“What do you want to know?”
“I’ve read through the first binder, about the disappearance and the searches, but
there are so many Vangers mentioned that I need your help identifying them all.”
For nearly ten minutes Salander stood in the empty hall with her eyes fixed on the
brass plaque that said “Advokat N. E. Bjurman” before she rang the bell. The lock on
the entry door clicked.
It was Tuesday. It was their second meeting, and she had a bad feeling about it.
She was not afraid of Bjurman—Salander was rarely afraid of anyone or anything.
On the other hand, she felt uncomfortable with this new guardian. His predecessor,
Advokat Holger Palmgren, had been of an entirely different ilk: courteous and kind.
But three months ago Palmgren had had a stroke, and Nils Erik Bjurman had
inherited her in accordance with some bureaucratic pecking order.
In the twelve years that Salander had been under social and psychiatric
guardianship, two of those years in a children’s clinic, she had never once given the
same answer to the simple question: “So, how are you today?”
When she turned thirteen, the court had decided, under laws governing the
guardianship of minors, that she should be entrusted to the locked ward at St.
Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children in Uppsala. The decision was primarily based
on the fact that she was deemed to be emotionally disturbed and dangerously
violent towards her classmates and possibly towards herself.
All attempts by a teacher or any authority figure to initiate a conversation with the
girl about her feelings, emotional life, or the state of her health were met, to their
great frustration, with a sullen silence and a great deal of intense staring at the
floor, ceiling, and walls. She would fold her arms and refuse to participate in any
psychological tests. Her resistance to all attempts to measure, weigh, chart, analyse,
or educate her applied also to her school work—the authorities could have her
carried to a classroom and could chain her to the bench, but they could not stop
her from closing her ears and refusing to lift a pen to write anything. She
completed the nine years of compulsory schooling without a certificate.