through a fraction of it, mostly to satisfy my curiosity, and that was enough to tell
me that he’s a gangster.”
“OK. He got her pregnant in 1997. When she wanted compensation, his lawyer got
someone to try to convince her to have an abortion. I assume the intention was to
offer her a sum of money, but she wasn’t interested. Then the persuading ended up
with the heavy holding her underwater in a bath until she agreed to leave
Wennerström in peace. And Wennerström’s idiot writes all this to the lawyer in an
email—of course encrypted, but even so...It doesn’t say much for the IQ of this
bunch.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“She had an abortion, and Wennerström was pleased.”
Salander said nothing for ten minutes. Her eyes had suddenly turned dark.
“One more man who hates women,” she muttered at last.
She borrowed the CDs and spent the next few days reading through
Wennerström’s emails and other documents. While Blomkvist kept working,
Salander was up in the sleeping loft with her PowerBook on her knees, pondering
Wennerström’s peculiar empire.
An idea had occurred to her and she could not let it go. Most of all she wondered
why it had not occurred to her sooner.
In late October Mikael turned off his computer when it was only 11:00 in the
morning. He climbed up to the sleeping loft and handed Salander what he had
written. Then he fell asleep. She woke him that evening and gave him her opinion
of the article.
Just after 2:00 in the morning, Blomkvist made the last backup of his work.
The next day he closed the shutters on the windows and locked up. Salander’s
holiday was over. They went back to Stockholm together.