Friday had not thought of buildings as expressing emotions before, but this one was definitely not relaxing.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Agent Olsen, ducking under the police tape and flashing his badge at the officer in charge of the perimeter.

  The entire entrance lobby could be seen through a glass wall. From the inside, the museum’s Chief of Security saw Agent Olsen approaching and waved to a guard to let them in. The chief was clearly important, because she wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was a tall woman who exuded authority. She beckoned for them to approach. She couldn’t come over herself, because she was being yelled at by a well-dressed elderly man in a suit.

  Friday’s self-taught Norwegian was not adequate to work out exactly what the man was saying, but she got the gist that he thought something was ‘outrageous’ and that a lot of time had passed and that he was going to make a ‘complaint’.

  Several dozen apathetic high-school students watched on, boredom oozing from every pore. Although, they were of that age where teenagers would act bored even if a meteor was hurtling to earth and they only had three seconds to live.

  The Security Chief nodded along while she was berated, but without expressing any sympathy or contrition. When the elderly man paused to draw breath, she interrupted.

  ‘Thank you for sharing your concerns,’ she said in very polite Norwegian. She motioned for a uniformed officer to come forward. ‘Perhaps you would like to yell at my assistant for a moment, while I consult my colleague?’ The man in the suit looked like he wanted to harangue her further, but she had already walked away to speak to Agent Olsen.

  ‘Where have you been?’ the chief demanded. ‘Interpol told me they were on high alert for exactly this type of crime after the robbery at the Bilbao Guggenheim. They knew the Munch would be a target, and yet you just disappear!’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Agent Olsen.

  ‘How many museum exhibits have been stolen in Norway over the last five years now?’ demanded the chief. ‘Two dozen? Three dozen? When is Interpol going to take the situation here seriously?’

  ‘Our agency had just sent a new top analyst to Oslo,’ said Agent Olsen. ‘I was fetching her.’

  The Chief of Security looked past Agent Olsen, through Friday and focused on Melanie. Melanie was, as ever, dressed very nicely, but she undeniably looked sixteen.

  ‘This is your top analyst?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I don’t know who she is,’ admitted Agent Olsen.

  ‘Interpol has been trying to recruit her too,’ said Friday. ‘She’s a human lie detector and she’s freakishly good at archery.’

  ‘This is their expert,’ said Agent Olsen, indicating Friday.

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ asked the chief.

  ‘Oh no,’ Agent Olsen assured her. ‘She’s going to be honoured with the Order of the Star of Italy for foiling the robbery of the Museo Galileo last month.’

  ‘That was her?’ asked the chief.

  ‘Yes,’ said Agent Olsen. He turned to Friday, ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I solved that one,’ said Friday. ‘Getting people to underestimate me is one of my key tactics.’

  ‘You do it very well,’ said the chief.

  Melanie chuckled. ‘Burn.’

  ‘Ow! Stop hitting me, please!’ cried a security guard a short distance away. The chief spun around. An old lady was bashing one of the guards over the head with her handbag.

  ‘Excuse me,’ muttered the chief as she rushed over to intervene. ‘Madam, you’ve been allowed to use the bathroom three times. You don’t need to hit Freidrick if you want to go again.’

  Some of the high-school students had started playing soccer with a wadded-up ball of paper floor plans. When it bounced off an oil painting on the wall, the chief abandoned Freidrick to his fate and hurried over to put a stop to the game. Controlling this crowd was obviously something that needed the chief’s full attention. Friday decided to get on with her investigation.

  ‘Can you show me the scene of the crime?’ Friday asked Agent Olsen.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  Agent Olsen led them up a staircase to the second floor and into a long gallery with just one huge picture on the wall. ‘Munch painted several monumental paintings,’ explained Agent Olsen. ‘This is the largest.’

  Friday looked up at the picture as they strode past. It was a massive canvas, in the same expressionist style as The Scream, depicting a woman sitting on a beach holding a baby and surrounded by lots of naked people.

  ‘That doesn’t look like a very inviting beach,’ said Melanie.

  ‘I guess when they do get warm weather here, they’re really determined to enjoy it,’ said Friday.

