The Guggenheim Mystery

  Lionel waved us past, and we went into the gift shop.

  Ty was there, standing on a stepladder, fixing a light bulb. His long bag of tools was next to his feet. ‘Hey!’ he said to us, looking round. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Um,’ said Salim. ‘We’re—’

  I looked at Kat. For once, I needed our brainwaves to be operating on the same frequency. I saw her eyes widen, and her mouth open.

  ‘We’re looking for a present for Auntie Glo,’ she said. ‘Ted, which print did you want?’

  I walked towards the drawers of posters. My knees felt like water, which is a figure of speech but at that moment did not feel very figurative at all.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said a voice behind me. Sandra was standing in the gift-shop doorway, her mouth straight and flat and her eyebrows raised. Lionel was just behind her. I decided to ignore her. ‘Ted!’ she said. ‘Ted Spark! What are you doing?’

  I reached forward and pulled open a drawer, taking out the poster tube on the top of the pile, the one that had been empty this morning.

  It was not empty any longer. I popped open the end of the tube and out slid a heavy roll of material that scratched my hands. It fell onto the floor and opened, and there were the curves and colours of In the Black Square. It was true, I noticed, that you could see the brush strokes Kandinsky had used. It really did not look like the prints of itself at all.

  ‘We have found the missing painting,’ I said. ‘Sandra and Ty were about to steal it.’

  FIFTY-ONE

  Silence and Noise

  I am beginning to realize that silences sound different in different circumstances. Sometimes they can be soft. Sometimes they can be full of the last noise that happened, its waves still bouncing further and further out into the universe.

  When you have just accused two people of stealing a painting worth $20 million, the silence is very full indeed. It was full of people breathing. No one said anything for 9.7 seconds (I counted by looking at my weather watch), which is long enough for the fastest man in the world to run the 100 metres.

  ‘This is utterly ridiculous!’ said Sandra, 9.8 seconds later.

  ‘No way,’ said Salim. ‘No way!’

  Lionel, still standing behind her, used a bad swear word, and then began to speak very quickly into his walkie-talkie.

  Ty had turned towards us on his ladder. He stared at the painting but didn’t say anything. His mouth was closed, and his face was blank. He didn’t move.

  ‘But … how did it get here?’ asked Lionel. ‘I saw you guys half an hour ago – it wasn’t here then!’

  ‘Because it was only just moved here,’ I explained. ‘Sandra cut it from its frame in the gallery, then Ty hid it in the broken light fixtures on the second floor of the ramp, where he had been just before the smoke bombs went off. He said he was up on a ladder, which is how I knew that for certain. The lights aren’t working at the moment, so the painting wouldn’t show up as a dark strip. The fixtures are over a metre long and triangular, which means that a rolled-up painting could fit in there. In fact, it’s one of the only places in this museum that a painting that size could be hidden – and Ty was the only person working in the right place, at the right time, to hide it.

  ‘After he had hidden the painting, Ty smashed the frame into pieces that would fit into his baggy work trousers and walked out of the Guggenheim. Later he hid the pieces in a bush in Central Park. After that, he and Sandra waited until the police had left the museum and let the maintenance crew back in to finish working on the new exhibition. Then Ty got the painting out from the lights, took it down to the gift shop and put it into the empty tube that Sandra had left there earlier. Later today, Sandra was going to come into the gift shop and buy a new print for her collection – which was really the painting.’

  ‘Ted, don’t be silly. Why would I steal the painting?’ asked Sandra. Her lip was wobbling, and her arms were folded.

  ‘Because you’ve worked at the Guggenheim for five years,’ I said. ‘You know all about how it’s designed, so you know that the lights would be a good hiding place. But you don’t make as much money as Aunt Gloria because you’re only an assistant curator. You don’t have much money, but you like nice things that are expensive. Like Manolo Blahnik shoes. You also don’t like Kandinsky, so if you had to cut a painting out of its frame to steal it you wouldn’t mind as much if it was a Kandinsky painting. You also work in the same office as Aunt Gloria. You had the best opportunity to steal her credit card on Monday. You’re a woman. Sarah at Effortless Light Removals said that it was a woman who called, and Ty’s voice is too deep to pretend to be Aunt Gloria. And you’ve got a big handbag.’

