“My name is Fredrika Nyman, I’m a doctor at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Solna.”
He was struck by fear.
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened, other than the stuff that always happens, and I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with you. But we’ve had a body in—”
“A woman?” he interrupted.
“No, no, very definitely a man. Well, very definitely…that’s a strange way of putting it, isn’t it? But it is a man, maybe in his sixties or a bit younger, who’s clearly been to hell and back. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Would you mind getting to the point?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I don’t think it’s likely you knew him. He was a down-and-out, and right at the bottom of the pecking order even in those circles.”
“So what has he got to do with me?”
“He had your mobile number in his pocket.”
“Lots of people do,” Blomkvist said, irritated. Immediately he felt he had been tactless.
“I do understand,” Fredrika Nyman went on. “You must be bombarded with calls. But this is something I feel strongly about.”
“In what way?”
“I believe that even the worst wrecks among us deserve some dignity in death.”
“Of course,” he said, to make up for his lack of sympathy a moment ago.
“Precisely,” she said, “and Sweden has always been a civilized country in that respect. But with each passing year we receive more and more bodies we don’t manage to identify, and that really upsets me. Everyone’s entitled to an identity in death. To a name, and a history.”
“True,” he said, but he had already lost his concentration and almost without being aware of it he went over to the laptop on his desk.
“Sometimes I’m sure there have been genuine difficulties,” the woman said. “But often it’s just down to a lack of resources or time, or worse, a lack of will, and I have a nasty feeling that may be the case with this body.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The fact that there have been no hits in any database, and because the man looks like someone without any significance at all. The lowest of the low. The sort we normally look away from and simply forget.”
“Very sad,” he said.
He searched through the files he had created over the years for Salander.
“With any luck I’m wrong,” Fredrika Nyman said. “I’ve just sent off my samples, and soon we may know more about this man. Now I’m at home, and I thought I could try and speed things up a bit. You live on Bellmansgatan, don’t you? It’s not that far from where he was found, you might have bumped into each other. Maybe he’s even called you?”
“So where was he found?”
“Beside a tree in Tantolunden. You would remember if you’d seen him. His face was dark brown and dirty, with deep furrows. Sparse beard. He’s almost certainly been exposed to strong sunshine and severe cold. His body bears the marks of frostbite and he’s missing most of his fingers and toes. His muscle attachments show signs of extreme exertion. I would guess that he comes from somewhere in Southeast Asia. He may have been quite handsome once upon a time. His features are clean, even though his face is ravaged. Yellowish skin due to liver damage. There are black patches on his cheeks, signs of necrosis. It’s always hard to determine age at this early stage, as I’m sure you know. But I would guess that he was getting on for sixty, as I said, and for a long time he’d been on the verge of dehydrating. He was short, a little under five feet.”
“I’m not sure. Doesn’t ring any bells,” Blomkvist said.
He was searching for messages from Salander among his files, but found none. She didn’t even appear to be hacking him these days, and this made him more and more worried. He could almost feel in his bones that she was in danger.
“I’m not done yet,” Fredrika Nyman said. “I haven’t mentioned the most noticeable thing about him, his down jacket.”
“What was so special about that?”
“It was so large and warm that it ought to have been pretty conspicuous in this heat.”
“As you say, I would have remembered it.”
He closed the computer and looked out over Riddarfjärden. Once again he thought it was probably sensible of Salander to have sold her apartment.
“But you don’t, right?”
“No…” he said hesitantly. “You don’t have a picture you could send me?”
“I don’t think that would be ethical.”
“How do you think he died?”
He was not fully focused.
“Well, poisoning finished him off, I would guess, self-inflicted no doubt, first and foremost from alcohol, of course. He reeked of it, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he had something else inside him as well. I’ll hear more on that from the forensics lab in a few days. I’ve requested a drug screening which covers more than eight hundred substances. But the broader picture is of slow and steady organ failure, and an enlarged heart.”
Blomkvist sat on the sofa and emptied his beer, and was clearly silent for too long.
“Are you still there?” the medical examiner said.
“Yes, I’m here. I was just thinking…”
“Thinking what?”
He was thinking about Lisbeth.
“That it may be a good thing he had my number,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe he felt he had a story to tell, and I’m sure that’ll encourage the police to try harder. Sometimes, when I’m at my best, I can put the wind up them.”
She gave a laugh.
“I’m sure you can.”
“Sometimes I just annoy them.”
Sometimes I annoy myself, he thought.
“Let’s hope it’s the first of those.”
“Yes, let’s.”
He wanted to end the call. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts. But the medical examiner wanted to talk some more and he did not have the heart to hang up on her.
“I mentioned that he was the sort of man one normally just wants to forget, didn’t I?” she went on.