The Guggenheim Mystery Read online

  Contents

  ONE: Patterns

  TWO: Figures of Speech

  THREE: The Home Front

  FOUR: The Odyssey, Part One

  FIVE: The Odyssey, Part Two

  SIX: Acting Up

  SEVEN: Cracks

  EIGHT: Ways of Seeing

  NINE: Protons, Electrons and Neutrons

  TEN: Fire, Fire!

  ELEVEN: No Smoke Without …?

  TWELVE: The Phenomenon of Spontaneous Combustion

  THIRTEEN: Ambitions and Sinkholes

  FOURTEEN: The Definition of Tragedy

  FIFTEEN: Five-per-cent Probability

  SIXTEEN: Wake-up Call

  SEVENTEEN: X + Y = ?

  EIGHTEEN: Thirteen Suspects

  NINETEEN: Red and White and Blue

  TWENTY: Seeing Billy

  TWENTY-ONE: Brooklyn Weather

  TWENTY-TWO: Oh, Honey

  TWENTY-THREE: Subway Blues

  TWENTY-FOUR: Building a Case

  TWENTY-FIVE: Zum Schneider

  TWENTY-SIX: Oompah and Orchestra

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Figure of Speech in a Bun

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Glass Garden

  TWENTY-NINE: Sweet Fourteen

  THIRTY: Scylla and Charybdis

  THIRTY-ONE: Wrong Train

  THIRTY-TWO: All the Lights in the Sky

  THIRTY-THREE: Red and White and Blue, Part Two

  THIRTY-FOUR: Sandra’s Paintings

  THIRTY-FIVE: Stealing The Scream

  THIRTY-SIX: Back in the Guggenheim

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Whichever Way You Look at It

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Occam’s Razor

  THIRTY-NINE: One

  FORTY: Which Door?

  FORTY-ONE: The Opposite of a Panopticon

  FORTY-TWO: Another Deductive Problem

  FORTY-THREE: Inside Out

  FORTY-FOUR: Literally Paperless

  FORTY-FIVE: Spinning in Circles

  FORTY-SIX: Priceless

  FORTY-SEVEN: Dead Ends

  FORTY-EIGHT: Out of the Blue

  FORTY-NINE: Brainwaves and Light Bulbs

  FIFTY: The Guggenheim Solution

  FIFTY-ONE: Silence and Noise

  FIFTY-TWO: In the Nick of Time

  FIFTY-THREE: At the Station

  FIFTY-FOUR: Cracked Case

  FIFTY-FIVE: A Change is as Good as …

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Robin Stevens was born in California and grew up in an Oxford college, across the road from the house where Alice in Wonderland lived. She has been making up stories all her life.

  She spent her teenage years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, reading a lot of murder mysteries and hoping that she’d get the chance to do some detecting herself (she didn’t). She went to university, where she studied crime fiction, and then worked in children’s publishing. She is now a full-time writer and the creator of the bestselling, award-winning Murder Most Unladylike mysteries.

  Robin lives in London with her husband and her pet bearded dragon, Watson.

  Siobhan Dowd lived in Oxford with her husband, Geoff, before tragically dying from cancer in August 2007, aged forty-seven. She was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary person.

  Siobhan’s first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, won the Branford Boase Award and the Eilis Dillon Award, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Booktrust Teenage Prize. The London Eye Mystery won the 2007 NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Children’s Book Award. With Bog Child, Siobhan was the first author to be posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2008.

  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was based on an original idea of Siobhan’s. It won both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal, and has been adapted into a movie starring Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver and Felicity Jones.

  Siobhan’s novella, The Ransom of Dond, was published in 2013, illustrated throughout by Pam Smy.

  Also by Robin Stevens:

  Murder Most Unladylike

  Arsenic for Tea

  First Class Murder

  Jolly Foul Play

  Mistletoe and Murder

  Cream Buns and Crime

  Also by Siobhan Dowd:

  The London Eye Mystery

  A Swift Pure Cry

  Solace of the Road

  Bog Child

  The Ransom of Dond

  The Pavee and the Buffer Girl

  From an original idea by Siobhan Dowd:

  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

  To Siobhan, for this mystery.

  And to David, for New York.

  ONE

  Patterns

  Here are some facts about me.

  My name is Ted Spark.

  I am twelve years and 281 days old.

  I have seven friends.

  There are nine lies in the silver folder labelled My Lies that I keep in my desk drawer.

