have said no to dessert too,” she said, glancing ruefully at Eriksson before taking up her spoon with a firm grip.

It was supposed to be a simple working dinner, in part to cement the cooperation they had agreed on and in part to continue to discuss plans for the themed issue. Svensson had suggested that they meet at his place for a bite to eat, and Johansson had served the best sweet-and-sour chicken Blomkvist had ever tasted. Over dinner they put away two bottles of robust Spanish red, and Svensson asked if anyone would like a glass of Tullamore Dew with their dessert. Only Berger was foolish enough to decline, and Svensson got out the glasses.

It was a one-bedroom apartment in Enskede. Svensson and Johansson had been going out for a few years, but had taken the plunge and moved in together a year ago.

The group gathered at around 6:00 p.m., and by the time dessert was served at 8:30 not a word had been said about the ostensible reason for the dinner. But Blomkvist did discover that he liked his hosts and enjoyed their company.

It was Berger who finally steered the conversation to the topic they had all come to discuss. Johansson produced a printout of her thesis and placed it on the table in front of Berger. It had a surprisingly ironic title-“From Russia with Love”-an homage, of course, to Ian Fleming’s classic novel. The subtitle was “Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society’s Response.”

“You have to recognize the difference between my thesis and the book Dag is writing,” she said. “Dag’s book is a polemic aimed at the people who are making money from trafficking. My thesis is statistics, field studies, law texts, and a study of how society and the courts treat the victims.”

“The girls, you mean.”

“Young girls, usually fifteen to twenty years old, working class, poorly educated. They often have unstable home lives, and many of them are subjected to some form of abuse even in childhood. One reason they come to Sweden is that they have been fed a pack of lies.”

“By the sex traders.”

“In this sense there is a sort of gender perspective to my thesis. It’s not often that a researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly. Girls-victims; boys-perpetrators. Apart from a handful of women working on their own who profit from the sex trade, there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles themselves are a precondition for the crime. Nor is there any other form of criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to prevent.”

“And yet Sweden does have tough laws against trafficking and the sex trade,” Berger said. “Is that not the case?”

“Don’t make me laugh. Several hundred girls-there are no published statistics, obviously-are transported to Sweden every year to work as prostitutes, which in this case means making their bodies available for systematic rape. After the law against trafficking went into effect, it was tested in the courts a few times. The first time was in April 2003, the case against that crazy brothel madam who had a sex change. And she was acquitted, of course.”

“I thought she was convicted.”

“Of running a brothel, yes. But she was acquitted of trafficking charges. The thing was, the girls who were the victims were also the witnesses against her, and they vanished back to the Baltics. Interpol tried to track them down, but after months of searching it was decided that they were not going to be found.”

“What had become of them?”

“Nothing. The TV show Insider did a follow-up and went over to Tallinn. It took the reporters exactly one afternoon to find two of the girls, who were living with their parents. The third girl had moved to Italy.”

“The police in Tallinn, in other words, weren’t very effective.”

“Since then we have actually won a couple of convictions, but in each case they were men who had been arrested for other crimes, or who were so conspicuously stupid that they couldn’t help but be caught. The law is pure window dressing. It isn’t enforced. And the problem here,” Svensson said, “is that the crime is aggravated rape, often in conjunction with abuse, aggravated abuse, and death threats, and in some instances illegal imprisonment as well. That’s everyday life for many of the girls who are brought, wearing miniskirts and heavy makeup, to some villa in the suburbs. The thing is that a girl like that doesn’t have any choice. Either she goes out and fucks dirty old men or she risks being abused and tortured by her pimp. The girls can’t run away-they don’t know the language, they don’t know the law, and they don’t know where they could turn. They can’t go home because their passports have been taken away, and in the case of the brothel madam the girls were locked in an apartment.”

“It sounds like slave labour camps. Do the girls make any money at all?”

“Oh yeah,” Johansson said. “They usually work for several months before they’re allowed to go back home. They’re given between 20,000 and 30,000 kronor, which in Russian money is a small fortune. Unfortunately they’ve often picked up heavy alcohol or drug habits and a lifestyle that means the money will run out very quickly. This makes the system self-sustaining: after a while they’re back again and return voluntarily, so to speak, to their torturers.”