The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo m(-1 Page 28

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  Blomkvist spent the Whitsuntide holiday going over the new material. He made two discoveries. The first filled him with dismay. The second made his pulse beat faster.

  The first was the face in Harriet Vanger’s window. The photograph had a slight motion blur and was thus excluded from the original set. The photographer had stood on the church hill and sighted towards the bridge. The buildings were in the background. Mikael cropped the image to include the window alone, and then he experimented with adjusting the contrast and increasing the sharpness until he achieved what he thought was the best quality he could get.

  The result was a grainy picture with a minimal greyscale that showed a curtain, part of an arm, and a diffuse half-moon-shaped face a little way inside the room.

  The face was not Harriet Vanger’s, who had raven-black hair, but a person with lighter hair colour.

  It was impossible to discern clear facial features, but he was certain it was a woman; the lighter part of the face continued down to shoulder level and indicated a woman’s flowing hair, and she was wearing light-coloured clothes.

  He calculated her height in relation to the window: it was a woman about five foot seven.

  He clicked on to other images from behind the accident and one person fitted the description – the twenty-year-old Cecilia Vanger.

  Nylund had taken eighteen shots from the window of Sundström’s Haberdashery. Harriet was in seventeen of them.

  She and her classmates had arrived at Järnvägsgatan at the same time Nylund had begun taking his pictures. Blomkvist reckoned that the photographs were shot over a period of five minutes. In the first pictures, Harriet and her friends were coming down the street into the frame. In photographs 2–7 they were standing still and watching the parade. Then they had moved about six yards down the street. In the last picture, which may have been taken after some time had passed, the girls had gone.

  Blomkvist edited a series of pictures in which he cropped the top half of Harriet and processed them to achieve the best contrast. He put the pictures in a separate folder, opened the Graphic Converter programme, and started the slide show function. The effect was a jerky silent film in which each image was shown for two seconds.

  Harriet arrives, image in profile. Harriet stops and looks down at the street. Harriet turns her face towards the street. Harriet opens her mouth to say something to her friend. Harriet laughs. Harriet touches her ear with her left hand. Harriet smiles. Harriet suddenly looks surprised, her face at a 20° angle to the left of the camera. Harriet’s eyes widen and she has stopped smiling. Harriet’s mouth becomes a thin line. Harriet focuses her gaze. In her face can be read… what? Sorrow, shock, fury? Harriet lowers her eyes. Harriet is gone.

  Blomkvist played the sequence over and over.

  It confirmed with some force the theory he had formulated. Something happened on Järnvägsgatan.

  She sees something – someone – on the other side of the street. She reacts with shock. She contacts Vanger for a private conversation which never happens. She vanishes without a trace.

  Something happened, but the photographs did not explain what.

  At 2:00 on Tuesday morning Blomkvist had coffee and sandwiches at the kitchen bench. He was simultaneously downhearted and exhilarated. Against all expectations he had turned up new evidence. The only problem was that although it shed light on the chain of events it brought him not one iota closer to solving the mystery.

  He thought long and hard about what role Cecilia Vanger might have played in the drama. Vanger had relentlessly charted the activities of all persons involved that day, and Cecilia had been no exception. She was living in Uppsala, but she arrived in Hedeby two days before that fateful Saturday. She stayed with Isabella Vanger. She had said that she might possibly have seen Harriet early that morning, but that she had not spoken to her. She had driven into Hedestad on some errand. She had not seen Harriet there, and she came back to Hedeby Island around 1:00, about the time Nylund was taking his pictures on Järnvägsgatan. She changed and at about 2:00 helped to set the table for the banquet that evening.

  As an alibi – if that is what it was – it was rather feeble. The times were approximate, especially the matter of when she had got back to Hedeby Island, but Vanger had not found anything to indicate that she was lying. Cecilia Vanger was one of those people in the family that Vanger liked best. And she had been his lover. How could he be objective? He certainly could not imagine her as a murderer.

  Now a hitherto unknown photograph was telling him that she had lied when she said that she had never been in Harriet’s room that day. Blomkvist wrestled with the possible significance of that.

  And if you lied about that, what else did you lie about?

  He went through in his mind what he knew about Cecilia. An introverted person obviously affected by her past. Lived alone, had no sex life, had difficulty getting close to people. Kept her distance, and when she let loose there was no restraint. She chose a stranger for a lover. Had said that she ended it because she was unable to live with the idea that he would go from her life as unexpectedly as he had appeared. Blomkvist supposed that the reason she had dared to start an affair with him was precisely that he was only there for a while. She did not have to be afraid he would change her life in any long-term way.

  He sighed and pushed the amateur psychology aside.

  He made the second discovery during the night. The key to the mystery was what it was that Harriet had seen in Hedestad. He would never find that out unless he could invent a time machine and stand behind her, looking over her shoulder.

  And then he had a thought. He slapped his forehead and opened his iBook. He clicked on to the uncropped images in the series on Järnvägsgatan and… there!

