The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Page 11

 

  "If Richard personified the family's dark, fanatical side, Gottfried embodied the indolent one. When he reached the age of eighteen I decided to take him under my wing - he was my dead brother's son, after all - and you have to remember that the age difference between Gottfried and me was not so great. I was only seven years older, but by then I was on the firm's board, and it was clear that I was the one who would take over from my father, while Gottfried was more or less regarded as an outsider. "

  Vanger thought for a moment.

  "My father didn't really know how to deal with his grandson, so I was the one who gave him a job in the company. This was after the war. He did try to do a reasonable job, but he was lazy. He was a charmer and good-time Charlie; he had a way with women, and there were periods when he drank too much. It isn't easy to describe my feelings for him. . . he wasn't a good-for-nothing, but he was not the least bit reliable and he often disappointed me deeply. Over the years he turned into an alcoholic, and in 1965 he died - the victim of an accidental drowning. That happened at the other end of Hedeby Island, where he'd had a cabin built, and where he used to hide away to drink. "

  "So he's the father of Harriet and Martin?" Blomkvist said, pointing at the portrait on the coffee table. Reluctantly he had to admit that the old man's story was intriguing.

  "Correct. In the late forties Gottfried met a German woman by the name of Isabella Koenig, who had come to Sweden after the war. She was quite a beauty - I mean that she had a lovely radiance like Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. Harriet probably got more of her genes from her mother rather than from Gottfried. As you can see from the photograph, she was pretty even at fourteen. "

  Blomkvist and Vanger contemplated the picture.

  "But let me continue. Isabella was born in 1928 and is still alive. She was eleven when the war began, and you can imagine what it was like to be a teenager in Berlin during the aerial bombardments. It must have felt as if she had arrived in paradise on earth when she landed in Sweden. Regrettably she shared many of Gottfried's vices; she was lazy and partied incessantly. She travelled a great deal in Sweden and abroad, and lacked all sense of responsibility. Obviously this affected the children. Martin was born in 1948 and Harriet in 1950. Their childhood was chaotic, with a mother who was forever leaving them and a father who was virtually an alcoholic.

  "In 1958 I'd had enough and decided to try to break the vicious cycle. At the time, Gottfried and Isabella were living in Hedestad - I insisted that they move out here. Martin and Harriet were more or less left to fend for themselves. "

  Vanger glanced at the clock.

  "My thirty minutes are almost up, but I'm close to the end of the story. Will you give me a reprieve?"

  "Go on," Blomkvist said.

  "In short, then. I was childless - in striking contrast to my brothers and other family members, who seemed obsessed with the need to propagate the house of Vanger. Gottfried and Isabella did move here, but their marriage was on the rocks. After only a year Gottfried moved out to his cabin. He lived there alone for long periods and went back to Isabella when it got too cold. I took care of Martin and Harriet, and they became in many ways the children I never had.

  "Martin was. . . to tell the truth, there was a time in his youth when I was afraid he was going to follow in his father's footsteps. He was weak and introverted and melancholy, but he could also be delightful and enthusiastic. He had some troubled years in his teens, but he straightened himself out when he started at the university. He is. . . well, in spite of everything he is CEO of what's left of the Vanger Corporation, which I suppose is to his credit. "

  "And Harriet?"

  "Harriet was the apple of my eye. I tried to give her a sense of security and develop her self-confidence, and we took a liking to each other. I looked on her as my own daughter, and she ended up being closer to me than to her parents. You see, Harriet was very special. She was introverted - like her brother - and as a teenager she became wrapped up in religion, unlike anyone else in the family. But she had a clear talent and she was tremendously intelligent. She had both morals and backbone. When she was fourteen or fifteen I was convinced that she was the one - and not her brother or any of the mediocre cousins, nephews, and nieces around me - who was destined to run the Vanger business one day, or at least play a central role in it. "

  "So what happened?"

