She also read the appendix with the correspondence between Björck and Dr Teleborian. She made a note of every name and every incident in the report that had to be verified. After two hours she got up and went to the coffee machine and got a refill. When she left her office she locked the door, part of the routine at S.I.S.

The first thing she did was to check the protocol number. She called the registrar and was informed that no report with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The evening papers and a morning paper had reported a person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had been started deliberately by a young girl.

Gunnar Björck, the author of the report, was a real person. He was a senior official in the immigration unit, lately on sick leave and now, very recently, deceased – a suicide.

The personnel department had no information about what Björck had been working on in 1991. The file was stamped Top Secret, even for other employees at S.I.S. Which was also routine.

It was a straightforward matter to establish that Salander had lived with her mother and twin sister on Lundagatan in 1991 and spent the following two years at St Stefan’s children’s psychiatric clinic. In these sections at least, the record corresponded with the report’s contents.

Peter Teleborian, now a well-known psychiatrist often seen on T.V., had worked at St Stefan’s in 1991 and was today its senior physician.

Figuerola then called the assistant head of the personnel department.

“We’re working on an analysis here in C.P. that requires evaluating a person’s credibility and general mental health. I need to consult a psychiatrist or some other professional who’s approved to handle classified information. Dr Peter Teleborian was mentioned to me, and I was wondering whether I could hire him.”

It took some while before she got an answer.

“Dr Teleborian has been an external consultant for S.I.S. in a couple of instances. He has security clearance and you can discuss classified information with him in general terms. But before you approach him you have to follow the bureaucratic procedure. Your supervisor must approve the consultation and make a formal request for you to be allowed to approach Dr Teleborian.”

Her heart sank. She had verified something that could be known only to a very restricted group of people. Teleborian had indeed had dealings with S.I.S.

She put down the report and focused her attention on other aspects of the information that Edklinth had given her. She studied the photographs of the two men who had allegedly followed the journalist Blomkvist from Café Copacabana on May 1.

She consulted the vehicle register and found that Göran Mårtensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the registration number legible in the photographs. Then she got confirmation from the S.I.S. personnel department that he was employed there. Her heart sank again.

Mårtensson worked in Personal Protection. He was a bodyguard. He was one of the officers responsible on formal occasions for the safety of the Prime Minister. For the past few weeks he had been loaned to Counter-Espionage. His leave of absence had begun on April 10, a couple of days after Zalachenko and Salander had landed in Sahlgrenska hospital. But that sort of temporary reassignment was not unusual – covering a shortage of personnel here or there in an emergency situation.

Then Figuerola called the assistant chief of Counter-Espionage, a man she knew and had worked for during her short time in that department. Was Göran Mårtensson working on anything important, or could he be borrowed for an investigation in Constitutional Protection?

The assistant chief of Counter-Espionage was puzzled. Inspector Figuerola must have been misinformed. Mårtensson had not been reassigned to Counter-Espionage. Sorry.

Figuerola stared at her receiver for two minutes. In Personal Protection they believed that Mårtensson had been loaned out to Counter-Espionage. Counter-Espionage said that they definitely had not borrowed him. Transfers of that kind had to be approved by the chief of Secretariat. She reached for the telephone to call him, but stopped short. If Personal Protection had loaned out Mårtensson, then the chief of Secretariat must have approved the decision. But Mårtensson was not at Counter-Espionage, which the chief of Secretariat must be aware of. And if Mårtensson was loaned out to some department that was tailing journalists, then the chief of Secretariat would have to know about that too.

Edklinth had told her: no rings in the water. To raise the matter with the chief of Secretariat might be to chuck a very large stone into a pond.

Berger sat at her desk in the glass cage. It was 10.30 on Monday morning. She badly needed the cup of coffee she had just got from the machine in the canteen. The first hours of her workday had been taken up entirely with meetings, starting with one lasting fifteen minutes in which Assistant Editor Fredriksson presented the guidelines for the day’s work. She was increasingly dependent on Fredriksson’s judgement in the light of her loss of confidence in Anders Holm.

The second was an hour-long meeting with the chairman Magnus Borgsjö, S.M.P.’s C.F.O. Christer Sellberg, and Ulf Flodin, the budget chief. The discussion was about the slump in advertising and the downturn in single-copy sales. The budget chief and the C.F.O. were both determined on action to cut the newspaper’s overheads.

“We made it through the first quarter of this year thanks to a marginal rise in advertising sales and the fact that two senior, highly paid employees retired at the beginning of the year. Those positions have not been filled,” Flodin said. “We’ll probably close out the present quarter with a small deficit. But the free papers, Metro and Stockholm City, are cutting into our ad. revenue in Stockholm. My prognosis is that the third quarter will produce a significant loss.”

“So how do we counter that?” Borgsjö said.

“The only option is cutbacks. We haven’t laid anyone off since 2002. But before the end of the year we will have to eliminate ten positions.”

“Which positions?” Berger said.

“We need to work on the ‘cheese plane’ principle, shave a job here and a job there. The sports desk has six and a half jobs at the moment. We should cut that to five full-timers.”

“As I understand it, the sports desk is on its knees already. What you’re proposing means that we’ll have to cut back on sports coverage.”

Flodin shrugged. “I’ll gladly listen to other suggestions.”

“I don’t have any better suggestions, but the principle is this: if we cut personnel, then we have to produce a smaller newspaper, and if we make a smaller newspaper, the number of readers will drop and the number of advertisers too.”

“The eternal vicious circle,” Sellberg said.

“I was hired to turn this downward trend around,” said Berger. “I see my job as taking an aggressive approach to change the newspaper and make it more attractive to readers. I can’t do that if I have to cut staff.” She turned to Borgsjö. “How long can the paper continue to bleed? How big a deficit can we take before we hit the limit?”

Borgsjö pursed his lips. “Since the early ’90s S.M.P. has eaten into a great many old consolidated assets. We have a stock portfolio that has dropped in value by about 30 per cent compared to ten years ago. A large portion of these funds were used for investments in I.T. We’ve also had enormous expenses.”

“I gather that S.M.P. has developed its own text editing system, the A.X.T. What did that cost?”