Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [40]
“But could she not have met with an accident somewhere else? The bridge was blocked, of course, but it’s a short distance over to the mainland. She could have swum or rowed across.”
“It was late September and the water was so cold that Harriet would hardly have set off to go swimming in the midst of all the commotion. But if she suddenly got the idea to swim to the mainland, she would have been seen and drawn a lot of attention. There were dozens of eyes on the bridge, and on the mainland side there were two or three hundred people along the water watching the scene.”
“A rowing boat?”
“No. That day there were precisely thirteen boats on Hedeby Island. Most of the pleasure boats were already in storage on land. Down in the small-boat harbour by the summer cabins there were two Pettersson boats in the water. There were seven eka rowing boats, of which five were pulled up on shore. Below the parsonage one rowing boat was on shore and one in the water. By Östergården there was a rowing boat and a motorboat. All these boats were checked and were exactly where they were supposed to be. If she had rowed across and run away, she would have had to leave the boat on the other side.”
Vanger held up four fingers.
“So there’s only one reasonable possibility left, namely that Harriet disappeared against her will. Someone killed her and got rid of the body.”
Lisbeth Salander spent Christmas morning reading Mikael Blomkvist’s controversial book about financial journalism, The Knights Templar: A Cautionary Tale for Financial Reporters. The cover had a trendy design by Christer Malm featuring a photograph of the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Malm had worked in PhotoShop, and it took a moment to notice that the building was floating in air. It was a dramatic cover with which to set the tone for what was to come.
Salander could see that Blomkvist was a fine writer. The book was set out in a straightforward and engaging way, and even people with no insight into the labyrinth of financial journalism could learn something from reading it. The tone was sharp and sarcastic, but above all it was persuasive.
The first chapter was a sort of declaration of war in which Blomkvist did not mince words. In the last twenty years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self-importance and who had no record of thinking critically. He drew this conclusion because time after time, without the least objection, so many financial reporters seemed content to regurgitate the statements issued by CEOs and stock-market speculators—even when this information was plainly misleading or wrong. These reporters were thus either so naive and gullible that they ought to be packed off to other assignments, or they were people who quite consciously betrayed their journalistic function. Blomkvist claimed that he had often been ashamed to be called a financial reporter, since then he would risk being lumped together with people whom he did not rate as reporters at all.
He compared the efforts of financial journalists with the way crime reporters or foreign correspondents worked. He painted a picture of the outcry that would result if a legal correspondent began uncritically reproducing the prosecutor’s case as gospel in a murder trial, without consulting the defence arguments or interviewing the victim’s family before forming an opinion of what was likely or unlikely. According to Blomkvist the same rules had to apply to financial journalists.
The rest of the book consisted of a chain of evidence to support his case. One long chapter examined the reporting of a famous dot-com in six daily papers, as well as in the Financial Journal, Dagens Industri, and “A-ekonomi,” the business report on Swedish TV. He first quoted and summarised what the reporters had said and written. Then he made a comparison with the actual situation. In