Chief Inspector Petterson found it incomprehensible. Two valuable paintings had been stolen from the National Museum, and although the police had set up road blocks, checked all the passengers on trains and planes, and contacted various car rental firms, they had no leads. There were no witnesses at the museum either. Of course that couldn’t be right. The thieves couldn’t simply have gone up in smoke. They had obviously escaped in a car before the museum staff realized that the paintings had been stolen. He had heard that museum staff don’t always realize the value of what they have in their collections. Chief Inspector Petterson was a middle-aged man in his prime but with a melancholy frame of mind. The case seemed hopeless. He had no idea at all how the art theft could be solved. He knew everything about weapons, ammunition, car chases and blackmail attempts, but this? The police hadn’t even got in any tips from the underworld. The informants they had contacted had not heard a thing.
‘There must be several years’ planning behind this,’ said his colleague Inspector Rolf Strömbeck, a bearded man of upper middle age, as he sorted the papers on his desk. ‘Imagine getting away without leaving any tracks or other leads. We don’t have fingerprints and we can’t see anyone suspicious on the pictures from the surveillance cameras either. I just don’t understand this.’
‘The camera that covered the room with the French Impressionists was not on—the thieves had pulled out the plug.’ Petterson sighed. ‘Pah, let’s go and get a cup of coffee.’
The two men got up and then remained standing beside the refreshment table where the coffee machine stood along with a selection of fruit and biscuits. This was Chief Inspector Petterson’s sixth cup of coffee that day. The coffee was hot and smelt of old plastic, but at least it provided him with some much-needed caffeine. There must be other clues; it was just a question of discovering them. That set him to thinking about the museum visitors.
‘It’s time to map out who was at the museum that day and bring them in for questioning. There must surely have been other people there besides those confused old folks that the security guards mentioned.’
‘The old people talked of a man with brown hair that one of the old girls thought was terribly kind. She even wished that he was her own son,’ sighed his colleague.
‘But one of the other old girls accused him of being a thief. He is said to have tried to snatch her handbag. Those poor pensioners must have been shocked by the alarm.’
Petterson went quiet and started ruminating about old age. To think that you could become so confused. Would he himself end up like that? From now on he ought to eat more fruits and vegetables; he had heard that such a diet was good for your brain. He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and nodded to his colleague.
‘Shall we take a look at the signs? They are all that the thieves left behind.’
‘As if we’re going to be any the wiser for those …’
They returned to the investigation room and sat down at the desk. There lay the three signs that had been found at the museum: out of order, inventory being undertaken, and back soon.
Chief Inspector Petterson tried to remember what had happened. The signs had delayed the police, and several hours passed before they realized that the elevator actually worked. Then there were the other two signs. The police officer in charge at the scene of the crime had thought that everything was as it should be in the room for nineteenth-century French paintings, and had directed their efforts to searching for stolen paintings in the other exhibit rooms. They had concentrated on the temporary exhibit, ‘Sins and Desires,’ where every painting was scrutinized closely. It was only when one of the curators established that there were no paintings missing from the new exhibit that they enlarged the scene-of-crime investigation to include the other areas. After that, they had started studying the two signs in the Impressionist exhibit with renewed interest. inventory being undertaken … Petterson had sent a group of colleagues down to the storerooms to see if the paintings were there, while his technical staff checked through ledgers and computer files. The police devoted a great deal of time and effort to this, but when no Renoirs or Monets were found, they realized that those were indeed the paintings that had been stolen. They weren’t just any old paintings. Claude Monet’s Schelde scene and the work by Renoir had been stolen once before. It was incredible that it could happen again!
‘Smart thieves,’ said Petterson, pointing at the inventory being undertaken sign. ‘What a red herring!’
Inspector Rolf Strömbeck looked at the sign for a long time, put a portion of tobacco under his gum and nodded. ‘And we fell for it—so simple yet so damned cunning.’
‘The sign saying back soon, what about that? Do you know what that’s about?’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years in the police force,’ his comrade answered. ‘Who can have put up such a sign, and why?’
‘It is at any rate handwritten, while the other signs have been printed on an ordinary printer. That is somebody’s handwriting.’
‘But was the back soon sign written by somebody who discovered the theft and then ran off to sound the alarm? In which case, we ought to get in touch with the person concerned as soon as possible.’ He chewed the tip of his pen while he pondered. ‘We ought to ask that person to step forward, but the question is, how do we go about doing that?
Chief Inspector Petterson thought over various alternatives, but couldn’t decide on a good one.
‘If we say we’re looking for a person who has written a sign with the words back soon, then we’ll get replies from all over Sweden—and you can guarantee that none of those will be the thieves. No professional criminal leaves such an obvious trail. The printed signs have been handled with gloved hands, but this one has distinct fingerprints in the actual ink. Can you see the thumbs in the corner? The black ink must have been sticky.’ Petterson pushed the sign across to his colleague.
‘You know what? This sign doesn’t lead anywhere. I can only see one use for it.’ Strömbeck got up, opened the door and hung the back soon sign on the handle outside. ‘Now we’ll take a walk and eat lunch in town. Then at least we’ll have a bit of peace for a while.’