Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [122]
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