“Cecilia, you don’t look as if you want to give me coffee.”

“I wasn’t expecting you for another month,” she said. “You surprised me.”

He turned her around so that he could see her face. They stood in silence for a moment. She still would not look him in the eye.

“Cecilia. Forget about the coffee. What’s going on?”

She shook her head and took a deep breath.

“Mikael, I’d like you to leave. Don’t ask. Just leave.”

Mikael first walked back to the cottage, but paused at the gate, undecided. Instead of going in he went down to the water by the bridge and sat on a rock. He smoked a cigarette while he sorted out his thoughts and wondered what could have so dramatically changed Cecilia Vanger’s attitude towards him.

He suddenly heard the sound of an engine and saw a big white boat slip into the sound beneath the bridge. When it passed, Mikael saw that it was Martin Vanger standing at the wheel, with his gaze focused on avoiding sunken rocks in the water. The boat was a forty-foot motor cruiser-an impressive bundle of power. He stood up and took the beach path. He discovered that several boats were already in the water at various docks, a mixture of motorboats and sailing boats. There were several Pettersson boats, and at one dock an IF-class yacht was rocking in the wake. Other boats were larger and more expensive vessels. He noticed a Hallberg-Rassy. The boats also indicated the class distribution of Hedeby’s marina-Martin Vanger had without a doubt the largest and the plushest boat in view.

He stopped below Cecilia Vanger’s house and stole a glance at the lighted windows on the top floor. Then he went home and put on some coffee of his own. He went into his office while he waited for it to brew.

Before he presented himself at the prison he had returned the majority of Vanger’s documentation on Harriet. It had seemed wise not to leave it in an empty house. Now the shelves looked bare. He had, of the reports, only five of Vanger’s own notebooks, and these he had taken with him to Rullåker and now knew by heart. He noticed an album on the top shelf of the bookcase that he had forgotten.

He carried it to the kitchen table. He poured himself coffee and began going through it.

They were photographs that had been taken on the day Harriet disappeared. The first of them was the last photograph of Harriet, at the Children’s Day parade in Hedestad. Then there were some 180 crystal-clear pictures of the scene of the accident on the bridge. He had examined the images one by one with a magnifying glass on several occasions previously. Now he turned the pages almost absent-mindedly; he knew he was not going to find anything he had not seen before. In fact he felt all of a sudden fed up with the unexplainable disappearance of Harriet Vanger and slammed the album shut.

Restlessly he went to the kitchen window and peered out into the darkness.

Then he turned his gaze back to the album. He could not have explained the feeling, but a thought flitted through his head, as though he were reacting to something he had just seen. It was as though an invisible creature had whispered in his ear, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

He opened the album again. He went through it page by page, looking at all the pictures of the bridge. He looked at the younger version of an oil-soaked Henrik Vanger and a younger Harald, a man whom he had still not met. The broken railing, the buildings, the windows and the vehicles visible in the pictures. He could not fail to identify a twenty-year-old Cecilia in the midst of the onlookers. She had on a light-coloured dress and a dark jacket and was in at least twenty of the photographs.

He felt a fresh excitement, and over the years Blomkvist had learned to trust his instincts. These instincts were reacting to something in the album, but he could not yet say what it was.

He was still at the kitchen table at 11:00, staring one by one again at the photographs when he heard the door open.

“May I come in?” It was Cecilia Vanger. Without waiting for an answer she sat down across from him at the table. Blomkvist had a strange feeling of déjà vu. She was dressed in a thin, loose, light-coloured dress and a greyish-blue jacket, clothes almost identical to those she was wearing in the photographs from 1966.

“You’re the one who’s the problem,” she said.

Blomkvist raised his eyebrows.

“Forgive me, but you took me by surprise when you knocked on the door tonight. Now I’m so unhappy I can’t sleep.”

“Why are you unhappy?”

“Don’t you know?”

He shook his head.

“If I tell you, promise you won’t laugh.”

“Promise.”

“When I seduced you last winter it was an idiotic, impulsive act. I wanted to enjoy myself, that’s all. That first night I was quite drunk, and I had no intention of starting anything long-term with you. Then it turned into something else. I want you to know that those weeks with you as my occasional lover were some of the happiest in my life.”

“I thought it was lovely too.”

“Mikael, I’ve been lying to you and to myself the whole time. I’ve never been particularly relaxed about sex. I’ve had five sex partners in my entire life. Once when I was twenty-one and a debutante. Then with my husband, whom I met when I was twenty-five and who turned out to be a bastard. And then a few times with three guys I met several years apart. But you provoked something in me. I simply couldn’t get enough. It had something to do with the fact that you’re so undemanding.”

“Cecilia, you don’t have to…”

“Shh-don’t interrupt, or I’ll never be able to tell you this.”

Blomkvist sat in silence.

“The day you left for prison I was absolutely miserable. You were gone, as though you had never existed. It was dark here in the guest house. It was cold and empty in my bed. And there I was, an old maid of fifty-six again.”

She said nothing for a while and looked Blomkvist in the eyes.

“I fell in love with you last winter. I didn’t mean to, but it happened. And then I took stock and realised that you were only here temporarily; one day you’ll be gone for good, and I’ll stay here for the rest of my life. It hurt so damn much that I decided I wasn’t going to let you in again when you came back from prison.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. When you left tonight I sat and cried. I wish I had the chance to live my life over again. Then I would decide on one thing.”

“What’s that?”

She looked down at the table.

“That I would have to be totally insane to stop seeing you just because you’re going to leave one day. Mikael, can we start again? Can you forget what happened earlier this evening?”

“It’s forgotten,” he said. “But thank you for telling me.”

She was still looking down at the table.

“If you still want me, let’s do it.”

She looked at him again. Then she got up and went over to the bedroom door. She dropped her jacket on the floor and pulled her dress over her head as she went.

Blomkvist and Cecilia Vanger woke up when the front door opened and someone was walking through the kitchen. They heard the thud of something heavy being put down near the woodstove. Then Berger was standing in the bedroom doorway with a smile that rapidly changed to shock.

“Oh, good Lord.” She took a step back.

“Hi, Erika,” Blomkvist said.

“Hi. I’m so sorry. I apologise a thousand times for barging in like this. I should have knocked.”

“We should have locked the front door. Erika-this is Cecilia Vanger. Cecilia-Erika Berger is the editor in chief of Millennium.”

“Hi,” Cecilia said.

“Hi,” Berger said. She looked as though she could not decide whether to step forward and politely shake hands or just leave. “Uh, I…I can go for a walk…”