“What happened?”
“He grabbed hold of her arm and was shouting.”
“Shouting what?”
“I’ve no idea. But he was waving some sort of stick. It left Catrin in a complete state. I tried to calm her down and helped her remove a grubby mark on her jacket.”
“Oh dear, that must have been awful for her.”
He had not meant to sound sarcastic, but Sofie was onto him in an instant.
“You’ve never liked her, have you?”
“Nothing much wrong with her, I guess,” he said defensively. “She’s just a bit too right-wing and proper for me, that’s all.”
“Little Miss Perfect, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you meant it. Do you have any idea how much shit she gets online? She’s seen as some sort of upper-class bitch who’s been to boarding school at Lundsberg and looks down her nose at ordinary people. But have you any idea what she’s been through?”
“No, Sofie, I don’t.”
He could not understand why she had suddenly got so angry.
“In that case I’ll tell you. She grew up in miserable circumstances, in a cracked-out hippie commune in Göteborg. Her parents were doing LSD and heroin, and home was a total mess, with people sitting around stoned out of their minds. Her suits and her tidiness have been her way of surviving. She’s a fighter. A rebel, in a way.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Exactly so, and I know you think she’s a reactionary, but she does an enormous amount of good in her fight against the new age and spiritual crap she grew up with. She’s a lot more interesting than people realize.”
“Are you friends?”
“We are.”
“Thanks, Sofie. In that case I’ll try to see her in a different light in the future.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, laughing apologetically, but the way she mumbled made it clear that this mattered to her.
Then she asked him how he was getting on with his story. He told her that he wasn’t exactly progressing in leaps and bounds. He said that the Russian lead had dried up.
“But you’ve got good sources, haven’t you?”
“What my sources don’t know, I don’t know either.”
“Maybe you should head off to Saint Petersburg, find out more about that troll factory. What was its name again?”
“New Agency House?”
“Wasn’t it some sort of hub?”
“That looks like a dead end too.”
“Am I listening to an unusually pessimistic Blomkvist?”
He could hear it too, but he had no wish to go to Saint Petersburg. The place was already teeming with journalists, and no-one had been able to find out who was behind the factory, or to what extent the intelligence services and the government were involved. He was fed up with it. He was tired of the news in general, tired of all the depressing political developments around the world. He ordered another espresso and asked Sofie about her idea for an article.
She wanted to write about the anti-Semitism in the disinformation campaign. This was nothing new because the trolls had been unable to resist suggesting that the whole stock market crash was a Jewish conspiracy. It was the same ugly rubbish which had been churned out for centuries, written about and analyzed countless times before, but Sofie had a more specific angle. She wanted to portray how this had affected people in their everyday lives—schoolchildren, teachers, intellectuals—ordinary individuals who had hitherto given hardly a thought to the fact that they were Jewish. “Great, go for it,” Blomkvist said. He asked her a few questions and made one or two suggestions, and spoke generally about hate in the community among the populists and extremists. He told her about all the idiots who had left bile on his voicemail. After a while he became fed up with listening to himself and gave Sofie a hug. He apologized—without really knowing why—and said goodbye, and then went home and changed to go for a run.
CHAPTER 6
August 16
Kira was in bed in the large house in Rublyovka to the west of Moscow when she received the message that her chief hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, wanted to talk to her. He would have to wait, she replied. For good measure she threw a hairbrush at her housekeeper Katya, and pulled the duvet over her head. It had been a night from hell. The memory of the commotion at the restaurant, her sister’s determined stride and silhouette, would not leave her, and she kept touching her shoulder, still aching from the impact of her fall to the pavement: It was not the pain so much as a presence which she simply could not shake off.
Why could it not end? She had worked so hard and achieved so much. But the past kept coming back, again and again, and each time it seemed in a new guise. There had been nothing good about her childhood, yet there had been parts which in her way she had loved. Now even those were being torn from her, one by one.
As a child, Camilla had longed to get out and away, far from Lundagatan, and away from life with her sister and mother, leaving behind the poverty and vulnerability. From an early age she knew that she deserved better. She had a distant memory of being in the Ljusgården atrium at the NK department store. A woman wearing a fur coat and patterned trousers was laughing, and she was so incredibly beautiful that she seemed to belong to another world entirely. Camilla moved closer until she was standing right by her legs, and then an equally elegant friend arrived and kissed the woman on both cheeks.
“My goodness, is that your daughter?” she said.
The first woman turned and looked down, seeing Camilla for the first time. “I wish it were,” she answered in English with a smile.
Camilla did not understand, but she could tell that it was meant to be flattering. As she walked away she heard the woman continue in Swedish: “Such a pretty girl. Shame that her mother doesn’t dress her better,” and those words left a gash in her. She stared at Agneta—even then she called her mother Agneta—who was looking at the Christmas window display with Lisbeth, and she saw the yawning gulf. These two women were radiant, as if life was laid out for their enjoyment alone, whereas Agneta was stooped and pale, dressed in worn and ugly clothes. A searing sense of injustice flared within her. I’ve ended up in the wrong place, she thought.
There were many such moments in her childhood, times when she felt both elated and damned: elated because people would call her as pretty as a little princess, damned because she was part of a family which lived on the margins, in the shadows.
It was true that she began to steal things to be able to buy clothes and barrettes. It wasn’t much, not at all, coins mostly, then a few notes, an old brooch of her grandmother’s, the Russian vase on the bookshelf. But it was also true that she was accused of much more than that, and it became clear to her that Agneta and Lisbeth were ganging up against her. She often felt like a stranger in her own home, a changeling who was being kept under supervision, and matters did not improve when Zala came to visit and threw her aside like a mongrel.