You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that these events were somehow
related. There had to be a skeleton in one of their cupboards, and Salander loved
hunting skeletons. Besides, she had nothing else on at the moment.
PART 3
Mergers
MAY 16 TO JULY 11
Thirteen percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual
assault outside of a sexual relationship.
CHAPTER 15
Friday, May 16–Saturday, May 31
Mikael Blomkvist was released from Rullåker Prison on Friday, May 16, two months
after he was admitted. The same day he entered the facility, he had submitted an
application for parole, with no great optimism. He never did quite understand the
technical reasons behind his release, but it may have had something to do with the
fact that he did not use any holiday leave and that the prison population was forty-
two while the number of beds was thirty-one. In any case, the warden—Peter
Sarowsky, a forty-year-old Polish exile—with whom Blomkvist got along well, wrote
a recommendation that his sentence be reduced.
His time at Rullåker had been unstressful and pleasant enough. The prison had
been designed, as Sarowsky expressed it, for hooligans and drunk drivers, not for
hardened criminals. The daily routines reminded him of living in a youth hostel. His
fellow prisoners, half of whom were second-generation immigrants, regarded
Blomkvist as something of a rare bird in the group. He was the only inmate to
appear on the TV news, which lent him a certain status.
On his first day, he was called in for a talk and offered therapy, training from
Komvux, or the opportunity for other adult education, and occupational