She went to the church. Still no sign. She was at a loss to know what to do. Then she went back to her motor cycle and got a flashlight from the saddlebag and set off along the water again. It took her a while to wind her way along the half-overgrown road, and even longer to find the path to Gottfried’s cabin. It loomed out of the darkness behind some trees when she had almost reached it. He was not on the porch and the door was locked.

She had turned towards the village when she stopped and went back, all the way out to the point. She caught sight of Blomkvist’s silhouette in the darkness on the end of the jetty where Harriet Vanger had drowned her father. She sighed with relief.

He heard her as she came out on to the jetty, and he turned around. She sat down next to him without a word. At last he broke the silence.

“Forgive me. I had to be alone for a while.”

“I know.”

She lit two cigarettes and gave him one. Blomkvist looked at her. Salander was the most asocial human being he had ever met. Usually she ignored any attempt on his part to talk about anything personal, and she had never accepted a single expression of sympathy. She had saved his life, and now she had tracked him out here in the night. He put an arm around her.

“Now I know what my price is,” he said. “We’ve forsaken those girls. They’re going to bury the whole story. Everything in Martin’s basement will be vacuumed into oblivion.”

Salander did not answer.

“Erika was right,” he said. “I would have done more good if I’d gone to Spain for a month and then come home refreshed and taken on Wennerström. I’ve wasted all these months.”

“If you’d gone to Spain, Martin Vanger would still be operating in his basement.”

They sat together for a long time before he suggested that they go home.

Blomkvist fell asleep before Salander. She lay awake listening to him breathe. After a while she went to the kitchen and sat in the dark on the kitchen bench, smoking several cigarettes as she brooded. She had taken it for granted that Vanger and Frode might con him. It was in their nature. But it was Blomkvist’s problem, not hers. Or was it?

At last she made a decision. She stubbed out her cigarette and went into the bedroom, turned on the lamp, and shook Mikael awake. It was 2:30 in the morning.

“What?”

“I’ve got a question. Sit up.”

Blomkvist sat up, drunk with sleep.

“When you were indicted, why didn’t you defend yourself?”

Blomkvist rubbed his eyes. He looked at the clock.

“It’s a long story, Lisbeth.”

“I’ve got time. Tell me.”

He sat for a long while, pondering what he should say. Finally he decided on the truth.

“I had no defence. The information in the article was wrong.”

“When I hacked your computer and read your email exchange with Berger, there were plenty of references to the Wennerström affair, but you two kept discussing practical details about the trial and nothing about what actually happened. What was it that went wrong?”

“Lisbeth, I can’t let the real story get out. I fell into a trap. Erika and I are quite clear that it would damage our credibility even further if we told anyone what really happened.”

“Listen, Kalle Blomkvist, yesterday afternoon you sat here preaching about friendship and trust and stuff. I’m not going to put the story on the Net.”

Blomkvist protested. It was the middle of the night. He could not face thinking about the whole thing now. She went on stubbornly sitting there until he gave in. He went to the bathroom and washed his face and put the coffeepot on. Then he came back to the bed and told her about how his old schoolfriend Robert Lindberg, in a yellow Mälar- 30 in the guest marina in Arholma, had aroused his curiosity.

“You mean that your buddy was lying?”

“No, not at all. He told me exactly what he knew, and I could verify each and every word in documents from the audit at SIB. I even went to Poland and photographed the sheet-metal shack where this huge big Minos Company was housed. I interviewed several of the people who had been employed at the company. They all said exactly the same thing.”

“I don’t get it.”

Blomkvist sighed. It was a while before he spoke again.

“I had a damned good story. I still hadn’t confronted Wennerström himself, but the story was airtight; if I had published it at that moment I really would have shook him up. It might not have led to an indictment for fraud-the deal had already been approved by the auditors-but I would have damaged his reputation.”

“What went wrong?”

“Somewhere along the way somebody heard about what I was poking my nose into, and Wennerström was made aware of my existence. And all of a sudden a whole bunch of strange things started happening. First I was threatened. Anonymous calls from card telephones that were impossible to trace. Erika was also threatened. It was the usual nonsense: lie down or else we’re going to nail you to a barn door, and so on. She, of course, was mad as a hellcat.”

He took a cigarette from Salander.

“Then something extremely unpleasant happened. Late one night when I left the office I was attacked by two men who just walked up to me and gave me a couple of punches. I got a fat lip and fell down in the street. I couldn’t identify them, but one of them looked like an old biker.”

“So, next…”

“All these goings-on, of course, only had the effect of making Erika very cross indeed, and I got stubborn. We beefed up security at Millennium. The problem was that the harassment was out of all proportion to the content of the story. We couldn’t fathom why all this was happening.”

“But the story you published was something quite different.”

“Exactly. Suddenly we made a breakthrough. We found a source, a Deep Throat in Wennerström’s circle. This source was literally scared to death, and we were only allowed to meet him in hotel rooms. He told us that the money from the Minos affair had been used for weapons deals in the war in Yugoslavia. Wennerström had been making deals with the right-wing Ustashe in Croatia. Not only that, the source was able to give us copies of documents to back it up.”

“You believed him?”

“He was clever. He only ever gave us enough information to lead us to the next source, who would confirm the story. We were even given a photograph of one of Wennerström’s closest colleagues shaking hands with the buyer. It was detailed blockbuster material, and everything seemed verifiable. So we published.”

“And it was a fake.”

“It was all a fake from beginning to end. The documents were skilful forgeries. Wennerström’s lawyer was able to prove that the photograph of Wennerström’s subordinate and the Ustashe leader was a montage of two different images.”

“Fascinating,” Salander said.

“In hindsight it was very easy to see how we had been manipulated. Our original story really had damaged Wennerström. Now that story was drowned in a clever forgery. We published a story that Wennerström could pick apart point by point and prove his innocence.”

“You couldn’t back down and tell the truth? You had absolutely no proof that Wennerström had committed the falsification?”

“If we had tried to tell the truth and accused Wennerström of being behind the whole thing, nobody would have believed us. It would have looked like a desperate attempt to shift the blame from our stupidity on to an innocent leader of industry.”

“I see.”

“Wennerström had two layers of protection. If the fake had been revealed, he would have been able to claim that it was one of his enemies trying to slander him. And we at Millennium would once again have lost all credibility, since we fell for something that turned out to be false.”

“So you chose not to defend yourself and take the prison sentence.”

“I deserved it,” Blomkvist said. “I had committed libel. Now you know. Can I go back to sleep now?”