Vanger gestured towards the tray, but Blomkvist pretended not to see; instead he made a tour of the room, first studying the bookshelf and then the wall of framed flowers. The desk was orderly, only a few papers in one heap. At its edge was a silver-framed photograph of a dark-haired girl, beautiful but with a mischievous look; a young woman on her way to becoming dangerous, he thought. It was apparently a confirmation portrait that had faded over the years it had been there.

“Do you remember her, Mikael?” Vanger said.

“Remember?”

“Yes, you met her. And actually you have been in this room before.”

Blomkvist turned and shook his head.

“No, how could you remember? I knew your father. I hired Kurt first as an installer and machinist several times in the fifties and sixties. He was a talented man. I tried to persuade him to keep studying and become an engineer. You were here the whole summer of 1963, when we put new machinery in the paper mill in Hedestad. It was hard to find a place for your family to live, so we solved it by letting you live in the wooden house across the road. You can see it from the window.”

Vanger picked up the photograph.

“This is Harriet Vanger, granddaughter of my brother Richard. She took care of you many times that summer. You were two, going on three. Maybe you were already three then-I don’t recall. She was thirteen.”

“I am sorry, but I don’t have the least recollection of what you’re telling me.” Blomkvist could not even be sure that Vanger was telling the truth.

“I understand. But I remember you. You used to run around everywhere on the farm with Harriet in tow. I could hear your shrieks whenever you fell. I remember I gave you a toy once, a yellow, sheet-metal tractor that I had played with myself as a boy. You were crazy about it. I think that was the colour.”

Blomkvist felt a chill inside. The yellow tractor he did remember. When he was older it had stood on a shelf in his bedroom.

“Do you remember that toy?”

“I do. And you will be amused to know that the tractor is still alive and well, at the Toy Museum in Stockholm. They put out a call for old original toys ten years ago.”

“Really?” Vanger chuckled with delight. “Let me show you…”

The old man went over to the bookshelf and pulled a photograph album from one of the lower shelves. Blomkvist noticed that he had difficulty bending over and had to brace himself on the bookshelf when he straightened up. He laid the album on the coffee table. He knew what he was looking for: a black-and-white snapshot in which the photographer’s shadow showed in the bottom left corner. In the foreground was a fair-haired boy in shorts, staring at the camera with a slightly anxious expression.

“This is you. Your parents are sitting on the garden bench in the background. Harriet is partly hidden by your mother, and the boy to the left of your father is Harriet’s brother, Martin, who runs the Vanger company today.”

Blomkvist’s mother was obviously pregnant-his sister was on the way. He looked at the photograph with mixed feelings as Vanger poured coffee and pushed over the plate of rolls.

“Your father is dead, I know. Is your mother still alive?”

“She died three years ago,” Blomkvist said.

“She was a nice woman. I remember her very well.”

“But I’m sure you didn’t ask me to come here to talk about old times you had with my parents.”

“You’re right. I’ve been working on what I wanted to say to you for several days, but now that you’re actually here I don’t quite know where to begin. I suppose you did some research, so you know that I once wielded some influence in Swedish industry and the job market. Today I’m an old man who will probably die fairly soon, and death perhaps is an excellent starting point for our conversation.”

Blomkvist took a swallow of black coffee-plainly boiled in a pan in true Norrland style-and wondered where this was going to lead.

“I have pain in my hip and long walks are a thing of the past. One day you’ll discover for yourself how strength seeps away, but I’m neither morbid nor senile. I’m not obsessed by death, but I’m at an age when I have to accept that my time is about up. You want to close the accounts and take care of unfinished business. Do you understand what I mean?”

Blomkvist nodded. Vanger spoke in a steady voice, and Blomkvist had already decided that the old man was neither senile nor irrational. “I’m mostly curious about why I’m here,” he said again.

“Because I want to ask for your help with this closing of accounts.”

“Why me? What makes you think I’d be able to help you?”

“Because as I was thinking about hiring someone, your name cropped up in the news. I knew who you were, of course. And maybe it’s because you sat on my knee when you were a little fellow. Don’t misunderstand me.” He waved the thought away. “I don’t look to you to help me for sentimental reasons. It was just that I had the impulse to contact you specifically.”

Mikael gave a friendly laugh. “Well, I don’t remember being perched on your knee. But how could you make the connection? That was in the early sixties.”

“You misunderstood me. Your family moved to Stockholm when your father got the job as the workshop foreman at Zarinder’s Mechanical. I was the one who got him the job. I knew he was a good worker. I used to see him over the years when I had business with Zarinder’s. We weren’t close friends, but we would chat for a while. The last time I saw him was the year before he died, and he told me then that you had got into journalism school. He was extremely proud. Then you became famous with the story of the bank robber gang. I’ve followed your career and read many of your articles over the years. As a matter of fact, I read Millennium quite often.”

“OK, I’m with you, but what is it exactly that you want me to do?”

Vanger looked down at his hands, then sipped his coffee, as if he needed a pause before he could at last begin to broach what he wanted.

“Before I get started, Mikael, I’d like to make an agreement with you. I want you to do two things for me. One is a pretext and the other is my real objective.”

“What form of agreement?”

“I’m going to tell you a story in two parts. The first is about the Vanger family. That’s the pretext. It’s a long, dark story, and I’ll try to stick to the unvarnished truth. The second part of the story deals with my actual objective. You’ll probably think some of the story is…crazy. What I want is for you to hear me out-about what I want you to do and also what I am offering-before you make up your mind whether to take on the job or not.”

Blomkvist sighed. Obviously Vanger was not going to let him go in time to catch the afternoon train. He was sure that if he called Frode to ask for a lift to the station, the car would somehow refuse to start in the cold.

The old man must have thought long and hard how he was going to hook him. Blomkvist had the feeling that every last thing that had happened since he arrived was staged: the introductory surprise that as a child he had met his host, the picture of his parents in the album, and the emphasis on the fact that his father and Vanger had been friends, along with the flattery that the old man knew who Mikael Blomkvist was and that he had been following his career for years from a distance… No doubt it had a core of truth, but it was also pretty elementary psychology. Vanger was a practised manipulator-how else had he become one of Sweden ’s leading industrialists?

Blomkvist decided that Vanger wanted him to do something that he was not going to have the slightest desire to do. He had only to wrest from him what this was and then say no thank you. And just possibly be in time to catch the afternoon train.

“Forgive me, Herr Vanger,” he said, “I’ve been here already for twenty minutes. I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes more to tell me what you want. Then I’m calling a taxi and going home.”