The Man Who Left Too Soon Page 10
Vanger extrapolates the less pleasant aspects of his story, filling in the background of the enigmatic Harriet, before he glances at the clock and tells Blomkvist that the 30 minutes are almost up – but that he is nearing the end of his story. Needless to say, Blomkvist asks him to go on. Vanger says that unlike his brothers and other family members he was childless, and that he took in the children Martin and Harriet (thereby rescuing them from the less-than-loving care of their parents), allowing them to become, in a way, his own children. Martin, who initially appeared weak and introverted, was able to achieve sufficient strength of will after university to become CEO of the Vanger Corporation. Blomkvist enquires: ‘And Harriet?’ Vanger replies that she was his special favourite and that he looked upon her as his own daughter. She was intelligent and talented, unlike her brother or her mediocre cousins, nephews and other relatives. As yet, of course, neither the reader nor Blomkvist know what has happened to Harriet. Vanger then delivers a telling sentence: ‘I want you to find out who in the family murdered Harriet and who since then has spent almost 40 years trying to drive me insane.’
Stieg Larsson’s reading of the great crime writers from a variety of countries bore fruit in an intriguing variety of fashions. In Chapter 5 he describes a great family reunion in 1966, when Harriet was 16 and had just begun her second year at secondary school. Vanger describes the reunion as a loathsome annual dinner and a tradition which had long turned into deeply unpleasant affairs. This is perhaps one of the first times when we are reminded that among Larsson’s prodigious crime fiction reading were the novels of Agatha Christie. It’s particularly interesting to discern her shade whenever it appears, as the graphic sexuality and violence of the books is a million miles away from the discreet British queen of crime. But for those who know their genres, she is actually rarely far away, notably in the careful attention to ingenious (and surprising) plotting.
Blomkvist at this point asks about the murder of Harriet and becomes impatient with the steady parcelling out of facts. But Vanger has decided to make him (and, inter alios, the reader) wait. He talks about a children’s day parade arranged by the sports club at Hedestad. She has gone into town and returns to the island after 2 o’clock with dinner due later in the afternoon. At this point Vanger takes Blomkvist over to the window and points to the bridge. He tells him that at 2.15, some moments after Harriet arrived home, an accident happened on the bridge. The brother of a farmer whose name was Aronsson drove onto the bridge and collided head-on with an oil lorry. Both men were going fast; the tanker turned over and ended up lying across the bridge with its trailer dangling over the edge. Aronsson was trapped in his car, and unable to scramble out as the tanker driver managed to. As Vanger says, the accident had nothing to do with Harriet, but what happened later was highly significant.
As people scrambled to try to help, attempting to pull the farmer from the wreckage, they were all aware of the danger they were in if the oil issuing from the tanker caused an explosion. At this point, Blomkvist mentally notes that the old man is a good storyteller (pointing up for the reader that we are in the hands of a pretty capable storyteller ourselves). But Vanger concludes that what really matters about the accident is that the bridge was blocked for 24 hours – and there was no way to reach the outside world. This, of course, leads Blomkvist to conclude that something happened to Harriet on the island and that the list of suspects may be drawn from those trapped there.
It’s at this point that Stieg Larsson decides to pull what might be described as a post-modern literary trick. He is drawing our attention to something that readers of Agatha Christie and co. [as noted earlier] will have noticed: we have the set-up for a ‘locked room mystery’ format, set on an island. Vanger smiles at the observation and says that the journalist is correct, adding, ‘Even I have read my Dorothy Sayers.’
There were 64 people on the island. Harriet had lived in a house across the road but had moved into Vanger’s house – an arrangement that was perfectly acceptable to her irresponsible mother Isabella. It is known that Harriet came home that day and met and had a conversation in the courtyard before coming upstairs to say hello to Vanger. She had told him that she wished to talk to him about a certain matter, but he was too busy at the time. At this point Blomkvist enquires how the girl died, but again Vanger will not be hurried and points out that the story must be told in chronological fashion.
