“This is the interesting picture,” Vanger said. “As far as we could determine it was
taken between 3:40 and 3:45, or about 45 minutes after Harriet ran into Falk. Take a
look at the house, the middle second floor window. That’s Harriet’s room. In the
preceding picture the window was closed. Here it’s open.”
“Someone must have been in Harriet’s room.”
“I asked everyone; nobody would admit to opening the window.”
“Which means that either Harriet did it herself, and she was still alive at that point,
or else that someone was lying to you. But why would a murderer go into her room
and open the window? And why should anyone lie about it?”
Vanger shook his head. No explanation presented itself.
“Harriet disappeared sometime around 3:00 or shortly thereafter. These pictures
give an impression of where certain people were at that time. That’s why I can
eliminate a number of people from the list of suspects. For the same reason I can
conclude that some people who were not in the photographs at that time must be
added to the list of suspects.”
“You didn’t answer my question about how you think the body was removed. I
realise, of course, that there must be some plausible explanation. Some sort of
common old illusionist’s trick.”
“There are actually several very practical ways it could have been done. Sometime
around 3:00 the killer struck. He or she presumably didn’t use any sort of weapon—
or we would have found traces of blood. I’m guessing that Harriet was strangled
and I’m guessing that it happened here—behind the wall in the courtyard,
somewhere out of the photographer’s line of sight and in a blind spot from the
house. There’s a path, if you want to take a shortcut, to the parsonage—the last
place she was seen—and back to the house. Today there’s a small flower bed and
lawn there, but in the sixties it was a gravelled area used for parking. All the killer
had to do was open the boot of a car and put Harriet inside. When we began
searching the island the next day, nobody was thinking that a crime had been
committed. We focused on the shorelines, the buildings, and the woods closest to
the village.”
“So nobody was checking the boots of cars.”