It was not merely a matter of concern for the company. Salander had made plain that she did not want Armansky to act as some sort of worried stepfather, and since their agreement he had been careful never to behave like one, but in reality he would never stop worrying about her. He sometimes caught himself comparing Salander to his daughters. He considered himself a good father who did not interfere unnecessarily in their lives. But he knew that he would not tolerate it if his daughters behaved like Salander or lived the life she led.

In the depths of his Croatian - or possibly Bosnian or Armenian - heart he had never been able to shed the conviction that Salander's life was heading for disaster. She seemed the perfect victim for anyone who wished her ill, and he dreaded the morning he would be awakened by the news that someone had done her harm.

"An investigation of this kind could get expensive," Armansky said, issuing a warning so as to gauge the seriousness of Frode's inquiry.

"Then we'll set a ceiling," Frode said. "I don't demand the impossible, but it's obvious that your colleague, just as you assured me, is exceedingly competent."

"Salander?" Armansky said, turning to her with a raised eyebrow.

"I'm not working on anything else right now."

"OK. But I want us to be in agreement about the constraints of the job. Let's hear the rest of your report."

"There isn't much more apart from his private life. In 1986 he married Monica Abrahamsson and the same year they had a daughter, Pernilla. The marriage didn't last; they were divorced in 1991. Abrahamsson has remarried, but they seem to be friends still. The daughter lives with her mother and doesn't see Blomkvist often."

Frode asked for more coffee and then turned to Salander.

"You said that everyone has secrets. Did you find any?"

"I meant that all people have things they consider to be private and that they don't go around airing in public. Blomkvist is obviously a big hit with women. He's had several love affairs and a great many casual flings. But one person has kept turning up in his life over the years, and it's an unusual relationship."

"In what way?"

"Erika Berger, editor in chief of Millennium: upper-class girl, Swedish mother, Belgian father resident in Sweden. Berger and Blomkvist met in journalism school and have had an on-and-off relationship ever since."

"That may not be so unusual," Frode said.

"No, possibly not. But Berger happens to be married to the artist Greger Beckman, a minor celebrity who has done a lot of terrible things in public venues."

"So she's unfaithful."

"Beckman knows about their relationship. It's a situation apparently accepted by all parties concerned. Sometimes she sleeps at Blomkvist's and sometimes at home. I don't know exactly how it works, but it was probably a contributing factor to the breakup of Blomkvist's marriage to Abrahamsson."

CHAPTER 3

Friday, December 20 - Saturday, December 21

Erika Berger looked up quizzically when an apparently freezing Blomkvist came into the editorial office. Millennium's offices were in the centre of the trendy section of Gotgatan, above the offices of Greenpeace. The rent was actually a bit too steep for the magazine, but they had all agreed to keep the space.

She glanced at the clock. It was 5:10, and darkness had fallen over Stockholm long before. She had been expecting him around lunchtime.

"I'm sorry," he said before she managed to say anything. "But I was feeling the weight of the verdict and didn't feel like talking. I went for a long walk to think things over."

"I heard the verdict on the radio. She from TV4 called and wanted a comment."

"What'd you say?"

"Something to the effect that we were going to read the judgement carefully before we make any statements. So I said nothing. And my opinion still holds: it's the wrong strategy. We come off looking weak with the media. They will run something on TV this evening."

Blomkvist looked glum.

"How are you doing?"

Blomkvist shrugged and plopped down in his favourite armchair next to the window in Erika's office. The decor was spartan, with a desk and functional bookcases and cheap office furniture. All of it was from IKEA apart from the two comfortable and extravagant armchairs and a small end table - a concession to my upbringing, she liked to say. She would sit reading in one of the armchairs with her feet tucked underneath her when she wanted to get away from the desk. Blomkvist looked down on Gotgatan, where people were hurrying by in the dark. Christmas shopping was in full swing.

