The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle (22 page)

The whole conversation was a discussion between Berger, on one side, and Henrik and Martin Vanger on the other. No-one asked Blomkvist what he thought.

         

Late that night Blomkvist lay with his head resting on Erika's breasts, looking into her eyes.

“How long have you and Henrik Vanger been discussing this arrangement?”

“About a week,” she said, smiling.

“Is Christer in agreement?”

“Of course.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Why in the world should I discuss it with you? You resigned as publisher, you left the editorial staff and the board, and you went to live in the woods.”

“So I deserve to be treated like an idiot.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Decidedly you do.”

“You really have been mad at me.”

“Mikael, I've never felt so furious, so abandoned, and so betrayed as when you left. I've never been this upset with you before.” She took a firm grip on his hair and then shoved him farther down in the bed.

         

By the time Berger left Hedeby on Sunday, Blomkvist was still so annoyed with Vanger that he did not want to risk running into either him or any other member of his clan. Instead, on Monday he took the bus into Hedestad and spent the afternoon walking in the town, visiting the library, and drinking coffee in a bakery. In the evening he went to the cinema to see
The Lord of the Rings
, which he had never before had time to see. He thought that orcs, unlike human beings, were simple and uncomplicated creatures.

He ended his outing at McDonald's in Hedestad and caught the last bus to Hedeby. He made coffee, took out a binder, and sat at the kitchen table. He read until 4:00 in the morning.

         

There were a number of questions regarding the investigation that seemed increasingly odd the further Blomkvist went through the documents. They were not revolutionary discoveries that he made all on his own; they were problems that had preoccupied Inspector Morell for long periods, especially in his free time.

During the last year of her life, Harriet had changed. In some ways this change could be explained as the change that everyone goes through in one form or another during their teenage years. Harriet was growing up. Classmates, teachers, and several members of the family, however, all testified that she had turned in on herself and become uncommunicative.

The girl who, two years earlier, was a lively teenager had begun to distance herself from everyone around her. In school she still spent time with her friends, but now she behaved in an “impersonal” manner, as one of her friends described it. This word was unusual enough for Morell to have made a note of it and then ask more questions. The explanation he got was that Harriet had stopped talking about herself, stopped gossiping, and stopped confiding in her friends.

Harriet Vanger had been a Christian, in a child's sense of the word—attending Sunday school, saying evening prayers, and becoming confirmed. In her last year she seemed to have become yet more religious. She read the Bible and went regularly to church. But she had not turned to Hedeby Island's pastor, Otto Falk, who was a friend of the Vanger family. Instead, during the spring she had sought out a Pentecostal congregation in Hedestad. Yet her involvement in the Pentecostal church did not last long. After only two months she left the congregation and instead began reading books about the Catholic faith.

The religious infatuation of a teenager? Perhaps, but no-one else in the Vanger family had ever been noticeably religious, and it was difficult to discern what impulses may have guided her. One explanation for her interest in God could, of course, have been that her father had drowned the previous year. Morell came to the conclusion that something had happened in Harriet's life that was troubling her or affecting her. Morell, like Vanger, had devoted a great deal of time to talking to Harriet's friends, trying to find someone in whom she might have confided.

Some measure of hope was pinned on Anita Vanger, two years older than Harriet and the daughter of Harald. She had spent the summer of 1966 on Hedeby Island and they were thought to be close friends. But Anita had no solid information to offer. They had hung out together that summer, swimming, taking walks, talking about movies, pop bands, and books. Harriet had sometimes gone with Anita when she took driving lessons. Once they had got happily drunk on a bottle of wine they stole from the house. For several weeks the two of them had also stayed at Gottfried's cabin on the very tip of the island.

The questions about Harriet's private thoughts and feelings remained unanswered. But Blomkvist did make a note of a discrepancy in the report: the information about her uncommunicative frame of mind came chiefly from her classmates, and to a certain extent from the family. Anita Vanger had not thought of her as being introverted at all. He made a note to discuss this matter with Vanger at some point.

A more concrete question, to which Morell had devoted much more attention, was a surprising page in Harriet's date book, a beautiful bound book she had been given as a Christmas present the year before she disappeared. The first half of the date book was a day-by-day calendar in which Harriet had listed meetings, the dates of exams at school, her homework, and so on. The date book also had a large section for a diary, but Harriet used the diary only sporadically. She began ambitiously enough in January with many brief entries about people she had met over the Christmas holidays and several about films she had seen. After that she wrote nothing personal until the end of the school year when she apparently—depending on how the entries were interpreted—became interested from a distance in some never-named boy.

The pages that listed telephone numbers were the ones that held the real mystery. Neatly, in alphabetical order, were the names and numbers of family members, classmates, certain teachers, several members of the Pentecostal congregation, and other easily identifiable individuals in her circle of acquaintances. On the very last page of the address book, which was blank and not really part of the alphabetical section, there were five names and telephone numbers. Three female names and two sets of initials:

         

Magda—32016

Sara—32109

R.J.—30112

R.L.—32027

Mari—32018

         

The telephone numbers that began with 32 were Hedestad numbers in the sixties. The one beginning with 30 was a Norrbyn number, not far from Hedestad. The problem was that when Morell contacted every one of Harriet's friends and acquaintances, no-one had any idea whose numbers they were.

The first number belonging to “Magda” initially seemed promising. It led to a haberdashery at Parkgatan 12. The telephone was in the name of one Margot Lundmark, whose mother's name was actually Magda; she sometimes helped out in the store. But Magda was sixty-nine years old and had no idea who Harriet Vanger was. Nor was there any evidence that Harriet had ever visited the shop or bought anything there. She wasn't interested in sewing.

