The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  Aunt Gloria’s eyes went moist again. ‘You’ll always be my baby boy,’ she whispered. ‘Just like Kat is Fai’s little girl. Oh, go on, get out.’

  We stood in the lift while it went down six floors, and then we walked out into the street. The sun was already hot, but there was shade under the trees. I looked around at the bright, tall, tan-coloured buildings with their exposed fire escapes, inside-out like beetle exoskeletons. New York felt very different to London.

  ‘Kat, I said. ‘You winked at me.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘Ted, something awful’s happened.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Aunt Gloria’s about to be arrested.’

  ‘Detective Ted!’ said Kat. ‘Yes, she is. The painting’s been stolen, so the police need to blame someone. Aunt Gloria makes sense. Her credit card was used, she was the last person in the Guggenheim that morning, and the police will think that all that crying she’s been doing is suspicious. But we know that she didn’t do it.’

  Some of what she was saying was true, but some was just guesswork. And it still did not explain the wink. I stared at her.

  ‘Ted, can you stop looking at me like that?’ snapped Kat. ‘You’ve been so weird since we arrived. You’ve barely talked to us. Anyone’d think you didn’t like us any more. So, are you in?’

  I blinked.

  ‘In where?’ I asked.

  ‘Aunt Gloria’s about to be arrested,’ Kat said. ‘The police think it’s her, so we can’t trust them. But who do we know who solved a mystery that even the police couldn’t? Who do we know who are detectives?’

  ‘Detectives,’ I said, because I did not believe that Kat was really saying what my ears were hearing.

  ‘Us, you idiot,’ said Kat. ‘The two of us – I mean, mostly you. And that means we can do it again, right? We can find out who really stole that painting. And stop doing that repeating thing, otherwise you can’t help.’

  ‘So, are you in?’ asked Salim. ‘Will you help solve the mystery?’

  ‘I am probably in,’ I said. ‘Let me think about it.’

  Kat smiled. ‘Probably means yes!’ she said. ‘I know it, Ted!’

  ‘Hrumm,’ I said.

  SEVENTEEN

  X + Y = ?

  We stopped off at the corner shop to get our breakfast, as well as Aunt Gloria’s and Mum’s coffee. Salim and Kat’s idea of breakfast was sweets and fizzy drinks (which Salim said was called soda in New York). I didn’t have any sweets, because they all looked very different and I was worried about E-numbers. Then I realized that the E in E-number stands for Europe, and we were not in Europe any more. So there were no E-numbers in these sweets. Even chemicals had different names in the USA.

  I breathed slowly in and out three times – once for me, once for Salim and once for Kat – and then asked for a Coke, but I wasn’t sure about it when the shopkeeper handed it to me: it was in a tall, thin, glass bottle instead of a fat red can, and it tasted at least twice as sweet and very sticky. I held it out in front of me and watched a drop of water crawl down its side. The water flashed in a rainbow, which meant that it had caught the white light from the sun and refracted it out into all its hidden colours. At least the laws of physics did not change in different countries.

  We sat down on a bench outside the shop. I still didn’t think I understood the mystery properly. I was also worried about detecting in New York.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Kat, jerking her head at me.

  ‘Why does it matter who really stole the painting?’ I asked.

  ‘Ted!’ said Kat. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Why?’ I repeated. It was all I could say.

  ‘Because Mum matters,’ said Salim. ‘She loves her job, and if she goes to prison she’ll lose it. And she likes it here. I know she’s still worried about me after the spring, and I wish she’d let me have a bit more freedom – but if I help work out who stole the painting, that might help her see that she can trust me. And I love it here now too. At my new school, no one calls me … that horrible name I told you about in the spring. I’m still a drama geek, but that’s kind of cool here. What Ty said – about me wanting to be an actor – I’m going to try out for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof this fall, I mean autumn, and after I’m done with high school I want to go to drama school here.’

