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?”
“Because it’s the only reasonable conclusion.” Vanger held up one finger. “From the outset I hoped that she had run away. But as the days passed, we all realised that this wasn’t the case. I mean, how would a sixteen-year-old from such a protected world, even a very able girl, be able to manage on her own? How could she stay hidden without being discovered? Where would she get money? And even if she got a job somewhere, she would need a social security card and an address.”
He held up two fingers.
“My next thought was that she had had some kind of accident. Can you do me a favour? Go to the desk and open the top drawer. There’s a map there.”
Blomkvist did as he was asked and unfolded the map on the coffee table. Hedeby Island was an irregularly shaped land mass about two miles long with a maximum width of about one mile. A large part of the island was covered by forest. There was a built-up area by the bridge and around the little summer-house harbour. On the other side of the island was the smallholding, Östergården, from which the unfortunate Aronsson had started out in his car.
“Remember that she couldn’t have left the island,” Vanger said. “Here on Hedeby Island you could die in an accident just like anywhere else. You could be struck by lightning—but there was no thunderstorm that day. You could be trampled to death by a horse, fall down a well, or tumble into a rock crevice. There are no doubt hundreds of ways to fall victim to an accident here. I’ve thought of most of them.”
He held up three fingers.
“There’s just one catch, and this also applies to the third possibility—that the girl, contrary to every indication, took her own life. Her body must be somewhere in this limited area.”
Vanger slammed his fist down on the map.
“In the days after she disappeared, we searched everywhere, crisscrossing the island. The men waded through every ditch, scoured every patch of field, cliff, and uprooted tree. We went through every building, chimney, well, barn, and hidden garret.”
The old man looked away from Blomkvist and stared into the darkness outside the window. His voice grew lower and more intimate.
“The whole autumn I looked for her, even after the search parties stopped and people had given up. When I wasn’t tending to my work I began going for walks back and forth across the island. Winter came on and we still hadn’t found a trace of her. In the spring I kept on looking until I realised how preposterous my search was. When summer came I hired three experienced woodsmen who did the entire search over again with dogs. They combed every square foot of the island. By that time I had begun to think that someone must have killed her. So they also searched for a grave. They worked at it for three months. We found not the slightest vestige of the girl. It was as if she had dissolved into thin air.”
“I can think of a number of possibilities,” Blomkvist ventured.
“Let’s hear them.”
“She could have drowned, accidentally or on purpose. This is an island, and water can hide most things.”
“True, but the probability isn’t great. Consider the following: if Harriet met with an accident and drowned, logically it must have occurred somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the village. Remember that the excitement on the bridge was the most sensational thing that had happened here on Hedeby Island in several decades. It was not a time when a sixteen-year-old girl with a normal sense of