“We do still have a problem,” she said.
Blomkvist nodded. “What happened to Harriet. Yes.”
Salander laid the two Polaroid pictures on the table in front of him. She explained
where she’d found them. Mikael studied the pictures intently for a while before he
looked up.
“It might be her,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t swear to it, but the shape of her body
and the hair remind me of the pictures I’ve seen.”
They sat in the garden for an hour, piecing together the details. They discovered
that each of them, independently and from different directions, had identified
Martin Vanger as the missing link.
Salander never did find the photograph that Blomkvist had left on the kitchen
table. She had come to the conclusion that Blomkvist had done something stupid
after studying the pictures from the surveillance cameras. She had gone over to
Martin Vanger’s house by way of the shore and looked in all the windows and seen
no-one. She had tried all the doors and windows on the ground floor. Finally she
had climbed in through an open balcony door upstairs. It had taken a long time,
and she had moved extremely cautiously as she searched the house, room by
room. Eventually she found the stairs down to the basement. Martin had been
careless. He left the door to his chamber of horrors ajar, and she was able to form a
clear impression of the situation.
Blomkvist asked her how much she had heard of what Martin said.
“Not much. I got there when he was asking you about what happened to Harriet,
just before he hung you up by the noose. I left for a few minutes to go back and
find a weapon.”
“Martin had no idea what happened to Harriet,” Blomkvist said.
“Do you believe that?”
“Yes,” Blomkvist said without hesitation. “Martin was dafter than a syphilitic
polecat—where do I get these metaphors from?—but he confessed to all the
crimes he had committed. I think that he wanted to impress me. But when it came
to Harriet, he was as desperate as Henrik Vanger to find out what happened.”