The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  ‘We can,’ said Kat. ‘If you promise to actually think about it and not just tell me off, and if you promise that I can do art and design as well as biology.’

  Mum rested her cupped hands against her head. ‘Kat, you have got me while I am weak,’ she said. ‘But … all right.’

  Kat whooped, and Salim high-fived her.

  That was when Lieutenant Leigh came back in to see us.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Cracked Case

  He told us that Sandra had confessed. Words poured out of her, said Lieutenant Leigh, and I imagined a river splashing from Sandra’s throat, each word a water molecule.

  She had told him that she needed the money, and she had heard of someone who would buy In the Black Square from her. She knew she could cut it out of its frame cleanly (I wondered if she had practised on some prints in her apartment), and where it could be hidden, but she needed someone to help her with the more physical part. She had decided that Ty would be the one, because he could cut the wiring in the lights and the camera systems, and he could get into the light fixtures easily. She told him that she would have him fired if he didn’t help, so it was her idea – but Ty had become very interested in planning, and most of what happened in the end was his idea.

  They worked everything out in Sandra’s apartment (which was the reason for the Pop Tarts – just as I had thought, Sandra had bought them for Ty). They had been waiting for an exhibition change-over, when the museum would be empty and the Director would be away.

  Sandra decided to frame Aunt Gloria from the beginning, but when Aunt Gloria told everyone that her English relatives were coming to stay this week, and she would only come to the museum on Thursday morning to show us around, they realized that the theft had to happen on Thursday.

  Once Sandra had set off the smoke bombs, and we had gone out of the museum, Sandra had run back up the ramp (through the smoke) into the tower gallery. In the gallery, the cameras weren’t working, so Sandra couldn’t be seen. There was also not as much smoke there as there was in the rotunda. She took a knife out of her handbag and cut the painting out of its frame. She rolled it up and then carried it, along with the frame, out to the entrance of the gallery, where Ty was waiting. He broke the frame into pieces with his boot – the noise of the alarm covered up any noise he made – then ran back up the ramp to put the painting into the light fixture, before going slowly back down the ramp with the pieces of the frame in his trousers. The whole thing took less than three minutes, and then they were out of the building with everyone else.

  The plan was to trick the police into thinking that the painting had been taken out of the Guggenheim by the removals van. They would follow it, and then the next van, as they went all around New York, and by the time they found the crate and realized that it was empty, Ty would have had the chance to get back into the Guggenheim, take the painting out of the light fixture and leave it in the gift shop, in the empty poster tube, for Sandra to collect and buy.

  ‘Very clever,’ the lieutenant said, nodding his head. ‘They would have outwitted us. Good work, Ted, Salim and Kat.’

  His lips turned up at me. I tried to make my mouth mirror his, the way I did with Salim.

  ‘If you’re ever looking for a job, you should think of us,’ said the lieutenant, and then he closed one eye in a wink behind his glasses. Usually this is the sign that someone is joking, but the rest of the lieutenant’s face was serious. So I decided that he was telling the truth. I felt pleased. He held out his hand and dropped a white card on the table – the same sort of card as Jas Singh had given Kat. I reached out my hand and picked it up. It read LIEUTENANT DONOVAN LEIGH, and there was a telephone number after his name.

  I looked up from the card to Lieutenant Leigh.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  It felt good to think that I had made a friend in New York, and I had seven friends after all.

  ‘I have to say, I feel terrible for that boy Ty, even if he did end up helping,’ said Mum when Lieutenant Leigh had gone. ‘He’s so young. Glo, this is dreadful.’

  I also felt very mixed up when I thought about Ty: sad and angry and confused. Ty had tricked us all, and pretended to be our friend, when he was really not. He had needed money to help him get what he wanted, which was to become an architect. But committing a crime is a choice, just like everything anyone does. Some things do not seem like choices, like the moment I got on the wrong subway train, but I still could have gone the other way, and if I had, things would be different. We all feel as though we are being pulled in different directions by patterns that we cannot even see, but actually we are making our own patterns, every single second. We can choose to be heroes or villains.

