Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [116]
He walked down a path to a boathouse. Next to the boathouse he found the wreck of a Pettersson boat. He returned to the Fortress and took a path up to a fence—he had come to Östergården from the other side.
He followed the meandering path through the woods, roughly parallel to the fields of Östergården. The path was difficult to negotiate—there were patches of marsh that he had to skirt. Finally he came to a swamp and beyond it a barn. As far as he could see the path ended there, a hundred yards from the road to Östergården.
Beyond the road lay the hill, Söderberget. Blomkvist walked up a steep slope and had to climb the last bit. Söderberget’s summit was an almost vertical cliff facing the water. He followed the ridge back towards Hedeby. He stopped above the summer cottages to enjoy the view of the old fishing harbour and the church and his own cottage. He sat on a flat rock and poured himself the last of the lukewarm coffee.
Cecilia Vanger kept her distance. Blomkvist did not want to be importunate, so he waited a week before he went to her house. She let him in.
“You must think I’m quite foolish, a fifty-six-year-old, respectable headmistress acting like a teenage girl.”
“Cecilia, you’re a grown woman. You have the right to do whatever you want.”
“I know and that’s why I’ve decided not to see you any more. I can’t stand…”
“Please, you don’t owe me an explanation. I hope we’re still friends.”
“I would like for us to remain friends. But I can’t deal with a relationship with you. I haven’t ever been good at relationships. I’d like it if you would leave me in peace for a while.”
CHAPTER 16
Sunday, June 1–Tuesday, June 10
After six months of fruitless cogitation, the case of Harriet Vanger cracked open. In the first week of June, Blomkvist uncovered three totally new pieces of the puzzle. Two of them he found himself. The third he had help with.
After Berger’s visit in May, he had studied the album again, sitting for three hours, looking at one photograph after another, as he tried to rediscover what it was that he had reacted to. He failed again, so he put the album aside and went back to work on the family chronicle instead.
One day in June he was in Hedestad, thinking about something altogether different, when his bus turned on to Järnvägsgatan and it suddenly came to him what had been germinating in the back of his mind. The insight struck him like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. He felt so confused that he stayed on the bus all the way to the last stop by the railway station. There he took the first bus back to Hedeby to check whether he had remembered correctly.
It was the first photograph in the album, the last picture taken of Harriet Vanger on that fateful day on Järnvägsgatan in Hedestad, while she had been watching the Children’s Day parade.
The photograph was an odd one to have included in the album. It was put there because it was taken the same day, but it was the only one of the photographs not of the accident on the bridge. Each time Blomkvist and (he supposed) everyone else had looked at the album, it was the people and the details in the pictures of the bridge that had captured their attention. There was no drama in the picture of a crowd at the Children’s Day parade, several hours earlier.
Vanger must have looked at the photograph a thousand times, a sorrowful reminder that he would never see her again.
But that was not what Blomkvist had reacted to.
It was taken from across the street, probably from a first-floor window. The wide-angle lens had caught the front