Hemmingen, 10^1 /2 miles, and another pointing towards Bastuträsk, 7 miles. Near
the crossroads was a small bridge with a creek that Blomkvist assumed was the
water, the sel. At the height of summer, it was as pretty as a postcard.
He parked in the courtyard in front of a Konsum that was no longer open, almost
opposite the third house on the right-hand side. When he knocked on the door, no-
one answered.
He took an hour-long walk along the road towards Hemmingen. He passed a spot
where the stream became rushing rapids. He met two cats and saw a deer, but not
a single person, before he turned around. Mildred Brännlund’s door was still shut.
On a post near the bridge he found a peeling flyer announcing the BTCC,
something that could be deciphered as the Bjursele Tukting Car Championship
- “Tukting” a car was apparently a winter sport that involved smashing up a
vehicle on the ice-covered lake.
He waited until 10:00 p.m. before he gave up and drove back to Norsjö, where he
had a late dinner and then went to bed to read the denouement of Val McDermid’s
novel.
It was grisly.
At 10:00 Salander added one more name to Harriet Vanger’s list. She did so with
some hesitation.
She had discovered a shortcut. At quite regular intervals articles were published
about unsolved murders, and in a Sunday supplement to the evening newspaper
she had found an article from 1999 with the headline “Many Murderers of Women
Go Free.” It was a short article, but it included the names and photographs of
several noteworthy murder victims. There was the Solveig case in Norrtälje, the
Anita murder in Norrköping, Margareta in Helsingborg, and a number of others.
The oldest case to be recounted was from the sixties, and none of the murders
matched the list that Salander had been given by Blomkvist. But one case did
attract her attention.
In June 1962 a prostitute by the name of Lea Persson from Göteborg had gone to
Uddevalla to visit her mother and her nine-year-old son, whom her mother was