He opened the folder with Nylund’s photographs from the crowd. For the next
couple of hours he enlarged each one and scrutinised it one square inch at a time.
He did not see the couple again until the very last pictures. Nylund had
photographed another clown with balloons in his hand posing in front of his
camera and laughing heartily. The photographs were taken in a car park by the
entrance to the sports field where the celebration was being held. It must have
been after 2:00 in the afternoon. Right after that Nylund had received the alarm
about the crash on the bridge and brought his portraits of Children’s Day to a rapid
close.
The woman was almost hidden, but the man in the striped sweater was clearly
visible, in profile. He had keys in his hand and was bending to open a car door. The
focus was on the clown in the foreground, and the car was a bit fuzzy. The number
plate was partly hidden but he could see that it started with “AC3.”
Number plates in the sixties began with a code indicating the county, and as a child
Blomkvist had memorised the county codes. “AC” was for Västerbotten.
Then he spotted something else. On the back window was a sticker of some sort.
He zoomed in, but the text dissolved in a blur. He cropped out the sticker and
adjusted the contrast and sharpness. It took him a while. He still could not read the
words, but he attempted to figure out what the letters were, based on the fuzzy
shapes. Many letters looked surprisingly similar. An “O” could be mistaken for a “D,”
a “B” for an “E,” and so on. After working with a pen and paper and excluding
certain letters, he was left with an unreadable text, in one line.
R JÖ NI K RIFA RIK
He stared at the image until his eyes began to water. Then he saw the text.
“NORSJÖ SNICKERIFABRIK,” followed by figures in a smaller size that were utterly
impossible to read, probably a telephone number.
CHAPTER 17
Wednesday, June 11–Saturday, June 14