Cecilia Vanger kept her distance. Blomkvist did not want to be importunate, so he
waited a week before he went to her house. She let him in.
“You must think I’m quite foolish, a fifty-six-year-old, respectable headmistress
acting like a teenage girl.”
“Cecilia, you’re a grown woman. You have the right to do whatever you want.”
“I know and that’s why I’ve decided not to see you any more. I can’t stand...”
“Please, you don’t owe me an explanation. I hope we’re still friends.”
“I would like for us to remain friends. But I can’t deal with a relationship with you. I
haven’t ever been good at relationships. I’d like it if you would leave me in peace
for a while.”
CHAPTER 16
Sunday, June 1–Tuesday, June 10
After six months of fruitless cogitation, the case of Harriet Vanger cracked open. In
the first week of June, Blomkvist uncovered three totally new pieces of the puzzle.
Two of them he found himself. The third he had help with.
After Berger’s visit in May, he had studied the album again, sitting for three hours,
looking at one photograph after another, as he tried to rediscover what it was that
he had reacted to. He failed again, so he put the album aside and went back to
work on the family chronicle instead.
One day in June he was in Hedestad, thinking about something altogether
different, when his bus turned on to Järnvägsgatan and it suddenly came to him
what had been germinating in the back of his mind. The insight struck him like a
thunderbolt out of a clear sky. He felt so confused that he stayed on the bus all the
way to the last stop by the railway station. There he took the first bus back to
Hedeby to check whether he had remembered correctly.