Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [183]
“How are you feeling?” she said at last.
“I think I’m still in shock,” he said. “I was helpless. For several hours I was convinced that I was going to die. I felt the fear of death and there wasn’t a thing I could do.”
He stretched out his hand and placed it on her knee.
“Thank you,” he said. “But for you, I would be dead.”
Salander smiled her crooked smile.
“All the same…I don’t understand how you could be such an idiot as to tackle him on your own. I was chained to the floor down there, praying that you’d see the picture and put two and two together and call the police.”
“If I’d waited for the police, you wouldn’t have survived. I wasn’t going to let that motherfucker kill you.”
“Why don’t you want to talk to the police?”
“I never talk to the authorities.”
“Why not?”
“That’s my business. But in your case, I don’t think it would be a terrific career move to be hung out to dry as the journalist who was stripped naked by Martin Vanger, the famous serial killer. If you don’t like ‘Kalle Blomkvist,’ you can think up a whole new epithet. Just don’t take it out of this chapter of your heroic life.”
Blomkvist gave her a searching look and dropped the subject.
“We do still have a problem,” she said.
Blomkvist nodded. “What happened to Harriet. Yes.”
Salander laid the two Polaroid pictures on the table in front of him. She explained where she’d found them. Mikael studied the pictures intently for a while before he looked up.
“It might be her,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t swear to it, but the shape of her body and the hair remind me of the pictures I’ve seen.”
They sat in the garden for an hour, piecing together the details. They discovered that each of them, independently and from different directions, had identified Martin Vanger as the missing link.
Salander never did find the photograph that Blomkvist had left on the kitchen table. She had come to the conclusion that Blomkvist had done something stupid after studying the pictures from the surveillance cameras. She had gone over to Martin Vanger’s house by way of the shore and looked in all the windows and seen no-one. She had tried all the doors and windows on the ground floor. Finally she had climbed in through an open balcony door upstairs. It had taken a long time, and she had moved extremely cautiously as she searched the house, room by room. Eventually she found the stairs down to the basement. Martin had been careless. He left the door to his chamber of horrors ajar, and she was able to form a clear impression of the situation.
Blomkvist asked her how much she had heard of what Martin said.
“Not much. I got there when he was asking you about what happened to Harriet, just before he hung you up by the noose. I left for a few minutes to go back and find a weapon.”
“Martin had no idea what happened to Harriet,” Blomkvist said.
“Do you believe that?”
“Yes,” Blomkvist said without hesitation. “Martin was dafter than a syphilitic polecat—where do I get these metaphors from?—but he confessed to all the crimes he had committed. I think that he wanted to impress me. But when it came to Harriet, he was as desperate as Henrik Vanger to find out what happened.”
“So…where does that take us?”
“We know that Gottfried was responsible for the first series of murders, between 1949 and 1965.”
“OK. And he brought on little Martin.”
“Talk about a dysfunctional family,” Blomkvist said. “Martin really didn’t have a chance.”
Salander gave him a strange look.
“What Martin told me—even though it was rambling—was that his father started his apprenticeship after he reached puberty. He was there at the murder of Lea in Uddevalla in 1962. He was fourteen, for God’s sake. He was there at the murder of Sara in 1964 and that time he took an active part. He was sixteen.”
“And?”
“He said that he had never touched another man—except his father. That made me think that…well, the only possible conclusion is that his father raped him. Martin called it ‘his duty.’ The sexual assaults must have gone on for a long time. He was raised