“When I turned in my report to Frode he gave me an extra assignment. He asked
me to try to find out what really happened at the trial. I had just started working on
it when he called Armansky and cancelled the job.”
“I wonder why.”
“I assume that they scrapped the investigation as soon as you accepted Henrik
Vanger’s assignment. It would no longer have been of immediate interest.”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t like leaving things unresolved. I had a few weeks...free last spring
when Armansky didn’t have any jobs for me, so I did some digging into
Wennerström for fun.”
Blomkvist sat up and turned on the lamp and looked at Salander. He met her eyes.
She actually looked guilty.
“Did you find out anything?”
“I have his entire hard disk on my computer. You can have as much proof as you
need that he’s a gangster.”
CHAPTER 28
Tuesday, July 29–Friday, October 24
Blomkvist had been poring over Salander’s computer printouts for three days—
boxes full of papers. The problem was that the subjects kept changing all the time.
An option deal in London. A currency deal in Paris through an agent. A company
with a post-office box in Gibraltar. A sudden doubling of funds in an account at the
Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
And then all those puzzling question marks: a trading company with 200,000
kronor in an untouched account registered five years earlier in Santiago, Chile—
one of nearly thirty such companies in twelve different countries—and not a hint of
what type of activity was involved. A dormant company? Waiting for what? A front