It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his
eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered,
he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to
call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had
moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age,
they had been born on the same day–which was something of an
irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with
his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

“It arrived.”

“What is it this year?”

“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get
someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.”

“No letter, I suppose.”

“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year.
One of those do-it-yourself ones.”

“Postmark?”

“Stockholm.”

“Handwriting?”

“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat
lettering.”

With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was
exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in
his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer
expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question
which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since
passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual
attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the
least interest in unravelling.

The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It
was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-like
foliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres
across.

The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it
was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert
Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later
confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The
botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree
and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin
Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New
Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that
rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at
the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish
tinge.

Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had
no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce
hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in
the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal
people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora
around Ayers Rock.

The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but
after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had
been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and
that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It
was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate
and had to remain indoors half of the year. It would not thrive in
calcareous soil and it had to be watered from below. It needed
pampering.

The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier
to trace the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it
was an impossible task. There was no registry to look it up in, no
licences to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred
enthusiasts could have had access to seeds or plants. And those
could have changed hands between friends or been bought by mail
order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the Antipodes.

But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each
year arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always
beautiful and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed,
mounted on watercolour paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by
28cm.

The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the
press; only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the
regular arrival of the flower was the object of much
scrutiny–at the National Forensic Laboratory, among
fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, and one
or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors in
the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired
police detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The
first two at least had reached such an age that the group of
interested parties would soon be further diminished.

The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his
first case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and
appallingly drunk worker at an electrical substation before he
caused others harm. During his career he had brought in poachers,
wife beaters, con men, car thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt
with burglars, drug dealers, rapists, and one deranged bomber. He
had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases. In five of
these the murderer had called the police himself and, full of
remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some
other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another
required the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took
two years.

The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which
is to say that they knew who the murderer was, but because the
evidence was so insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to
proceed with the case. To the detective superintendent’s
dismay, the statute of limitations eventually put an end to the
matter. But all in all he could look back on an impressive
career.

He was anything but pleased.

For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers”
had been nagging at him for years–his last, unsolved and
frustrating case. The situation was doubly absurd because after
spending literally thousands of hours brooding, on duty and off, he
could not say beyond doubt that a crime had indeed been
committed.

The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have
worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or
the glass. The frame could have been bought in camera shops or
stationery stores the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead
to follow. Most often the parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three
times from London, twice from Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once
from Madrid, once from Bonn, and once from Pensacola, Florida. The
detective superintendent had had to look it up in an atlas.

After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday
boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless
flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the
wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in
their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In
the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would
be number forty-four.

Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this
sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.

Friday, December 20

The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had
been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written
verdict was handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that
remained was a summing up from the reporters waiting in the
corridor outside the district court.

Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his
step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were
unavoidable, and he—of all people—knew that they had to
be asked and answered. This is how it is to be a criminal,
he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He
straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him
friendly, almost embarrassed greetings.

"Let's see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service,
TV4, and . . . where are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens
Nyheter. I must be a celebrity," Blomkvist said.

"Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist." It was a reporter
from one of the evening papers.

Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to
roll his eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started
his first summer job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a
gang which had pulled off five bank robberies over the past two
years. There was no doubt that it was the same gang in every
instance. Their trademark was to hold up two banks at a time with
military precision. They wore masks from Disney World, so
inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang. The
newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sinister,
more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had
recklessly fired warning shots and threatened curious
passersby.

Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the
height of the holiday season. A reporter from the local radio
station happened to be in the bank at the time. As soon as the
robbers were gone he went to a public telephone and dictated his
story for live broadcast.

Blomkvist was spending several days with a girlfriend at her
parents' summer cabin near Katrineholm. Exactly why he made the
connection he could not explain, even to the police, but as he was
listening to the news report he remembered a group of four men in a
summer cabin a few hundred feet down the road. He had seen them
playing badminton out in the yard: four blond, athletic types in
shorts with their shirts off. They were obviously bodybuilders, and
there had been something about them that had made him look
twice—maybe it was because the game was being played in
blazing sunshine with what he recognised as intensely focused
energy.

