Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [152]
Blomkvist read doubt in Martin Vanger’s eyes. At last he made a decision.
“OK, in that case the best thing we can do is to solve the mystery of Harriet as quickly as possible. I’ll give you all the support I can so that you finish the work to your satisfaction—and, of course, Henrik’s—and then return to Millennium.”
“Good. So I won’t have to fight with you too.”
“No, you won’t. You can ask for my help whenever you run into a problem. I’ll make damn sure that Birger won’t put any sort of obstacles in your way. And I’ll try to talk to Cecilia, to calm her down.”
“Thank you. I need to ask her some questions, and she’s been resisting my attempts at conversation for a month now.”
Martin Vanger laughed. “Perhaps you have other issues to iron out. But I won’t get involved in that.”
They shook hands.
Salander had listened to the conversation. When Martin Vanger left she reached for the Hedestad Courier and scanned the article. She put the paper down without making any comment.
Blomkvist sat in silence, thinking. Gunnar Karlman was born in 1948 and would have been eighteen in 1966. He was one of the people on the island when Harriet disappeared.
After breakfast he asked his research assistant to read through the police report. He gave her all the photographs of the accident, as well as the long summary of Vanger’s own investigations.
Blomkvist then drove to Frode’s house and asked him kindly to draw up an agreement for Salander as a research assistant for the next month.
By the time he returned to the cottage, Salander had decamped to the garden and was immersed in the police report. Blomkvist went in to heat up the coffee. He watched her through the kitchen window. She seemed to be skimming, spending no more than ten or fifteen seconds on each page. She turned the pages mechanically, and Blomkvist was amazed at her lack of concentration; it made no sense, since her own report was so meticulous. He took two cups of coffee and joined her at the garden table.
“Your notes were done before you knew we were looking for a serial killer.”
“That’s true. I simply wrote down questions I wanted to ask Henrik, and some other things. It was quite unstructured. Up until now I’ve really been struggling in the dark, trying to write a story—a chapter in the autobiography of Henrik Vanger.”
“And now?”
“In the past all the investigations focused on Hedeby Island. Now I’m sure that the story, the sequence of events that ended in her disappearance, started in Hedestad. That shifts the perspective.”
Salander said: “It was amazing what you discovered with the pictures.”
Blomkvist was surprised. Salander did not seem the type to throw compliments around, and he felt flattered. On the other hand—from a purely journalistic point of view—it was quite an achievement.
“It’s your turn to fill in the details. How did it go with that picture you were chasing up in Norsjö?”
“You mean you didn’t check the images in my computer?”
“There wasn’t time. I needed to read the résumés, your situation reports to yourself.”
Blomkvist started his iBook and clicked on the photograph folder.
“It’s fascinating. The visit to Norsjö was a sort of progress, but it was also a disappointment. I found the picture, but it doesn’t tell us much.
“That woman, Mildred Berggren, had saved all her holiday pictures in albums. The picture I was looking for was one of them. It was taken on cheap colour film and after thirty-seven years the print was incredibly faded—with a strong yellow tinge. But, would you believe, she still had the negative in a shoebox. She let me borrow all the negatives from Hedestad and I’ve scanned them in. This is what Harriet saw.”
He clicked on an image which now had the filename HARRIET/bd-19.eps.
Salander immediately understood his dismay. She saw an unfocused image that showed clowns in the foreground of the Children’s Day parade. In the background could be seen the corner of Sundström’s Haberdashery. About ten people were standing on the pavement in front of Sundström’s.
“I think this is the person she saw. Partly