Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [121]
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