  ‘The Scream’s room is through here,’ said Agent Olsen at the end of the gallery. Friday and Melanie followed him through. The room they stepped into was very large and the walls were all painted white. There were several paintings in Munch’s distinctive style on the side walls, but the end wall was bare. A picture frame lay on the floor in front of it.

  ‘That’s where it hung,’ said Agent Olsen.

  Friday slowly walked the full length of the room, taking in every window, air vent and display. The description of The Scream was still on the wall, next to where the painting had been. Friday leaned in and read the card.

  Skrik (The Scream)

  Edvard Munch 1893

  91 cm × 73.5 cm

  Oil, tempera, pastel and crayon on cardboard.

  Friday looked around the rest of the room. She particularly noted the cameras. There was one diagonally opposite the empty wall, but it had been smashed. The broken camera was dangling from the ceiling by its wires.

  ‘This camera didn’t catch who smashed it?’ asked Friday.

  ‘No,’ said Agent Olsen. ‘It was pointed at the picture on the wall. The person who struck it must have been standing directly below, out of frame.’

  ‘Then they would have been picked up by that camera,’ said Friday, pointing to the security camera at the opposite end of the room.

  ‘No, they aren’t on that footage either,’ said Agent Olsen. ‘A fly landed on the lens. It caused that camera to go out of focus. The rest of the room became a blur.’

  ‘Really?’ said Friday. ‘A fly disabled the camera?’

  Agent Olsen shrugged. ‘These things happen. That’s the problem with introducing the very latest technology – sometimes the technology is too smart for its own good. The museum is so new they hadn’t worked out all the bugs yet.’

  ‘In this case, the bug was actually a bug,’ Melanie observed.

  Friday walked over and took a closer look at this other camera. ‘That’s an awfully stationary fly,’ she observed. Friday looked about the room. ‘Surely a museum would have anti-insect strategies? Insects could cause a lot of damage if they didn’t.’ She turned to Agent Olsen. ‘Crouch down, I want to climb up on your shoulders.’

  ‘What?’ asked Agent Olsen.

  ‘I want to have a closer look,’ said Friday, pointing up at the camera above her.

  ‘Do you think some of the visitors are secretly circus performers and they did elaborate acrobatics to disable the cameras?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘Maybe something like that,’ said Friday, before turning back to Agent Olsen. ‘Are you going to crouch down, then? You’re very tall. It’s going to be hard for me to climb up on you otherwise.’

  Agent Olsen got down on one knee.

  Melanie clapped excitedly. ‘I love seeing a man on one knee! Even if it isn’t Ian. Although, wouldn’t it be good if he was here?’ Melanie started getting her phone out. ‘He’d be so jealous. I’ve got to take a photo!’

  Friday eventually clambered up on Agent Olsen’s shoulders. When he stood up, Friday’s face was only a foot below the camera. ‘Just as I thought,’ said Friday, reaching up and grabbing the fly. ‘It’s not a real fly. It’s made of rubber.’

  ‘Someone put it there?’ asked Agent Olsen.

  ‘This robbery was planned with brilliant simplicity,’ said Friday as she clambered down. ‘The 2004 robbery was like something out of a movie. The robbers burst in armed with guns, so all the security improvements since then have been designed to counter a similar attack. That’s why the best way to rob the Munch now was with elegance and simplicity.’

  ‘But who did it?’ asked Agent Olsen. ‘And how?’

  ‘Let’s go back downstairs and take a look at our suspects,’ said Friday. ‘It shouldn’t take long to figure out.’

  When they returned to the lobby, a full-on brawl was taking place. The elderly gentleman was still yelling at the Security Chief, while the teenage students were stamping and clapping and cheering, egging him on. The old ladies had got out their thermoses and sandwiches and were enjoying a picnic while they watched, totally ignoring the museum guides who were pleading with them to stop eating in the gallery.

  Friday clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. ‘That’s enough of that, then.’

  The room fell silent. Nothing about Friday exuded authority, but they were all thoroughly bored and therefore interested to see what would happen next.

