Father and daughter spent the time together in her room upstairs. Pernilla’s
parents were divorced when she was five, and she had had a new father since she
was seven. Pernilla came to see him about once a month and had week-long
holidays with him in Sandhamn. When they spent time together they usually got
along well, but Blomkvist had let his daughter decide how often she wanted to see
him, the more so after her mother remarried. There had been a couple of years in
her early teens when contact almost stopped, and it was only in the past two years
that she seemed to want to see him more often.
She had followed the trial in the firm belief that things were just as her father said:
he was innocent, but he could not prove it.
She told him about a sort-of boyfriend who was in another class, and she surprised
him by saying that she had joined a church. Blomkvist refrained from comment.
He was invited to stay for dinner but he was expected with his sister and her family
out in the yuppie suburb of Stäket.
That morning he had also had an invitation to celebrate Christmas Eve with the
Beckmans in Saltsjöbaden. He said no, but thank you, certain that there was a limit
to Beckman’s indulgence and quite sure that he had no ambition to find out what
that limit might be.
Instead he was knocking on the door where Annika Blomkvist, now Annika
Giannini, lived with her Italian-born husband and their two children. With a platoon
of her husband’s relatives, they were about to carve the Christmas ham. During
dinner he answered questions about the trial and received much well-meaning and
quite useless advice.
The only one who had nothing to say about the verdict was his sister, although she
was the only lawyer in the room. She had worked as clerk of a district court and as
an assistant prosecutor for several years before she and three colleagues opened a
law firm of their own with offices on Kungsholmen. She specialised in family law,
and without Blomkvist having taken stock of its happening, his little sister began to
appear in newspapers as representing battered or threatened women, and on
panel discussions on TV as a feminist and women’s rights advocate.
As he was helping her prepare the coffee, she put a hand on his shoulder and asked
him how was he doing. He told her he felt as low as he had in life.
“Get yourself a real lawyer next time,” she said.