Three other people in the Vanger family lived on Hedeby Island. Alexander Vanger,
son of Greger, born in 1946, lived in a renovated wooden house. Vanger told
Blomkvist that Alexander was presently in the West Indies, where he gave himself
over to his favourite pastimes: sailing and whiling away the time, not doing a scrap
of work. Alexander had been twenty and he had been there on that day.
Alexander shared the house with his mother, Gerda, eighty years old and widow of
Greger Vanger. Blomkvist had never seen her; she was mostly bedridden.
The third family member was Harald Vanger. During his first month Blomkvist had
not managed even a glimpse of him. Harald’s house, the one closest to Blomkvist’s
cabin, looked gloomy and ominous with its blackout curtains drawn across all the
windows. Blomkvist sometimes thought he saw a ripple in the curtains as he
passed, and once when he was about to go to bed late, he noticed a glimmer of
light coming from a room upstairs. There was a gap in the curtains. For more than
twenty minutes he stood in the dark at his own kitchen window and watched the
light before he got fed up and, shivering, went to bed. In the morning the curtains
were back in place.
Harald seemed to be an invisible but ever-present spirit who affected life in the
village by his absence. In Blomkvist’s imagination, Harald increasingly took on the
form of an evil Gollum who spied on his surroundings from behind the curtains and
devoted himself to no-one-knew-what matters in his barricaded cavern.
Harald was visited once a day by the home-help service (usually an elderly woman)
from the other side of the bridge. She would bring bags of groceries, trudging
through the snowdrifts up to his door. Nilsson shook his head when Blomkvist
asked about Harald. He had offered to do the shovelling, he said, but Harald did not
want anyone to set foot on his property. Only once, during the first winter after
Harald had returned to Hedeby Island, did Nilsson drive the tractor up there to
clear the snow from the courtyard, just as he did for all the other driveways. Harald
had come out of his house at a startling pace, yelling and gesticulating until Nilsson
went away.
Unfortunately, Nilsson was unable to clear Blomkvist’s yard because the gate was
too narrow for the tractor. A snow shovel and manual labour were still the only way
to do it.