  "Now we come to the real reason I want to hire you. I want you to find out who in the family murdered Harriet, and who since then has spent almost forty years trying to drive me insane. "

  CHAPTER 5

  Thursday, December 26

  For the first time since he began his monologue, the old man had managed to take Blomkvist by surprise. He had to ask him to repeat it to be sure he had heard correctly. Nothing in the cuttings had hinted at a murder.

  "It was September 24, 1966. Harriet was sixteen and had just begun her second year at prep school. It was a Saturday, and it turned into the worst day of my life. I've gone over the events so many times that I think I can account for what happened in every minute of that day - except the most important thing. "

  He made a sweeping gesture. "Here in this house a great number of my family had gathered. It was the loathsome annual dinner. It was a tradition which my father's father introduced and which generally turned into pretty detestable affairs. The tradition came to an end in the eighties, when Martin simply decreed that all discussions about the business would take place at regular board meetings and by voting. That's the best decision he ever made. "

  "You said that Harriet was murdered. . . "

  "Wait. Let me tell you what happened. It was a Saturday, as I said. It was also the day of the party, with the Children's Day parade that was arranged by the sports club in Hedestad. Harriet had gone into the town during the day and watched the parade with some of her schoolfriends. She came back here to Hedeby Island just after 2:00 in the afternoon. Dinner was supposed to begin at 5:00, and she was expected to take part along with the other young people in the family. "

  Vanger got up and went over to the window. He motioned Blomkvist to join him, and pointed.

  "At 2:15, a few minutes after Harriet came home, a dramatic accident occurred out there on the bridge. A man called Gustav Aronsson, brother of a farmer at ostergarden - a smallholding on Hedeby Island - turned on to the bridge and crashed head-on with an oil truck. Evidently both were going too fast and what should have been a minor collision proved a catastrophe. The driver of the truck, presumably instinctively, turned his wheel away from the car, hit the railing of the bridge and the tanker flipped over; it ended up across the bridge with its trailer hanging over the edge. One of the railings had been driven into the oil tank and flammable heating oil began spurting out. In the meantime Aronsson sat pinned inside his car, screaming in pain. The tanker driver was also injured but managed to scramble out of his cabin. "

  The old man went back to his chair.

  "The accident actually had nothing to do with Harriet. But it was significant in a crucial way. A shambles ensued: people on both sides of the bridge hurried to try to help; the risk of fire was significant and a major alarm was sounded. Police officers, an ambulance, the rescue squad, the fire brigade, reporters and sightseers arrived in rapid succession. Naturally all of them assembled on the mainland side; here on the island side we did what we could to get Aronsson out of the wreck, which proved to be damnably difficult. He was pinned in and seriously injured.

  "We tried to prise him loose with our bare hands, and that didn't work. He would have to be cut or sawed out, but we couldn't do anything that risked striking a spark; we were standing in the middle of a sea of oil next to a tanker truck lying on its side. If it had exploded we would have all been killed. It took a long time before we could get help from the mainland side; the truck was wedged right across the bridge, and climbing over it would have been the same as climbing over a bomb. "

  Blomkvist could not r
esist the feeling that the old man was telling a meticulously rehearsed story, deliberately to capture his interest. The man was an excellent storyteller, no question. On the other hand, where was the story heading?

  "What matters about the accident is that the bridge was blocked for twenty-four hours. Not until Sunday evening was the last of the oil pumped out, and then the truck could be lifted up by crane and the bridge opened for traffic. During these twenty-four hours Hedeby Island was to all intents and purposes cut off from the rest of the world. The only way to get across to the mainland was on a fireboat that was brought in to transport people from the small-boat harbour on this side to the old harbour below the church. For several hours the boat was used only by rescue crews - it wasn't until quite late on Saturday night that stranded islanders began to be ferried across. Do you understand the significance of this?"

  "I assume that something happened to Harriet here on the island," Blomkvist said, "and that the list of suspects consists of the finite number of people trapped here. A sort of locked-room mystery in island format?"

