“Yes, I’ve worked with images and have an Agfa neg. scanner of my own. I work in
PhotoShop.”
“Then you use the same equipment we do.”
Blomberg took him on a quick tour of the small office, gave him a chair at a light
table, and switched on a computer and scanner. She showed him where the coffee
machine was in the canteen area. They agreed that Blomkvist could work by
himself, but that he had to call her when he wanted to leave the office so that she
could come in and set the alarm system. Then she left him with a cheerful “Have
fun.”
The Courier had had two photographers back then. The one who had been on duty
that day was Kurt Nylund, whom Blomkvist actually knew. Nylund was in his
twenties in 1966. Then he moved to Stockholm and became a famous
photographer working both freelance and as an employee of Scanpix Sweden in
Marieberg. Blomkvist had crossed paths with Kurt Nylund several times in the
nineties, when Millennium had used images from Scanpix. He remembered him as
an angular man with thinning hair. On the day of the parade Nylund had used a
daylight film, not too fast, one which many news photographers used.
Blomkvist took out the negatives of the photographs by the young Nylund and put
them on the light table. With a magnifying glass he studied them frame by frame.
Reading negatives is an art form, requiring experience, which Blomkvist lacked. To
determine whether the photograph contained information of value he was going
to have to scan in each image and examine it on the computer screen. That would
take hours. So first he did a quite general survey of the photographs he might be
interested in.
He began by running through all the ones that had been taken of the accident.
Vanger’s collection was incomplete. The person who had copied the collection—
possibly Nylund himself—had left out about thirty photographs that were either
blurred or of such poor quality that they were not considered publishable.
Blomkvist switched off the Courier’s computer and plugged the Agfa scanner into
his own iBook. He spent two hours scanning in the rest of the images.
One caught his eye at once. Some time between 3:10 and 3:15 p.m., just at the time
when Harriet vanished, someone had opened the window in her room. Vanger had