  I remembered Sandra telling us that she didn’t like Kandinsky. I had thought that meant she wouldn’t steal a painting by him, but instead it meant the opposite: that she wouldn’t mind stealing a Kandinsky to get the money from it. It was just another way of looking at the same thing.

  ‘So?’ asked Sandra. I could see that her body was worried, and I knew that her voice was lying.

  ‘You could have hidden smoke bombs in it,’ I said. ‘We saw you come into the gallery just before the smoke alarms went off. You could have come up the side stairs and dropped the bombs on the way. I realized that the person who set off the smoke bombs must have hidden them somewhere – they could not have just held them in their hands. And you could have put a knife in your handbag too, to cut the painting out of its frame. Lionel would trust you – he wouldn’t have looked in your bag.

  ‘After the smoke alarms went off you ran down the ramp with us, but then you left us at the main door. You could have run back up the ramp into the gallery and cut the painting out of its frame then. But you couldn’t have smashed the frame in those high-heeled shoes you were wearing, and you couldn’t have made sure the camera systems were off before. You needed someone strong and good with electrical things, someone who has a clever brain to plan tricks. Someone like Ty.

  ‘You met Ty in the gallery, gave him the painting, and he ran back up the ramp, climbed up his ladder and pushed the painting into the light fixtures he had been working on. Then he went out of the front door with everyone else. Apart from us, he was the fifth person to come out, which is strange, because he wasn’t that high up the ramp. He only just came out in front of Jacob. But it makes more sense if he was moving slowly because he had something in the legs of his trousers that made him walk stiffly.

  ‘When we saw him in Central Park, he was moving oddly. I didn’t know why, but it makes sense now, if he had just got rid of the bits of frame in the bushes!’ I took a deep breath.

  ‘What did you mean about the Pop Tarts?’ whispered Kat to me.

  ‘Sandra can’t eat Pop Tarts,’ I said. ‘She’s gluten intolerant. So that made me realize that she had had someone in her flat who was not allergic to gluten, and probably someone young too. Someone who would like to eat Pop Tarts. I realized that Sandra would have needed help from someone on the crew, and Ty is the youngest. We thought that no one on the crew liked Sandra – and we thought that, if there were two thieves working together, they had to like each other, or be family. But we weren’t thinking in the right way. It didn’t matter whether Sandra liked the person who helped her steal the painting. She made them help her, because that is the kind of person she is.

  ‘Ty also fitted with the way the crime was planned. He is the kind of person who would think of smoke bombs, because he likes jokes and pranks, like Salim. He also likes puns, and wordplay. Remember how he used the word cracked in two different ways, and referred back to it later? He told us that he didn’t see nothing, which was literally true. That was also wordplay. And Effortless Light Removals was his joke too. He sent the police after a van with a light bulb on it, when all the time the painting was hidden next to a real light bulb.’

  ‘Is this true?’ asked Lionel to Ty.

  ‘No,’ said Ty. He was still very stiff and I saw that his hands were shaking.


  That was when Lieutenant Leigh walked into the gift shop.

  FIFTY-TWO

  In the Nick of Time

  His lips were turned down, but when his eyes behind their glasses saw In the Black Square lying on the floor they got very wide.

  ‘Where—’ he said. ‘How—’

  ‘Sandra and Ty stole it,’ I told him. ‘We found it just in the nick of time. The frame is in a bush in Central Park, broken up. The painting used to be in the light fixtures on the second floor, but it was just moved to the gift shop. Sandra was going to buy it as soon as the museum shop opened again.’

  ‘I think the kid’s on to something,’ said Lionel, nodding. ‘You’ve got to listen to him.’

  After that, things moved at New York speed. Lionel put his hands on Sandra and Ty’s shoulders (he didn’t look happy about this, and neither did they), while Lieutenant Leigh took out his phone and spoke quickly into it. Seven minutes later, two blue-and-white cars with New York plates pulled up outside the gift shop, and three police officers scrambled out and put Ty and Sandra in handcuffs. I thought this was exciting, because I had never actually seen people put in handcuffs before. But then I looked at Salim’s face and saw that its skin was tight, its eyes looking down and its mouth straight.

