Now one would have thought that Angela must be the most famous detective in the world and drowned in jobs and money. But the truth was quite different. It had been ages since Angela had a real assignment. This was mainly due to the fact that many people either went straight to the police or preferred Angela's male colleagues. Even the police always tried very hard to successfully complete cases on their own. At some point even the "dead cases" were no longer given to them. "To save face" they had said. Your level of awareness was of no use. And so, with sagging shoulders and in a very bad mood, she asked her father to find her the position in the British Museum for an indefinite period of time.

For over a year she had been earning her money in the library and her detective life seemed like a distant dream to her. But then the tide turned. About a month and a half ago she got a call from a smaller London auction house. Shortly before an extremely extensive auction, thieves had completely cleared the warehouse apart from a few things. The police had also been called in, but they made practically no progress. So the auction house got the idea to call Angela. Of course, the young detective immediately contacted the investigating police officers, but there were not many results yet.
The list of stolen items included numerous items, some of them antique, such as old paintings, but also jewelry and porcelain. The thieves were extremely professional because there were no traces around or in the building and even the broken doors showed no significant damage.
All of this seemed very familiar to Angela and a look into the archives of the yard was enough to see that these thieves belonged to a whole gang that had been breaking into the same pattern across the country for years. Action houses, Antikquare, but also smaller museums and private houses all over the country and perhaps also all over Europe had been relieved of their valuable artifacts. There have never been any usable traces and so far not one of the stolen items has turned up again. Angela and a lot of the people in the yard were convinced that things were now in the hands of some rich bogus. Yeah ... art smuggling, it had to be, it was so obvious. And just as obviously these people were also active in other countries.
Angela gained access to the files of similar cases from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland and now spent her nights finding clues and similarities. It was already a week and Angela was at the end of her tether.
Then at last she found a crucial clue. Again and again in the cases from England, but increasingly also in those from France and Belgium, a country house near the German border appeared.Surely it had been searched a hundred times and the owners questioned, but without any results. But Angela felt that it was important somehow. So she went there herself and took a close look at the house ... in fact, she broke in. For hours she had crept quietly from room to room, searching drawers and cupboards in the dark. In the fireplace room she had stumbled over a bearskin and when she tried to hold on to a candle holder by the fireplace, it pushed itself down and opened a secret path. "How trite" had thought Angela.
The path led into an underground labyrinth of various corridors and rooms with a wide variety of objects, including a few of the art goods from the auction house. That was enough proof. She took photos and went straight to the police.
It didn't take her long to explain the case to the Belgians, and two days later they struck.

What they found exceeded anything Angela expected. A few members of the gang could be arrested, nowhere near all of them, that was for sure.
The warehouse they had set up under the country house was huge and extremely well sorted. There were even lists of what was in which room, what its estimated value and sometimes even what fraction it came from.
That made it much easier to find the owners of the many things.
Of course, there have been extensive reports on the case and the press tries to make Angela a hero. However, she didn't care much about giving interviews. She hated being the center of attention just because she was doing her job. The way she tried to avoid press attention was unfortunately not quite as successful as she had hoped.
A large part of the goods found came from the inheritance of a formerly very wealthy family in Belgium. They were aristocratic and had famous members. Angela decided to deliver the missing heir to the only descendant, a Captain A. Haddock herself.
She was then enthusiastically welcomed at the old family seat near Brussels, Schloss Mühlenhof.
Captain Haddock was a very lively guy who did not fail to portray her loudly and in colored metaphors as "the savior of his legacy". But when Angela looked at the house and all the antique things on display, what she had attached was only a devastatingly small part of the wealth of the old seafaring family.
But Haddock persisted and soon Angela regretted her decision to escape the newspaper by bringing back the man's property herself.