"You must think I'm stupid."

"No, Mum. You're not stupid. But life is unfair."

"Have you seen your sister?"

"Not in a long time."

"She never comes."

"I know, Mum. She doesn't see me either."

"Are you working?"

"Yes. I'm doing fine."

"Where do you live? I don't even know where you live."

"I live in your old apartment on Lundagatan. I've lived there for several years. I had to take over the payments."

"In the summertime maybe I can come and see you."

"Of course. In the summertime."

Her mother at last got the Christmas present open and sniffed at the aroma, enchanted. "Thank you, Camilla," she said.

"Lisbeth. I'm Lisbeth."

Her mother looked embarrassed. Salander said that they should go to the TV room.

Blomkvist spent the hour of the Disney special on Christmas Eve with his daughter Pernilla at the home of his ex-wife, Monica, and her new husband in Sollentuna. After discussions with her mother they had agreed to give Pernilla an iPod, an MP3 player hardly bigger than a matchbox which could store her huge CD collection.

Father and daughter spent the time together in her room upstairs. Pernilla's parents were divorced when she was five, and she had had a new father since she was seven. Pernilla came to see him about once a month and had week-long holidays with him in Sandhamn. When they spent time together they usually got along well, but Blomkvist had let his daughter decide how often she wanted to see him, the more so after her mother remarried. There had been a couple of years in her early teens when contact almost stopped, and it was only in the past two years that she seemed to want to see him more often.

She had followed the trial in the firm belief that things were just as her father said: he was innocent, but he could not prove it.

She told him about a sort-of boyfriend who was in another class, and she surprised him by saying that she had joined a church. Blomkvist refrained from comment.

He was invited to stay for dinner but he was expected with his sister and her family out in the yuppie suburb of Staket.

That morning he had also had an invitation to celebrate Christmas Eve with the Beckmans in Saltsjobaden. He said no, but thank you, certain that there was a limit to Beckman's indulgence and quite sure that he had no ambition to find out what that limit might be.

Instead he was knocking on the door where Annika Blomkvist, now Annika Giannini, lived with her Italian-born husband and their two children. With a platoon of her husband's relatives, they were about to carve the Christmas ham. During dinner he answered questions about the trial and received much well-meaning and quite useless advice.

The only one who had nothing to say about the verdict was his sister, although she was the only lawyer in the room. She had worked as clerk of a district court and as an assistant prosecutor for several years before she and three colleagues opened a law firm of their own with offices on Kungsholmen. She specialised in family law, and without Blomkvist having taken stock of its happening, his little sister began to appear in newspapers as representing battered or threatened women, and on panel discussions on TV as a feminist and women's rights advocate.

As he was helping her prepare the coffee, she put a hand on his shoulder and asked him how was he doing. He told her he felt as low as he had in life.

"Get yourself a real lawyer next time," she said.

"It probably wouldn't have helped in this case. But we'll talk it all the way through, Sis, some other time when all the dust is settled."

She gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek before they carried out the Christmas cake and the coffee. Then Blomkvist excused himself and asked to use the telephone in the kitchen. He called the lawyer in Hedestad and could hear there too the buzz of voices in the background.

"Merry Christmas," Frode said. "Dare I hope you have made up your mind?"

"I really don't have any immediate plans and I am curious to know more. I'll come up the day after Christmas if that suits you."

"Excellent, excellent. I am incredibly pleased. You will forgive me, I've got children and grandchildren visiting and can hardly hear myself think. Can I call you tomorrow to agree on a time? Where can I reach you?"

Blomkvist regretted his decision before even he left for home, but by then it was too awkward to call and cancel. So on the morning of December 26 he was on the train heading north. He had a driver's license, but he had never felt the need to own a car.

Frode was right, it was not a long journey. After Uppsala came the string of small industrial towns along the Norrland coast. Hedestad was one of the smaller ones, a little more than an hour north of Gavle.

On Christmas night there had been a big snowstorm, but the skies had now cleared and the air was ice-cold when Blomkvist alighted at Hedestad. He realised at once that he wasn't wearing enough clothes for winter in Norrland. Frode knew what he looked like and kindly collected him from the platform and led him straight to the warmth of his Mercedes. In the centre of Hedestad, snow clearing was in full swing, and Frode wove his careful way through the narrow streets. High banks of snow presented a picturesque contrast to Stockholm. The town seemed almost like another planet, yet he was only a little more than three hours from Sergels Torg in downtown Stockholm. He stole a glance at the lawyer: an angular face with sparse, bristly white hair and thick glasses perched on an impressive nose.

"First time in Hedestad?" Frode said.

Blomkvist nodded.

