The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (49 page)

He took the long way around Östergården’s fields and Söderberget to reach home. When he passed Östergården he could see that their car was gone. At the top of Söderberget he stopped and looked down on Hedeby. In the old fishing cabins by the marina there were summer visitors; women in bathing suits were sitting talking on a dock. He smelled something cooking on an outdoor grill. Children were splashing in the water near the docks in the marina.

Just after 8:00. It was fifty minutes since the shots had been fired. Nilsson was watering his lawn, wearing shorts and no shirt.
How long have you been there?
Vanger’s house was empty but for Anna. Harald Vanger’s house looked deserted as always. Then he saw Isabella Vanger in her back garden. She was sitting there, obviously talking to someone. It took a second for Blomkvist to realise it was the sickly Gerda Vanger, born in 1922 and living with her son, Alexander, in one of the houses beyond Henrik’s. He had never met her, but he had seen her a few times. Cecilia Vanger’s house looked empty, but then Mikael saw a movement in her kitchen.
She’s home. Was the marksman a woman?
He knew that Cecilia could handle a gun. He could see Martin Vanger’s car in the drive in front of his house.
How long have you been home?

Or was it someone else that he had not thought of yet? Frode? Alexander? Too many possibilities.

He climbed down from Söderberget and followed the road into the village; he got home without encountering anyone. The first thing he saw was that the door of the cottage was ajar. He went into a crouch almost instinctively. Then he smelled coffee and saw Salander through the kitchen window.

She heard him come in the front door and turned towards him. She stiffened. His face looked terrible, smeared with blood that had begun to congeal. The left side of his white T-shirt was crimson. He was holding a sodden red handkerchief to his head.

“It’s bleeding like hell, but it’s not dangerous,” Blomkvist said before she could ask.

She turned and got the first-aid kit from the cupboard; it contained two packets of elastic bandages, a mosquito stick, and a little roll of surgical tape. He pulled off his clothes and dropped them on the floor; then he went to the bathroom.

The wound on his temple was a gash so deep that he could lift up a big flap of flesh. It was still bleeding and it needed stitches, but he thought it would probably heal if he taped it closed. He ran a towel under the cold tap and wiped his face.

He held the towel against his temple while he stood under the shower and closed his eyes. Then he slammed his fist against the tile so hard that he scraped his knuckles.
Fuck you, whoever you are,
he thought.
I’m going to find you, and I will get you.

When Salander touched his arm he jumped as if he had had an electric shock and stared at her with such anger in his eyes that she took a step back. She handed him the soap and went back to the kitchen without a word.

He put on three strips of surgical tape. He went into the bedroom, pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a new T-shirt, taking the folder of printed-out photographs with him. He was so furious he was almost shaking.

“Stay here, Lisbeth,” he shouted.

He walked over to Cecilia Vanger’s house and rang the doorbell. It was half a minute before she opened the door.

“I don’t want to see you,” she said. Then she saw his face, where blood was already seeping through the tape.

“Let me in. We have to talk.”

She hesitated. “We have nothing to talk about.”

“We do now, and you can discuss it here on the steps or in the kitchen.”

Blomkvist’s tone was so determined that Cecilia stepped back and let him in. He sat at her kitchen table.

“What have you done?” she said.

“You claim that my digging for the truth about Harriet Vanger is some futile form of occupational therapy for Henrik. That’s possible, but an hour ago someone bloody nearly shot my head off, and last night someone—maybe the same humourist—left a horribly dead cat on my porch.”

Cecilia opened her mouth, but Blomkvist cut her off.

“Cecilia, I don’t give a shit about your hang-ups or what you worry about or the fact that you suddenly hate the sight of me. I’ll never come near you again, and you don’t have to worry that I’m going to bother you or run after you. Right this minute I wish I’d never heard of you or anyone else in the Vanger family. But I require answers to my questions. The sooner you answer them, the sooner you’ll be rid of me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Number one: where were you an hour ago?”

Cecilia’s face clouded over.

“An hour ago I was in Hedestad.”

“Can anyone confirm where you were?”

“Not that I can think of, and I don’t have to account to you.”

“Number two: why did you open the window in Harriet’s room the day she disappeared?”

“What?”

“You heard me. For all these years Henrik has tried to work out who opened the window in Harriet’s room during those critical minutes. Everybody has denied doing it. Someone is lying.”

