Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [78]
“Christ Almighty.”
“Exactly. It was so sadistic. Poor Torstensson was the first detective on the scene after she was found. And the murder remained unsolved, even though experts were called in from Stockholm. He could never let go of that case.”
“I can understand that.”
“My Rebecka case was Harriet. In this instance we don’t even know how she died. We can’t even prove that a murder was committed. But I have never been able to let it go.” He paused to think for a moment. “Being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later—after weeks or months—they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over their grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there’s only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it’s the officer who’s left with the investigation.”
Three other people in the Vanger family lived on Hedeby Island. Alexander Vanger, son of Greger, born in 1946, lived in a renovated wooden house. Vanger told Blomkvist that Alexander was presently in the West Indies, where he gave himself over to his favourite pastimes: sailing and whiling away the time, not doing a scrap of work. Alexander had been twenty and he had been there on that day.
Alexander shared the house with his mother, Gerda, eighty years old and widow of Greger Vanger. Blomkvist had never seen her; she was mostly bedridden.
The third family member was Harald Vanger. During his first month Blomkvist had not managed even a glimpse of him. Harald’s house, the one closest to Blomkvist’s cabin, looked gloomy and ominous with its blackout curtains drawn across all the windows. Blomkvist sometimes thought he saw a ripple in the curtains as he passed, and once when he was about to go to bed late, he noticed a glimmer of light coming from a room upstairs. There was a gap in the curtains. For more than twenty minutes he stood in the dark at his own kitchen window and watched the light before he got fed up and, shivering, went to bed. In the morning the curtains were back in place.
Harald seemed to be an invisible but ever-present spirit who affected life in the village by his absence. In Blomkvist’s imagination, Harald increasingly took on the form of an evil Gollum who spied on his surroundings from behind the curtains and devoted himself to no-one-knew-what matters in his barricaded cavern.
Harald was visited once a day by the home-help service (usually an elderly woman) from the other side of the bridge. She would bring bags of groceries, trudging through the snowdrifts up to his door. Nilsson shook his head when Blomkvist asked about Harald. He had offered to do the shovelling, he said, but Harald did not want anyone to set foot on his property. Only once, during the first winter after Harald had returned to Hedeby Island, did Nilsson drive the tractor up there to clear the snow from the courtyard, just as he did for all the other driveways. Harald had come out of his house at a startling pace, yelling and gesticulating until Nilsson went away.
Unfortunately, Nilsson was unable to clear Blomkvist’s yard because the gate was too narrow for the tractor. A snow shovel and manual labour were still the only way to do it.
In the middle of January Blomkvist asked his lawyer to find out when he was going to be expected to serve his three months in prison. He was anxious to take care of the matter as quickly as possible. Getting into prison turned out to be easier than he had expected. After a very few weeks of discussion, it was decreed that Blomkvist present himself on March 17 at the Rullåker Prison outside Östersund, a minimum-security prison. The lawyer advised him that the sentence would very likely be shortened.
“Fine,” Blomkvist said, without much enthusiasm.
He sat at the kitchen table and petted the