As an alibi-if that is what it was-it was rather feeble. The times were approximate, especially the matter of when she had got back to Hedeby Island, but Vanger had not found anything to indicate that she was lying. Cecilia Vanger was one of those people in the family that Vanger liked best. And she had been his lover. How could he be objective? He certainly could not imagine her as a murderer.

Now a hitherto unknown photograph was telling him that she had lied when she said that she had never been in Harriet’s room that day. Blomkvist wrestled with the possible significance of that.

And if you lied about that, what else did you lie about?

He went through in his mind what he knew about Cecilia. An introverted person obviously affected by her past. Lived alone, had no sex life, had difficulty getting close to people. Kept her distance, and when she let loose there was no restraint. She chose a stranger for a lover. Had said that she ended it because she was unable to live with the idea that he would go from her life as unexpectedly as he had appeared. Blomkvist supposed that the reason she had dared to start an affair with him was precisely that he was only there for a while. She did not have to be afraid he would change her life in any long-term way.

He sighed and pushed the amateur psychology aside.

He made the second discovery during the night. The key to the mystery was what it was that Harriet had seen in Hedestad. He would never find that out unless he could invent a time machine and stand behind her, looking over her shoulder.

And then he had a thought. He slapped his forehead and opened his iBook. He clicked on to the uncropped images in the series on Järnvägsgatan and…there!

Behind Harriet and about a yard to her right were a young couple, the man in a striped sweater and the woman in a pale jacket. She was holding a camera. When Blomkvist enlarged the image it looked to be a Kodak Instamatic with flash-a cheap holiday camera for people who know nothing about photography.

The woman was holding the camera at chin level. Then she raised it and took a picture of the clowns, just as Harriet’s expression changed.

Blomkvist compared the camera’s position with Harriet’s line of vision. The woman had taken a picture of exactly what Harriet was looking at.

His heart was beating hard. He leaned back and plucked his cigarettes out of his breast pocket. Someone had taken a picture. How would he identify and find the woman? Could he get hold of her snapshot? Had the roll ever been developed, and if so did the prints still exist?

He opened the folder with Nylund’s photographs from the crowd. For the next couple of hours he enlarged each one and scrutinised it one square inch at a time. He did not see the couple again until the very last pictures. Nylund had photographed another clown with balloons in his hand posing in front of his camera and laughing heartily. The photographs were taken in a car park by the entrance to the sports field where the celebration was being held. It must have been after 2:00 in the afternoon. Right after that Nylund had received the alarm about the crash on the bridge and brought his portraits of Children’s Day to a rapid close.

The woman was almost hidden, but the man in the striped sweater was clearly visible, in profile. He had keys in his hand and was bending to open a car door. The focus was on the clown in the foreground, and the car was a bit fuzzy. The number plate was partly hidden but he could see that it started with “AC3.”

Number plates in the sixties began with a code indicating the county, and as a child Blomkvist had memorised the county codes. “AC” was for Västerbotten.

Then he spotted something else. On the back window was a sticker of some sort. He zoomed in, but the text dissolved in a blur. He cropped out the sticker and adjusted the contrast and sharpness. It took him a while. He still could not read the words, but he attempted to figure out what the letters were, based on the fuzzy shapes. Many letters looked surprisingly similar. An “O” could be mistaken for a “D,” a “B” for an “E,” and so on. After working with a pen and paper and excluding certain letters, he was left with an unreadable text, in one line.

R JÖ NI K RIFA RIK

He stared at the image until his eyes began to water. Then he saw the text. “NORSJÖ SNICKERIFABRIK,” followed by figures in a smaller size that were utterly impossible to read, probably a telephone number.

CHAPTER 17. Wednesday, June 11-Saturday, June 14

Blomkvist got help with the third jigsaw piece from an unexpected quarter.

After working on the images practically all night he slept heavily until well into the afternoon. He awoke with a headache, took a shower, and walked to Susanne’s for breakfast. He ought to have gone to see Vanger and report what he had discovered. Instead, when he came back, he went to Cecilia’s house and knocked on the door. He needed to ask her why she had lied to him about being in Harriet’s room. No-one came to the door.

He was just leaving when he heard: “Your whore isn’t home.”

Gollum had emerged from his cave. He was once tall, almost six foot six, but now so stooped with age that his eyes were level with Blomkvist’s. His face and neck were splotched with dark liver spots. He was in his pyjamas and a brown dressing gown, leaning on a cane. He looked like a Central Casting nasty old man.

“What did you say?”

“I said that your whore isn’t home.”

Blomkvist stepped so close that he was almost nose to nose with Harald Vanger.

“You’re talking about your own daughter, you fucking pig.”

“I’m not the one who comes sneaking over here in the night,” Harald said with a toothless smile. He smelled foul. Blomkvist sidestepped him and went down the road without looking back. He found Vanger in his office.

“I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting your brother,” Mikael said.

“Harald? Well, well, so, he’s ventured out. He does that a couple of times a year.”

“I was knocking on Cecilia’s door when this voice behind me said, quote, Your whore isn’t home, unquote.”

“That sounds like Harald,” Vanger said calmly.

“He called his own daughter a whore, for God’s sake.”

“He’s been doing that for years. That’s why they don’t talk much.”

“Why does he call her that?”

“Cecilia lost her virginity when she was twenty-one. It happened here in Hedestad after a summer romance, the year after Harriet disappeared.”

“And?”

“The man she fell in love with was called Peter Samuelsson. He was a financial assistant at the Vanger Corporation. A bright boy. Today he works for ABB. The kind of man I would have been proud to have as my son-in-law if she were my daughter. Harald measured his skull or checked his family tree or something and discovered that he was one-quarter Jewish.”

“Good Lord.”

“He’s called her a whore ever since.”

“He knew that Cecilia and I have…”

“Everybody in the village probably knows that with the possible exception of Isabella, because no-one in his right mind would tell her anything, and thank heavens she’s nice enough to go to bed at 8:00 every night. Harald on the other hand has presumably been following every step you take.”

Blomkvist sat down, looking foolish.

“You mean that everyone knows…”

“Of course.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“My dear Mikael, it’s really none of my business.”

“Where is Cecilia?”

“The school term is over. She went to London on Saturday to visit her sister, and after that she’s having a holiday in…hmmm, I think it was Florida. She’ll be back in about a month.”

Blomkvist felt even more foolish.

“We’ve sort of put our relationship on hold for a while.”