Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [43]
“Tell me.”
“Harriet went missing sometime around 3:00 that afternoon. At about 2:55 she was seen by Pastor Falk, who was hurrying to the bridge. At almost exactly the same time a photographer arrived from the local paper, and for the next hour he took a great number of pictures of the drama. We—the police, I mean—examined the photographs and confirmed that Harriet was not in any one of them; but every other person in town was seen in at least one, apart from very small children.”
Vanger took out another album and placed it on the table.
“These are pictures from that day. The first one was taken in Hedestad during the Children’s Day parade. The same photographer took it around 1:15 p.m., and Harriet is there in it.”
The photograph was taken from the second floor of a building and showed a street along which the parade—clowns on trucks and girls in bathing suits—had just passed. Spectators thronged the pavements. Vanger pointed at a figure in the crowd.
“That’s Harriet. It’s about two hours before she will disappear; she’s with some of her schoolfriends in town. This is the last picture taken of her. But there’s one more interesting shot.”
Vanger leafed through the pages. The album contained about 180 pictures—five rolls—from the crash on the bridge. After having heard the account, it was almost too much to suddenly see it in the form of sharp black-and-white images. The photographer was a professional who had managed to capture the turmoil surrounding the accident. A large number of the pictures focused on the activities around the overturned tanker truck. Blomkvist had no problem identifying a gesticulating, much younger Henrik Vanger soaked with heating oil.
“This is my brother Harald.” The old man pointed to a man in shirtsleeves bending forward and pointing at something inside the wreck of Aronsson’s car. “My brother Harald may be an unpleasant person, but I think he can be eliminated from the list of suspects. Except for a very short while, when he had to run back here to the farm to change his shoes, he spent the afternoon on the bridge.”
Vanger turned some more pages. One image followed another. Focus on the tanker truck. Focus on spectators on the foreshore. Focus on Aronsson’s car. General views. Close-ups with a telephoto lens.
“This is the interesting picture,” Vanger said. “As far as we could determine it was taken between 3:40 and 3:45, or about 45 minutes after Harriet ran into Falk. Take a look at the house, the middle second floor window. That’s Harriet’s room. In the preceding picture the window was closed. Here it’s open.”
“Someone must have been in Harriet’s room.”
“I asked everyone; nobody would admit to opening the window.”
“Which means that either Harriet did it herself, and she was still alive at that point, or else that someone was lying to you. But why would a murderer go into her room and open the window? And why should anyone lie about it?”
Vanger shook his head. No explanation presented itself.
“Harriet disappeared sometime around 3:00 or shortly thereafter. These pictures give an impression of where certain people were at that time. That’s why I can eliminate a number of people from the list of suspects. For the same reason I can conclude that some people who were not in the photographs at that time must be added to the list of suspects.”
“You didn’t answer my question about how you think the body was removed. I realise, of course, that there must be some plausible explanation. Some sort of common old illusionist’s trick.”
“There are actually several very practical ways it could have been done. Sometime around 3:00 the killer struck. He or she presumably didn’t use any sort of weapon—or we would have found traces of blood. I’m guessing that Harriet was strangled and I’m guessing that it happened here—behind the wall in the courtyard, somewhere out of the photographer’s line of sight and