Anna came upstairs with a cup of coffee. He thanked her. By then he had reached modern times and was paging through images of Vanger in his prime, opening factories, shaking hands with Tage Erlander, one of Vanger and Marcus Wallenberg-the two capitalists staring grimly at each other.

In the same album he found a spread on which Vanger had written in pencil “Family Council 1966.” Two colour photographs showed men talking and smoking cigars. He recognised Henrik, Harald, Greger, and several of the male in-laws in Johan Vanger’s branch of the family. Two photographs showed the formal dinner, forty men and women seated at the table, all looking into the camera. The pictures were taken after the drama at the bridge was over but before anyone was aware that Harriet had disappeared. He studied their faces. This was the dinner she should have attended. Did any of the men know that she was gone? The photographs provided no answer.

Then suddenly he choked on his coffee. He started coughing and sat up straight in his chair.

At the far end of the table sat Cecilia Vanger in her light-coloured dress, smiling into the camera. Next to her sat another blonde woman with long hair and an identical light-coloured dress. They were so alike that they could have been twins. And suddenly the puzzle piece fell into place. Cecilia wasn’t the one in Harriet’s window-it was her sister, Anita, two years her junior and now living in London.

What was it Salander had said? Cecilia Vanger is in a lot of the pictures. Not at all. There were two girls, and as chance would have it-until now-they had never been seen in the same frame. In the black-and-white photographs, from a distance, they looked identical. Vanger had presumably always been able to tell the sisters apart, but for Blomkvist and Salander the girls looked so alike that they had assumed it was one person. And no-one had ever pointed out their mistake because they had never thought to ask.

Blomkvist turned the page and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It was as if a cold gust of wind passed through the room.

There were pictures taken the next day, when the search for Harriet had begun. A young Inspector Morell was giving instructions to a search party consisting of two uniformed police officers and ten men wearing boots who were about to set out. Vanger was wearing a knee-length raincoat and a narrow-brimmed English hat.

On the left of the photograph stood a young, slightly stout young man with light, longish hair. He had on a dark padded jacket with a red patch at the shoulder. The image was very clear. Blomkvist recognised him at once-and the jacket-but, just to make sure, he removed the photograph and went down to ask Anna if she recognised the man.

“Yes, of course, that’s Martin.”

Salander ploughed through year after year of press cuttings, moving in chronological order. She began in 1949 and worked her way forward. The archive was huge. The company was mentioned in the media nearly every day during the relevant time period-not only in the local press but also in the national media. There were financial analyses, trade union negotiations, the threat of strikes, factory openings and factory closings, annual reports, changes in managers, new products that were launched…There was a flood of news. Click. Click. Click. Her brain was working at high speed as she focused and absorbed the information from the yellowing pages.

After several hours she had an idea. She asked the archives manager if there was a chart showing where the Vanger Corporation had factories or companies during the fifties and sixties.

Bodil Lindgren looked at Salander with undisguised coldness. She was not at all happy giving a total stranger permission to enter the inner sanctum of the firm’s archives, being obliged to allow her to look through whatever documents she liked. And besides, this girl looked like some sort of half-witted fifteen-year-old anarchist. But Herr Frode had given her instructions that could not be misinterpreted. This slip of a girl was to be free to look at anything she pleased. And it was urgent. She brought out the printed annual reports for the years that Salander wanted to see; each report contained a chart of the firm’s divisions throughout Sweden.

Salander looked at the charts and saw that the firm had many factories, offices, and sales outlets. At every site where a murder was committed, there was also a red dot, sometimes several, indicating the Vanger Corporation.

She found the first connection in 1957. Rakel Lunde, Landskrona, was found dead the day after the V. amp; C. Construction Company clinched an order worth several million to build a galleria in the town. V. amp; C. stood for Vanger and Carlén Construction. The local paper had interviewed Gottfried Vanger, who had come to town to sign the contract.

Salander recalled something she had read in the police investigation in the provincial record office in Landskrona. Rakel Lunde, fortune-teller in her free time, was an office cleaner. She had worked for V. amp; C. Construction.

At 7:00 in the evening Blomkvist called Salander a dozen times and each time her mobile was turned off. She did not want to be disturbed.

He wandered restlessly through the house. He had pulled out Vanger’s notes on Martin’s activities at the time of Harriet’s disappearance.

Martin Vanger was in his last year at the preparatory school in Uppsala in 1966. Uppsala. Lena Andersson, seventeen-year-old preparatory school pupil. Head separated from the fat.

Vanger had mentioned this at one point, but Blomkvist had to consult his notes to find the passage. Martin had been an introverted boy. They had been worried about him. After his father drowned, Isabella had decided to send him to Uppsala -a change of scene where he was given room and board with Harald Vanger. Harald and Martin? It hardly felt right.

Martin Vanger was not with Harald in the car going to the gathering in Hedestad, and he had missed a train. He arrived late in the afternoon and so was among those stranded on the wrong side of the bridge. He only arrived on the island by boat some time after 6:00. He was received by Vanger himself, among others. Vanger had put Martin far down the list of people who might have had anything to do with Harriet’s disappearance.

Martin said that he had not seen Harriet on that day. He was lying. He had arrived in Hedestad earlier in the day and he was on Järnvägsgatan, face to face with his sister. Blomkvist could prove the lie with photographs that had been buried for almost forty years.

Harriet Vanger had seen her brother and reacted with shock. She had gone out to Hedeby Island and tried to talk to Henrik, but she was gone before any conversation could take place. What were you thinking of telling him? Uppsala? But Lena Andersson, Uppsala, was not on the list. You could not have known about it.

The story still did not make sense to Blomkvist. Harriet had disappeared around 3:00 in the afternoon. Martin was unquestionably on the other side of the water at that time. He could be seen in the photograph from the church hill. He could not possibly have hurt Harriet on the island. One puzzle piece was still missing. An accomplice? Anita Vanger?

From the archives Salander could see that Gottfried Vanger’s position within the firm had changed over the years. At the age of twenty in 1947, he met Isabella and immediately got her pregnant; Martin Vanger was born in 1948, and with that there was no question but that the young people would marry.

When Gottfried was twenty-two, he was brought into the main office of the Vanger Corporation by Henrik Vanger. He was obviously talented and they may have been grooming him to take over. He was promoted to the board at the age of twenty-five, as the assistant head of the company’s development division. A rising star.