"I suppose it'll pass," he said. "But right now it feels as if I've got myself a very raw deal."

"Yes, I can imagine. It's the same for all of us. Janne Dahlman went home early today."

"I assume he wasn't over the moon about the verdict."

"He's not the most positive person anyway."

Mikael shook his head. For the past nine months Dahlman had been managing editor. He had started there just as the Wennerstrom affair got going, and he found himself on an editorial staff in crisis mode. Blomkvist tried to remember what their reasoning had been when he and Berger decided to hire him. He was competent, of course, and had worked at the TT news bureau, the evening papers, and Eko on the radio. But he apparently did not like sailing against the wind. During the past year Blomkvist had often regretted that they had hired Dahlman, who had an enervating habit of looking at everything in as negative a light as possible.

"Have you heard from Christer?" Blomkvist asked without taking his eyes off the street.

Christer Malm was the art director and designer of Millennium. He was also part owner of the magazine together with Berger and Blomkvist, but he was on a trip abroad with his boyfriend.

"He called to say hello."

"He'll have to be the one who takes over as publisher."

"Lay off, Micke. As publisher you have to count on being punched in the nose every so often. It's part of the job description."

"You're right about that. But I was the one who wrote the article that was published in a magazine of which I also happen to be the publisher. That makes everything look different all of a sudden. Then it's a matter of bad judgement."

Berger felt that the disquiet she had been carrying with her all day was about to explode. In the weeks before the trial started, Blomkvist had been walking around under a black cloud. But she had never seen him as gloomy and dejected as he seemed to be now in the hour of his defeat. She walked to his side of the desk and sat on his lap, straddling him, and put her arms round his neck.

"Mikael, listen to me. We both know exactly how it happened. I'm as much to blame as you are. We simply have to ride out the storm."

"There isn't any storm to ride out. As far as the media are concerned, the verdict means that I've been shot in the back of the head. I can't stay on as the publisher of Millennium. The vital thing is to maintain the magazine's credibility, to stop the bleeding. You know that as well as I do."

"If you think I intend to let you take the rap all by yourself, then you haven't learned a damn thing about me in the years we've worked together."

"I know how you operate, Ricky. You're 100 percent loyal to your colleagues. If you had to choose, you'd keep fighting against Wennerstrom's lawyers until your credibility was gone too. We have to be smarter than that."

"And you think it's smart to jump ship and make it look as if I sacked you?"

"If Millennium is going to survive, it depends on you now. Christer is great, but he's just a nice guy who knows about images and layout and doesn't have a clue about street fighting with billionaires. It's just not his thing. I'm going to have to disappear for a while, as publisher, reporter, and board member. Wennerstrom knows that I know what he did, and I'm absolutely sure that as long as I'm anywhere near Millennium he's going to try to ruin us."

"So why not publish everything we know? Sink or swim?"

"Because we can't prove a damn thing, and right now I have no credibility at all. Let's accept that Wennerstrom won this round."

"OK, I'll fire you. What are you going to do?"

"I need a break, to be honest. I'm burned right out. I'm going to take some time for myself for a while, some of it in prison. Then we'll see."

Berger put her arms around him and pulled his head down to her breasts. She hugged him hard.

"Want some company tonight?" she said.

Blomkvist nodded.

"Good. I've already told Greger I'm at your place tonight."

***

The street lights reflecting off the corners of the windows were all that lit the room. When Berger fell asleep sometime after 2:00 in the morning, Blomkvist lay awake studying her profile in the dimness. The covers were down around her waist, and he watched her breasts slowly rising and falling. He was relaxed, and the anxious knot in his stomach had eased. She had that effect on him. She always had had. And he knew that he had the same effect on her.

Twenty years, he thought. That's how long it had been. As far as he was concerned, they could go on sleeping together for another two decades. At least. They had never seriously tried to hide their relationship, even when it led to awkwardness in their dealings with other people.

