Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [164]
“You’ll get your answer.” She held out the photograph to him. “I didn’t go into Harriet’s room that day. It’s not me in the picture. I didn’t have the slightest thing to do with her disappearance.”
She went to the front door.
“You have your answer. Now please go. But I think you should have a doctor look at that wound.”
Salander drove him to Hedestad Hospital. It took only two stitches and a good dressing to close the wound. He was given cortisone salve for the rash from the stinging nettles on his neck and hands.
After they left the hospital Blomkvist sat for a long time wondering whether he ought to go to the police. He could see the headlines now. “Libel Journalist in Shooting Drama.” He shook his head. “Let’s go home,” he said.
It was dark when they arrived back at Hedeby Island, and that suited Salander fine. She lifted a sports bag on to the kitchen table.
“I borrowed this stuff from Milton Security, and it’s time we made use of it.”
She planted four battery-operated motion detectors around the house and explained that if anyone came closer than twenty feet, a radio signal would trigger a small chirping alarm that she set up in Blomkvist’s bedroom. At the same time, two light-sensitive video cameras that she had put in trees at the front and back of the cabin would send signals to a PC laptop that she set in the cupboard by the front door. She camouflaged the cameras with dark cloth.
She put a third camera in a birdhouse above the door. She drilled a hole right through the wall for the cable. The lens was aimed at the road and the path from the gate to the front door. It took a low-resolution image every second and stored them all on the hard drive of another PC laptop in the wardrobe.
Then she put a pressure-sensitive doormat in the entrance. If someone managed to evade the infrared detectors and got into the house, a 115-decibel siren would go off. Salander demonstrated for him how to shut off the detectors with a key to a box in the wardrobe. She had also borrowed a night-vision scope.
“You don’t leave a lot to chance,” Blomkvist said, pouring coffee for her.
“One more thing. No more jogging until we crack this.”
“Believe me, I’ve lost all interest in exercise.”
“I’m not joking. This may have started out as a historical mystery, but what with dead cats and people trying to blow your head off we can be sure we’re on somebody’s trail.”
They ate dinner late. Blomkvist was suddenly dead tired and had a splitting headache. He could hardly talk any more, so he went to bed.
Salander stayed up reading the report until 2:00.
CHAPTER 23
Friday, July 11
He awoke at 6:00 with the sun shining through a gap in the curtains right in his face. He had a vague headache, and it hurt when he touched the bandage. Salander was asleep on her stomach with one arm flung over him. He looked down at the dragon on her shoulder blade.
He counted her tattoos. As well as a wasp on her neck, she had a loop around one ankle, another loop around the biceps of her left arm, a Chinese symbol on her hip, and a rose on one calf.
He got out of bed and pulled the curtains tight. He went to the bathroom and then padded back to bed, trying to get in without waking her.
A couple of hours later over breakfast Blomkvist said, “How are we going to solve this puzzle?”
“We sum up the facts we have. We try to find more.”
“For me, the only question is: why? Is it because we’re trying to solve the mystery about Harriet, or because we’ve uncovered a hitherto unknown serial killer?”
“There must be a connection,” Salander said. “If Harriet realised that there was a serial killer, it can only have been someone she knew. If we look at the cast of characters in the sixties, there were at least two dozen possible candidates. Today hardly any of them are left except Harald Vanger, who is not running around in the woods of Fröskogen at almost ninety-three