Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [165]
“Unless there are two people who are collaborating. One older and one younger.”
“Harald and Cecilia? I don’t think so. I think she was telling the truth when she said that she wasn’t the person in the window.”
“Then who was that?”
They turned on Blomkvist’s iBook and spent the next hour studying in detail once again all the people visible in the photographs of the accident on the bridge.
“I can only assume that everyone in the village must have been down there, watching all the excitement. It was September. Most of them are wearing jackets or sweaters. Only one person has long blonde hair and a light-coloured dress.”
“Cecilia Vanger is in a lot of the pictures. She seems to be everywhere. Between the buildings and the people who are looking at the accident. Here she’s talking to Isabella. Here she’s standing next to Pastor Falk. Here she’s with Greger Vanger, the middle brother.”
“Wait a minute,” Blomkvist said. “What does Greger have in his hand?”
“Something square-shaped. It looks like a box of some kind.”
“It’s a Hasselblad. So he too had a camera.”
They scrolled through the photographs one more time. Greger was in more of them, though often blurry. In one it could be clearly seen that he was holding a square-shaped box.
“I think you’re right. It’s definitely a camera.”
“Which means that we go on another hunt for photographs.”
“OK, but let’s leave that for a moment,” Salander said. “Let me propose a theory.”
“Go ahead.”
“What if someone of the younger generation knows that someone of the older generation is a serial killer, but they don’t want it acknowledged. The family’s honour and all that crap. That would mean that there are two people involved, but not that they’re in it together. The murderer could have died years ago, while our nemesis just wants us to drop the whole thing and go home.”
“But why, in that case, put a mutilated cat on our porch? It’s an unmistakable reference to the murders.” Blomkvist tapped Harriet’s Bible. “Again a parody of the laws regarding burnt offerings.”
Salander leaned back and looked up at the church as she quoted from the Bible. It was as if she were talking to herself.
“Then he shall kill the bull before the Lord; and Aaron’s sons the priests shall present the blood, and they shall throw the blood round about against the altar that is the door of the tent of meeting. And he shall flay the burnt offering and cut it into pieces.”
She fell silent, aware that Blomkvist was watching her with a tense expression. He opened the Bible to the first chapter of Leviticus.
“Do you know verse twelve too?”
Salander did not reply.
“And he shall…” he began, nodding at her.
“And he shall cut it into pieces, with its head and its fat, and the priest shall lay them in order upon the wood that is on the fire upon the altar.” Her voice was ice.
“And the next verse?”
Abruptly she stood up.
“Lisbeth, you have a photographic memory,” Mikael exclaimed in surprise. “That’s why you can read a page of the investigation in ten seconds.”
Her reaction was almost explosive. She fixed her eyes on Blomkvist with such fury that he was astounded. Then her expression changed to despair, and she turned on her heel and ran for the gate.
“Lisbeth,” he shouted after her.
She disappeared up the road.
Mikael carried her computer inside, set the alarm, and locked the front door before he set out to look for her. He found her twenty minutes later on a jetty at the marina. She was sitting there, dipping her feet in the water and smoking. She heard him coming along the jetty, and he saw her shoulders stiffen. He stopped a couple of paces away.
“I don’t know what I did, but I didn’t mean to upset you.”
He sat down next to her, tentatively placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Please, Lisbeth. Talk to me.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “I’m just a freak, that’s all.”
“I’d be overjoyed if my memory was what