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

"It got infected. I had to chop it off."

Niedermann could not feel pain. Salander had sliced his hand open with a spade at Gosseberga only seconds before Zalachenko had shot her in the head.

"I should have aimed for your skull," Salander said in a neutral tone. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you'd left the country months ago."

He smiled at her again.

If Niedermann had tried to answer Salander's question as to what he was doing in the dilapidated brickworks, he probably would not have been able to explain. He could not explain it to himself.

He had left Gosseberga with a feeling of liberation. He was counting on the fact that Zalachenko was dead and that he would take over the business. He knew he was an excellent organizer.

He had changed cars in Alingsas, put the terror-stricken dental hygienist, Anita Kaspersson, in the trunk, and driven towards Boras. He had no plan. He improvised as he went. He had not reflected on Kaspersson's fate. It made no difference to him whether she lived or died, and he assumed that he would be forced to do away with a bothersome witness. Somewhere on the outskirts of Boras it came to him that he could use her in a different way. He turned south and found a desolate forest outside Seglora. He tied her up in a barn and left her there. He reckoned that she would be able to work her way loose within a few hours and then lead the police south in their hunt for him. And if she did not manage to free herself, and starved or froze to death in the barn, it did not matter; it was no concern of his.

Then he drove back to Boras and from there east towards Stockholm. He had driven straight to Svavelsjo, but he avoided the clubhouse itself. It was a drag that Lundin was in prison. He went instead to the home of the club's sergeant-at-arms, Hans-Ake Waltari. He said he was looking for a place to hide, which Waltari sorted out by sending him to Goransson, the club's treasurer. But he had stayed there only a few hours.

Niedermann had, theoretically, no money worries. He had left behind almost 200,000 kronor in Gosseberga, but he had access to considerably larger sums that had been deposited abroad. His problem was that he was short of actual cash. Goransson was responsible for Svavelsjo MC's finances, and it had not been difficult for Niedermann to persuade him to take him to the cabinet in the barn where the cash was kept. Niedermann was in luck. He had been able to help himself to 800,000 kronor.

He seemed to remember that there had been a woman in the house too, but he had forgotten what he had done with her.

Goransson had also provided a car that the police were not yet looking for. Niedermann went north. He had a vague plan to make it onto one of the ferries at Kapellskar that would take him to Tallinn.

When he got to Kapellskar he sat in the parking lot for half an hour, studying the area. It was crawling with policemen.

He drove on aimlessly. He needed a place where he could lie low for a while. When he passed Norrtalje he remembered the old brickworks. He had not even thought about the place in more than a year, since the time when repairs had been under way. The brothers Harry and Atho Ranta were using the brickworks as a depot for goods moving to and from the Baltic ports, but they had both been out of the country for several weeks, ever since that journalist Svensson had started snooping around the whore trade. The brickworks would be empty.

He had driven Goransson's Saab into a shed behind the factory and gone inside. He had had to break open a door on the ground floor, and one of the first things he did was to create an emergency exit through a loose plywood board at one end of the ground floor. He later replaced the broken padlock. Then he had made himself at home in a cosy room on the upper floor.

A whole afternoon had passed before he heard the sounds coming through the walls. At first he thought these were his familiar phantoms. He sat alert and listened for almost an hour before he got up and went out to the workshop to listen more closely. At first he heard nothing, but he stood there patiently until he heard more scraping noises.

He found the key next to the sink.

Niedermann had seldom been as amazed as when he opened the door and found the two Russian whores. They were skin and bones. They seemed to have had no food for several weeks and had been living on tea and water since the last packet of rice had run out.

One of the girls was so exhausted that she could not get up from the bed. The other was in better shape. She spoke only Russian, but he knew enough of the language to understand that she was thanking God and him for saving them. She fell on her knees and threw her arms around his legs. He pushed her away, then left the room and locked the door behind him.

He had not known what to do with the whores. He heated up some soup from the cans he found in the kitchen and gave it to them while he thought. The weaker woman on the bed seemed to be getting some of her strength back. He spent the evening questioning them. It was a while before he understood that the two women were not whores at all, but students who had paid the Ranta brothers to get them into Sweden. They had been promised visas and work permits. They had come from Kapellskar in February and were taken straight to the warehouse, and there they were locked up.