  Behind Harriet and about a yard to her right were a young couple, the man in a striped sweater and the woman in a pale jacket. She was holding a camera. When Blomkvist enlarged the image it looked to be a Kodak Instamatic with flash – a cheap holiday camera for people who know nothing about photography.

  The woman was holding the camera at chin level. Then she raised it and took a picture of the clowns, just as Harriet’s expression changed.

  Blomkvist compared the camera’s position with Harriet’s line of vision. The woman had taken a picture of exactly what Harriet was looking at.

  His heart was beating hard. He leaned back and plucked his cigarettes out of his breast pocket. Someone had taken a picture. How would he identify and find the woman? Could he get hold of her snapshot? Had the roll ever been developed, and if so did the prints still exist?

  He opened the folder with Nylund’s photographs from the crowd. For the next couple of hours he enlarged each one and scrutinised it one square inch at a time. He did not see the couple again until the very last pictures. Nylund had photographed another clown with balloons in his hand posing in front of his camera and laughing heartily. The photographs were taken in a car park by the entrance to the sports field where the celebration was being held. It must have been after 2:00 in the afternoon. Right after that Nylund had received the alarm about the crash on the bridge and brought his portraits of Children’s Day to a rapid close.

  The woman was almost hidden, but the man in the striped sweater was clearly visible, in profile. He had keys in his hand and was bending to open a car door. The focus was on the clown in the foreground, and the car was a bit fuzzy. The number plate was partly hidden but he could see that it started with “AC3.”

  Number plates in the sixties began with a code indicating the county, and as a child Blomkvist had memorised the county codes. “AC” was for Västerbotten.

  Then he spotted something else. On the back window was a sticker of some sort. He zoomed in, but the text dissolved in a blur. He cropped out the sticker and adjusted the contrast and sharpness. It took him a while. He still could not read the words, but he attempted to figure out what the letters were, based on the fuzzy shapes. Many letters looked surprisingly similar. An �
��O” could be mistaken for a “D,” a “B” for an “E,” and so on. After working with a pen and paper and excluding certain letters, he was left with an unreadable text, in one line.

  R JÖ NI K RIFA RIK

  He stared at the image until his eyes began to water. Then he saw the text. “NORSJÖ SNICKERIFABRIK,” followed by figures in a smaller size that were utterly impossible to read, probably a telephone number.

  CHAPTER 17

  Wednesday, June 11 – Saturday, June 14

  Blomkvist got help with the third jigsaw piece from an unexpected quarter.

  After working on the images practically all night he slept heavily until well into the afternoon. He awoke with a headache, took a shower, and walked to Susanne’s for breakfast. He ought to have gone to see Vanger and report what he had discovered. Instead, when he came back, he went to Cecilia’s house and knocked on the door. He needed to ask her why she had lied to him about being in Harriet’s room. No-one came to the door.

  He was just leaving when he heard: “Your whore isn’t home.”

  Gollum had emerged from his cave. He was once tall, almost six foot six, but now so stooped with age that his eyes were level with Blomkvist’s. His face and neck were splotched with dark liver spots. He was in his pyjamas and a brown dressing gown, leaning on a cane. He looked like a Central Casting nasty old man.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that your whore isn’t home.”

  Blomkvist stepped so close that he was almost nose to nose with Harald Vanger.

  “You’re talking about your own daughter, you fucking pig.”

  “I’m not the one who comes sneaking over here in the night,” Harald said with a toothless smile. He smelled foul. Blomkvist sidestepped him and went down the road without looking back. He found Vanger in his office.

  “I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting your brother,” Mikael said.

  “Harald? Well, well, so, he’s ventured out. He does that a couple of times a year.”

  “I was knocking on Cecilia’s door when this voice behind me said, quote, Your whore isn’t home, unquote.”

  “That sounds like Harald,” Vanger said calmly.

  “He called his own daughter a whore, for God’s sake.”

  “He’s been doing that for years. That’s why they don’t talk much.”

  “Why does he call her that?”

  “Cecilia lost her virginity when she was twenty-one. It happened here in Hedestad after a summer romance, the year after Harriet disappeared.”

  “And?”

  “The man she fell in love with was called Peter Samuelsson. He was a financial assistant at the Vanger Corporation. A bright boy. Today he works for ABB. The kind of man I would have been proud to have as my son-in-law if she were my daughter. Harald measured his skull or checked his family tree or something and discovered that he was one-quarter Jewish.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “He’s called her a whore ever since.”

  “He knew that Cecilia and I have…”

  “Everybody in the village probably knows that with the possible exception of Isabella, because no-one in his right mind would tell her anything, and thank heavens she’s nice enough to go to bed at 8:00 every night. Harald on the other hand has presumably been following every step you take.”

  Blomkvist sat down, looking foolish.

  “You mean that everyone knows…”

  “Of course.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “My dear Mikael, it’s really none of my business.”

  “Where is Cecilia?”

  “The school term is over. She went to London on Saturday to visit her sister, and after that she’s having a holiday in… hmmm, I think it was Florida. She’ll be back in about a month.”

  Blomkvist felt even more foolish.