Several people have remarked on seeing Harriet on the bridge during the confusion that followed the accident, but the possibility of an explosion had obliged Vanger to clear everyone from the area, apart from five people working to rescue the trapped man (one of whom was Vanger’s brother Harald). Just before 3 o’clock she was seen crossing the courtyard by her mother and she was known to have spoken to Otto Falk, the local pastor. He, it appears, was the last person to see her alive. Nobody knew how she died. When the injured man was pulled from the car at 5 o’clock, the threat of a fire had been contained. It was 8 o’clock in the evening before it was discovered that Harriet was missing. And from that day onward she has never been seen again.
Blomkvist points out that there is no way of knowing from these facts that she was murdered, but Vanger has a reason for thinking that someone took her life – it is, he says, the only reasonable conclusion. She has vanished so comprehensively, without a social security card or any other means of surviving. And then Vanger makes a striking observation. He considers that her body must be somewhere in the limited area of the island, even though the most thorough of searches had been conducted. Blomkvist suggests that she might have drowned (either accidentally or on purpose) but Vanger regards this as not a real probability. All the areas where she might have been drowned have been dragged and have revealed no trace. He is convinced that she was murdered and that her body was somehow mysteriously disposed of.
We are now nearly 100 pages into the book and it appears that Larsson has set up (in leisurely fashion) for us what will be the basic premise of the plot: the missing girl, the elderly industrialist with the unpleasant family, the compromised hero who (by solving the mystery) will possibly have reclaimed his former position in society. But this is not quite Stieg Larsson’s strategy, and when we are reintroduced to Lisbeth Salander on page 90 – she is spending Christmas morning reading Blomkvist’s book about financial journalism, The Knights Templar: A Cautionary Tale for Financial Reporters – we are forcibly reminded that Blomkvist is not the only protagonist here and that another assignment has already been handed out: Lisbeth is to investigate him.
Taking time out to look at Blomkvist’s character, we can see that he is a journalist of rigorous ethics, intolerant of those who are not able to approach their assignments with either true objectivity or incisiveness. He is, it seems, particularly disposed to be impatient with those who take the facts they are given at face value, something that he will never do, and is keen to establish that he is different from all these other reporters. Once again we are reminded that Blomkvist is something of an identification figure for Larsson himself, possibly in the way that James Bond was for Ian Fleming. It was much more likely, however, that Larsson could lead the same life as his journalist hero, acted out on a slightly more realistic stage than the globe-hopping antics of 007, although Blomkvist’s sexual attractiveness to a variety of women still ties in with the wish fulfilment of the author’s theme.
Salander finishes Blomkvist’s book and demonstrates her own intelligence by completely – and effortlessly – assimilating its tactics and findings. But (not for the last time) she maintains a distance from the man with whom she is soon to have a close relationship by saying to herself: ‘Hello Kalle Blomkvist, you are pretty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?’ The reader might perhaps think that in Blomkvist and Salander we have an emblematic version of Freud’s ego and super ego, the two being in fruitful symbiosis with each other to achieve a particular end – although as neither has met at this point of the book, such a thesis might be a bit premature. (The two also sh
ift in ‘controlling’ terms, so this metaphor is a loose one.)
It’s worth noting at this point that Larsson is also well aware of the strategy of keeping us intrigued about one of the characters. In the same way that Mikael Blomkvist might be said to be a surrogate or identification figure for the author himself, Blomkvist also fulfils this function for the reader. Right from the start of the book we are placed firmly within his consciousness and are party to most of his thoughts and motivations – not to mention the fact that we are given a fairly extensive itinerary of his days. The same is not true of Lisbeth Salander, although we are told a lot about her. She nevertheless remains something of an enigma and the reader looks upon her with a degree of wonder in rather the same way that those who have already dealt with her have done – and Blomkvist will come to do. It is this maintaining of a character’s mystique at which Larsson is particularly adroit, and his particular skill is to maintain this element of mystery about his female protagonist throughout all three books, however extreme the situations he puts her in (and the situations are certainly going to become extreme).
