Blomkvist put his laptop case on the desk. It contained the findings of Olsson, the stringer in Göteborg. He watched the flow of people on Götgatan. That was one of the things he liked best about his office. Götgatan was full of life at all hours of the day and night, and when he sat by the window he never felt isolated, never alone.

He was under great pressure. He had kept working on the articles that were to go into the summer issue, but he had finally realized that there was so much material that not even an issue devoted entirely to the topic would be sufficient. He had ended up in the same situation as during the Wennerström affair, and he had again decided to publish all the articles as a book. He had enough text already for 150 pages, and he reckoned that the final book would run to 320 or 336 pages.

The easy part was done. He had written about the murders of Svensson and Johansson and described how he happened to be the one who came upon the scene. He had dealt with why Salander had become a suspect. He spent a chapter debunking first what the press had written about Salander, then what Prosecutor Ekström had claimed, and thereby indirectly the entire police investigation. After long deliberation he had toned down his criticism of Bublanski and his team. He did this after studying a video from Ekström’s press conference, in which it was clear that Bublanski was uncomfortable in the extreme and obviously annoyed at Ekström’s rapid conclusions.

After the introductory drama, he had gone back in time and described Zalachenko’s arrival in Sweden, Salander’s childhood, and the events that led to her being locked away in St Stefan’s in Uppsala. He was careful to annihilate both Teleborian and the now dead Björck. He rehearsed the psychiatric report of 1991 and explained why Salander had become a threat to certain unknown civil servants who had taken it upon themselves to protect the Russian defector. He quoted from the correspondence between Teleborian and Björck.

He then described Zalachenko’s new identity and his criminal operations. He described his assistant Niedermann, the kidnapping of Miriam Wu, and Paolo Roberto’s intervention. Finally, he summed up the dénouement in Gosseberga which led to Salander being shot and buried alive, and explained how a policeman’s death was a needless catastrophe because Niedermann had already been shackled.

Thereafter the story became more sluggish. Blomkvist’s problem was that the account still had gaping holes in it. Björck had not acted alone. Behind this chain of events there had to be a larger group with resources and political influence. Anything else did not make sense. But he had eventually come to the conclusion that the unlawful treatment of Salander would not have been sanctioned by the government or the bosses of the Security Police. Behind this conclusion lay no exaggerated trust in government, but rather his faith in human nature. An operation of that type could never have been kept secret if it were politically motivated. Someone would have called in a favour and got someone to talk, and the press would have uncovered the Salander affair several years earlier.

He thought of the Zalachenko club as small and anonymous. He could not identify any one of them, except possibly Mårtensson, a policeman with a secret appointment who devoted himself to shadowing the publisher of Millennium.

It was now clear that Salander would definitely go to trial.

Ekström had brought a charge for grievous bodily harm in the case of Magge Lundin, and grievous bodily harm or attempted murder in the case of Karl Axel Bodin.

No date had yet been set, but his colleagues had learned that Ekström was planning for a trial in July, depending on the state of Salander’s health. Blomkvist understood the reasoning. A trial during the peak holiday season would attract less attention than one at any other time of the year.

Blomkvist’s plan was to have the book printed and ready to distribute on the first day of the trial. He and Malm had thought of a paperback edition, shrink-wrapped and sent out with the special summer issue. Various assignments had been given to Cortez and Eriksson, who were to produce articles on the history of the Security Police, the IB affair,* and the like.

He frowned as he stared out of the window.

It’s not over. The conspiracy is continuing. It’s the only way to explain the tapped telephones, the attack on Annika, and the doubletheft of the Salander report. Perhaps the murder of Zalachenko is a part of it too.

But he had no evidence.

Together with Eriksson and Malm, he had decided that Millennium Publishing would publish Svensson’s text about sex trafficking, also to coincide with the trial. It was better to present the package all at once, and besides, there was no reason to delay publication. On the contrary – the book would never be able to attract the same attention at any other time. Eriksson was Blomkvist’s principal assistant for the Salander book. Karim and Malm (against his will) had thus become temporary assistant editors at Millennium, with Nilsson as the only available reporter. One result of this increased workload was that Eriksson had had to contract several freelancers to produce articles for future issues. It was expensive, but they had no choice.

Blomkvist wrote a note on a yellow Post-it, reminding himself to discuss the rights to the book with Svensson’s family. His parents lived in Örebro and they were his sole heirs. He did not really need permission to publish the book in Svensson’s name, but he wanted to go and see them to get their approval. He had postponed the visit because he had had too much to do, but now it was time to take care of the matter.

Then there were a hundred other details. Some of them concerned how he should present Salander in the articles. To make the ultimate decision he needed to have a personal conversation with her to get her approval to tell the truth, or at least parts of it. And he could not have that conversation because she was under arrest and no visitors were allowed.

In that respect, his sister was no help either. Slavishly she followed the regulations and had no intention of acting as Blomkvist’s go-between. Nor did Giannini tell him anything of what she and her client discussed, other than the parts that concerned the conspiracy against her – Giannini needed help with those. It was frustrating, but all very correct. Consequently Blomkvist had no clue whether Salander had revealed that her previous guardian had raped her, or that she had taken revenge by tattooing a shocking message on his stomach. As long as Giannini did not mention the matter, neither could he.

But Salander’s being isolated presented one other acute problem. She was a computer expert, also a hacker, which Blomkvist knew but Giannini did not. Blomkvist had promised Salander that he would never reveal her secret, and he had kept his promise. But now he had a great need for her skills in that field.

Somehow he had to establish contact with her.

He sighed as he opened Olsson’s folder again. There was a photocopy of a passport application form for one Idris Ghidi, born 1950. A man with a moustache, olive skin and black hair going grey at the temples.

He was Kurdish, a refugee from Iraq. Olsson had dug up much more on Ghidi than on any other hospital worker. Ghidi had apparently aroused media attention for a time, and appeared in several articles.

Born in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, he graduated as an engineer and had been part of the “great economic leap forward” in the ’70s. In 1984 he was a teacher at the College of Construction Technology in Mosul. He had not been known as a political activist, but he was a Kurd, and so a potential criminal in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In 1987 Ghidi’s father was arrested on suspicion of being a Kurdish militant. No elaboration was forthcoming. He was executed in January 1988. Two months later Idris Ghidi was seized by the Iraqi secret police, taken to a prison outside Mosul, and tortured there for eleven months to make him confess. What he was expected to confess, Ghidi never discovered, so the torture continued.