They ate dinner late. Blomkvist was suddenly dead tired and had a splitting
headache. He could hardly talk any more, so he went to bed.
Salander stayed up reading the report until 2:00.
CHAPTER 23
Friday, July 11
He awoke at 6:00 with the sun shining through a gap in the curtains right in his
face. He had a vague headache, and it hurt when he touched the bandage.
Salander was asleep on her stomach with one arm flung over him. He looked down
at the dragon on her shoulder blade.
He counted her tattoos. As well as a wasp on her neck, she had a loop around one
ankle, another loop around the biceps of her left arm, a Chinese symbol on her hip,
and a rose on one calf.
He got out of bed and pulled the curtains tight. He went to the bathroom and then
padded back to bed, trying to get in without waking her.
A couple of hours later over breakfast Blomkvist said, “How are we going to solve
this puzzle?”
“We sum up the facts we have. We try to find more.”
“For me, the only question is: why? Is it because we’re trying to solve the mystery
about Harriet, or because we’ve uncovered a hitherto unknown serial killer?”
“There must be a connection,” Salander said. “If Harriet realised that there was a
serial killer, it can only have been someone she knew. If we look at the cast of
characters in the sixties, there were at least two dozen possible candidates. Today
hardly any of them are left except Harald Vanger, who is not running around in the
woods of Fröskogen at almost ninety-three with a gun. Everybody is either too old
to be of any danger today, or too young to have been around in the fifties. So we’re
back to square one.”