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in his shack.
    She was aware that when they walked together they looked like two teenagers. Sweet sixteen.
    He evidently thought that life had become much more interesting. He had met a woman who was teaching him about mathematics and eroticism.
    He opened the door and smiled delightedly at her.
    “Would you like company?” she said.
    Salander left the shack just after two in the morning. She had a warm feeling in her body and strolled along the beach instead of taking the road to the Keys Hotel. She walked alone in the dark, knowing that Bland would be a hundred yards behind.
    He always did that. She had never slept over at his place, and he often protested that she, a woman all alone, should not be walking back to her hotel at night. He insisted it was his duty to accompany her back to the hotel. Especially when it was very late, as it often was. Salander would listen to his objections and then cut the discussion off with a firm no.
I’ll walk where I want, when I want. And no, I don’t want an escort
. The firsttime she caught him following her she was really annoyed. But now she thought his wanting to protect her was rather sweet, so she pretended that she did not know he was there behind her or that he would turn back when he saw her go in the door of the hotel.
    She wondered what he would do if she were attacked.
    She would make use of the hammer she had bought at a hardware store and kept in the outside pocket of her shoulder bag. There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer, Salander thought.
    There was a full moon and the stars were sparkling. Salander looked up and identified Regulus in Leo near the horizon. She was almost at the hotel terrace when she stopped short. She had caught sight of someone near the waterline below the hotel. It was the first time she had seen a living soul on the beach after dark. He was almost a hundred yards off, but Salander knew at once who it was there in the moonlight.
    It was the fine Dr. Forbes from room 32.
    She took three quick steps into the shadow of a tree. When she turned her head, Bland was invisible too. The figure at the water’s edge was walking slowly back and forth. He was smoking a cigarette. Every so often he would stop and bend down as if to examine the sand. This pantomime continued for twenty minutes before he turned and with rapid steps walked to the hotel’s beach entrance and vanished.
    Salander waited for a few minutes before she went down to where Dr. Forbes had been. She made a slow semicircle, inspecting the sand. All she could make out was pebbles and some shells. After a few minutes she broke off her search and went back to the hotel.
    On her balcony, she leaned over the railing and peered in her neighbours’ door. All was quiet. The evening’s argument was obviously over. After a while she took from her shoulder bag some papers to roll a joint from the supply that Bland had given her. She sat down on a balcony chair and gazed out at the dark water of the Caribbean as she smoked and thought.
    She felt like a radar installation on high alert.

CHAPTER 2

Friday, December 17

    Advokat Nils Erik Bjurman set down his coffee cup and watched the flow of people outside the window of Café Hedon on Stureplan. He saw everyone passing in an unbroken stream, but observed none of them.
    He was thinking of Lisbeth Salander. He thought often about Salander.
    What he was thinking made him boil with rage.
    Salander had crushed him. He was never going to forget it. She had taken command and humiliated him. She had abused him in a way that had left indelible marks on his body. On an area the size of a book below his navel. She had handcuffed him to his bed, abused him, and tattooed him with I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST .
    Stockholm’s district court had declared Salander legally incompetent. He had been assigned to be her guardian, which made her inescapably dependent on him. From the first time he met her