worked late on the bookkeeping and was there alone. She must have let the killer
in voluntarily. She was raped and strangled to death.”
“That doesn’t sound quite like Harriet’s list, does it?”
“Not exactly, if it weren’t for one thing. The killer concluded his barbarities by
shoving a parakeet up her vagina and then let all the animals out into the shop.
Cats, turtles, white mice, rabbits, birds. Even the fish in the aquarium. So it was
quite an appalling scene her sister encountered in the morning.”
Blomkvist made a note.
“She was murdered in August 1960, four months after the murder of the farmer’s
wife Magda Lovisa in Karlstad. In both instances they were women who worked
professionally with animals, and in both cases there was an animal sacrifice. The
cow in Karlstad may have survived—but I can imagine it would be difficult to stab a
cow to death with a knife. A parakeet is more straightforward. And besides, there
was an additional animal sacrifice.”
“What?”
Salander told the story of the “pigeon murder” of Lea Persson. Blomkvist sat for so
long in silence and in thought that even Salander grew impatient.
“I’ll buy your theory,” he said at last. “There’s one case left.”
“A case that I discovered by chance. I don’t know how many I may have missed.”
“Tell me about it.”
“February 1966 in Uppsala. The victim was a seventeen-year-old gymnast called
Lena Andersson. She disappeared after a class party and was found three days later
in a ditch on the Uppsala plain, quite a way out of town. She had been murdered
somewhere else and her body dumped there. This murder got a lot of attention in
the media, but the true circumstances surrounding her death were never reported.
The girl had been grotesquely tortured. I read the pathologist’s report. She was
tortured with fire. Her hands and breasts were atrociously burned, and she had
been burned repeatedly at various spots all over her body. They found paraffin
stains on her, which showed that candles had been used, but her hands were so
charred that they must have been held over a more powerful fire. Finally, the killer
sawed off her head and tossed it next to the body.”