  ‘Why did it have to be Ty?’ he said. ‘I thought he was helping us. He kept texting to see how we were getting on!’

  ‘He was texting because he wanted to know how close we were to finding the painting,’ I said. ‘He was helping Sandra because he needed the money to become an architect.’

  This explanation made sense to me, but it didn’t seem to please Salim. And I understood. It was true, but it was also sad.

  As Ty was being taken out of the gift-shop door, he turned back to where we were standing. ‘Salim!’ he said. ‘Man. Hey, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You framed my mum,’ said Salim. ‘You helped steal the painting, and you would have let her go to jail for you!’

  ‘Yeah, but—’ said Ty. ‘It’s just a painting. No one got hurt.’

  ‘I got hurt,’ said Salim, and he folded his arms and stared at a spot on the ceiling.

  Kat stood next to him and folded her arms, and I copied them. I thought I was getting very good at this. We stood there, and Ty and Sandra were put into the cars and they drove away. It felt like some of the air was draining out of the universe.

  Lieutenant Leigh took out a pair of white latex gloves from his pocket and went over to where the painting was. He bent over it, and I could tell that his body knew exactly how to deal with it. It wasn’t awkward and stiff any more. He rolled up the painting in a gentle, perfect curve, and then slid it very carefully back into the tube it had come from. Once he had done that he breathed out slowly, and his lips went up. He turned his head to face us.

  ‘You’re very lucky kids,’ he said.

  ‘It was not luck!’ I said. ‘We deduced the truth by ruling out impossible things one by one. We worked together. The painting had to be in the museum. There was only one place a long, rolled-up painting could be hidden, and only one person who could have hidden it there – Ty. But he couldn’t have done it on his own.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Lieutenant Leigh. ‘You’re very smart. And I’m very lucky. I came here today because all our other leads had gone cold. The crate we spent almost two days chasing was found in a warehouse this morning, empty. The CCTV cameras in the area around the museum had come up with nothing. The smoke bombs and removals companies had been bought with Gloria McCloud’s credit card, but she wasn’t admitting it under questioning.’

  ‘That’s because she didn’t do it! Sandra and Ty did. She’s innocent!’ said Salim.

  ‘I didn’t believe her before, but that’s certainly how it seems now,’ said Lieutenant Leigh. ‘But we have to make sure.’ Then his walkie-talkie buzzed. He listened to it, and his eyebrows raised above the rims of his glasses again. ‘We’ve found the smashed-up pieces of frame,’ he said to me and Kat and Salim. ‘They were exactly where you told us they would be: in a bush in Central Park, near the ice-cream stand. Well, well!’

  ‘Well, well,’ I said.

  ‘He means good work, Ted!’ Kat whispered to me.

  I noticed that Lionel wasn’t speaking to the detective, or helping us explain the case. Instead, he was wiping his face again, left to right and then right to left and then left to right, but I saw four beads of sweat on his right temple that he had missed. From this I deduced that Lionel was hot, but he was also nervous. I thought, and understood why this was: because he had also committed a crime, a very small one. He was worried that Lieutenant Leigh would want to punish him as well. Lionel had done a bad thing, but he had done it for a good reason. It was a little like what Ty had done.

  I wanted to help Lionel. ‘You won’t be searching the museum any more, will you?’ I asked Lieutenant Leigh.

  ‘What?’ asked Lieutenant Leigh. He wasn’t paying attention to me. ‘No.’

  ‘That is good,’ I said. ‘Also, Lionel is an excellent security guard. He helped us solve the case, and he is very kind. You should tell the Director that he has done a good job.’ It felt like lying, not telling Lieutenant Leigh about what Lionel had done – but I was realizing that lying can sometimes be a good thing.

  The detective’s lips turned up. ‘Sure,’ he said, looking at Lionel at last. ‘I guess he has.’

  I was pleased.

  ‘Now,’ said Lieutenant Leigh. ‘I think the three of you need to come down to the station and answer some more questions. I’m not gonna arrest you, I promise – I just want to understand what happened.’