  Then Salim said, ‘I want to see him. I want to see Ty.’

  We were shown into another small white room with a white table and six white chairs. This time only one person was sitting on one of them. It was Ty. His arms were leaning on the table and his head was leaning on his arms, and I knew that the emotion he was feeling was sadness.

  ‘Ty,’ said Salim, and Ty looked up at us. His eyes were red, and his mouth was turned down.

  ‘Salim, man,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said before. I’m really, really sorry.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Salim.

  ‘We’re still friends,’ said Ty. ‘Right? I just … made a mistake. It started out as Sandra’s idea. She told me if I helped her, I’d be rich. I could have everything I wanted, and we’d never be caught, because most art thieves aren’t caught, and anyway it was just a painting. It didn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it mattered,’ said Salim.

  ‘I know that now,’ said Ty, and his head dropped down onto his arms again. ‘But then I just got, I don’t know, interested in the planning. It was just another problem to solve, something else to build, and then we were doing it and it felt like a joke. The cameras even went down on their own on Tuesday – I barely had to do anything. But after we’d done it, it didn’t feel like a joke any more. I was so worried that you’d work it out. And I thought that they’d just let your mom off. But then the lieutenant really thought she’d done it when he arrested her. He wasn’t going to let her go.’

  I thought that even though Ty had been one of the thieves, and he had helped plan the crime, he was right that it was very hard to say no to Sandra. I remembered the way she had told us what to do when we stayed with her. Then I knew for certain that Ty was still a clever, good person, even though he had done a bad thing.

  I had thought that a missing painting would be a simple mystery to solve, with no emotions in it, but it had turned out to be very difficult to understand.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  A Change is as Good as …

  It was very strange trying to have a holiday in New York after we had solved a mystery. Aunt Gloria and Mum became extra-cheerful, saying lots of loud things about how EXCITING New York was, and how there was SO MUCH TO DO.

  The next day, instead of resting, we were dragged onto the subway, and then off again, and up tall buildings and down again. We went to a toy shop with a man outside it pretending to be a Buckingham Palace guard, and a clock on the wall inside with a face and eyes that moved. Noise shrilled into my ears from ten different directions and lights flashed. We went to Central Park, and its zoo, and saw the lonely polar bear swimming round and round his enclosure. It was all exactly like my guidebook.

  But something had changed in me since our first day in New York. I realized as we stood at the top of the Empire State Building that evening, with New York shining in all directions like a lit map, and a wind coming in from the sea against my face, that all the noise and light didn’t make me feel as though I was about to disintegrate into approximately a billion pieces. My hand flapped, but that was only for reassurance. I had travelled all over New York, and that quest had changed me.

  Salim had his camera up to his eye, and was taking pictures. I thought he was taking pictures of the city, until I followe
d the path of his lens and saw Kat, with her arms up, her face pushing into the wind. She didn’t look beautiful, or like a model. She looked like my sister.

  ‘Good picture,’ said Salim to me, lowering the camera. This was the first thing he had said for quite a while.

  ‘Can I have a copy?’ I asked.

  ‘You can have as many as you want,’ said Salim. I imagined thousands of copies of the picture of Kat, flying off the edge of the Empire State Building’s balcony and whirling through the air. I liked that thought. Although some art is important because there is only one of it, I think photographs are always just as good, because each print is the photograph itself.

  I didn’t know how to say what I really meant, so I said, ‘Thank you, Salim,’ and went to stand next to Mum.

  ‘My Ted,’ said Mum, and she put her arm round me. I took a deep breath, and didn’t let my body flinch. ‘You’re something special, you know that?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I said, because I did.

  There was a message from Lieutenant Leigh for Aunt Gloria on the answering machine when we got home. He had good news. The police were charging Sandra as the main thief of In the Black Square. Ty was going to be charged with helping her steal it, and hiding it, but he was a minor, which means not an adult yet, and so he wouldn’t go to prison for as long, even if he was found guilty.

