Liesbeth Maas

Liesbeth Maas is 39 and has been the museum's restorer for eleven years. She was born in Utrecht, the daughter of a chemist at a paint factory, and grew up in a smell of solvents that she can now name one by one. She studied conservation in Amsterdam and Brussels, worked two years at a private restoration studio and joined the museum at 28. She talks about painting the way a doctor talks about disease, and cannot stand being interrupted.

She lives alone in a two-room apartment in a narrow building beside a canal, with tall windows, plants on the balcony and a black bicycle leaning against the entrance. Shelves of art books cover whole walls, and there is always a magnifying glass on the dining table. She makes tea with a thermometer and eats at fixed hours. At night she listens to the radio, low.

Her dark blond hair is pinned in a low bun with a pencil stuck through it; she has fair, freckled skin and thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses. She wears a beige linen apron stained with varnish over a navy-blue dress, and a watchmaker's loupe hangs from a ribbon around her neck. She is dry, exact, and corrects any imprecise sentence with a look.

About the painting, her account is technical: the cracks are too regular, she says. Paint that dries for three hundred years cracks at random, like river mud, and this one cracked evenly. She also distrusted the faces, the heavy eyelids, the movie actress gaze. She recalls that Doctor Hofstede and two critics examined the work with a magnifying glass, not with chemistry, and that no one asked for her laboratory before signing the check.

Liesbeth says little when a question strays from technique and turns icy when her rigor is doubted. It may be the firmness of a professional who did her duty and was heard too late. It may be the restraint of someone who keeps another part of the story to herself. The detective will have to decide which.