"It's an old industrial town with a harbour. Population of only 24,000. But people like living here. Herr Vanger lives in Hedeby - at the southern edge of the town."

"Do you live here too?"

"I do now. I was born in Skane down south, but I started working for Vanger right after I graduated in 1962. I'm a corporate lawyer, and over the years Herr Vanger and I became friends. Today I'm officially retired, and Herr Vanger is my only client. He's retired too, of course, and doesn't need my services very often."

"Only to scrape up journalists with ruined reputations."

"Don't sell yourself short. You're not the first one to lose a match against Hans-Erik Wennerstrom."

Blomkvist turned to Frode, unsure how to read that reply.

"Does this invitation have anything to do with Wennerstrom?" he said.

"No," said Frode. "But Herr Vanger is not remotely in Wennerstrom's circle of friends, and he followed the trial with interest. He wants to meet you to discuss a wholly different matter."

"Which you don't want to tell me about."

"Which it isn't my place to tell you about. We have arranged it so that you can spend the night at Herr Vanger's house. If you would rather not do that, we can book you a room in the Grand Hotel in town."

"I might be taking the evening train back to Stockholm."

The road into Hedeby was still unploughed, and Frode manoeuvred the car down frozen tyre ruts. The old town centre consisted of houses along the Gulf of Bothnia, and around them larger, more modern homes. The town began on the mainland and spilled across a bridge to a hilly island. On the mainland side of the bridge stood a small, white stone church, and across the street glowed an old-fashioned neon sign that read SUSANNE'S BRIDGE CAFe AND BAKERY. Frode drove about a hundred yards farther and turned left on to a newly shovelled courtyard in front of a stone building. The farmhouse was too small to be called a manor, but it was considerably larger than the rest of the houses in the settlement. This was the master's domain.

"This is the Vanger farm," Frode said. "Once it was full of life and hubbub, but today only Henrik and a housekeeper live there. There are plenty of guest rooms."

They got out. Frode pointed north.

"Traditionally the person who leads the Vanger concern lives here, but Martin Vanger wanted something more modern, so he built his house on the point there."

Blomkvist looked around and wondered what insane impulse he had satisfied by accepting Frode's invitation. He decided that if humanly possible he would return to Stockholm that evening. A stone stairway led to the entry, but before they reached it the door was opened. He immediately recognised Henrik Vanger from the photograph posted on the Internet.

In the pictures there he was younger, but he looked surprisingly vigorous for eighty-two: a wiry body with a rugged, weather-beaten face and thick grey hair combed straight back. He wore neatly pressed dark trousers, a white shirt, and a well-worn brown casual jacket. He had a narrow moustache and thin steel-rimmed glasses.

"I'm Henrik Vanger," he said. "Thank you for agreeing to visit me."

"Hello. It was a surprising invitation."

"Come inside where it's warm. I've arranged a guest room for you. Would you like to freshen up? We'll be having dinner a little later. And this is Anna Nygren, who looks after me."

Blomkvist shook hands with a short, stout woman in her sixties. She took his coat and hung it in a hall cupboard. She offered him a pair of slippers because of the draught.

Mikael thanked her and then turned to Henrik Vanger. "I'm not sure that I shall be staying for dinner. It depends on what this game is all about."

Vanger exchanged a glance with Frode. There was an understanding between the two men that Blomkvist could not interpret.

"I think I'll take this opportunity to leave you two alone," said Frode. "I have to go home and discipline the grandkids before they tear the house down."

He turned to Mikael.

"I live on the right, just across the bridge. You can walk there in five minutes; the third house towards the water down from the bakery. If you need me, just telephone."

Blomkvist reached into his jacket pocket and turned on a tape recorder. He had no idea what Vanger wanted, but after the past twelve months of havoc with Wennerstrom he needed a precise record of all strange occurrences anywhere near him, and an unlooked-for invitation to Hedestad came into that category.

Vanger patted Frode on the shoulder in farewell and closed the front door before turning his attention to Blomkvist.

"I'll get right to the point in that case. This is no game. I ask you to listen to what I have to say and then make up your mind. You're a journalist, and I want to give you a freelance assignment. Anna has served coffee upstairs in my office."

The office was a rectangle of more than 1,300 square feet. One wall was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf thirty feet long containing a remarkable assortment of literature: biographies, history, business and industry, and A4 binders. The books were arranged in no apparent order. It looked like a bookshelf that was used. The opposite wall was dominated by a desk of dark oak. On the wall behind the desk was a large collection of pressed flowers in neat meticulous rows.

Through the window in the gable the desk had a view of the bridge and the church. There was a sofa and coffee table where the housekeeper had set out a thermos, rolls, and pastries.

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."