“I’m going to take him,” she said, running for the door. She grabbed the keys as she passed the table and tossed them backhanded to the floor next to Blomkvist.

He tried to shout to her to wait, but he managed only a rasping sound and by then she had vanished.

Salander had not forgotten that Martin Vanger had a rifle somewhere, and she stopped, holding the pistol ready to fire in front of her, as she came upstairs to the passageway between the garage and the kitchen. She listened, but she could hear no sound telling her where her prey was. She moved stealthily towards the kitchen, and she was almost there when she heard a car starting up in the courtyard.

From the drive she saw a pair of tail lights passing Henrik Vanger’s house and turning down to the bridge, and she ran as fast as her legs could carry her. She stuffed the pistol in her jacket pocket and did not bother with the helmet as she started her motorcycle. Seconds later she was crossing the bridge.

He had maybe a ninety-second start when she came into the roundabout at the entrance to the E4. She could not see his car. She braked and turned off the motor to listen.

The sky was filled with heavy clouds. On the horizon she saw a hint of the dawn. Then she heard the sound of an engine and caught a glimpse of tail lights on the E4, going south. Salander kicked the motorcycle, put it into gear, and raced under the viaduct. She was doing 40 miles per hour as she took the curve of the entrance ramp. She saw no traffic and accelerated to full speed and flew forward. When the road began to curve along a ridge, she was doing 90 mph, which was about the fastest her souped-up lightweight bike could manage going downhill. After two minutes she saw the lights about 650 yards ahead.

Analyse consequences. What do I do now?

She decelerated to a more reasonable seventy-five and kept pace with him. She lost sight of him for several seconds when they took several bends. Then they came on to a long straight; she was only two hundred yards behind him.

He must have seen the headlight from her motorcycle, and he sped up when they took a long curve. She accelerated again but lost ground on the bends.

She saw the headlights of a truck approaching. Martin Vanger did too. He increased his speed again and drove straight into the oncoming lane. Salander saw the truck swerve and flash its lights, but the collision was unavoidable. Martin Vanger drove straight into the truck and the sound of the crash was terrible.

Salander braked. She saw the trailer start to jackknife across her lane. At the speed she was going, it took two seconds for her to cover the distance up to the accident site. She accelerated and steered on to the hard shoulder, avoiding the hurtling back of the truck by two yards as she flew past. Out of the corner of her eye she saw flames coming from the front of the truck.

She rode on, braking and thinking, for another 150 yards before she stopped and turned around. She saw the driver of the truck climb out of his cab on the passenger side. Then she accelerated again. At Åkerby, about a mile south, she turned left and took the old road back north, parallel to the E4. She went up a hill past the scene of the crash. Two cars had stopped. Big flames were boiling out of the wreckage of Martin’s car, which was wedged underneath the truck. A man was spraying the flames with a small fire extinguisher.

She was soon rolling across the bridge at a low speed. She parked outside the cottage and walked back to Martin Vanger’s house.

Mikael was still fumbling with the handcuffs. His hands were so numb that he could not get a grip on the key. Salander unlocked the cuffs for him and held him tight as the blood began to circulate in his hands again.

“Martin?” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Dead. He drove slap into the front of a truck a couple of miles south on the E4.”

Blomkvist stared at her. She had only been gone a few minutes.

“We have to…call the police,” he whispered. He began coughing hard.

“Why?” Salander said.

For ten minutes Blomkvist was incapable of standing up. He was still on the floor, naked, leaning against the wall. He massaged his neck and lifted the water bottle with clumsy fingers. Salander waited patiently until his sense of touch started to return. She spent the time thinking.

“Put your trousers on.”

She used Blomkvist’s cut-up T-shirt to wipe fingerprints from the handcuffs, the knife, and the golf club. She picked up her PET bottle.

“What are you doing?”

“Get dressed and hurry up. It’s getting light outside.”

Blomkvist stood on shaky legs and managed to pull on his boxers and jeans. He slipped on his trainers. Salander stuffed his socks into her jacket pocket and then stopped him.

“What exactly did you touch down here?”

Blomkvist looked around. He tried to remember. At last he said that he had touched nothing except the door and the keys. Salander found the keys in Martin Vanger’s jacket, which he had hung over the chair. She wiped the door handle and the switch and turned off the light. She helped Blomkvist up the basement stairs and told him to wait in the passageway while she put the golf club back in its proper place. When she came back she was carrying a dark T-shirt that belonged to Martin Vanger.

“Put this on. I don’t want anyone to see you scampering about with a bare chest tonight.”

Blomkvist realised that he was in a state of shock. Salander had taken charge, and passively he obeyed her instructions. She led him out of Martin’s house. She held on to him the whole time. As soon as they stepped inside the cottage, she stopped him.

“If anyone sees us and asks what we were doing outside tonight, you and I went out to the point for a nighttime walk, and we had sex out there.”

“Lisbeth, I can’t…”

“Get in the shower. Now.”

She helped him off with his clothes and propelled him to the bathroom. Then she put on water for coffee and made half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles. She sat down at the kitchen table and was thinking hard when he came limping back into the room. She studied the bruises and scrapes on his body. The noose had been so tight that he had a dark red mark around his neck, and the knife had made a bloody gash in his skin on the left side.

“Get into bed,” she said.

She improvised bandages and covered the wound with a makeshift compress. Then she poured the coffee and handed him a sandwich.

“I’m really not hungry,” he said.

“I don’t give a damn if you’re hungry. Just eat,” Salander commanded, taking a big bite of her own cheese sandwich.

Blomkvist closed his eyes for a moment, then he sat up and took a bite. His throat hurt so much that he could scarcely swallow.

Salander took off her leather jacket and from the bathroom brought a jar of Tiger Balm from her sponge bag.

“Let the coffee cool for a while. Lie face down.”

She spent five minutes massaging his back and rubbing him with the liniment. Then she turned him over and gave him the same treatment on the front.

“You’re going to have some serious bruises for a while.”

“Lisbeth, we have to call the police.”

“No,” she replied with such vehemence that Blomkvist opened his eyes in surprise. “If you call the police, I’m leaving. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. Martin Vanger is dead. He died in a car accident. He was alone in the car. There are witnesses. Let the police or someone else discover that fucking torture chamber. You and I are just as ignorant about its existence as everyone else in this village.”

“Why?”

She ignored him and started massaging his aching thighs.

“Lisbeth, we can’t just…”