Petra had been slumbering on the underground when she’d caught sight of the headlines about the great art theft at the National Museum. Not so many years had passed since the last robbery, and she’d wondered if the same thieves had struck again. She’d eagerly bought a paper but had been disappointed by the lack of detail given in the article. The police were keeping quiet, and at first they hadn’t even announced which paintings had been stolen.
At the time, Petra hadn’t followed the case particularly because she and her boyfriend had had a big fight and at the same time she’d been studying intensively for exams. Even her cleaning job at the Grand Hotel had been put on the backburner because she was so busy. It wasn’t until after her exams that she finally sorted things out with her boyfriend. They had had a good talk and had decided that, after the stress of her exams, they both needed a well-deserved holiday. So they had gone off on a last-minute charter holiday to Spain. After Petra had arrived back from her holiday, well rested and with an attractive suntan, she went back to her part-time work at the Grand Hotel.
That was when she had found out that the two stolen paintings were a Monet and a Renoir. She was in the library at the Grand Hotel leafing through some old evening papers when she saw them. The pictures. She gasped. The man in the Renoir that she had seen had worn a hat and a moustache and there were extra sailing boats on the Schelde river scene in the Monet, but apart from that the paintings were very similar to the pair that she had taken down in the Princess Lilian suite. She had simply assumed that they were poor reproductions—but what if they weren’t? Yet surely it would be utterly remarkable if the crooks had left the paintings behind in a hotel room just one hundred metres from the National Museum. The works of art would almost certainly have been spirited out of the country ages ago. Nevertheless, she felt a growing concern, because when she thought about it in more detail she remembered that the paintings did have noticeably fancy frames. At the same time, that was what people did, wasn’t it? Adding a beautiful frame could make the worst reproduction look almost professional.
Petra bit her nails and couldn’t concentrate. The paintings had disappeared from the cleaning trolley, but perhaps they were still in the annex. She would have liked to ask if anyone had seen them, but she hesitated to do so. If they had been the real paintings then she could end up in trouble because she had switched them without orders from above. Paintings worth thirty million … She looked around her. There was a murmur of people at the bar, and over in the Veranda restaurant guests were eating. If she went across to the National Museum and asked to see reproductions of Renoir and Monet, she could compare them with what she remembered of the paintings in the suite. Then she smiled at her own stupidity. All she had to do was to go to the museum’s home page on the Internet. She got up and went to the computer room on the ground floor.
She quickly went to the National Museum site and clicked her way into the collections. It didn’t take long to find the two paintings. The hotel’s colour printer was right next to her and she clicked on ‘print’. Then she put the copies in her handbag and went back to the computer to delete her surfing history. With the papers in her bag, she hurried down to the annex. She simply must look for the paintings once more. They must be somewhere in the hotel because she couldn’t imagine that they had just disappeared. Unless somebody had discovered them and realized that they were not worthless reproductions but paintings worth thirty million kronor …