ponds, where they ran into some other friends from school. At noon they
wandered back into town to watch the parade. Just before 2:00 in the afternoon
Harriet suddenly told them that she had to go home. They said goodbye at a bus
stop near Järnvägsgatan.
None of her friends had noticed anything unusual. One of them was Inger
Stenberg, the one who had described Harriet’s transformation over the past year
by saying that she had become “impersonal.” She said that Harriet had been
taciturn that day, which was usual, and mostly she just followed the others.
Inspector Morell had talked to all of the people who had encountered Harriet that
day, even if they had only said hello in the grounds of the family party. A
photograph of her was published in the local newspapers while the search was
going on. After she went missing, several residents of Hedestad had contacted the
police to say that they thought they had seen her during the day of the parade, but
no-one had reported anything out of the ordinary.
The next morning Blomkvist found Vanger at his breakfast table.
“You said that the Vanger family still has an interest in the Hedestad Courier.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d like to have access to their photographic archive. From 1966.”
Vanger set down his glass of milk and wiped his upper lip.
“Mikael, what have you discovered?”
He looked the old man straight in the eye.
“Nothing solid. But I think we may have made a mistake about the chain of events.”
He showed Vanger the photograph and told him what he was thinking. Vanger sat
saying nothing for a long time.
“If I’m right, we have to look as far as we still can at what happened in Hedestad
that day, not just at what happened on Hedeby Island,” Blomkvist said. “I don’t
know how to go about it after such a long time, but a lot of photographs must have