“And what in hell makes you think it was me?”

“This picture,” Blomkvist said, and flung the blurry photograph onto her kitchen table.

Cecilia walked over to the table and studied the picture. Blomkvist thought he could read shock on her face. She looked up at him. He felt a trickle of blood run down his cheek and drop onto his shirt.

“There were sixty people on the island that day,” he said. “And twenty-eight of them were women. Five or six of them had shoulder-length blonde hair. Only one of those was wearing a light-coloured dress.”

She stared intently at the photograph.

“And you think that’s supposed to be me?”

“If it isn’t you, I’d like you to tell me who you think it is. Nobody knew about this picture before. I’ve had it for weeks and tried to talk to you about it. I may be an idiot, but I haven’t showed it to Henrik or anyone else because I’m deathly afraid of casting suspicion on you or doing you wrong. But I do have to have an answer.”

“You’ll get your answer.” She held out the photograph to him. “I didn’t go into Harriet’s room that day. It’s not me in the picture. I didn’t have the slightest thing to do with her disappearance.”

She went to the front door.

“You have your answer. Now please go. But I think you should have a doctor look at that wound.”

Salander drove him to Hedestad Hospital. It took only two stitches and a good dressing to close the wound. He was given cortisone salve for the rash from the stinging nettles on his neck and hands.

After they left the hospital Blomkvist sat for a long time wondering whether he ought to go to the police. He could see the headlines now.
“Libel Journalist in Shooting Drama.”
He shook his head. “Let’s go home,” he said.

It was dark when they arrived back at Hedeby Island, and that suited Salander fine. She lifted a sports bag on to the kitchen table.

“I borrowed this stuff from Milton Security, and it’s time we made use of it.”

She planted four battery-operated motion detectors around the house and explained that if anyone came closer than twenty feet, a radio signal would trigger a small chirping alarm that she set up in Blomkvist’s bedroom. At the same time, two light-sensitive video cameras that she had put in trees at the front and back of the cabin would send signals to a PC laptop that she set in the cupboard by the front door. She camouflaged the cameras with dark cloth.

She put a third camera in a birdhouse above the door. She drilled a hole right through the wall for the cable. The lens was aimed at the road and the path from the gate to the front door. It took a low-resolution image every second and stored them all on the hard drive of another PC laptop in the wardrobe.

Then she put a pressure-sensitive doormat in the entrance. If someone managed to evade the infrared detectors and got into the house, a 115-decibel siren would go off. Salander demonstrated for him how to shut off the detectors with a key to a box in the wardrobe. She had also borrowed a night-vision scope.

“You don’t leave a lot to chance,” Blomkvist said, pouring coffee for her.

“One more thing. No more jogging until we crack this.”

“Believe me, I’ve lost all interest in exercise.”

“I’m not joking. This may have started out as a historical mystery, but what with dead cats and people trying to blow your head off we can be sure we’re on somebody’s trail.”

They ate dinner late. Blomkvist was suddenly dead tired and had a splitting headache. He could hardly talk any more, so he went to bed.

Salander stayed up reading the report until 2:00.

CHAPTER
23

Friday, July 11

He awoke at 6:00 with the sun shining through a gap in the curtains right in his face. He had a vague headache, and it hurt when he touched the bandage. Salander was asleep on her stomach with one arm flung over him. He looked down at the dragon on her shoulder blade.

He counted her tattoos. As well as a wasp on her neck, she had a loop around one ankle, another loop around the biceps of her left arm, a Chinese symbol on her hip, and a rose on one calf.

He got out of bed and pulled the curtains tight. He went to the bathroom and then padded back to bed, trying to get in without waking her.

A couple of hours later over breakfast Blomkvist said, “How are we going to solve this puzzle?”

“We sum up the facts we have. We try to find more.”

“For me, the only question is: why? Is it because we’re trying to solve the mystery about Harriet, or because we’ve uncovered a hitherto unknown serial killer?”

“There must be a connection,” Salander said. “If Harriet realised that there was a serial killer, it can only have been someone she knew. If we look at the cast of characters in the sixties, there were at least two dozen possible candidates. Today hardly any of them are left except Harald Vanger, who is not running around in the woods of Fröskogen at almost ninety-three with a gun. Everybody is either too old to be of any danger today, or too young to have been around in the fifties. So we’re back to square one.”

“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.”