what salander saw was a blurry figure standing a little bit behind the spectators, almost in the side street. he had on a dark padded jacket with a red patch on the shoulders and dark trousers, possibly jeans. blomkvist zoomed in so that the figure from the waist up filled the screen. the photograph became instantly fuzzier still.

"it's a man. he's about five-foot eleven, normal build. he has dark-blond, semi-long hair and is clean-shaven. but it's impossible to make out his facial features or even estimate his age. he could be anywhere between his teens and middle age.

"you could manipulate the image..."

"i have manipulated the image, dammit. i even sent a copy to the image processing wizard at millennium." blomkvist clicked up a new shot. "this is the absolute best i can get out of it. the camera is simply too lousy and the distance too far."

"have you shown the picture to anyone? someone might recognise the man's bearing or..."

"i showed it to frode. he has no idea who the man is."

"herr frode probably isn't the most observant person in hedestad."

"no, but i'm working for him and henrik vanger. i want to show the picture to henrik before i cast the net wider."

"perhaps he's nothing more than a spectator."

"that's possible. but he managed to trigger a strange response from harriet."

during the next several days blomkvist and salander worked on the harriet case virtually every waking moment. salander went on reading the police report, rattling off one question after another. there could only be one truth, and each vague answer or uncertainty led to more intense interrogation. they spent one whole day examining timetables for the cast of characters at the scene of the accident on the bridge.

salander became more and more of an enigma to him. despite the fact that she only skimmed the documents in the report, she always seemed to settle on the most obscure and contradictory details.

they took a break in the afternoons, when the heat made it unbearable out in the garden. they would swim in the channel or walk up to the terrace at susanne's bridge cafe. susanne now treated blomkvist with an undisguised coolness. he realised that salander looked barely legal and she was obviously living at his cottage, and that - in susanne's eyes - made him a dirty old middle-aged man. it was not pleasant.

blomkvist went out every evening for a run. salander made no comment when he returned out of breath to the cottage. running was obviously not her thing.

"i'm over forty," he said. "i have to exercise to keep from getting too fat around the middle."

"i see."

"don't you ever exercise?"

"i box once in a while."

"you box?"

"yeah, you know, with gloves."

"what weight do you box in?" he said, when he emerged from the shower.

"none at all. i spar a little now and then against the guys in a club in soder."

why is that no surprise? he thought. but at least she had told him something about herself. he knew no basic facts about her. how did she come to be working for armansky? what sort of education did she have? what did her parents do? as soon as blomkvist tried to ask about her life she shut up like a clam, answered in single syllables or ignored him.

one afternoon salander suddenly put down a binder, frowning.

"what do you know about otto falk? the pastor."

"not much. i met the present incumbent a few times earlier in the year, and she told me that falk lives in some geriatric home in hedestad. alzheimer's."

"where did he come from?"

"from hedestad. he studied in uppsala."

"he was unmarried. and harriet hung out with him."

"why do you ask?"

"i'm just saying that morell went pretty easy on him in the interview."

"in the sixties pastors enjoyed a considerably different status in society. it was natural for him to live out here on the island, close to the power brokers, so to speak."

"i wonder how carefully the police searched the parsonage. in the photographs it looks like it was a big wooden house, and there must have been plenty of places to hide a body for a while."

"that's true, but there's nothing in the material to indicate that he would have any connection to the serial murders or to harriet's disappearance."

"actually, there is," salander said, with a wry smile. "first of all he was a pastor, and pastors more than anyone else have a special relationship to the bible. second, he was the last person known to have seen and talked with harriet."

"but he went down to the scene of the accident and stayed there for several hours. he's in lots of the pictures, especially during the time when harriet must have vanished."

"all right, i can't crack his alibi. but i was actually thinking about something else. this story is about a sadistic killer of women."

"so?"

"i was... i had a little time to myself this spring and read quite a bit about sadists in a rather different context. one of the things i read was an fbi manual. it claimed that a striking portion of convicted serial killers came from dysfunctional homes and tortured animals in their childhood. some of the convicted american serial killers were also arrested for arson. tortured animals and arson crop up in several of harriet's murder cases, but what i was really thinking about was the fact that the parsonage burned down in the late seventies."

"it's a long shot," blomkvist said.

lisbeth nodded. "agreed. but i find nothing in the police report about the cause of the fire, and it would be very interesting to know if there were other unexplained fires hereabouts in the sixties. it would also be worth checking to see if there were any cases of animal abuse or mutilation in the area back then."

when salander went to bed on her seventh night in hedeby, she was mildly irritated with blomkvist. for almost a week she had spent practically every waking minute with him. normally seven minutes of another person's company was enough to give her a headache, so she set things up to live as a recluse. she was perfectly content as long as people left her in peace. unfortunately society was not very smart or understanding; she had to protect herself from social authorities, child welfare authorities, guardianship authorities, tax authorities, police, curators, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers, and bouncers, who (apart from the guys watching the door at kvarnen, who by this time knew who she was) would never let her into the bar even though she was twenty-five. there was a whole army of people who seemed not to have anything better to do than to try to disrupt her life, and, if they were given the opportunity, to correct the way she had chosen to live it.

it did no good to cry, she had learned that early on. she had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse. consequently it was up to her to solve her problems by herself, using whatever methods she deemed necessary. something that advokat bjurman had found out the hard way.

