Free The Girl Who Lived Twice by David Lagercrantz Page B

more surprised by that than to see the lake still in its usual position through the window. The girls spent every spare moment on their phones, watching YouTube or whatever it was, and she wanted to snap at them to put them away and read a book instead, or play the piano, or not skip their basketball training again. Or at least to get out into the sunshine.
    But she had no energy. It had been an awful day, and she had just been talking to an idiot of a policeman who, like most idiots, thought he was a genius. He had looked into the matter, he said, which meant that he had simply read the Wikipedia entry and was now an expert on Buddhism. That weirdo was probably sitting around somewhere, feeling enlightened. It was so disrespectful and stupid that she had not even bothered to answer, and now she found a place next to her daughters on the grey sofa and hoped that one of them would say hello. Neither did. But Josefin did at least reply when Fredrika asked what she was watching.
    “A thing,” she said.
    A thing.
    Fredrika wanted to scream, but instead she got to her feet, went into the kitchen and wiped the counter and the table clean. She scrolled through Facebook on her phone to show that she could keep up with the girls, and then daydreamed of going far away. She searched a few things on Google and, without quite knowing how, ended up on a website for holidays to Greece.
    She was looking at a photograph of an ancient man sitting at a beachside café when an idea came to her, and she thought immediately of Mikael Blomkvist. She was reluctant to call him again. The last thing she wanted was to be the boring woman who keeps hassling the famous journalist. But he was the only person she could think of who might be interested, so she dialled his number after all.
    “Hello there,” he said. “How nice of you to call!”
    He sounded so cheerful that she felt at once it was the best thing that had happened to her all day, which was not saying much.
    “I was thinking—” she said.
    “You know what,” he interrupted. “It dawned on me that I had actually seen your beggar, at least it must have been him.”
    “Really?”
    “It all fits, the down jacket, the patches on the cheeks, the truncated fingers. It can’t have been anyone else.”
    “So where did you see him?”
    “In Mariatorget. In fact, it’s astonishing that I’d forgotten him,” he went on. “I can hardly believe it. He used to sit totally still on a piece of cardboard by the statue on the square. I must have passed him ten or twenty times.”
    His enthusiasm was contagious.
    “That’s amazing. What was your impression of him?”
    “Well…I’m not really sure,” he said. “I never paid him much attention. But I remember him as broken. And proud—the way you described him when he was dead. He’d sit bolt upright with his head high, a bit like a Sioux chieftain in the movies. I don’t know how he managed to stay like that for hours on end.”
    “Did he seem under the influence of alcohol, or drugs?”
    “I can’t really say. He could have been. But if he’d been out of it he’d hardly have been able to hold that position for so long. Why do you ask?”
    “Because this morning I got the results of my drug screening. He had 2.5 micrograms of eszopiclone per gram of femoral blood in his body, and that’s an awful lot.”
    “What’s eszopiclone?”
    “A substance you find in some sleeping pills, in Lunesta, for example. I’d say that he must have had at least twenty tablets, mixed with alcohol, and on top of that quite a lot of dextropropoxyphene, a painkilling opiate.”
    “What do the police say?”
    “Overdose or suicide.”
    “On what grounds?”
    She snorted.
    “On the grounds that it’s easiest for them, I’d guess. The person in charge of the investigation seemed to be focusing on doing as little work as possible.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “The officer in charge? Hans Faste.”
    “Oh, brilliant…” he said.
    “Do you