Mirela Sandu

Mirela Sandu is 29 and the executive assistant to the board of Lumexa, where she has worked for four years always at Leopold Graf's side. She was born in Cluj, Romania, the daughter of a German teacher and an electrician, and went to Germany at 19, alone, with a suitcase and the address of a student flat share. She learned the language from her mother and the trade from nights as an intern, and today she knows every director's schedule by heart.

She lives in a small apartment in Schwabing, in Munich, shared with a friend who is almost never home, in an old building without an elevator. She has a narrow balcony with two pots of geraniums, an enamel teapot inherited from her grandmother and a leather planner always closed on the kitchen table. She calls her mother every Sunday, speaks Romanian for twenty minutes and then sits in silence, looking at the roof of the building opposite.

She has dark brown wavy hair loose to her shoulders, an oval face, fair, slightly olive skin and big brown eyes. She wears a tailored petrol-blue dress with a beige cardigan over it, and always sleeps little. She speaks fast and remembers every time, every meeting and every allergy. She is efficient, loyal and discreet, and those who see her in the boardroom corridor rarely think she is the person who knows the most about that company.

About the work, her account is one of loyalty and routine: she takes care of Mr. Graf's coffee, flights and allergies, and he says the company would stop without her. She learned of the audit problem from the newspaper's website, shortly after five, before any internal email, and came straight to the building. She arrived at six. She schedules meetings, she repeats, she does not forge banks, and she is offended when anyone suggests otherwise.

Mirela knows that the assistant is always the first to be remembered when something leaks, because she is in every corridor and on every phone call. When the detective asks whether she forged the bank letters, she answers that the gentleman has no idea what she does there. It may be the indignation of someone who only follows orders. It may be that of someone guarding something of hers that she does not want to see in the report. The detective will have to decide which.