  I remembered Salim as the boy who had not bent back his New York guidebook once before coming to this city, and Kat as the girl who slipped out of school to smoke, and who argued with Mum. But this Salim was happy in New York, and this Kat was a grown-up Kat, who knew what she wanted to be. I thought of Dad saying, ‘My little kitten!’ and I wondered what he would think of her now.

  ‘You can solve the mystery, Ted,’ said Salim. ‘You and Kat worked out what happened to me, after all.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ I said. ‘We worked through all the possible solutions until we arrived at the truth.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Salim, his expression changing to happiness. ‘You did. The police couldn’t, but you did. And you can do it again.’

  My hand flapped. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know I said I could, but … I don’t understand New York.’

  ‘Yeah, but you understand problems,’ said Kat.

  ‘I don’t understand people,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand you and Salim. Why were you talking to each other and not me? Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to be a fashion designer? Are you still my friends?’

  ‘Ted!’ said Salim. “What— Why would you think we weren’t friends any more? Kat only asked me not to tell you because—’

  ‘Because I knew you’d tell Mum and Dad,’ said Kat. ‘And you’d do it in that stupid Ted way that’d make them side with you and tell me off. It always happens, and it’s not fair!’

  She sounded angry, but when I looked at her, I saw that her mouth was shaking and her eyes were wet.

  ‘Ted,’ she said. ‘I was stupid, and I’m sorry I’ve been cross with you. It’s just – look, it’s not easy, being part of your family. You don’t know it, but you need so much. All the time. Appointments and lessons and – things, Ted. And the more things you have, the less there is to go around. And I know you don’t mean it, and you can’t help it, but sometimes I wish … I wish everything wasn’t always about you, all right? When I try to make it about me, I get yelled at. Mum and Dad want me to be sensible all the time, but I can’t.’

  ‘I can’t help being me either, Kat,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Kat, wiping her eyes. ‘And being you is a good thing to be. It really is. Because when something like this happens, you can help solve it. I know you can.’

  ‘So can you!’ I said, because it is true that Kat made some very clever deductions during our last case.

  My mind was spinning. Could I do it? When Salim went missing, I’d had the tube and the phone book. I had been at home in London, but all the same I hadn’t been able to see the real pattern until it was almost too late. Could I do it again, in New York, where everything was the wrong way round? I imagined the words Who stole the painting as an equation. The painting was X, just the way I had imagined before. The thief was Y. But there were several different variables on the other side. First, we were in New York, not London. Also, Salim would be with me, not just Kat. Salim and Kat were both different to how they had been in May, so even though they told me they were still my friends, I couldn’t be really sure how they would behave. My hand shook itself out, because I wanted to go back to our house, and our garden, and Dad. New York + Ted + Salim + Kat = X + Y was a difficult equation. It didn’t balance, like London + Ted + Kat – Salim = Salim + X, where X marked Salim’s spot.

  But then I remembered that, just like the earthquake in America that had caused the tidal wave in Japan, London and New York were connected. That meant they had things in common, patterns that I could find. No matter how strange this mystery felt, I knew I could turn it around into something that I could solve. When Salim went missing I learned that this is how my brain works – thi
s is what makes me special and different, and different is not a bad thing.

  And when I thought that, I knew that even though it gave me a bad feeling all the way up my oesophagus, I had to help Kat, and I had to help Salim and Aunt Gloria. We were family, and now I had discovered that we really were also friends.

  I also knew what I had to say, the secret password that would make Kat happy again. ‘Kat,’ I said. ‘Sis. I think I can help solve the mystery.’

  Kat squealed. ‘All right!’ she said. ‘And we’ve also got Salim this time. We’ll be unstoppable!’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Salim. He put out his hand, and Kat put hers on top of it. They both waited. Then Kat giggled.