  I am going to be a meteorologist when I grow up, so I can help people when the weather goes wrong. This is something that will happen more and more in the future. The world is heating up because of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is causing the seas to rise, and weather to become more extreme and unpredictable. This is very interesting and also very concerning. I don’t know why the rest of my family – Mum and Dad and my sister, Kat – are not as worried about this as I am.

  It might have something to do with my funny brain that works on a different operating system to other people’s. It makes patterns like the weather very important to me, and makes me notice things that no one else could. I see the way things connect, and I connect things that other people do not seem able to. I am learning that there are even patterns in stories and myths and poetry. There are patterns everywhere you look.

  Three months ago I solved the mystery of how my cousin Salim disappeared from a pod on the London Eye while Kat and I were watching him. A man came up to us while we were queueing and offered us a free ticket, which Salim took. Salim got into the pod at 11.32 a.m. on Monday 24 May, but when it came down again at 12.02 p.m., we did not see him get out again. Mum and Dad and Aunt Gloria, who is Mum’s sister and Salim’s mum, thought that his disappearance was impossible. Even the police thought it was impossible.

  But I knew that even though some things seem impossible, they always make sense once you understand them. For example, in the year 1700 there was an earthquake in America that caused a tsunami in Japan 4,721 miles away. A tsunami is a huge wave. At that time, the Japanese people who were hit by it probably didn’t even know that America existed, but the tsunami flattened their houses anyway. This is absolutely true, and it proves that the whole of history is a pattern, and everything is caused by something else.

  When Salim disappeared, Kat and I came up with nine possible theories, and one of them had to be true. That is what I knew, and that is what Kat and I proved. We worked out which theory was correct, and we got Salim back, and then he and Aunt Gloria went to New York together, to a new weather system and a new life, and a new job for Aunt Gloria as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum (my encyclopaedia says that a curator is someone who looks after paintings and pieces of art, and organizes exhibitions in art galleries). But we were still part of that life, and when Kat and Mum and I went to visit them during our summer holidays this year, the mystery of the London Eye turned out not to be the only mystery in our universe.

  Fifteen days ago, on the first proper day of our holiday, a painting was stolen from the Guggenheim Museum.

  When the painting was stolen, everyone kept saying that it was priceless. That was not correct. They should have said that it was worth $20 million in New York, which is £16.02 million if you are in London, where Kat a
nd Mum and I live. (This is because of something called the exchange rate, which decides the number of dollars you can buy for a pound, or the other way round. The exchange rate isn’t always the same, which I find very interesting.)

  It was very difficult for me to understand how a painting could be worth so much. Unlike photographs, paintings are not always accurate or realistic. I can see why a photograph would be valuable, because it shows you what the photographer saw at the very moment the picture was taken. My cousin Salim loves photography, and his photographs helped us solve the mystery of his disappearance. When I look at his pictures, I can tell exactly how the world looked when he took them. It’s like time travel. But paintings are not like that, and so at first I wasn’t very interested in the stolen painting.

  But then Aunt Gloria was blamed. The police thought that she had stolen it, and they tried to put her in prison. That would be bad for her, and also bad for Salim. Salim is my cousin and one of my seven friends, and so I knew that I had to help him by getting the painting back again, and proving that Aunt Gloria had not been the one to take it.

  This is how I, and Kat and Salim, did it.

  TWO

  Figures of Speech

  Dad calls Aunt Gloria ‘Hurricane Gloria’. This is a good name for her. She leaves a trail of destruction in her wake (Dad’s words). In fact, Aunt Gloria does not physically destroy things. She is just quite noisy and chaotic. Dad’s name for her is an example of a figure of speech.

  Dad has been teaching me about figures of speech, which are words or phrases that sound like they mean one thing, but really mean another. One example is It’s raining cats and dogs. This doesn’t mean that kittens and puppies are actually falling from the sky. It means it’s raining hard. I am making progress with figures of speech, but I still get confused very easily.

  I knew we were going to see Aunt Gloria and Salim in New York before I was meant to. On 26 July, when I should have been asleep, I eavesdropped (which doesn’t mean I dropped anything, it means that I listened carefully outside the living-room door when I wasn’t supposed to) on a conversation between Mum and Dad. Mum and Aunt Gloria had just had a phone call, and Mum was telling Dad about it. Mum said that Aunt Gloria wanted us all to come and visit her and Salim in New York.

