“We have to go to the police about this.”

“Not we. You can go to the police if you like. It’s your decision.”

“This can’t be brushed under a carpet.”

“I’m not suggesting that it should be brushed anywhere, just that you leave me and Mikael out of it. When you discover the room, you draw your own conclusions and decide for yourself who you want to tell.”

“If what you say is true, it means that Martin has kidnapped and murdered women…there must be families that are desperate because they don’t know where their children are. We can’t just…”

“That’s right. But there’s just one problem. The bodies are gone. Maybe you’ll find passports or ID cards in some drawer. Maybe some of the victims can be identified from the videotapes. But you don’t need to decide today. Think it over.”

Frode looked panic-stricken.

“Oh, dear God. This will be the death blow for the company. Think of how many families will lose their livelihood if it gets out that Martin…”

Frode rocked back and forth, juggling with a moral dilemma.

“That’s one issue. If Isabella Vanger is to inherit, you may think it would be inappropriate if she were the first one to light upon her son’s hobby.”

“I have to go and see…”

“I think you should stay away from that room today,” Salander said sharply. “You have a lot of things to take care of. You have to go and tell Henrik, and you have to call a special meeting of the board and do all those things you chaps do when your CEO dies.”

Frode thought about what she was saying. His heart was thumping. He was the old attorney and problem-solver who was expected to have a plan ready to meet any eventuality, yet he felt powerless to act. It suddenly dawned on him that here he was, taking orders from a child. She had somehow seized control of the situation and given him the guidelines that he himself was unable to formulate.

“And Harriet…?”

“Mikael and I are not finished yet. But you can tell Herr Vanger that I think now that we’re going to solve it.”

Martin Vanger’s unexpected demise was the top story on the 9:00 news on the radio when Blomkvist woke up. Nothing was reported about the night’s events other than to say that the industrialist had inexplicably and at high speed crossed to the wrong side of the E4, travelling south. He had been alone in the car.

The local radio ran a story that dealt with concern for the future of the Vanger Corporation and the consequences that this death would inevitably have for the company.

A hastily composed lunchtime update from the TT wire service had the headline A TOWN IN SHOCK, and it summed up the problems of the Vanger Corporation. It escaped no-one’s notice that in Hedestad alone more than 3,000 of the town’s 21,000 inhabitants were employed by the Vanger Corporation or were otherwise dependent on the prosperity of the company. The firm’s CEO was dead, and the former CEO was seriously ill after a heart attack. There was no natural heir. All this at a time considered to be among the most critical in the company’s history.

Blomkvist had had the option of going to the police in Hedestad and telling them what had happened that night, but Salander had already set a certain process in motion. Since he had not immediately called the police, it became harder to do so with each hour that passed. He spent the morning in gloomy silence, sitting on the kitchen bench, watching the rain outside. Around 10:00 there was another cloudburst, but by lunchtime the rain had stopped and the wind had died down a bit. He went out and wiped off the garden furniture and then sat there with a mug of coffee. He was wearing a shirt with the collar turned up.

Martin’s death cast a shadow, of course, over the daily life of Hedeby. Cars began parking outside Isabella Vanger’s house as the clan gathered to offer condolences. Salander observed the procession without emotion.

“How are you feeling?” she said at last.

“I think I’m still in shock,” he said. “I was helpless. For several hours I was convinced that I was going to die. I felt the fear of death and there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

He stretched out his hand and placed it on her knee.

“Thank you,” he said. “But for you, I would be dead.”

Salander smiled her crooked smile.

“All the same…I don’t understand how you could be such an idiot as to tackle him on your own. I was chained to the floor down there, praying that you’d see the picture and put two and two together and call the police.”

“If I’d waited for the police, you wouldn’t have survived. I wasn’t going to let that motherfucker kill you.”

“Why don’t you want to talk to the police?”

“I never talk to the authorities.”

“Why not?”

“That’s my business. But in your case, I don’t think it would be a terrific career move to be hung out to dry as the journalist who was stripped naked by Martin Vanger, the famous serial killer. If you don’t like ‘Kalle Blomkvist,’ you can think up a whole new epithet. Just don’t take it out of this chapter of your heroic life.”

Blomkvist gave her a searching look and dropped the subject.

“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.”

“So…where does that take us?”

“We know that Gottfried was responsible for the first series of murders, between 1949 and 1965.”

“OK. And he brought on little Martin.”

“Talk about a dysfunctional family,” Blomkvist said. “Martin really didn’t have a chance.”

Salander gave him a strange look.

“What Martin told me-even though it was rambling-was that his father started his apprenticeship after he reached puberty. He was there at the murder of Lea in Uddevalla in 1962. He was fourteen, for God’s sake. He was there at the murder of Sara in 1964 and that time he took an active part. He was sixteen.”

“And?”

“He said that he had never touched another man-except his father. That made me think that…well, the only possible conclusion is that his father raped him. Martin called it ‘his duty.’ The sexual assaults must have gone on for a long time. He was raised by his father, so to speak.”