There had been no good reason to suspect them of being the bank
robbers, but nevertheless he had gone to a hill overlooking their
cabin. It seemed empty. It was about forty minutes before a Volvo
drove up and parked in the yard. The young men got out, in a hurry,
and were each carrying a sports bag, so they might have been doing
nothing more than coming back from a swim. But one of them returned
to the car and took out from the boot something which he hurriedly
covered with his jacket. Even from Blomkvist's relatively distant
observation post he could tell that it was a good old AK4, the
rifle that had been his constant companion for the year of his
military service.

He called the police and that was the start of a three-day siege of
the cabin, blanket coverage by the media, with Blomkvist in a
front-row seat and collecting a gratifyingly large fee from an
evening paper. The police set up their headquarters in a caravan in
the garden of the cabin where Blomkvist was staying.

The fall of the Bear Gang gave him the star billing that launched
him as a young journalist. The downside of his celebrity was that
the other evening newspaper could not resist using the headline
"Kalle Blomkvist solves the case." The tongue-in-cheek
story was written by an older female columnist and contained
references to the young detective in Astrid Lindgren's books for
children. To make matters worse, the paper had run the story with a
grainy photograph of Blomkvist with his mouth half open even as he
raised an index finger to point.

It made no difference that Blomkvist had never in life used the
name Carl. From that moment on, to his dismay, he was nicknamed
Kalle Blomkvist by his peers—an epithet employed with
taunting provocation, not unfriendly but not really friendly
either. In spite of his respect for Astrid Lindgren—whose
books he loved—he detested the nickname. It took him several
years and far weightier journalistic successes before the nickname
began to fade, but he still cringed if ever the name was used in
his hearing.

Right now he achieved a placid smile and said to the reporter from
the evening paper:

"Oh come on, think of something yourself. You usually do."

His tone was not unpleasant. They all knew each other, more or
less, and Blomkvist's most vicious critics had not come that
morning. One of the journalists there had at one time worked with
him. And at a party some years ago he had nearly succeeded in
picking up one of the reporters—the woman from She
on TV4.

"You took a real hit in there today," said the one from Dagens
Nyheter, clearly a young part-timer. "How does it feel?"

Despite the seriousness of the situation, neither Blomkvist nor the
older journalists could help smiling. He exchanged glances with
TV4. How does it feel? The half-witted sports reporter
shoves his microphone in the face of the Breathless Athlete on the
finishing line.

"I can only regret that the court did not come to a different
conclusion," he said a bit stuffily.

"Three months in gaol and 150,000 kronor damages. That's pretty
severe," said She from TV4.

"I'll survive."

"Are you going to apologise to Wennerström? Shake his
hand?"

"I think not."

"So you still would say that he's a crook?" Dagens
Nyheter.

The court had just ruled that Blomkvist had libelled and defamed
the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. The trial was over and he
had no plans to appeal. So what would happen if he repeated his
claim on the courthouse steps? Blomkvist decided that he did not
want to find out.

"I thought I had good reason to publish the information that was in
my possession. The court has ruled otherwise, and I must accept
that the judicial process has taken its course. Those of us on the
editorial staff will have to discuss the judgement before we decide
what we're going to do. I have no more to add."

"But how did you come to forget that journalists actually have to
back up their assertions?" She from TV4. Her expression
was neutral, but Blomkvist thought he saw a hint of disappointed
repudiation in her eyes.

The reporters on site, apart from the boy from Dagens
Nyheter, were all veterans in the business. For them the
answer to that question was beyond the conceivable. "I have nothing
to add," he repeated, but when the others had accepted this TV4
stood him against the doors to the courthouse and asked her
questions in front of the camera. She was kinder than he deserved,
and there were enough clear answers to satisfy all the reporters
still standing behind her. The story would be in the headlines but
he reminded himself that they were not dealing with the media event
of the year here. The reporters had what they needed and headed
back to their respective newsrooms.

Excerpted from THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO © Copyright
2011 by Stieg Larsson. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All
rights reserved.