  ‘Bro,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to put your hand on top.’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said politely.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thirteen Suspects

  ‘We have to start with what happened,’ said Kat, in the tone of voice that Mum always calls bossy, jumping up from the bench where we were sitting and walking back and forth in front of me and Salim. She went in and out of the shade from the shop’s green awning, turning bright in the sun and then darker in its shadow, again and again. ‘Someone set off smoke bombs, the smoke alarm went off, everyone ran out of the museum and, when they came back, the painting had been stolen. It was put into one of the packing crates we saw on the Guggenheim first floor, then taken to the back door of the museum and picked up by a removals company, who we know were hired using Auntie Glo’s credit card.’

  I thought carefully about what she had said. It seemed simple, but it was really not simple at all.

  I considered the smoke bombs first. We knew about them because the firefighters had told Aunt Gloria, and she had told us. This is called anecdotal evidence, and it means any evidence that a detective hears about. In this case, because the firefighters had said it, and they are generally trustworthy, it was probably still useful information, but anecdotal evidence is really the weakest kind of evidence there is, because it is only based on what someone says, and as I have discovered, most people are better at lying than I am.

  The smoke itself, though, was different. We could prove that it had been there, because we had seen it with our eyes. This is called empirical evidence, and it is better than anecdotal evidence. But although it seems like good evidence, it is still not the best kind, because (as Kat and I discovered last time) your eyes can trick you. The best kind of evidence is scientific evidence – evidence that has been tested and proved to be correct. As far as I could tell, we didn’t have any scientific evidence yet.

  Then I thought about everyone running out of the museum. Mum, Salim, Kat and I had got out very quickly, but the rest of the museum staff didn’t all come out at the same time. They had appeared one by one, apart from Ben and Rafael, who came outside together. It had been seven minutes before the last person, Aunt Gloria, had appeared.

  Then, four minutes later, the fire department arrived and they had been in the building, unsupervised, for five more minutes.

  I said all this to Kat, and she narrowed her eyes. I was worried, until I decided that this look was her thoughtful-narrowed-eyes look, not her angry one.

  ‘We need to write this down,’ she said. ‘Salim, do you have something to write with?’

  Salim pulled a piece of paper and a pen out of his pocket and, with his help, we made a list of all the people we had seen leave the museum:

  In what order did people leave the Guggenheim?

  Ted, Kat, Salim and Mum (Aunt Faith) left the building at 10.23 (two minutes after the alarms first went off)

  The freckly man from the maintenance crew (Ben) and the man with lots of curly hair (Rafael, who Salim says is the janitor) left together at 10.24

  Lana, the short woman with red hair, left just after Rafael and Ben, at 10.24

  Sandra, blonde and slim, was standing at the doorway of the Guggenheim from 10.25

  Ty, Salim’s friend, who is skinny with a big square hairdo, left at 10.25

  Jacob, the old man with a white beard, left just after Ty, also at 10.25

  Helen, the woman with a ponytail who is in charge of the maintenance crew, left at 10.26

  Lionel, the tall security guard, left at 10.27

  Aunt Gloria left the building at 10.28, seven minutes after the first alarms, and five minutes after Ted, Kat, Salim and Mum

  The builder, Gabriel, was working on the outside of the building, and we don’t think he ever went inside. But he was late for the roll call, which is suspicious.

  The firefighters arrived four minutes after Aunt Gloria left the Guggenheim, at 10.32, and came out five minutes after that.

  Looking at this list, I was worried. There were so many suspects.

  ‘Would the first people out of the museum have had enough time to steal the painting?’ asked Salim. ‘Rafael and Ben only came out a minute after us, and Lana came out just after them.’

  We did not know how long it would take to steal In the Black Square yet, but I agreed with Salim that it would be more difficult for people who only had two or three minutes to do it. We could not rule them out yet, but they were not as good suspects as the people who had come out later.

  ‘Also, the thief would have to be strong, wouldn’t they?’ asked Kat. ‘The painting’s big, and it’s probably heavy.’

  ‘It is ninety-seven point five centimetres by ninety-three point three centimetres,’ I agreed. I had looked it up on Salim’s computer.

  ‘It’s in a big wooden frame too – that must weigh quite a bit. And those packing cases are also very heavy,’ said Salim. ‘I tried to lift one once! There’s no way that Mum could manage it, or Sandra either.’

