Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [148]
“That doesn’t sound quite like Harriet’s list, does it?”
“Not exactly, if it weren’t for one thing. The killer concluded his barbarities by shoving a parakeet up her vagina and then let all the animals out into the shop. Cats, turtles, white mice, rabbits, birds. Even the fish in the aquarium. So it was quite an appalling scene her sister encountered in the morning.”
Blomkvist made a note.
“She was murdered in August 1960, four months after the murder of the farmer’s wife Magda Lovisa in Karlstad. In both instances they were women who worked professionally with animals, and in both cases there was an animal sacrifice. The cow in Karlstad may have survived—but I can imagine it would be difficult to stab a cow to death with a knife. A parakeet is more straightforward. And besides, there was an additional animal sacrifice.”
“What?”
Salander told the story of the “pigeon murder” of Lea Persson. Blomkvist sat for so long in silence and in thought that even Salander grew impatient.
“I’ll buy your theory,” he said at last. “There’s one case left.”
“A case that I discovered by chance. I don’t know how many I may have missed.”
“Tell me about it.”
“February 1966 in Uppsala. The victim was a seventeen-year-old gymnast called Lena Andersson. She disappeared after a class party and was found three days later in a ditch on the Uppsala plain, quite a way out of town. She had been murdered somewhere else and her body dumped there. This murder got a lot of attention in the media, but the true circumstances surrounding her death were never reported. The girl had been grotesquely tortured. I read the pathologist’s report. She was tortured with fire. Her hands and breasts were atrociously burned, and she had been burned repeatedly at various spots all over her body. They found paraffin stains on her, which showed that candles had been used, but her hands were so charred that they must have been held over a more powerful fire. Finally, the killer sawed off her head and tossed it next to the body.”
Blomkvist blanched. “Good Lord,” he said.
“I can’t find any Bible quote that fits, but there are several passages that deal with a fire offering and a sin offering, and in some places it’s recommended that the sacrificial animal—most often a bull—be cut up in such a way that the head is severed from the fat. Fire also reminds me of the first murder, of Rebecka here in Hedestad.”
Towards evening when the mosquitoes began to swarm they cleared off the garden table and moved to the kitchen to go on with their talk.
“The fact that you didn’t find an exact Bible quotation doesn’t mean much. It’s not a matter of quotations. This is a grotesque parody of what is written in the Bible—it’s more like associations to quotations pulled out of context.”
“I agree. It isn’t even logical. Take for example the quote that both have to be cut off from their people if someone has sex with a girl who’s having her period. If that’s interpreted literally, the killer should have committed suicide.”
“So where does all this lead?” Blomkvist wondered aloud.
“Your Harriet either had quite a strange hobby or else she must have known that there was a connection between the murders.”
“Between 1949 and 1966, and maybe before and after as well. The idea that an insanely sick sadistic serial killer was slaughtering women for at least seventeen years without anyone seeing a connection sounds utterly unbelievable to me.”
Salander pushed back her chair and poured more coffee from the pot on the stove. She lit a cigarette. Mikael cursed himself and stole another from her.
“No, it’s not so unbelievable,” she said, holding up one finger. “We have several dozen unsolved murders of women in