  Vanger smiled ironically. "Mikael, you don't know how right you are. Even I have read my Dorothy Sayers. These are the facts: Harriet arrived here on the island about 2:10. If we also include children and unmarried guests, all in all about forty family members arrived in the course of the day. Along with servants and residents, there were sixty-four people either here or near the farm. Some of them - the ones who were going to spend the night - were busy getting settled in neighbouring farms or in guest rooms.

  "Harriet had previously lived in a house across the road, but given that neither Gottfried nor Isabella was consistently stable, and one could clearly see how that upset the girl, undermined her studies and so on, in 1964, when she was fourteen, I arranged for her to move into my house. Isabella probably thought that it was just fine to be spared the responsibility for her daughter. Harriet had been living here for the past two years. So this is where she came that day. We know that she met and exchanged some words with Harald in the courtyard - he's one of my older brothers. Then she came up the stairs, to this room, and said hello to me. She said that she wanted to talk to me about something. Right then I had some other family members with me and I couldn't spare the time for her. But she seemed anxious and I promised I'd come to her room when I was free. She left through that door, and that was the last time I saw her. A minute or so later there was the crash on the bridge and the bedlam that followed upset all our plans for the day. "

  "How did she die?"

  "It's more complicated than that, and I have to tell the story in chronological order. When the accident occurred, people dropped whatever they were doing and ran to the scene. I was. . . I suppose I took charge and was feverishly occupied for the next few hours. Harriet came down to the bridge right away - several people saw her - but the danger of an explosion made me instruct anyone who wasn't involved in getting Aronsson out of his car to stay well back. Five of us remained. There were myself and my brother Harald. There was a man named Magnus Nilsson, one of my workers. There was a sawmill worker named Sixten Nordlander who had a house down by the fishing harbour. And there was a fellow named Jerker Aronsson. He was only sixteen, and I should really have sent him away, but he was the nephew of Gustav in the car.

  "At about 2:40 Harriet was in the kitchen here in the house. She drank a glass of milk and talked briefly to Astrid, our cook. They looked out of the window at the commotion down at the bridge.

  "At 2:55 Harriet crossed the courtyard. She was seen by Isabella. About a minute later she ran into Otto Falk, the pastor in Hedeby. At that time the parsonage was where Martin Vanger has his villa today, and the pastor lived on this side of the bridge. He had been in bed, nursing a cold, when the accident took place; he had missed the drama, but someone had telephoned and he was on his way to the bridge. Harriet stopped him on the road and apparently wanted to say something to him, but he waved her off and hurried past. Falk was the last person to see her alive. "

  "How did she die?" Blomkvist said again.

  "I don't know," Vanger said with a troubled expression. "We didn't get Aronsson out of his car until around 5:00 - he survived, by the way, although he was not in good shape - and sometime after 6:00 the threat of fire was considered past. The island was still cut off, but things began to calm down. It wasn't until we sat down at the table to have our longdelayed dinner around 8:00 that we discovered Harriet was missing. I sent one of the cousins to get Harriet from her room, but she came back to say that she couldn't find her. I didn't think much about it; I probably assumed she had gone for a walk or she hadn't been told that dinner was served. And during the evening I had to deal with various discussions and arguments with the family. So it wasn't until the next morning, when Isabella went to find her, that we realised that nobody knew where Harriet was and that no-one had seen her since the day before. " He spread his arms out wide. "And from that day, she has been missing without a trace. "

  "Missing?" Blomkvist echoed.

  "For all these years we haven't been able to find one microscopic scrap of her. "

  "But if she vanished, as you say, you can't be sure that she was murdered. "

  "I understand the objection. I've had thoughts along the same lines. When a person vanishes without a trace, one of four things could have happened. She could have gone off of her own free will and be hiding somewhere. She could have had an accident and died. She could have committed suicide. And finally, she could have been the victim of a crime. I've weighed all these possibilities. "

  "But you believe that someone took Harriet's life. Why?"