  ‘One of you has been very naughty and stolen a painting that, apart from being worth many millions of dollars, is also the pride and joy of the nation of Norway,’ said Friday.

  The visitors glanced at each other.

  ‘At first, the brilliance of this crime made me suspect a member of staff,’ began Friday.

  ‘That’s outrageous!’ The union official’s voice was muffled as he banged on the glass wall. He still had not been allowed inside. ‘The staff at the Munch are all proud professionals.’

  ‘The Bilbao Guggenheim was robbed by one of its staff conservators earlier this week,’ said Friday. ‘This is a very similar crime.’ All the staff turned and looked at a mousy woman sitting in the corner. Evidently, she was the only conservator at work that day.

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ she protested.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Friday. ‘You’re not carrying the necessary equipment to commit this robbery.’

  The conservator looked slightly relieved, but still nervous.

  ‘The thief needed a piece of equipment that could do two things,’ said Friday. ‘Number one, plant an artificial fly on a camera lens. And number two, smash a camera fixed to a ten-foot-high ceiling.’

  ‘But no one is allowed to bring anything into the gallery,’ said the chief. ‘All personal items have to be left in the cloak room.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Friday. ‘To do both things, the thief would simply need a long piece of tube. They could fire the fly onto the first camera by using the tube as a blow gun, much like the famed pygmy tribes of the Amazon jungle. And they could use the same tube to reach up and smash the second camera.’

  ‘No one here has a long tube,’ said the chief.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ said Friday. ‘Three of those old ladies are carrying walking sticks. Modern walking sticks aren’t made of wood anymore. To keep them light, they’re made of hollow aluminium. They are essentially tubes with a rubber stopper on one end and a handle on the other.’

  Friday walked over to the group of senior citizens. ‘Do any of you ladies have a walking stick with a handle that can be easily removed?’ she asked.

  One of the ladies responded by reaching out and whacking Friday hard on the shin with her walking stick.

  ‘Ow!’ cried Friday.

  ‘I’d like to see you try to find out,’ declared the elderly lady. ‘I’m not letting you touch my stick. Not over my dead body.’ Her friends giggled.

  ‘Good for you, Anita,’ said one.

  ‘Young people today need to learn respect for their elders,’ said the other.

  ‘Okay,’ said Friday, hopping on one foot as she rubbed her injured shin. ‘Well, you’re on the short list. But the thief, having stolen the painting, would also need a way of smuggling it out.’

  ‘These women have all been searched,’ said the chief.

  ‘I don’t mind being searched again,’ said one of the three. ‘If that handsome devil with the blond hair does it this time.’

  A young blond security guard blushed.

  ‘What did you get from the gift shop?’ asked Friday, pointing towards the ladies’ shopping bags.

  ‘A lovely mug of the Madonna painting,’ said the flirty lady. ‘I don’t care for The Scream. It’s too dramatic for my liking.’

  ‘Let’s narrow this down further,’ said Friday. ‘If I had to sneak a painting that was ninety centimetres by seventy centimetres out of an art gallery, what would be the best way to do that?’

  ‘Should you really be narrating this in front of a group of school students?’ asked Agent Olsen. ‘Are you going to give them a tutorial on art theft?’

  ‘Bear with me,’ said Friday. ‘The painting is just pigment on cardboard. The gift shop sells copies of The Scream printed onto posters. Which are also pigment on cardboard. Almost exactly the same size, in fact. To smuggle The Scream out, it would be so simple to roll up the original and slide it into the packaging for a poster, then pop that in a gift shop bag. No one would look twice. So now the question is – which one of you three walking-stick-carrying ladies also has a poster from the gift shop in your souvenir bag?’

  There was a long pause. Everyone was looking at the three ladies. They didn’t seem to be able to fathom what had just been said to them. Then suddenly, one of the three leapt up and sprinted for the door.

  Unfortunately for her, her sprinting days were behind her. When an eighty-one-year-old sprints, it’s more equivalent to a sixteen-year-old’s amble. None of the security guards raced after her because it was just so pathetic. There were dozens of police officers right outside, so she stood no chance of getting away. But that never became an issue, because when she got to the glass double door she couldn’t figure out how to open it. Apparently, the big green button to one side was neither big enough nor green enough for her to work it out.

