The Investigation Begins

Poor Miss O’Riley was completely overcome. She had sunk all her savings into the venture and couldn’t see how she was going to recover from this blow. She wandered around the empty gallery, then went upstairs to her apartment and just sat for a while, her mind going over and over what she had just seen. After a few minutes had passed she began to revive and called the police. A handsome officer named Detective Braveheart came right over.
Detective Braveheart asked Miss O’Riley for a list of the works that had been stolen. Being an organized woman she had one at hand, with titles, descriptions and pictures of the artworks that had been stolen. As Miss O’Riley began to focus on the work ahead of her, her mood changed from one of despair to anger at the person who had done this to her.
The detective inquired if she had seen any suspicious people in her gallery recently, but she said no. Various residents of the sim had dropped by, as well as some friends of hers, but nothing out of the way had happened, at least not while she was in-world. Unfortunately the welcome mat only recorded the number of visitors to the gallery and not the names, so there was no way of telling who had been in. Over the holidays there had been a slight increase in numbers, but that was to be expected.
After talking for a while with Miss O’Riley, Detective Braveheart left and began to search the area around the gallery. He also spoke with some of the neighbours. One man did recall seeing someone in the gallery moving artworks around, but he did not think anything of it at the time. The man said the visitor was shorter than average and older, too, with grey hair. When asked if he could recall the name of the avatar, the neighbour said he thought it was something like “Old Bert”.
In the meantime, Miss O’Riley sent an urgent IM to Mr. Stoneyheart, begging him to come right over as something dreadful had happened and she needed his help.

With thanks to Boye Jervil for the photograph of Old Bert moving frames.