  ‘Definitely not Sandra. She’s really small and slim. And she was wearing Manolo Blahniks,’ said Kat, nodding.

  I frowned at her.

  ‘They’re shoes,’ Kat said, sighing. ‘Really expensive designer shoes. The gorgeous high heels Sandra was wearing. Remember? I don’t think Sandra could have lifted anything in them.’

  ‘Right, that’s one point against Mum or Sandra,’ said Salim. ‘And also against Ben, Rafael and Lana, because the timing is less easy. Now we have to work out how to rule out Mum properly. Hey! I know. If we can prove Mum wasn’t the one using her credit card to order the van, then we can prove she had nothing to do with the theft, and someone else stole it from her bag and used it! So all we need to do is find out which removals company it was, and go and see them. They might be able to tell us when the card was used. Maybe it was a day when Mum wasn’t even in the office. Or maybe the person who placed the order didn’t sound like her.’

  I did not think it was right for Salim to say all we need to do like that. I thought that Salim was expecting this to be very simple and easy, but I was not. The police were far ahead of us in this investigation. They had found the removal van by looking at traffic cameras – traffic cameras that we didn’t have access to, the way we’d had access to the film in Salim’s camera when we investigated our last mystery. Salim had a new camera now, a digital one, but even a digital camera couldn’t show us all the things the police could see. The police had discovered which removal company the van was from. They would already be following that lead.

  But Salim was smiling. ‘Listen, we don’t need cameras to work out where the van came from. We’ve got something just as good. We’ve got Billy.’

  ‘Billy?’ I asked.

  ‘Billy’s – well, you’ll see,’ said Salim. ‘He’ll help us find the removals company. Then we’ll be able to prove it wasn’t Mum easily! All we have to do is go back to the Guggenheim.’

  ‘How are we supposed to do that?’ asked Kat, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘We’ll tell Mum and Aunt Fai that we’ll be all right while’ – Salim swallowed suddenly in the middle of his sentence – ‘while they’re answering the police’s questions. We’ll say that we’re going to … sightsee. All right?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Kat. ‘All right. Ted, can you
lie, if Mum or Auntie Glo asks?’

  ‘Just copy me, Ted,’ said Salim, nudging me. ‘Just do exactly what I do and you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I repeated.

  But as we walked back to Aunt Gloria’s apartment, I had a nervous feeling in my stomach. I was about to tell the fourth lie of my life.

  NINETEEN

  Red and White and Blue

  When we got back, though, we found that Aunt Gloria’s apartment building was lit up not only by the bright white sun, but also by flashing lights, red and white and blue. Red, white and blue are the colours of both the British and the American flags, but also of the American police, and that was what these lights meant: the police were here for Aunt Gloria.

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Kat. She and Salim began to run, and I chased after them as quickly as I could.

  There were two police cars flashing their lights, and one other car that was grey, with a Connecticut number plate. I recognized this car from the Guggenheim the day before: it belonged to the art detective. I had a bad feeling, because seeing that car made Aunt Gloria being arrested go from a possibility to a high probability. And when we opened the door to Aunt Gloria’s apartment, that probability became a certainty.

  The art detective was in Aunt Gloria’s living room. He was still wearing his long brown coat, even though he was inside. ‘You have the right to remain silent, of course, but anything you do say can be used in evidence against you in a court of law,’ he was saying to Aunt Gloria, leaning over her threateningly and glaring at her through his gold-rimmed glasses.

  A lump rose up my throat, because I knew from Mum’s TV shows that this was the thing you say to someone when you are arresting them.

  Then he turned and saw Salim. ‘This must be your son,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘Salim,’ said Aunt Gloria. She was dressed, and had made up her face, but her mascara was running. I deduced from this that she had been crying. ‘My boy. You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be seeing this.’ She turned to Mum, who was standing next to her, looking very worried. ‘Fai, help me, please, you have to come with me to the station, please …’