  ‘There’s your culprit,’ said Friday.

  ‘This is the weirdest crime I’ve had since joining Interpol,’ said Agent Olsen. ‘And I spent six months investigating a counterfeit Belgian chocolate racket.’

  ‘It’s strangely similar to the theft in Bilbao,’ said Friday.

  ‘That didn’t involve an old lady,’ said Melanie.

  ‘It’s simple and clever in the same way,’ said Friday. ‘I’m going to run it by Bernie.’

  ‘Agent Bernie Barnes?’ asked Agent Olsen.

  ‘Yes, he’s my uncle,’ said Friday.

  ‘It would be great if you could get his help,’ said Agent Olsen. ‘He’s a legend at Interpol.’

  ‘Really?’ said Friday.

  ‘It shouldn’t surprise you,’ said Melanie. ‘You share the family trait.’

  ‘Which family trait?’ asked Friday.

  ‘Getting people to underestimate you,’ said Melanie.

  Ingrid’s meeting with her father must have gone well, because Binky was immediately given three days’ leave and allowed to take a transport flight back to Oslo. Ingrid was delighted. Now that her on-again off-again birthday party was definitely on again, she wanted all the help she could get to make it spectacular. Binky was mainly in charge of fetching and carrying things while Melanie and Ingrid organised the more creative details. Friday had no opinions about napkins or taper length, but Ingrid had discovered that Friday was very good at origami, so she was put in charge of folding paper animals to decorate the ballroom.

  ‘Friday, I’m going into town to pick up some balloons,’ said Binky. ‘Do you think you could help me?’

  Friday looked at Binky. She knew, and she knew he knew, that carrying wasn’t her strong suit. Walking without carrying things wasn’t even her strong suit.

  ‘Are you trying to get me away from Melanie and Ingrid because you have a problem you want to discuss?’ asked Friday.

  Binky glanced over to the kitchen, where Melanie and Ingrid were on the phone with the caterer. They were both engrossed in the elaborate description of a profiterole sculpture they wanted to be made in the shape of a Viking ship. There was no chance they had overheard.

  ‘Yes, please,’ whispered Binky.

  ‘Okay,’ said Friday, setting aside her 312th origami herring and going with him.

  Binky led the way. The palace was a maze of corridors. If you didn’t know where you were going, you could easily stumble into a political meeting when you were trying to find the bathroom. Binky was very familiar with the layout, though, and he confidently wove his way towards the back door. A little too confidently, because as he strode around a corner, Binky slammed into a small man in a grey suit. The man was so much smaller than Binky he was knocked off his feet and the stack of files he was carrying landed in a flutter all around him.

  ‘Terribly sorry, Sir Eirik,’ said Binky. ‘Didn’t see you there.’ Binky crouched down to help him collect the papers.

  ‘Din store tull,’ muttered Sir Eirik.

  ‘In my defence,’ said Binky. ‘You’re not often down this end of the palace.’

  ‘Store tull? Did he just call you a big fool?’ asked Friday.

  ‘It’s just his nickname for me,’ said Binky.

  ‘Those are confidential documents,’ said Sir Eirik. ‘Hand them to me at once.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Binky, handing over the stack he had. ‘I don’t know anything about money laundering anyway, so I wouldn’t have understood anything if I’d read them.’

  ‘You read that they are about money laundering!’ exclaimed Sir Eirik.

  ‘Well, I’m not blind,’ said Binky. ‘Just because my brain doesn’t want to read them doesn’t mean my eyes won’t pick up the odd word.’

  ‘And who is this girl?’ asked Sir Eirik. ‘You are bringing other girls to the palace! Is this proper? Does the princess know?’

  ‘Oh yes, Ingrid is fine with it,’ said Binky. ‘Friday isn’t a girl. She’s a friend. My sister’s friend. We’re just popping out to pick up a bit of shopping.’

  ‘In my day, young men didn’t do such things,’ said Sir Eirik.