Every display case is alarmed on its lid and logged for humidity, because the objects in them are two hundred years old and a wet night can end one. Case twelve's lid alarm goes at ten past one every night. The case is open when the guard reaches it, the lid up on its stays, the key in the lock, and the key lives in a safe in the office. Nothing is taken. The one object in the case, a small portrait, has been turned round.
I am a night security officer at a town museum and case twelve is the reason I do not sit down between one and two.
The case.
A glass box on a plinth in the long gallery. Alarmed on the lid, so that lifting it without the key sets off the panel in my office, and logged for humidity and temperature every minute because the things in the cases are old. It holds one object. A small oil portrait of a woman, in a frame the size of a hand, on a stand, facing the room.
At ten past one the lid alarm goes.
What I find.
The lid up, on its stays. The key in the lock, turned. The key is one of a set that lives in the office safe, and I have opened the safe at a quarter past one with the alarm going and the set is in it, all keys, including the one for twelve, and the one for twelve is also in the lock of twelve.
The portrait is turned round. On its stand, still, but facing the back of the case, the wall, so that the room sees the back of the frame and the label on it.
Nothing else is touched. The humidity log shows the case open for the four minutes it takes me to get there and close it, and nothing else.
What has been checked.
The lock, changed, and the safe key with it. The lid opens at ten past one with the new key in it.
The gallery camera. It sees the case. At ten past one the lid rises. The key is in the lock before the lid rises and it was not there the frame before. The portrait, inside, turns on its stand, a quarter, a half, until it faces the wall, and stops, and nobody is at the case.
The portrait. The curator has had it out. It is what it says on the label: a woman, unknown, oil on board, about 1830, bequeathed with a house's contents in 1961. There is nothing on the back but the label. The curator turned it to face the room, and locked the case, and at ten past one it was facing the wall.
Who.
I asked the curator whose house. She looked it up. The contents of a house in the town, left to the museum by the last of a family, an old woman who had lived alone in it, and the portrait was on the inventory as "portrait of a lady, said to be Miss so and so", the old woman's own name, "which she kept turned to the wall."
Kept turned to the wall. The inventory clerk had written that down in 1961 as a curiosity. The curator read it to me and neither of us said anything.
What is done about it.
The alarm goes and I close the case and turn the portrait to face the room and lock it and log it, and the curator turns it every morning because I have turned it wrong, and the log has the case open for four minutes every night as a fault on the lid sensor, and the sensor has been replaced twice.
What I do.
I do nights.
I stopped turning it back. I went to the curator and I said that the woman whose face it was had kept it to the wall for her whole life in her own house and that we had put it in a glass box facing a room for sixty years and that she was coming in every night to put it right, and the curator said that was not how museums worked, and I said I knew, and she said she would think about it.
The label has been rewritten. It says what the inventory said: portrait of a lady, said to be Miss so and so, which she kept turned to the wall. And the portrait faces the wall, on its stand, in the case, and the visitors read the label and look at the back of a frame, and some of them ask, and the guides say, that is how she wanted it.
The alarm does not go. The case has not been opened since. But at ten past one, on the camera, something stands at case twelve for a moment, the length of time it takes to check a thing is as you left it, and goes, and the humidity in the case, for that minute, drops the small amount it drops when somebody breathes out near the glass, and I think she is checking, and I think she is satisfied, and I do not stand between one and two any more, and I sit.