“What did he look like?”

“He was built like a tank. I’m not exaggerating. He was over six foot six and weighed at least 300 pounds. All muscle and armour plating. A fucking giant who doesn’t know what pain is.”

“You’ve never seen him before?”

“Never. He had no idea how to box. I could feint and throw him off his guard and he didn’t have a clue how to move to avoid being hit. He was out of it. But at the same time he tried to move like a boxer. He held his arms up the right way and he kept recovering to a starting stance. Maybe he’d trained in boxing but hadn’t heard a word of what the trainer said. What saved my life-and the girl’s-was that he moved so slowly. He would throw roundhouse swings that he telegraphed a month in advance, and I could duck or parry them. He got in two good punches on me-one to the face, and you see what that did, then one to the body, where he cracked a rib. But neither of them was full power. If he’d landed them properly he would have knocked my head off.”

Paolo Roberto laughed, a bubbling sort of laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“I won. That moron tried to kill me and I won. I actually decked him. But I had to use a fucking plank to get him down for the count.”

He turned serious again. “If Miriam Wu hadn’t kicked him in the balls at just the right moment, I don’t want to think about how the hell it would have ended.”

“Paolo-I’m really, really glad you won. Miriam is going to say the same thing when she wakes up. Have you heard how she’s doing?”

“She looks about the same as I do. She has a concussion, several cracked ribs, a broken nose, and damage to her kidneys.”

Blomkvist bent forward and put his hand on Paolo Roberto’s good knee. “If you ever need me to do anything…” he said.

Paolo Roberto smiled. “Blomkvist-if you ever need a favour again…”

“Yes?”

“… ask Sebastián Luján to do it for you.”

CHAPTER 26 Wednesday, April 6

Inspector Bublanski was in a dismal mood when he met Modig in the parking lot outside the hospital just before 7:00. Blomkvist had woken him up, and he in turn called Modig and woke her up. They met Blomkvist by the entrance and went with him to Paolo Roberto’s room.

Bublanski could hardly grasp the bewildering details, but what was eventually clear was that Wu had been kidnapped and that the boxer had beaten up the kidnapper. Except that to judge by his face, it was far from obvious who had beaten up whom. As far as Bublanski was concerned, the night’s events had lifted the investigation of Lisbeth Salander to a whole new level of complication. Nothing in this infernal case seemed to be normal.

How had Paolo Roberto even gotten involved in the affair?

“I’m a good friend of Lisbeth Salander’s,” he told them.

Bublanski and Modig looked at each other, surprised and sceptical.

“She sparred with me at the gym.”

Bublanski fixed his gaze somewhere on the wall behind Paolo Roberto. Modig could not help laughing out loud. After a while they had written down all the details he could give them.

“I’d like to make a few points,” Blomkvist said dryly.

They turned to him.

“First of all, Paolo’s description of the man who drove away from the warehouse in the van matches the one I gave of the person who attacked Salander at the same spot on Lundagatan. A tall guy with a light brown ponytail and a beer belly. OK?”

Bublanski nodded.

“Second, the point of the kidnapping was to force Miriam Wu to reveal where Lisbeth Salander is hiding. So these two thugs have been looking for Salander since at least a week before the murders. Agreed?”

Modig murmured a “yes.”

“Third, it looks less likely that Salander is the lone nutcase she has been portrayed as. And neither of these maniacs seems, on the face of it, to be a member of a lesbian Satanist gang.”

Neither Bublanski nor Modig said a word.

“And finally, number four. I think this story has something to do with a man called Zala. Dag Svensson did a lot of work on him in his last two weeks. All the relevant information is in his computer. Dag linked him to the murder of a prostitute named Irina Petrova in Södertälje. The autopsy recorded that she was very severely beaten. So severely that any one of three of the worst blows would have been fatal on its own. Her injuries sound very like the ones that Miriam Wu and Paolo Roberto have been subjected to. In both cases the instruments of this extraordinary violence could be the hands of a gigantic thug.”

“And Bjurman?” Bublanski said. “Let’s suppose that someone had a reason to silence Svensson. Who would have had a motive to murder Salander’s guardian?”

“All the pieces of the puzzle aren’t in place yet, but there’s a connection between Bjurman and Zala. That’s the only credible solution. Could you agree to start thinking along new lines? I think that these crimes have something to do with the sex trade. And Salander would sooner die than be involved in something like that. I told you she’s a damned moralist.”

“So what was her role? What was she doing at Svensson and Johansson’s apartment?”

“I don’t know. Witness? Opponent? Maybe she was there to warn Dag and Mia that their lives were in danger.”

Bublanski set the wheels in motion. He called the Södertälje police and gave them Paolo Roberto’s directions to a dilapidated warehouse southwest of Lake Yngern. Then he called Holmberg-he lived in Flemings-berg and was closest of the team to Södertälje-and asked him to join up with the Södertälje police as soon as he possibly could to assist with the crime scene investigation.

Holmberg called back an hour later. He had arrived at the crime scene. The Södertälje police had had no difficulty finding the warehouse. Along with two smaller storage sheds it had burned to the ground, and the fire department was there now, mopping up. There were two discarded gasoline cans in the yard.

Bublanski felt a sense of frustration approaching fury.

What the hell was going on? Who were these thugs? Who was this Salander person really? And why was it impossible to find her?

The situation did not improve when Ekström joined the fray at the 9:00 meeting. Bublanski told him about the morning’s dramatic developments and proposed that the search be reprioritized in light of the mysterious events that had taken place, which cast doubt on the scenario that the team had been working on.

Paolo Roberto’s story reinforced Blomkvist’s account of the attack on Salander on Lundagatan. The hypothesis that all three murders were committed by one mentally ill woman no longer seemed valid. The suspicions regarding Salander could not altogether be discarded-they needed an explanation for her fingerprints being on the murder weapon-but it did mean that the investigation had to work on the possibility of a different killer. There was only one theory at present-Blomkvist’s belief that the murders had to do with Svensson’s imminent exposé of the sex trade. Bublanski identified three significant points.

The prime task was to find and identify the abnormally large man and his associate with the ponytail who had kidnapped and assaulted Miriam Wu. The giant should be relatively easy to find.

Andersson reminded them that Salander also had an unusual appearance, and that after three weeks of searching, the police still had no idea where she was.

The second task was to add to the investigative team a group that would actively focus on the list of prostitutes’ clients in Svensson’s computer. There was a logistical problem associated with this. The team had Svensson’s computer from Millennium and the Zip disks that held the backup of his missing laptop, but they contained several years’ worth of collected research and thousands of pages. It would take time to catalogue and study them. The team needed reinforcements, and Bublanski detailed Modig to head that unit.