Salander boots up her iBook and sends an e-mail, after utilising an encryption programme. We are reminded of her computer expertise – this is not a woman who would struggle for long with the computer problems that bedevil most of us. But then she performs a rather surprising action – one that gives us a new insight into her as a character. She puts on black jeans, a polo shirt, a jacket and matching knitted gloves. She also takes the rings from her eyebrows and nostril, applies a pale pink lipstick and, by these actions, transforms herself into an ordinary-looking woman simply out for an afternoon walk. This, we are told, is appropriate camouflage and we realise that there is much more to Lisbeth – literally – than meets the eye. She makes her way to the apartment block at which one of the residents is Wennerström.
Chapter 6 utilises a mini version of the ticking clock so beloved of many crime novelists. Blomkvist has set himself the task of catching the evening train at 9.30 pm. He has looked at the scrapbook that Vanger has given him and has absorbed the available information. There has been a certain amount of interest in the missing girl for a while, but then no new facts were forthcoming, and the interest has waned. More than three decades later, the issue of what happened to Harriet Vanger appears to be of little or no interest. One explanation has been accepted: that she was drowned and lost in the sea.
Vanger asks Blomkvist what he thinks has happened to her, and the latter gives a summing up which would have done Agatha Christie proud: the island normally had some 20-odd residents, but the family reunion had meant that there were 60 on Hedeby Island on the occasion that the girl went missing, and Blomkvist discounts most of them. He suggests that the most likely solution was that a member of the family murdered Harriet and concealed her body. But Vanger is having none of this, and raises a host of objections, principally relating to the timing of the girl’s disappearance. There is a photograph, taken during the Children’s Day parade which appears to show Harriet two hours before she disappears. And there is an even more intriguing photograph: Vanger finds a picture of his brother Harald, who is seen pointing at something behind the wreckage of the car.
The evidence suggests that Harald spent the afternoon on the bridge. But then Blomkvist is shown a picture of a house, and it is pointed out to him that a window on the second floor is Harriet’s room. In the preceding pictures in the sequence it is open, then closed, and now it is open. Somebody has been in the girl’s room. Blomkvist, however, is not convinced that this is important evidence, and the conclusion is that although the whereabouts of certain people can be identified at certain times, those who were not in the photographs should be placed in the line of fire regarding suspects. A theory is advanced: the killer opened the boot of a car and put the body of the murdered girl inside. Despite all the assiduous checking of shorelines, etc, nobody was checking cars. And by the next night it would have been possible to spirit the body away. Blomkvist points out that this would have been the action of a ‘cold-blooded bastard’, to which Vanger replies that this is a fairly accurate description of several members of his family. As Vanger continues his entreaties that Blomkvist track down the killer of Harriet, it’s clear that Larsson is prepared to take his time – and risk straining reader’s patience – with regard to this piece of exposition.
A basic situation that might have been set out by other authors in a much shorter time is still being treated at length. But such is Larsson’s skill that we remain gripped, even though the narrative is not advancing in any significant way. There is, of course, the issue of Salander and the other investigation being undertaken – Larsson is well aware that we will not have forgotten that. He takes us back to his female protagonist, parking a car by a railway station in Sundbyberg. It’s a car she’s borrowed from her employers, Milton Securities’ fleet of vehicles and (true to form) for which she has not requested permission.
She is calling on a contact. The door opens on a darkened apartment and she greets its occupant, saying, ‘Hi, Plague.’ The reply is ‘Wasp,’ with a sardonic remark that she only calls when she needs something. She is visiting a man three years older than herself, and consistent with her lack of social graces she points out his lack of physical freshness, commenting that the apartment smells like a monkey house. His reply that he is socially incompetent amuses her, but she hands him 5000 kronor and explains the reason she is there: she’s after an electronic cuff that he mentioned some months ago. She examines the cuff and the author knows we will be wondering what this strange object is for.