  I felt good about this. I didn’t like thinking about Ty in prison. I hoped that he would be able to study to become an architect while he was there, or when he got out again.

  Mum called Dad in London, and they had a long talk while Kat paced in circles around Aunt Gloria’s white sofa and chewed her nails. But in the end she didn’t need to worry, because Mum came back out of Aunt Gloria’s room with a smile on her face. The smile meant that Kat was allowed to take art and design GCSEs, and also to apply for fashion design internship programmes in London next summer, including at the House of Cyriax.

  ‘My clever niece!’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘Art does run in our family!’

  Kat squealed, and hugged Mum and Aunt Gloria and Salim, and then she went dancing around the sofa again, arms waving. She was Hurricane Kat again, but she was whirling with happiness, not anger.

  I woke up at 3.32 a.m. New York time, on the day we were going to fly home to London and Dad, and heard Salim and Kat whispering again. They were both sitting on Salim’s futon, and their heads were bent close together.

  ‘I’m glad Aunt Faith listened to you,’ said Salim.

  ‘Me too,’ said Kat. ‘And I’m glad Auntie Glo listened to you.’ Then she sighed. ‘I wish you weren’t so far away, though,’ she said. ‘I’m going to miss you this year.’

  I agreed with Kat. Although I was happy that Salim didn’t have to go back to Manchester because Aunt Gloria was in prison, I realized that there would be a gap in the pattern of our family without them. New York was very far away from London.

  ‘Hey!’ said Salim. ‘I’ll email you! Or we can Skype.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Kat, and she sighed again.

  ‘Listen!’ said Salim. ‘We’re a team. You, me and Ted. We don’t have to be on the same continent for that. Right, Ted?’

  ‘Hrumm,’ I said, because I hadn’t realized that Salim knew I was awake.

  Then Kat laughed, and Salim laughed too. It was good to know that they really were my friends, as well as my family.

  Our plane took off that afternoon. I sat in my seat as Kat’s head bobbed along to the music on her iPod, and Mum bent bent over her magazine, and stared down at the clouds below me. They were altocumulus, which meant that change was on the way, and I thought this was good. I had been to New York, and learned its patterns and weather systems, and gone on a quest like Odysseus and become a hero and solved a mystery, and even though I had felt myself change, I also knew that I was still the same Ted I had always been. My brain was still unique, and it was still good. It had helped me solve two mysteries that no one else could, and I thought that if I ever found any more mysteries in my life, I would know what to do.

  I sat back in my seat, and felt the plane jump and judder through my body. I was Ted Spark. And I was happy with that.

  Author’s Note

  It is strange to come to the end of a book and acknowledge that you wish you had not written it. Of course, that is not literally true: I am proud of The Guggenheim Mystery and loved every moment of creating Ted’s New York mystery.

  But all the same it is a tragedy that I ever sat down to write it. Siobhan Dowd created Ted Spark and his family in The London Eye Mystery. She was contracted to write it and one other book, simply referred to as The Guggenheim Mystery, but only a few months after The London Eye Mystery was published, in August 2007, she died from cancer at the age of forty-seven. She never got to even begin planning her Guggenheim Mystery, and so the Siobhan Dowd Trust had to look for another author to write it in her stead. They approached me in 2015, to see if I would be interested, and I knew that I absolutely would. I began the project with only Siobhan’s characters and those three words to go on, and the story built from there.

  I loved The London Eye Mystery from the first time I read it. Siobhan was an incredible writer, and all her books are marvellous, but The London Eye Mystery feels particularly special to me. It is, quite simply, one of the best-constructed mysteries I have ever come across, and so the thought of carrying on Ted’s story was both extremely exciting and completely daunting. All I can say is that I have done my best, and I am grateful for all the pointers I have been given from all the people who loved her. When you talk to anyone who worked with Siobhan and her books, their faces light up. She means so much to everyone she knew, and everyone has a personal story of her kindness to tell.

