Saturday, March 8–Monday, March 17


Salander spent the week in bed with pain in her abdomen¹, bleeding from her rectum, and less visible wounds that would take longer to heal. What she had gone through was very different from the first rape² in his office; it was no longer a matter of coercion³ and degradation⁴. This was systematic⁵ brutality⁶.
She realised much too late that she had utterly⁷ misjudged Bjurman.
She had assumed he was on a power trip and liked to dominate, not that he was an all-out sadist. He had kept her in handcuffs half the night. Several times she believed he meant to kill her, and at one point he had pressed a pillow over her face until she thought she was going to pass out.
She did not cry.
Apart from the tears of pure physical pain she shed not a single tear. When she left the apartment she made her way with difficulty to the taxi stand at Odenplan. With difficulty she climbed the stairs to her own apartment. She showered and wiped the blood from her genitals. Then she drank a pint⁸ of water with two Rohypnol and stumbled to her bed and pulled the duvet over her head.
She woke up at midday on Sunday, empty of thoughts and with constant pain in her head, muscles and abdomen. She got up, drank two glasses of kefir, and ate an apple. Then she took two more sleeping pills and went back to bed.
She did not feel like getting up until Tuesday. She went out and bought a big box of Billy’s Pan Pizza, stuck two of them in the microwave, and filled a thermos⁹ with coffee. She spent that night on the Internet, reading articles and theses on the psychopathology of sadism.
She found one article published by a women’s group in the United States in which the author claimed that the sadist chose his “relationships” with almost intuitive precision; the sadist’s best victim was the one who voluntarily went to him because she did not think she had any choice. The sadist specialised in people who were in a position of

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