Ingrid Solvang

Ingrid Solvang is 58 and has made the museum's night rounds for thirty years. She was born in Tønsberg, the daughter of a retired whaler and a seamstress, and came to Oslo at 28, after a short marriage and a stint at a fish warehouse. She joined the museum for a three-month shift, when the old watchman fell ill, and stayed. She says she knows the creaks of the floorboards the way other people know the voices of their children.

She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Bøler, in the east of the city, with a view of a parking lot and a forest of firs. She goes to work by tram, always at the same hour, with a bottle of black coffee and a brown cheese sandwich wrapped in bread paper. She dries her wool sweater on the heater, keeps her flashlight beside the door and has a habit of checking twice that she turned off the stove. The neighbors say it is impossible to ask her for quiet, because she never makes noise.

She has short, straight gray hair, fair skin pinked by the cold and blue eyes tired from staring at monitors all night. She wears the navy-blue guard uniform with the embroidered badge, a gray wool sweater underneath and a flashlight clipped to her belt. She is direct, grumpy and proud of her thirty years of rounds. She has little patience for repeated questions and even less for anyone who calls her auntie.

About the small hours, her account is short. The window sensor in Room 10 went off at 6:31 a.m., but snow on the sensor does that every week this winter. When she went up, she found the empty frame on the floor and a ladder leaning outside. She says she was in front of the monitor panel, like every night, and never took her eyes off the screens. She complains about the two facade cameras, one of which only records every four seconds, and thinks the board spent on little flags what it should have spent on cameras.

Ingrid knows that an alarm that sounds with no one arriving in time is the first thing a guard is held to account for. When the detective suggests she opened the way for the thieves, her voice hardens and she warns that from here on she will speak only with a lawyer present, the union's. It may be the honor of a professional who will not be treated as an accomplice. It may be someone who prefers the union's shield to a more direct question. The detective will have to decide which.