This had consequently become associated with the great difficulty of even
diagnosing her mental deficiencies. In short, Lisbeth Salander was anything but
easy to handle.
By the time she was thirteen, it was also decided that a trustee should be assigned
to take care of her interests and assets until she came of age. This trustee was
Advokat Palmgren who, in spite of a rather difficult start, had succeeded where
psychiatrists and doctors had failed. Gradually he won not only a certain amount of
trust but also a modest amount of warmth from the girl.
When she turned fifteen, the doctors had more or less agreed that she was not,
after all, dangerously violent, nor did she represent any immediate danger to
herself. Her family had been categorised as dysfunctional, and she had no relatives
who could look after her welfare, so it was decided that Lisbeth Salander should be
released from the psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala and eased back into
society by way of a foster family.
That had not been an easy journey. She ran away from the first foster family after
only two weeks. The second and third foster families fell by the wayside in quick
succession. At that point Palmgren had a serious discussion with her, explaining
bluntly that if she persisted on this path she would be institutionalised again. This
threat had the effect that she accepted foster family number four—an elderly
couple who lived in Midsommarkransen.
But it did not mean, however, that she behaved herself. At the age of seventeen,
Salander was arrested by the police on four occasions; twice she was so intoxicated
that she ended up in the emergency room, and once she was plainly under the
influence of narcotics. On one of these occasions she was found dead drunk, with
her clothes in disarray, in the back seat of a car parked at Söder Mälarstrand. She
was with an equally drunk and much older man.
The last arrest occurred three weeks before her eighteenth birthday, when she,
perfectly sober, kicked a male passenger in the head inside the gates of the Gamla
Stan tunnelbana station. She was charged with assault and battery. Salander
claimed that the man had groped her, and her testimony was supported by
witnesses. The prosecutor dismissed the case. But her background was such that
the district court ordered a psychiatric evaluation. Since she refused, as was her
custom, to answer any questions or to participate in the examinations, the doctors
consulted by the National Board of Health and Welfare handed down an opinion
based on “observations of the patient.” It was unclear precisely what could be