  Before I was given The Guggenheim Mystery as a project, I did not know much about the Guggenheim itself – apart from the fact that it was a museum, in New York, that showed modern art. But as soon as I began to read about it, I realized why Siobhan had chosen it as the setting of Ted’s second adventure. If Ted is a different sort of detective, the Guggenheim, with its curving ramp, its rotunda shape and its insistence on viewing art from all angles at once, is a different sort of museum. Ted would be perfectly at home there – and if anything were to happen to one of the paintings, he would be the perfect person to solve the mystery.

  Once I knew that I was going to write my first art heist, I had to think carefully about which painting I wanted to steal. I ended up choosing In the Black Square by Vasily Kandinsky. In case you were wondering, this painting, and its artist, are absolutely real, and you may Google them both. Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian abstract artist who worked with colours and shapes. His paintings are bright and exciting, and I love looking at them. I thought that Ted would enjoy the weather in In the Black Square – it would stretch him in exactly the right way, and make him think about art, and why we value it so much.

  I have tried to be as truthful and as close to reality as I could with the setting itself, and worked with the Guggenheim to get my facts straight, but at the end of the day I made this book up. There are some places (precise details of the exhibition I used, for example) where I’ve had to take certain liberties with the truth. Forgive me!

  One more note on museums. Like Salim, I grew up with a mother who worked in one. Mine was the Director of Education at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and so I spent many hours wandering around the museum as a child. In fact, my mother was part of the Ashmolean staff in 2000, when one of its most famous art thefts occurred. I promise you, though, that she didn’t do it any more than Aunt Gloria did. Thieves broke into the museum on New Year’s Eve, using the noise of the fireworks to mask their entry. To make sure that the cameras did not catch them, they set off smoke bombs in the gallery, and escaped with a Cézanne worth three million pounds. So if you’ve been wondering why I chose the method I did for my own made-up art theft … now you know.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my perceptive, thoughtful and direct early readers
: Kathie Booth Stevens, Charlie Morris, Anne Miller, Mariam Khan, Wei Ming Kam, Holly Campbell from the Guggenheim (huge thanks to JiaJia Fei, who put us in touch), Simon Houlton and Leonie Bennett, and Michele Butler and Jordan Lynton (who were introduced to me by Aimée Felone). Your feedback helped shape this book, and I am enormously grateful to you.

  Huge thanks to Donal Emerson and Oona Emerson, and to the Siobhan Dowd Trust for supporting this book and giving me an insight into Ted’s interests and ambitions. Thanks to Hilary Delamere, Alice Sutherland-Hawes and the team at the Agency – it’s been wonderful to collaborate with you on such an exciting project!

  Thank you to my family, who coped beautifully with the news that I was going to be writing a surprise extra book, and who have supported me throughout the process. Special thanks go to my husband, David, who lived this book alongside me, and has listened patiently to me talk about everything from painting dimensions to the New York subway. There’s no one who deserves this book more – I couldn’t have done it without you by my side.

  Thank you to my friends (sorry I was NEVER free for dinner. This book is why), and also to my author-support network Non Pratt, Louie Stowell, Karen Lawler, Genn McMenemy, Charlie Morris (again), Anne Miller (again!) and every fantastic member of Team Cooper, who made sure I reached the finish line still basically cheerful and functioning. Thank you to Char, who gave me much-needed words of wisdom about first drafts. And finally, shout-out to reader Wakiuru Wohoro, who named Sandra on Twitter.

  The team at Puffin have, as always, been incredible. Thank you to Natalie Doherty, Kelly Hurst, Harriet Venn, Francesca Dow, Tom Rawlinson, Sue Cook, Frances Evans and everyone else who’s helped with this book. I’m honoured to have had some of the people who worked on The London Eye Mystery on The Guggenheim Mystery’s team as well, and it’s wonderful to feel so connected to that book. Thank you to David Dean for a cover so beautiful it made me cry, and thank you to my agent, Gemma Cooper, for the years of hard work and resolve that have led to this amazing moment. Gemma, I am so glad to have you on my team!