Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [120]
Blomkvist took out the negatives of the photographs by the young Nylund and put them on the light table. With a magnifying glass he studied them frame by frame. Reading negatives is an art form, requiring experience, which Blomkvist lacked. To determine whether the photograph contained information of value he was going to have to scan in each image and examine it on the computer screen. That would take hours. So first he did a quite general survey of the photographs he might be interested in.
He began by running through all the ones that had been taken of the accident. Vanger’s collection was incomplete. The person who had copied the collection—possibly Nylund himself—had left out about thirty photographs that were either blurred or of such poor quality that they were not considered publishable.
Blomkvist switched off the Courier’s computer and plugged the Agfa scanner into his own iBook. He spent two hours scanning in the rest of the images.
One caught his eye at once. Some time between 3:10 and 3:15 p.m., just at the time when Harriet vanished, someone had opened the window in her room. Vanger had tried in vain to find out who it was. Blomkvist had a photograph on his screen that must have been taken at exactly the moment the window was opened. There were a figure and a face, albeit out of focus. He decided that a detailed analysis could wait until he had first scanned all the images.
Then he examined the images of the Children’s Day celebrations. Nylund had put in six rolls, around two hundred shots. There was an endless stream of children with balloons, grown-ups, street life with hot dog vendors, the parade itself, an artist on a stage, and an award presentation of some sort.
Blomkvist decided to scan in the entire collection. Six hours later he had a portfolio of ninety images, but he was going to have to come back.
At 9:00 he called Blomberg, thanked her, and took the bus home to Hedeby Island.
He was back at 9:00 on Sunday morning. The offices were still empty when Blomberg let him in. He had not realised that it was the Whitsuntide holiday weekend, and that there would not be a newspaper until Tuesday. He spent the entire day scanning images. At 6:00 in the evening there were still forty shots left of Children’s Day. Blomkvist had inspected the negatives and decided that close-ups of cute children’s faces or pictures of a painter appearing on stage were simply not germane to his objective. What he had scanned in was the street life and crowds.
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