Larsson then cuts back to the island and Blomkvist’s interrogation by Vanger who tells him that in 1967, a year after Harriet disappeared, he received a flower on his birthday – a violet, which arrived in a padded envelope with no return address or message, adding that the same strange gesture has happened on his birthday every year since.
Vanger then delivers his ace-in-the-hole for persuading Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of Harriet by offering something that the journalist wants more than anything else. He tells Blomkvist he can deliver to him his nemesis, Hans-Erik Wennerström, and points out that he can prove that he is a swindler if Blomkvist is prepared to solve the mystery of the disappearance. It’s a measure of Larsson’s skill that when he next cuts to Erika and Christer Malm discussing the future of the magazine Millennium with an unhappy Blomkvist present, this acrimonious discussion is as interesting as the two principal plot engines. Blomkvist is repeating that he has not given up on Millennium, and that the magazine is still immensely important to him. But he will, he says, be on a leave of absence. Erika though, points out that she and Christer will not be able to carry the workload, but Blomkvist counters that he is not really functioning anymore and that he is, in effect, burnt out.
It is difficult not to try to read Blomkvist’s comment as a possible reflection on Larsson’s own life. It was, after all, by common consent the view that the author’s immense workload – combined with his unhealthy lifestyle – contributed to his death, and he was too intelligent a man not to realise the necessity of recharging one’s batteries (even if he was not prepared to take that advice himself). Blomkvist tries to persuade his partners that the commission is a way of getting to Wennerström, but Erika continues to argue with him. In this discussion, Larsson reminds the reader how good he is at characterising his female protagonists: Erika is not simply there to advance the plot, but she is a plausible and well-rounded character in her own right, with her own reasons for dissuading her sometime lover from his course of action.
The first section of the book ends with a discussion between Armansky and Salander, after Lisbeth is woken by her boss at one o’clock in the afternoon from a deep sleep. He tells her that their client, the lawyer Frode, has instructed them to drop the investigation of Wennerström. She objects that she has only just begun working on the assignment, but is told that the client is no longer interested. They will be paid, but Salander asks w
hat should be done with the material that she has gathered – which, as she admits, contains nothing significant. She is told that she can either shelve it or destroy it, and that there will be a new job for her shortly. The reader, however, will not be surprised to learn that she is not persuaded by this. She is not the kind of woman to drop an assignment she has begun, and the section ends with her conclusion (in italics) that people always have secrets – secrets that can always be ascertained.
Part Two of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo begins with a forbidding superscription: ‘CONSEQUENCE ANALYSES’ and a telling statistic (relating to the original Swedish title of the book, changed for non-Swedish readers) that ‘46% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man’. This is, of course, one of the most notable motivating factors in the book, and by encapsulating his rage at this situation within the context of a popular genre novel, Larsson makes his points more effectively than a dozen journalistic pieces.
Blomkvist arrives at Hedestad for the second time to a pastel blue sky and a freezing cold atmosphere. This time there is no heated car to greet him and he is obliged to manhandle his two ungainly suitcases to a taxi stand. Everything is covered in snow, and the non-Scandinavian reader is firmly within the territory that they associate with crime fiction from this part of the world – that’s to say, a certain frigidity, both physical and (in the case of many of the characters) emotional.
Vanger greets Blomkvist dressed in a heavy fur coat. The journalist is told that he has to be a little more prepared for the weather in this part of the world, and an interesting tactic is employed by Larsson here: although Blomkvist is the same nationality as those around him, he has become a visitor to this part of society and is now something of a conduit for the reader. He is shown the guesthouse, which is comfortable and well-equipped, although he is warned that it can be very cold. A telephone has been ordered for him, to be installed shortly. It’s then pointed out that Blomkvist’s neighbour is Gunnar Nilsson, the caretaker (although the latter is more of a superintendent for all the buildings on the island and even some on the nearby islands). Blomkvist is reminded that the explanation for his presence is that he is here to write Vanger’s autobiography, and that the actual assignment will remain a secret between Blomkvist, Vanger and Dirch Frode.