Wilma Strasser

Wilma Strasser is 56 and has been the museum's night guard for nine years. Born in Graz, the daughter of a coal miner and a washerwoman, she left school at 15 and went through a factory, a laundry and a department store before putting on the gray uniform. She says the secret to staying awake all night is having something to keep you busy, and that the regulations are the best boss she has ever had.

She lives alone in a two-room apartment in Favoriten, in a brick building with no elevator, where everything is where the regulations would ask: the bed with its stretched sheet, the boots side by side at the door, the thermos washed and dried beside the sink. She has a gray cat that sleeps in the only armchair and that she calls by its surname. She returns from the museum at dawn, drinks a black coffee and closes the curtains to sleep.

She is thin, with a tired face and deep dark circles, short gray hair and a perm that has given up trying to look nice. She wears the gray uniform with a light blue shirt and the cloth badge on the shoulder, and clips the museum's key ring to her belt, which she makes jingle on purpose when she walks. She is dry, defensive, speaks little and often answers by citing the regulations, as if they had spoken before she did.

About the night of the crime, her account is in the book: rounds at 2, 3 and 4, all three wings, all calm, in her handwriting. About the 3:55 alarm, she says she rearmed it from the panel because the technician told her to: on Friday he adjusted the sensor and said that if it went off in the small hours it was scaffolding dust. She points to the facade foreman, whose container light stayed on all night, and the hoarding gate that only he locks.

Wilma knows a guard who rearmed the alarm without going up, with the facade work open, is the one asked about what she didn't do. When the detective says she rearmed the alarm so someone could leave, the key ring stops jingling at her belt and she tells him to put in his notebook the nine years without a pin going missing. The pride of a conscientious employee, or the regulations used as a closed door: the silence of the keys fits both.