  And so, three minutes and fifty seconds later, Salim, Kat and I were all sitting in the back of another blue-and-white police car, on the way to the police station ourselves.

  FIFTY-THREE

  At the Station

  When we got to the police station, which was a tall red building with yellow-and-blue arches and writing on the glass above the front door that said 19 PRECINCT, there was a lot of shouting.

  This is because, three minutes after we walked through the door and were sent into a small room with a square white table and six hard white chairs, like school chairs, Aunt Gloria and Mum came in.

  Aunt Gloria’s make-up had run down her face, and Mum’s hair was sticking up on one side of her head as though she had been sleeping against the wall. When they saw us, Aunt Gloria burst into tears and ran at Salim and hugged him, then shouted at him, then hugged him again. Mum hugged Kat, and hugged me, even though I tried to step away from her.

  ‘We solved the mystery, Mum!’ I said. ‘We’ve saved you, Aunt Gloria!’

  ‘WHAT?’ cried Aunt Gloria.

  ‘WHAT?’ cried Mum.

  They were being very loud. I felt my head go to one side.

  ‘Listen!’ shouted Kat. ‘MUM! AUNT GLORIA! It’s true! We did it. I mean, Ted worked it out in the end, but I did help, and so did Salim. We found the painting! And we worked out who stole it, so the police know it wasn’t you, Auntie Glo. They’re going to let you out soon!’

  Salim grinned, crossed his arms and said, ‘What Kat said.’

  Aunt Gloria gaped, and so did Mum. We had to tell them the whole story, which bothered me because it took a very long time. But saying everything again made me see some points in the pattern that I had missed.

  ‘I just can’t believe Sandra would do such a thing!’ Aunt Gloria kept repeating, very loudly. ‘She was my rock! She was always there for me! She knew everything!’

  I translated what Aunt Gloria had said, looking at it upside down, just the way I had with Sandra and the Kandinsky. Sandra had been at the Guggenheim for years before Aunt Gloria arrived. This meant that even though she acted nicely to Aunt Gloria and Salim, she might also be annoyed that Aunt Gloria was more important than her. Sandra knew everything, including where to cut the cameras to put them out of action, and where you could set off smoke bombs without anyone else noticing. She set one off in the stairwell, and another
on the second-floor ramp, so it had rolled down, to where the fire crew had found it later.

  ‘That Ty boy, though,’ Aunt Gloria went on. ‘Salim, you should never have spent time with him.’

  ‘Mum!’ said Salim. ‘That’s not fair! He was always nice to me. He didn’t exactly tell me that he was going to steal a painting, did he? If you didn’t know about Sandra, then I shouldn’t have to have known about Ty. I liked him, all right? And you liked Sandra.’

  ‘Well –’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘Well— oh, Salim, I knew this city was a bad idea!’

  ‘No way! I love it here. I helped solve the crime, didn’t I?’ said Salim. ‘Mum, I don’t need to be protected any more. And we can’t leave, and go back to Manchester. We’re different now.’

  Mum smiled. She murmured that Aunt Gloria had almost been sent to prison, which would have made her extremely different. It was the sort of joke that Dad would usually make, which let me know that Mum was missing him.

  Kat said, ‘You have to listen to me too, Mum,’ and she held out the card the woman on the steps of the Met had given her. She told Mum that the woman had said she had potential, and that had made Kat sure that she was right to want to do art and design GCSEs. Mum stopped smiling.

  ‘Kat, you’re too young!’ she said. ‘I’ve told you, no one knows what they want to be when they are fourteen.’

  Kat stuck out her chin and said, ‘I’m not too young. I’m growing up all the time. And I do know what I want to be. I bet you did too, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, your mum nursed anything she could get her hands on,’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘I remember her making me pretend I had a broken leg when I was three and she was six. She gave me a spoonful of something from a bottle to make me better, only it ended up being your grandad’s gin, and I was sick all over the sofa.’

  ‘GLO!’ shouted Mum. ‘You are not helping! Oh, Kat, can’t we talk about this another time?’