The second number for “Sara” belonged to a family by the name of Toresson, who lived in Väststan, on the other side of the tracks. The family included Anders and Monica and their children, Jonas and Peter, who at the time were pre-school age. There was no Sara in the family, nor did they know of Harriet Vanger, other than that she had been reported in the media as missing. The only vague connection between Harriet and the Toresson family was that Anders, who was a roofer, had several weeks earlier put a tiled roof on the school which Harriet attended. So theoretically there was a chance that they had met, although it might be considered extremely unlikely.

The remaining three numbers led to similar dead ends. The number 32027 for “R.L.” had actually belonged to one Rosmarie Larsson. Unfortunately, she had died several years earlier.

Inspector Morell concentrated a great deal of his attention during the winter of 1966–67 on trying to explain why Harriet had written down these names and numbers.

One possibility was that the telephone numbers were written in some personal code—so Morell tried to guess how a teenage girl would think. Since the thirty-two series obviously pointed to Hedestad, he set about rearranging the remaining three digits. Neither 32601 or 32160 led to a Magda. As Morell continued his numerology, he realised that if he played around with enough of the numbers, sooner or later he would find some link to Harriet. For example, if he added one to each of the three remaining digits in 32016, he got 32127—which was the number to Frode's office in Hedestad. But one link like that meant nothing. Besides, he never discovered a code that made sense of all five of the numbers.

Morell broadened his inquiry. Could the digits mean, for example, car number plates, which in the sixties contained the two-letter county registration code and five digits? Another dead end.

The inspector then concentrated on the names. He obtained a list of everyone in Hedestad named Mari, Magda, or Sara or who had the initials R.L. or R.J. He had a list of 307 people. Among these, 29 actually had some connection to Harriet. For instance, a boy from her class was named Roland Jacobsson—R.J. They scarcely knew each other and had had no contact since Harriet started preparatory school. And there was no link to the telephone number.

The mystery of the numbers in the date book remained unsolved.

         

Her fourth encounter with Advokat Bjurman was not one of their scheduled meetings. She was forced to make contact with him.

In the second week of February Salander's laptop fell victim to an accident that was so uncalled for that she felt an urgent desire to kill someone. She had ridden her bike to a meeting at Milton Security and parked it behind a pillar in the garage. As she set her rucksack on the ground to put on the bike lock, a dark red Saab began reversing out. She had her back turned but heard the cracking sound from her rucksack. The driver didn't notice a thing and, unwitting, drove off up the exit ramp.

The rucksack contained her white Apple iBook 600 with a 25-gig hard drive and 420 megs of RAM, manufactured in January 2002 and equipped with a 14-inch screen. At the time she bought it, it was Apple's state-of-the-art laptop. Salander's computers were upgraded with the very latest and sometimes most expensive configurations—computer equipment was the only extravagant entry on her list of expenses.

When she opened the rucksack, she could see that the lid of her computer was cracked. She plugged in the power adapter and tried to boot up the computer; not even a death rattle. She took it over to Timmy's MacJesus Shop on Brännkyrkagatan, hoping that at least something on the hard drive could be saved. After fiddling with it for a short time, Timmy shook his head.

“Sorry. No hope,” he said. “You'll have to arrange a nice funeral.”

The loss of her computer was depressing but not disastrous. Salander had had an excellent relationship with it during the year she had owned it. She had backed up all her documents, and she had an older desktop Mac G3 at home, as well as a five-year-old Toshiba PC laptop that she could use. But she needed a fast, modern machine.

Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.

Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.

In terms of hardware, it was the Rolls-Royce of portable computers, but what really triggered Salander's need to have it was the simple feature that the keyboard was equipped with backlighting, so that she could see the letters even if it was pitch dark. So simple. Why had no-one thought of that before?

It was love at first sight.

It cost 38,000 kronor, plus tax.

That
was the problem.

Come what may, she put in her order at MacJesus. She bought all her computer accessories there, so they gave her a reasonable discount. She tallied up her expenses. The insurance on her ruined computer would cover a good part of the price, but with the warranty and the higher price of her new acquisition, she was still 18,000 kronor short. She had 10,000 kronor hidden in a coffee tin at home but that was all. She sent evil thoughts to Herr Bjurman, but then she bit the bullet and called her guardian to explain that she needed money for an unexpected expense. Bjurman's secretary said that he had no time to see her that day. Salander replied that it would take the man twenty seconds to write out a cheque for 10,000 kronor. She was told to be at his office at 7:30 that evening.

         

Blomkvist might have no experience of evaluating criminal investigations, but he reckoned that Inspector Morell had been exceptionally conscientious. When Blomkvist had finished with the police investigation, Morell still kept turning up as a player in Vanger's own notes. They had become friends, and Blomkvist wondered whether Morell had been as obsessed as the captain of industry became.

It was unlikely, in his view, that Morell had missed anything. The solution to the mystery was not going to be found in the police records. Every imaginable question had been asked, and all leads followed up, even some that seemed absurdly far-fetched. He had not read every word of the report, but the further into the investigation he got, the more obscure the subsequent leads and tips became. He was not going to find anything that his professional predecessor and his experienced team had missed, and he was undecided what approach he should adopt to the problem. Eventually it came to him that the only reasonably practical route for him to take was to try to find out the psychological motives of the individuals involved.

The first question had to do with Harriet herself. Who was she?