They had met at a party when they were both in their second year at journalism school. Before they said goodnight they had exchanged telephone numbers. They both knew that they would end up in bed together, and in less than a week they realised this conviction without telling their respective partners.

Blomkvist was sure that it was not the old-fashioned kind of love that leads to a shared home, a shared mortgage, Christmas trees, and children. During the eighties, when they were not bound by other relationships, they had talked of moving in together. He had wanted to, but Erika always backed out at the last minute. It wouldn't work, she said, they would risk what they had if they fell in love too. Blomkvist had often wondered whether it were possible to be more possessed by desire for any other woman. The fact was that they functioned well together, and they had a connection as addictive as heroin.

Sometimes they were together so often that it felt as though they really were a couple; sometimes weeks and months would go by before they saw each other. But even as alcoholics are drawn to the state liquor store after a stint on the wagon, they always came back to each other.

Inevitably it did not work in the long run. That kind of relationship was almost bound to cause pain. They had both left broken promises and unhappy lovers behind - his own marriage had collapsed because he could not stay away from Erika Berger. He had never lied about his feelings for her to his wife, Monica, but she had thought it would end when they married and their daughter was born. And Berger had almost simultaneously married Greger Beckman. Blomkvist too had thought it would end, and for the first years of his marriage he and Berger had only seen each other professionally. Then they started Millennium and within a few weeks all their good intentions had dissolved, and one late evening they had furious sex on her desk. That led to a troublesome period in which Blomkvist wanted very much to live with his family and see his daughter grow up, but at the same time he was helplessly drawn to Berger. Just as Salander had guessed, it was his continual infidelity that drove his wife to leave.

Strangely enough, Beckman seemed to accept their relationship. Berger had always been open about her feelings for Mikael, and she told her husband as soon as they started having sex again. Maybe it took the soul of an artist to handle such a situation, someone so wrapped up in his own creativity, or possibly just wrapped up in himself, that he did not rebel when his wife slept with another man. She even divided up her holiday so she could spend two weeks with her lover in his summer cabin at Sandhamn. Blomkvist did not think very highly of Beckman, and he had never understood Berger's love for him. But he was glad that he accepted that she could love two men at the same time.

Blomkvist could not sleep, and at 4:00 he gave up. He went to the kitchen and read the court judgement one more time from beginning to end. Having the document in his hand he had a sense that there had been something almost fateful about the meeting at Arholma. He could never be sure whether Lindberg had told him the details of Wennerstrom's swindle simply for the sake of a good story between toasts in the privacy of his boat's cabin or whether he had really wanted the story to be made public.

He tended to believe the first. But it may have been that Lindberg, for his own personal or business reasons, had wanted to damage Wennerstrom, and he had seized the opportunity of having a captive journalist on board. Lindberg had been sober enough to insist on Blomkvist treating him as an anonymous source. From that moment Lindberg could say what he liked, because his friend would never be able to disclose his source.

If the meeting at Arholma had been a set-up, then Lindberg could not have played his role better. But the meeting had to have happened by chance.

Lindberg could have had no notion of the extent of Blomkvist's contempt for people like Wennerstrom. For all that, after years of study, he was privately convinced that there was not a single bank director or celebrity corporate executive who wasn't also a cretin.

Blomkvist had never heard of Lisbeth Salander and was happily innocent of her report delivered earlier that day, but had he listened to it he would have nodded in agreement when she spoke of his loathing for bean counters, saying that it was not a manifestation of his left-wing political radicalism. Mikael was not uninterested in politics, but he was extremely sceptical of political "isms." He had voted only once in a parliamentary election - in 1982 - and then he had hesitantly plumped for the Social Democrats, there being nothing in his imagination worse than three years more with Gosta Bohman as finance minister and Thorbjorn Falldin (or possibly Ola Ullsten) as prime minister. So he had voted for Olof Palme, and got instead the assassination of his prime minister plus the Bofors scandal and Ebbe Carlsson.