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