The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium 3)

She turned and glanced at the gas station, where a long-distance truck and trailer with the emblem of the International Road Transport Union had just pulled in. She remembered that she was on the main road from the ferry terminal at Kapellskar, through which a good deal of the freight traffic between Sweden and the Baltic countries passed.

She started the car and drove out onto the road towards the old brickworks. She parked in the middle of the yard and got out. It was below freezing outside, and she put on a black knitted cap and leather gloves.

The main building was on two floors. On the ground floor all the windows had been boarded up with plywood, and she could see that on the floor above many of them had been broken. The factory was a much bigger building than she had imagined, and it was incredibly dilapidated. She could see no evidence of repairs. There was no trace of a living soul, but she saw that someone had discarded a used condom in the yard, and that graffiti artists had attacked part of the facade.

Why had Zalachenko owned this building?

She walked around the factory and found the ramshackle north building to the rear. She saw that the doors to the main building were locked. In frustration she studied a door at one end of the building. All the other doors had padlocks attached with iron bolts and galvanized security strips, but the lock on the gable end seemed weaker and was in fact attached only with rough spikes. Damn it, it's my building. She looked around and found a narrow iron pipe in a pile of rubbish. She used it to lever open the fastening of the padlock.

She entered a stairwell with a doorway to the ground floor area. The boarded-up windows meant that it was pitch-black inside, except for a few shafts of light seeping in at the edges of the boards. She stood still for several minutes, until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She saw a sea of junk--wooden pallets, old machine parts, and lumber--in a workshop that was 150 feet long and about 65 feet wide, supported by massive pillars. The old brick ovens seemed to have been disassembled, and in their place were big pools of water and patches of mould on the floor. There was a stale, foul smell from all the debris. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

She turned back and went up the stairs. The top floor was dry and consisted of two similar rooms, each about sixty-five feet square, and at least twenty-five feet high. There were tall, inaccessible windows close to the ceiling which provided no view but let in plenty of light. The upper floor, like the workshop downstairs, was full of junk. There were dozens of three-foot-high packing cases stacked on top of one another. She gripped one of them but could not move it. The label on the crate read: MACHINE PARTS 0-A77, with an apparently corresponding label in Russian underneath. She noticed an open freight elevator halfway down one wall of the first room.

It was a machine warehouse of some sort, but that would hardly generate income so long as the machinery stood there rusting.

She went into the inner room and discovered that this was where the repair work must have been carried out. The room was again full of rubbish, boxes, and old office furniture arranged in some sort of labyrinthine order. A section of the floor was exposed where new floor planks had been laid. Salander guessed that the renovation work had been stopped abruptly. A crosscut saw and a circular saw, a nail gun, a crowbar, an iron rod, and tool boxes were still there. She frowned. Even if the work had been discontinued, the joiners should have picked up their tools. But this question too was answered when she held a screwdriver up to the light and saw that the writing on the handle was Russian. Zalachenko had imported the tools, and probably the workers as well.

She switched on the circular saw and a green light went on. There was power. She turned it off.

At the far end of the room were three doors to smaller rooms, perhaps the old offices. She tried the handle of the door on the north side of the building. Locked. She went back to the tools and got a crowbar. It took her a while to break open the door.

It was pitch-black inside the room and smelled musty. She ran her hand along the wall and found a switch that lit a bare bulb in the ceiling. Salander looked around in astonishment.

The furniture in the room consisted of three beds with soiled mattresses and another three mattresses on the floor. Filthy bed linen was strewn around. To the right was a two-ring electric stove and some pots next to a rusty water tap. In a corner stood a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper.

Somebody had lived here. Several people.

Then she saw that there was no handle on the inside of the door. She felt an ice-cold shiver run down her back.

There was a large linen cupboard at the far end of the room. She opened it and found two suitcases. Inside the one on top were some clothes. She rummaged through them and held up a dress with a Russian label. She found a handbag and emptied the contents on the floor. From among the cosmetics and other bits and pieces she retrieved a passport belonging to a young, dark-haired woman. It was a Russian passport, and she sounded out the name as Valentina.

Salander walked slowly from the room. She had a feeling of deja vu. She had done the same kind of crime scene examination in a basement in Hedeby two and a half years earlier. Women's clothes. A prison. She stood there for a long time, thinking. It bothered her that the passport and clothes had been left behind. It did not feel right.

Then she went back to the assortment of tools and rummaged about until she found a powerful flashlight. She checked that there was life in the batteries and went downstairs into the larger workshop. The water from the puddles on the floor seeped into her boots.

The nauseating stench of rotting matter grew stronger the farther into the workshop she went; it seemed to be worst when she was in the middle of the room. She stopped next to the foundation of one of the old brick furnaces, which was filled with water almost to the brim. She shone her flashlight onto the coal-black surface of the water but could not make anything out. The surface was partly covered by algae that had formed a green slime. Nearby she found a long steel rod, which she stuck into the pool and stirred around. The water was only about twenty inches deep. Almost immediately the rod bumped into something. She manipulated it this way and that for several seconds before a body rose to the surface, face first, a grinning mask of death and decomposition. Breathing through her mouth, Salander looked at the face in the beam of the flashlight and saw that it was a woman, possibly the woman from the passport photograph. She knew nothing about the speed of decay in cold, stagnant water, but the body seemed to have been in the pool for a long time.

There was something moving on the surface of the water. Larvae of some sort.

She let the body sink back beneath the surface and poked around more with the rod. At the edge of the pool she came across something that might have been another body. She left it there and pulled out the rod, letting it fall to the floor as she stood thinking next to the pool.

Salander went back up the stairs. She used the crowbar to break open the middle door. The room was empty.

She went to the last door and slotted the crowbar in place, but before she began to force it, the door swung open a crack. It was not locked. She nudged it open with the crowbar and looked around.

The room was about a hundred feet square. It had windows at a normal height with a view of the yard in front of the brickworks. She could see the gas station on the hill. There was a bed, a table, and a sink with dishes. Then she saw a bag lying open on the floor. There were banknotes in it. Surprised, she took two steps forward before she noticed that the room was warm and saw an electric heater in the middle of the room. Then she saw that the red light was on on the coffee machine.

Someone was living here. She was not alone in the building.

She spun around and ran through the inner room, out the doors, and towards the exit in the outer workshop. She stopped five steps short of the stairwell when she saw that the exit had been closed and padlocked. She was locked in. Slowly she turned and looked around, but there was no-one.

"Hello, little sister," came a cheerful voice from somewhere to her right.

She turned to see Niedermann's vast form materialize from behind some packing crates.

In his hand was a large knife.

"I was hoping I'd have a chance to see you again," Niedermann said. "Everything happened so fast the last time."

Salander looked around.

"Don't bother," Niedermann said. "It's just you and me, and there's no way out except through the locked door behind you."

Salander turned her eyes to her half-brother.

"How's the hand?" she said.

Niedermann was smiling at her. He raised his right hand and showed her. His little finger was missing.