blomkvist had the same tiresome habit as everyone else, poking around in her life and asking questions. on the other hand, he did not react at all like most other men she had met.

when she ignored his questions he simply shrugged and left her in peace. astounding.

her immediate move, when she got hold of his ibook that first morning, had naturally been to transfer all the information to her own computer. that way it was ok if he dumped her from the case; she would still have access to the material.

she had expected a furious outburst when he appeared for his breakfast. instead he had looked almost resigned, muttered something sarcastic, and gone off to the shower. then he began discussing what she had read. a strange guy. she might even be deluded into thinking that he trusted her.

that he knew about her propensities as a hacker was serious. salander was aware that the legal description of the kind of hacking she did, both professionally and as a hobby, was "unlawful data trespassing" and could earn her two years in prison. she did not want to be locked up. in her case a prison sentence would mean that her computers would be taken from her, and with them the only occupation that she was really good at. she had never told armansky how she gathered the information they were paying her to find.

with the exception of plague and a few people on the net who, like her, devoted themselves to hacking on a professional level - and most of them knew her only as "wasp" and did not know who she was or where she lived - kalle blomkvist was the only one who had stumbled on to her secret. he had come to her because she made a blunder that not even a twelve-year-old would commit, which only proved that her brain was being eaten up by worms and that she deserved to be flogged. but instead of going crazy with rage he had hired her.

consequently she was mildly irritated with him.

when they had a snack just before she went to bed, he had suddenly asked her if she was a good hacker.

to her own surprise she replied, "i'm probably the best in sweden. there may be two or three others at about my level."

she did not doubt the accuracy of her reply. plague had once been better than she was, but she had passed him long ago.

on the other hand, it felt funny to say the words. she had never done it before. she had never had an outsider to have this sort of conversation with, and she enjoyed the fact that he seemed impressed by her talents. then he had ruined the feeling by asking another question: how had she taught herself hacking?

what could she say? i've always been able to do it. instead she went to bed without saying goodnight.

irritating her yet further, he did not react when she left so abruptly. she lay listening to him moving about in the kitchen, clearing the table and washing the dishes. he had always stayed up later than she did, but now he was obviously on his way to bed too. she heard him in the bathroom, and then he went into his bedroom and shut the door. after a while she heard the bed creak when he got into it, not a yard away from her own but on the other side of the wall.

she had been sharing a house with him for a week, and he had not once flirted with her. he had worked with her, asked her opinion, slapped her on the knuckles figuratively speaking when she was on the wrong track, and acknowledged that she was right when she corrected him. dammit, he had treated her like a human being.

she got out of bed and stood by the window, restlessly peering into the dark. the hardest thing for her was to show herself naked to another person for the first time. she was convinced that her skinny body was repulsive. her breasts were pathetic. she had no hips to speak of. she did not have much to offer. apart from that she was a quite normal woman, with the same desires and sex drive as every other woman. she stood there for the next twenty minutes before she made up her mind.

blomkvist was reading a novel by sara paretsky when he heard the door handle turn and looked up to see salander. she had a sheet wrapped round her body and stood in the doorway for a moment.

"you ok?" he said.

she shook her head.

"what is it?"

she went over to his bed, took the book, and put it on the bedside table. then she bent down and kissed him on the mouth. she quickly got into his bed and sat looking at him, searching him. she put her hand on the sheet over his stomach. when he did not protest she leaned over and bit him on the nipple.

blomkvist was flabbergasted. he took her shoulders and pushed her away a little so that he could see her face.

"lisbeth... i don't know if this is such a good idea. we have to work together."

"i want to have sex with you. and i won't have any problem working with you, but i will have a hell of a problem with you if you kick me out."

"but we hardly know each other."

she laughed, an abrupt laugh that sounded almost like a cough.

"you've never let anything like that stand in your way before. in fact, as i didn't say in my background report, you're one of these guys who can't keep his hands off women. so what's wrong? aren't i sexy enough for you?"

blomkvist shook his head and tried to think of something clever to say. when he couldn't she pulled the sheet off him and sat astride him.

"i don't have any condoms," he said.

"screw it."

when he woke up, he heard her in the kitchen. it was not yet 7:00. he may only have slept for two hours, and he stayed in bed, dozing.

this woman baffled him. at absolutely no point had she even with a glance indicated that she was the least bit interested in him.

"good morning," she said from the doorway. she even had the hint of a smile.

"hi."

"we are out of milk. i'll go to the petrol station. they open at seven." and she was gone.

he heard her go out of the front door. he shut his eyes. then he heard the front door open again and seconds later she was back in the doorway. this time she was not smiling.

"you'd better come and look at this," she said in a strange voice.

blomkvist was on his feet at once and pulled on his jeans.

during the night someone had been to the cottage with an unwelcome present. on the porch lay the half-charred corpse of a cat. the cat's legs and head had been cut off, then the body had been flayed and the guts and stomach removed, flung next to the corpse, which seemed to have been roasted over a fire. the cat's head was intact, on the saddle of salander's motorcycle. he recognised the reddish-brown fur.

chapter 22

thursday, july 10

they ate breakfast in the garden in silence and without milk in their coffee. salander had taken out a canon digital camera and photographed the macabre tableau before blomkvist got a rubbish sack and cleaned it away. he put the cat in the boot of the volvo. he ought to file a police report for animal cruelty, possibly intimidation, but he did not think he would want to explain why the intimidation had taken place.