Maren Lunde

Maren Lunde is 34 and the museum's assistant curator. She was born in Bergen, the daughter of a history teacher and a flight attendant, and came to Oslo to study art history, with a scholarship and a folder of notes she has never put down. She did a master's on Nordic painters of the late nineteenth century, and was one of five people in the country who had read the full works of the exhibition's artist, in three languages.

She works in the museum library's reference room, a long room with oak shelves, a reading table with a green top and tall windows onto the inner courtyard. The catalogs, the painter's letters and the loan ledgers are kept there, and she knows by heart which shelf holds each thing. She drinks ginger tea from a chipped mug, switches off the main light and works under the desk lamp. She says the museum is the only place where the noise of the city arrives muffled.

She has very fair skin, long red hair in a loosened bun and deep dark circles. She wears round tortoiseshell glasses, a long wine-colored cardigan over a black turtleneck and a lanyard with the museum badge. She walks with a folder of papers clutched to her chest, as if someone might take it. She is intelligent, precise and ironic when she is afraid, and defends the painting as if it were her own.

About the room change, her account is clear: the one who decided to move The Red Bridge to Room 10 was the installer, Rune Vik, who said the light from the window brought out the red and measured the window himself, twice. She wanted the painting away from the street, but the board liked the idea. About the night, she says she was at home, asleep, like any sane person on a Saturday, and learned of everything by phone, at seven. She recalls that the move made the newspapers that week, with a photo and everything, and that the board wanted Olympic tourists and got thieves.

Maren knows that whoever has looked after a canvas for six years is the first to be looked at when it vanishes. When the detective suggests she handed over the painting, the irony loses its breath and she says she knows every crack in that canvas: if you want an easy culprit, look in another room. It may be the love of someone protecting what is hers. It may be someone who prefers not to explain where she was. The detective will have to decide which.