“Yes,” Erlander said with an audible sigh. He was not entirely sure what the letter of the law was on this point. “Our number one objective is to discover if she has any information as to where Ronald Niedermann might be. Is it O.K. to ask her about that… even if you’re not present?”

“That’s fine… you may ask her questions relating to the police hunt for Niedermann. But you may not ask her any questions relating to any possible charges against her. Agreed?”

“I think so, yes.”

Inspector Erlander got up from his desk and went upstairs to tell the preliminary investigation leader, Agneta Jervas, about his conversation with Giannini.

“She was obviously hired by Blomkvist. I can’t believe Salander knows anything about it.”

“Giannini works in women’s rights. I heard her lecture once. She’s sharp, but completely unsuitable for this case.”

“It’s up to Salander to decide.”

“I might have to contest the decision in court… For the girl’s own sake she has to have a proper defence, and not some celebrity chasing headlines. Hmm. Salander has also been declared legally incompetent. I don’t know whether that affects things.”

“What should we do?”

Jervas thought for a moment. “This is a complete mess. I don’t know who’s going to be in charge of this case or if it’ll be transferred to Ekström in Stockholm. In any event she has to have a lawyer. O.K… ask her if she wants Giannini.”

When Blomkvist reached home at 5.00 in the afternoon he turned on his iBook and took up the thread of the text he had begun writing at the hotel in Göteborg. When he had worked for seven straight hours, he had identified the most glaring holes in the story. There was still much research to be done. One question he could not answer – based on the existing documentation – was who in Säpo, apart from Gunnar Björck, had conspired to lock Salander away in the asylum. Nor had he got to the heart of the relationship between Björck and the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian.

Finally he shut down the computer and went to bed. He felt as soon as he lay down that for the first time in weeks he could relax and sleep peacefully. The story was under control. No matter how many questions remained unanswered, he already had enough material to set off a landslide of headlines.

Late as it was, he picked up the telephone to call Berger and update her. And then he remembered that she had left Millennium. Suddenly he found it difficult to sleep.

A man carrying a brown briefcase stepped carefully down from the 7.30 p.m. train at Stockholm Central Station. He stood for a moment in the sea of travellers, getting his bearings. He had started out from Laholm just after 8.00 in the morning. He stopped in Göteborg to have lunch with an old friend before resuming his journey to Stockholm. He had not been to Stockholm for two years. In fact he had not planned to visit the capital ever again. Even though he had lived there for large parts of his working life, he always felt a little out of place in Stockholm, a feeling that had grown stronger with every visit he made since his retirement.

He walked slowly through the station, bought the evening papers and two bananas at Pressbyrån, and paused to watch two Muslim women in veils hurry past him. He had nothing against women in veils. It was nothing to him if people wanted to dress up in costume. But he was bothered by the fact that they had to dress like that in the middle of Stockholm. In his opinion, Somalia was a much better place for that sort of attire.

He walked the three hundred metres to Frey’s Hotel next to the old post office on Vasagatan. That was where he had stayed on previous visits. The hotel was centrally located and clean. And it was inexpensive, which was a factor since he was paying for the journey himself. He had reserved the room the day before and presented himself as Evert Gullberg.

When he got up to the room he went straight to the bathroom. He had reached the age when he had to use the toilet rather often. It was several years since he had slept through a whole night.

When he had finished he took off his hat, a narrow-brimmed, dark-green English felt hat, and loosened his tie. He was one metre eighty-four tall and weighed sixty-eight kilos, which meant he was thin and wiry. He wore a hound’s-tooth jacket and dark-grey trousers. He opened the brown briefcase and unpacked two shirts, a second tie, and underwear, which he arranged in the chest of drawers. Then he hung his overcoat and jacket in the wardrobe behind the door.

It was too early to go to bed. It was too late to bother going for an evening walk, something he might not enjoy in any case. He sat down in the obligatory chair in the hotel room and looked around. He switched on the T. V. and turned down the volume so that he would not have to hear it. He thought about calling reception and ordering coffee, but decided it was too late. Instead he opened the mini-bar and poured a miniature of Johnny Walker into a glass, and added very little water. He opened the evening papers and read everything that had been written that day about the search for Ronald Niedermann and the case of Lisbeth Salander. After a while he took out a leather-bound notebook and made some notes.

Gullberg, formerly Senior Administrative Officer at the Security Police, was now seventy-eight years old and had been retired for thirteen years. But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows.

After the war, when Gullberg was nineteen years old, he had joined the navy. He did his military service first as an officer cadet and was then accepted for officer training. But instead of the usual assignment at sea that he had anticipated, he was sent to Karlskrona as a signal tracker in the navy’s intelligence service. He had no difficulty with the work, which was mostly figuring out what was going on on the other side of the Baltic. But he found it dull and uninteresting. Through the service’s language school, however, he did learn Russian and Polish. These linguistic skills were one of the reasons he was recruited by the Security Police in 1950, during the time when the impeccably mannered Georg Thulin was head of the third division of Säpo. When he started, the total budget of the secret police was 2.7 million kronor for a staff of ninety-six people. When Gullberg formally retired in 1992, the budget of the Security Police was in excess of 350 million kronor, and he had no idea how many employees the Firm had.

Gullberg had spent his life on his majesty’s secret service, or perhaps more accurately in the secret service of the social-democratic welfare state. Which was an irony, since he had faithfully voted for the moderates in one election after another, except for 1991 when he deliberately voted against the moderates because he believed that Carl Bildt was a realpolitik catastrophe. He had voted instead for Ingvar Carlsson. The years of “ Sweden ’s best government” had also confirmed his worst fears. The moderate government had come to power when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in his opinion no government had been less prepared to meet the new political opportunities emerging in the East, or to make use of the art of espionage. On the contrary, the Bildt government had cut back the Soviet desk for financial reasons and had at the same time got themselves involved in the international mess in Bosnia and Serbia – as if Serbia could ever threaten Sweden. The result was that a fabulous opportunity to plant long-term informants in Moscow had been lost. Some day, when relations would once again worsen – which according to Gullberg was inevitable – absurd demands would be made on the Security Police and the military intelligence service; they would be expected to wave their magic wand and summon up well-placed agents out of a bottle.