Rune Vik

Rune Vik is 41 and installs exhibitions on contract. He was born in Fredrikstad, the son of a shipyard carpenter and a hotel receptionist, and dropped out of architecture school in his second year to earn money. He has worked trade fairs, galleries, a theater lobby and a Christmas installation in a shopping mall. He says you learn more about art carrying walls than reading catalogs, and that he prefers the weight of a frame to the weight of an opinion.

He works out of an assembly workshop in the industrial zone east of Oslo, a high-ceilinged shed where he keeps panels, dismantled display cases, stacks of lumber and cans of screws. The bench has an articulated lamp, an old coffee machine and a radio that stays on all day. He likes to say the workshop is the only home the city has left him. His work shirts dry hanging from a line between two pillars.

He has short, tousled dark blond hair, the sparse beard of someone who hasn't shaved since Monday and gray eyes that never settle anywhere. He wears a blue quilted jacket with the company logo embroidered on it, work trousers splattered with gray paint and carries a folding ruler in his chest pocket. He is friendly, a joker, talks fast and presents himself as a simple man who only understands walls and screws.

About the week, his account is that of someone proud of his work: he installed the Games exhibition, panels, display cases and the new first-floor room painted gray, and delivered ahead of schedule, a rare thing in that city. According to the curator, it was his idea to move The Red Bridge to the room with the window, because of the light that brought out the red. He doesn't say, unless asked, where he spent the night, and says no one buys a painting like that, only a madman would take it. He finds it odd that the guard spends the small hours with the door of the monitor room shut.

Rune knows that whoever installs an exhibition knows every door and every window of the building. When the detective accuses him of stealing the painting, the smile vanishes: he says he spends the week carrying walls for that house and this is how they thank him. It may be the hurt of a worker who feels treated as a suspect by trade. It may be someone who prefers to joke rather than answer a more precise question. The detective will have to decide which.