  “We’ve sort of put our relationship on hold for a while.”

  “So I understand, but it’s still none of my business. How’s your work coming along?”

  Blomkvist poured himself a cup of coffee from Vanger’s thermos.

  “I think I’ve found some new material.”

  He took his iBook out of his shoulder bag and scrolled through the series of images showing how Harriet had reacted on Järnvägsgatan. He explained how he had found the other spectators with the camera and their car with the Norsjö Carpentry Shop sign. When he was finished Vanger wanted to see all the pictures again. When he looked up from the computer his face was grey. Blomkvist was suddenly alarmed and put a hand on Vanger’s shoulder. Vanger waved him away and sat in silence for a while.

  “You’ve done what I thought was impossible. You’ve turned up something completely new. What are you going to do next?”

  “I am going to look for that snapshot, if it still exists.”

  He did not mention the face in the window.

  Harald Vanger had gone back to his cave by the time Blomkvist came out. When he turned the corner he found someone quite different sitting on the porch of his cottage, reading a newspaper. For a fraction of a second he thought it was Cecilia, but the dark-haired girl on the porch was his daughter.

  “Hi, Pappa,” Pernilla Abrahamsson said.

  He gave his daughter a long hug.

  “Where in the world did you spring from?”

  “From home, of course. I’m on my way to Skellefteå. Can I stay the night?”

  “Of course you can, but how did you get here?”

  “Mamma knew where you were. And I asked at the café if they knew where you were staying. The woman told me exactly how to get here. Are you glad to see me?”

  “Certainly I am. Come in. You should have given me some warning so I could buy some good food or something.”

  “I stopped on impulse. I wanted to welcome you home from prison, but you never called.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK. Mamma told me how you’re always getting lost in your own thoughts.”

  “Is that what she says about me?”

  “More or less. But it doesn’t matter. I still love you.”

  “I love you too, but you know…”

  “I know. I’m pretty grown-up by now.”

  He made tea and put out pastries.

  What his daughter had said was true. She was most assuredly no longer a little girl; she was almost seventeen, practically a grown woman. He had to learn to stop treating her like a child.

  “So, how was it?”

  “How was what?”

  “Prison.”

  He laughed. “Would you believe me if I said that it was like having a paid holiday with all the time you wanted for thinking and writing?”

  “I would. I don’t suppose there’s much difference between a prison and a cloister, and people have always gone to cloisters for self-reflection.”

  “Well, there you go. I hope it hasn’t been a problem for you, your father being a gaolbird.”

  “Not at all. I’m proud of you, and I never miss a chance to brag about the fact that you went to prison for what you believe in.”

  “Believe in?”

  “I saw Erika Berger on TV.”

  “Pernilla, I’m not innocent. I’m sorry that I haven’t talked to you about what happened, but I wasn’t unfairly sentenced. The court made their decision based on what they were told during the trial.”

  “But you never told your side of the story.”

  “No, because it turned out that I didn’t have proof.”

  “OK. Then answer me one question: is Wennerström a scoundrel or isn’t he?”

  “He’s one of the blackest scoundrels I’ve ever dealt with.”

  “That’s good enough for me. I’ve got a present for you.”

  She took a package out of her bag. He opened it and found a CD, The Best of Eurythmics. She knew it was one of his favourite old bands. He put it in his iBook, and they listened to “Sweet Dreams” together.

  “Why are you going to Skellefteå?”

  “Bi
ble school at a summer camp with a congregation called the Light of Life,” Pernilla said, as if it were the most obvious choice in the world.

  Blomkvist felt a cold fire run down the back of his neck. He realised how alike his daughter and Harriet Vanger were. Pernilla was sixteen, exactly the age Harriet was when she disappeared. Both had absent fathers. Both were attracted to the religious fanaticism of strange sects – Harriet to the Pentecostals and Pernilla to an offshoot of something that was just about as crackpot as the Word of Life.

  He did not know how he should handle his daughter’s new interest in religion. He was afraid of encroaching on her right to decide for herself. At the same time, the Light of Life was most definitely a sect of the type that he would not hesitate to lambast in Millennium. He would take the first opportunity to discuss this matter with her mother.

  Pernilla slept in his bed while he wrapped himself in blankets on the bench in the kitchen. He woke with a crick in his neck and aching muscles. Pernilla was eager to get going, so he made breakfast and went with her to the station. They had a little time, so they bought coffee at the mini-mart and sat down on a bench at the end of the platform, chatting about all sorts of things. Until she said: “You don’t like the idea that I’m going to Skellefteå, do you?”

  He was non-plussed.

  “It’s not dangerous. But you’re not a Christian, are you?”

  “Well, I’m not a good Christian, at any rate.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “No, I don’t believe in God, but I respect the fact that you do. Everyone has to have something to believe in.”

  When her train arrived, they gave each other a long hug until Pernilla had to get on board. With one foot on the step, she turned.

  “Pappa, I’m not going to proselytise. It doesn’t matter to me what you believe, and I’ll always love you. But I think you should continue your Bible studies.”