Niedermann's face had darkened with anger. Those bastard Ranta brothers were collecting an income that they had not told Zalachenko about. Then they had completely forgotten about the women, or maybe had knowingly left them to their fate when they fled Sweden in such a hurry.

The question was: what was he supposed to do with them? He had no reason to harm them, and yet he could not really let them go, considering that they would probably lead the police to the brickworks. It was that simple. He could not send them back to Russia, because that would mean he would have to drive them down to Kapellskar. That seemed too difficult. The dark-haired woman, whose name was Valentina, had offered him sex if he helped them. He was not the least bit interested in having sex with the girls, but the offer had turned her into a whore too. All women were whores. It was that simple.

After three days he had tired of their incessant pleading, nagging, and knocking on the wall. He could see no other way out. So he unlocked the door one last time and swiftly solved the problem. He asked Valentina to forgive him before he reached out and in one movement broke her neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Then he went over to the blond girl on the bed whose name he did not know. She lay there passively, did not put up any resistance. He carried the bodies downstairs and put them in one of the flooded pits. At last he could feel some sort of peace.

Niedermann had not intended to stay long at the brickworks. He thought he would have to lie low only until the initial police manhunt had died down. He shaved his head and let his beard grow to half an inch, and that altered his appearance. He found a pair of overalls belonging to one of the workers from NorrBygg which were almost big enough to fit him. He put on a Beckers Paints baseball cap and stuffed a folding ruler into a leg pocket. At dusk he drove to the gas station shop on the hill and bought supplies. He had all the cash he needed from Svavelsjo MC's piggy bank. He looked like any workman stopping on his way home, and nobody seemed to pay him any attention. He shopped once or twice a week at the same time of day. At the shop they were always perfectly friendly to him.

From the very first day he had spent a considerable amount of time fending off the creatures that inhabited the building. They lived in the walls and came out at night. He could hear them wandering around the workshop

.

He barricaded himself in his room. After several days he had had enough. He armed himself with a large knife which he had found in a kitchen drawer and went out to confront the monsters. It had to end.

All of a sudden he discovered that they were retreating. For the first time in his life he had been able to dominate his phantoms. They shrank back when he approached. He could see their deformed bodies and their tails slinking off behind the packing crates and cabinets. He howled at them. They fled.

Relieved, he went back to his room and sat up all night, waiting for them to return. They mounted a renewed attack at dawn and he faced them down once more. They fled.

He was teetering between panic and euphoria.

All his life he had been haunted by these creatures in the dark, and for the very first time he felt that he was in control of the situation. He did nothing. He slept. He ate. He thought. It was peaceful.

The days turned into weeks and spring turned to summer. From his transistor radio and the evening papers he could tell that the hunt for the killer Ronald Niedermann was winding down. He read with interest the reports of the murder of Zalachenko. What a laugh. A psycho put an end to Zalachenko. In July his interest was again aroused when he followed the reports of Salander's trial. He was appalled when she was acquitted and released. It did not feel right. She was free while he was forced to hide.

He bought the Millennium special issue at the gas station shop and read all about Salander and Zalachenko and Niedermann. A journalist named Blomkvist had described Niedermann as a pathological murderer and a psychopath. He frowned.

Fall came suddenly, and still he had not made a move. When it got colder he bought an electric heater at the shop. He did not know what kept him from leaving the brickworks.

Occasionally some young people drove into the yard and parked there, but no-one had disturbed him or tried to break into the building. In September a car drove up and a man in a blue Windbreaker tried the doors and snooped around the property. Niedermann had watched him from the window on the upper floor. The man kept writing in his notebook. He had stayed for twenty minutes before he looked around one last time and got in his car and drove away. Niedermann breathed a sigh of relief. He had no idea who the man was or what business had brought him there, but he appeared to be doing a survey of the property. It did not occur to Niedermann that Zalachenko's death had prompted an inventory of his estate.