“How many people worked at the carpentry shop?”
“The normal work force was forty or so. I worked there from the age of seventeen in
the mid-fifties until the shop closed. Then I became a contractor.” Burman thought
for a moment. “This much I can tell you. The guy in your pictures never worked
there. He might have been a contractor, but I think I’d recognise him if he was. But
there is one other possibility. Maybe his father or some other relative worked at the
shop and that’s not his car.”
Mikael nodded. “I realise there are lots of possibilities. Can you suggest anyone I
could talk to?”
“Yes,” said Burman, nodding. “Come by tomorrow morning and we’ll go and have a
talk with some of the old guys.”
Salander was facing a methodology problem of some significance. She was an
expert at digging up information on just about anybody, but her starting point had
always been a name and a social security number for a living person. If the
individual was listed in a computer file, which everyone inevitably was, then the
subject quickly landed in her spider’s web. If the individual owned a computer with
an Internet connection, an email address, and maybe even a personal website,
which nearly everyone did who came under her special type of research, she could
sooner or later find out their innermost secrets.
The work she had agreed to do for Blomkvist was altogether different. This
assignment, in simple terms, was to identify four social security numbers based on
extremely vague data. In addition, these individuals most likely died several
decades ago. So probably they would not be on any computer files.
Blomkvist’s theory, based on the Rebecka Jacobsson case, was that these
individuals had fallen victim to a murderer. This meant that they should be found in
various unsolved police investigations. There was no clue as to when or where
these murders had taken place, except that it had to be before 1966. In terms of
research, she was facing a whole new situation.
So, how do I go about this?
She pulled up the Google search engine, and typed in the keywords [Magda] +
[murder]. That was the simplest form of research she could do. To her surprise, she