“Well-”

“I couldn’t prevent shit. As a policewoman I invariably arrived on the scene after a crime had been committed. I couldn’t cope with the arrogant lingo on the squad. And I soon found out that some crimes are never even investigated. You’re a typical example. Did you try to call the police about what happened?”

“Yes.”

“And did they bother to come out here?”

“Not really. I was told to file a report at the local station.”

“So now you know. I work for Armansky, and I come into the picture before a crime is committed.”

“Mostly to do with women who are threatened?”

“I work with all kinds of things. Security assessments, bodyguard protection, surveillance and so on. But the work is often to do with people who have been threatened. I get on considerably better at Milton than on the force, although there’s a drawback.”

“What’s that?”

“We are only there for clients who can pay.”

As she lay in bed Berger thought about what Linder had said. Not everyone can afford security. She herself had accepted Rosin’s proposal for several new doors, engineers, back-up alarm systems and everything else without blinking. The cost of all that work would be almost 50,000 kronor. But she could afford it.

She pondered for a moment her suspicion that the person threatening her had something to do with S.M.P. Whoever it was had known that she had hurt her foot. She thought of Holm. She did not like him, which added to her mistrust of him, but the news that she had been injured had spread fast from the second she appeared in the newsroom on crutches.

And she had the Borgsjö problem.

She suddenly sat up in bed and frowned, looking around the bedroom. She wondered where she had put Cortez’s file on Borgsjö and Vitavara Inc.

She got up, put on her dressing gown and leaned on a crutch. She went to her study and turned on the light. No, she had not been in her study since… since she had read through the file in the bath the night before. She had put it on the windowsill.

She looked in the bathroom. It was not on the windowsill.

She stood there for a while, worrying.

She had no memory of seeing the folder that morning. She had not moved it anywhere else.

She turned ice-cold and spent the next five minutes searching the bathroom and going through the stacks of papers and newspapers in the kitchen and bedroom. In the end she had to admit that the folder was gone.

Between the time when she had stepped on the shard of glass and Rosin’s arrival that morning, somebody had gone into her bathroom and taken Millennium’s material about Vitavara Inc.

Then it occurred to her that she had other secrets in the house. She limped back to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the chest by her bed. Her heart sank like a stone. Everyone has secrets. She kept hers in the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Berger did not regularly write a diary, but there were periods when she had. There were also old love letters which she had kept from her teenage years.

There was an envelope with photographs that had been cool at the time, but… When Berger was twenty-five she had been involved in Club Xtreme, which arranged private dating parties for people who were into leather. There were photographs from various parties, and if she had been sober at the time, she would have recognized that she looked completely demented.

And – most disastrous of all – there was a video taken on holiday in the early ’90s when she and Greger had been guests of the glass artist Torkel Bollinger at his villa on the Costa del Sol. During the holiday Berger had discovered that her husband had a definite bisexual tendency, and they had both ended up in bed with Torkel. It had been a pretty wonderful holiday. Video cameras were still a relatively new phenomenon. The movie they had playfully made was definitely not for general release.

The drawer was empty.

How could I have been so bloody stupid?

On the bottom of the drawer someone had spray-painted the familiar five-letter word.

Salander finished her autobiography at 4.00 on Friday morning and sent a copy to Blomkvist via the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. Then she lay quite still in bed and stared at the ceiling.

She knew that on Walpurgis Night she had had her twenty-seventh birthday, but she had not even reflected on the fact at the time. She was imprisoned. She had experienced the same thing at St Stefan’s. If things did not go right for her there was a risk that she would spend many more birthdays in some form of confinement.

She was not going to accept a situation like that.

The last time she had been locked up she was scarcely into her teens. She was grown-up now, and had more knowledge and skills. She wondered how long it would take for her to escape and settle down safely in some other country to create a new identity and a new life for herself.

She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom where she looked in the mirror. She was no longer limping. She ran her fingers over her hip where the wound had healed to a scar. She twisted her arms and stretched her left shoulder back and forth. It was tight, but she was more or less healed. She tapped herself on the head. She supposed that her brain had not been too greatly damaged after being perforated by a bullet with a full-metal jacket.

She had been extraordinarily lucky.

Until she had access to a computer, she had spent her time trying to work out how to escape from this locked room at Sahlgrenska.

Then Dr Jonasson and Blomkvist had upset her plans by smuggling in her Palm. She had read Blomkvist’s articles and brooded over what he had to say. She had done a risk assessment and pondered his plan, weighing her chances. She had decided that for once she was going to do as he advised. She would test the system. Blomkvist had convinced her that she had nothing to lose, and he was offering her a chance to escape in a very different way. If the plan failed, she would simply have to plan her escape from St Stefan’s or whichever other nuthouse.

What actually convinced her to decide to play the game Blomkvist’s way was her desire for revenge.

She forgave nothing.

Zalachenko, Björck and Bjurman were dead.

Teleborian, on the other hand, was alive.

So too was her brother, the so-called Ronald Niedermann, even though in reality he was not her problem. Certainly, he had helped in the attempt to murder and bury her, but he seemed peripheral. If I run into him sometime, we’ll see, but until such time he’s the police’s problem.

Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.

So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist’s plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist’s reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.

The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the whole truth. She had no intention of doing that.

She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.

She felt a niggling irritation that she could not identify. She reached for a notebook, given to her by Giannini and hardly used. She turned to the first page, where she had written: