The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) by David Lagercrantz Page B

traffic lights, but that there was something more beneath the surface.
    She had sensed it in his eyes, in that look which, when he was excited, seemed to register every little detail of his surroundings. She had sensed it in the way the boy listened to his teachers, and the nervous way he leafed through the maths books she had bought for him, and most of all she had sensed it in his numbers. There was nothing so strange as those numbers. Hour after hour he would write down series of incomprehensibly large sums, and Hanna really did try to understand them, or at least to grasp the point of it all. But however hard she tried she had not been able to work it out, and now she supposed that she had missed something important. She had been too unhappy and wrapped up in herself to fathom what was going on in her son’s mind, wasn’t that it?
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    “Don’t know what,” Frans said in irritation.
    “I don’t know if I can come,” she said, and at the same time she heard a racket at the front door.
    Lasse was coming in with his old drinking buddy Roger Winter, and that made her flinch in fear, mutter an apology to Frans and for the thousandth time dwell on the fact that she was a bad mother.
    Balder stood on the chequered floor in the bedroom, the telephone in his hand, and swore. He had had the floor laid because it appealed to his sense of mathematical order, with the squares repeating themselves endlessly in the wardrobe mirrors on either side of the bed. There were days when he saw the multiplication of the squares reflected there as a teeming riddle, something with a life of its own rising up out of the schematic in the same way that thoughts and dreams arise from neurons or computer programs emerge from binary codes. But just then he was lost in quite different thoughts.
    “Dear boy. What has become of your mother?” he said aloud.
    August, who was sitting on the floor beside him eating a cheese and gherkin sandwich, looked up with a concentrated expression, and Balder was seized by a strange premonition that he was about to say something grown up and wise. But that was obviously idiotic. August remained as silent as ever and knew nothing about women who were neglected and had faded away. The fact that the idea had even occurred to Balder was of course due to the drawings.
    The drawings – by now there had been three – seemed to him to be proof not only of artistic and mathematical gifts, but also of some sort of wisdom. The works seemed so mature and complex in their geometric precision that Balder could not reconcile them with August’s mental limitations. Or rather, he did not want to reconcile them, because he had long ago worked out what this was about.
    As the father of an autistic son Balder had long suspected that many parents hoped the notion of a savant would be their consolation prize to make up for a diagnosis of cognitive deficiencies. But the odds were against them.
    According to a common estimate, only one in ten children with autism has some kind of savant gift, and for the most part these talents, though they often entail a fantastic memory and observation of detail, are not as startling as those depicted in films. There are, for example, autistic people who can say on which day of the week a certain date falls, within a range of several hundred years – in extreme cases within a range of forty thousand years.
    Others possess encyclopaedic knowledge within a narrow field, such as bus timetables or telephone numbers. Some can calculate large sums in their heads, or remember what the weather had been like every day of their lives, or are able to tell the time to the second without looking at a watch. There are all kinds of more or less remarkable talents and, from what Balder gathered, people with these skills are called talented savants and capable of quite outstanding accomplishments given the fact that they are otherwise handicapped.
    Another far less common group is