Jonas Brandt

Jonas Brandt is 36 and owns a small metalworks in Saxony, inherited from his father, who learned the trade from his grandfather. He was born in Freiberg, an old mining town an hour from Dresden, and began sanding gates at 14, during summer vacations. Today he has three employees, a white van and a client list that includes churches, town halls and, as he puts it, half the museums in the state.

He lives alone in a ground-floor apartment in Freiberg, at the back of a gray stone building, with a kitchen he barely uses and a narrow yard where he keeps rust-proof paint cans stacked by color. On winter nights he restores pieces of wrought iron nobody commissioned: a 1900 banister, a church hinge, a little garden gate. He says old iron has more patience than people, and that is why he prefers iron.

He has dark blond hair shaved at the sides, short stubble that is never quite shaved and cold blue eyes that barely blink. He wears a navy-blue work jacket with orange reflective stripes, even off duty, and his thick hands carry old cuts on the fingers, one for each hard job. At work he uses an old welding mask with a dark visor that was his father's and that he refuses to replace. He speaks softly, too politely, like someone who has rehearsed the sentence, and has a habit of answering a question with another.

About the castle, his account is a supplier's: the metalworks did painting and repair of grilles there this year, a job like so many others, and he is one supplier among twenty. He says he knows the treasury room as a visitor, once, as a boy, when he went with his mother, and remembers the queue better than the jewels. For him, the damage has an address: the camera filmed everything and the police took forever to arrive. With the street dark and the outside cameras blind, no one can say for certain who was near that window in the days before the robbery.

Jonas knows that in a robbery where the grille gave way, the metalworker is the first name on the list. When the detective accuses him head-on, the politeness hardens: he says he repairs grilles, that the detective is looking for a thief and picking the man who owns a saw, and that laziness in investigating has another name. It may be the pride of a craftsman treated as a suspect because of his trade. It may be someone who had the answer ready before hearing the question. The detective will have to decide which.