  ‘I think she’s missing me,’ said Mum. ‘The new job’s going well so far – but you know how hard it was for her to get there.’ I did know, because New York is roughly 3,459 miles and one seven-hour-and-fifty-minute flight from London. ‘And Salim seems to be fitting in – isn’t that a marvel? But it’d be nice for him to see his cousins. What do you think, love?’

  Dad said he thought that it sounded like a lot of money, and Mum might take me and Kat but she couldn’t count on him coming too, because someone had to hold down a job and earn the money for the mortgage and school uniforms and Ted’s appointments. I felt the air pressure drop, and a cold front sweep into the living room. (This is a metaphor, another thing I am learning about. The temperature on our home thermostat by the stairs was 17 degrees Celsius and it did not change).

  ‘Don’t be like that, love,’ said Mum, after a pause. ‘Glo and Salim are family. We have to stick together, especially after what happened in the spring. Just think of it – the children will love it! It’ll be a holiday for them! And … it might be good for Kat.’

  Dad sighed. ‘It might,’ he said. ‘And Ted as well. He needs to start learning how to cope with the rest of the world.’

  The air in the living room metaphorically warmed, but an icy pocket formed around me as I sat on the stairs. I did not like hearing Dad say that. I was happy in London. I knew its geography and its weather. I knew the tube. I was not sure I wanted to travel to another country.

  Last term at school I had learned about some journeys that made travelling sound dangerous and bad. When Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, he did it by mistake, while he was looking for India. That journey took him a whole five weeks. This is actually not much time at all compared to how long it took Odysseus, the legendary Greek hero, to cross the Mediterranean in The Odyssey (seventeen years). Both these journeys reminded me how big and confusing the world can be, and how it is possible to get lost in it.

  What if I got lost in New York? What if I never came home again?

  THREE

  The Home Front

  To calm myself down I decided to look up the Guggenheim Museum, where Aunt Gloria worked, in my encyclopaedia. What I discovered made me feel a bit happier. The Guggenheim is an important New York landmark, just like the Statue of Liberty. Museum is not an entirely accurate word to describe it. My favourite museum in London, the British Museum, is big and hundreds of years old, and full of statues and jewels and pots. I like to go there and think about the patterns in history. But the Guggenheim is not like that. It was opened in 1959, so it’s much newer than the British Museum. It also doesn’t have any jewels, or pots. It is a museum that mostly just holds paintings. It is a very unusual museum, just like I am a very unusual person.

  It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a famous American architect, and when it first opened, it made a lot of people very upset. This is because Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t want to design an ordinary square building with ordinary walls and floors and ceilings. Instead, he wanted his museum to be an interesting shape. So instead of square, it’s round, with a round spiralling ramp inside it.

  I was interested when I read about that. I thought that I would like to see a place so full of patterns.

  But then I thought about who I was going with, and I felt worried all over again. What Dad had meant about Kat, but not said properly, because grown-ups are bad at finishing sentences, was that this summer she was being Mad, Mean Kat approximately 97 per cent of the time. She had failed her maths and science exams at the end of the year, and almost failed history, which made Mum and Dad very unhappy. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to do any of them for GCSE,’ Kat had said, when she opened her envelope from school. ‘I want to do art and design. And media studies.’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ said Mum. ‘You know you have to do maths, it’s the law. And as for art – Kat, love, you have to be sensible! Your father and I want you to study practical subjects. There’ll be time for art later.’

  ‘But Auntie Glo’s not practical,’ said Kat, sticking out her chin and fiddling with her hair. ‘She studied art, didn’t she? I want to be like her.’

  ‘Your aunt’s doing all right now, but she’s struggled, Kat,’ said Mum, folding her arms. ‘The worry I’ve had over her career – love, there were years when she couldn’t pay her way, and we had to help. I won’t have that for you.’

  ‘That’s just not fair!’ yelled Kat, and that was the beginning of the argument.

  Sometimes I don’t understand people’s emotions. But this time it was very easy. Everyone was angry. Our house was full of shouting and tears, which I imagined in my head as cold fronts and showers, for weeks. Kat stayed out late in the park with her friends, or came home on time but refused to leave her room for dinner. She also let her hair grow, so that Dad said she looked like a shaggy sheepdog, and cut it herself into a strange new shape that made Mum shout and Dad say, ‘Kat, absolutely not.’

  ‘All right, then, I’ll get my belly button pierced,’ she said. And the hair was allowed to stay.

  Kat began to spend a lot of time on Dad’s computer in the evenings, the green light on her face making the bones of her cheeks stand out. Apparently Kat is beautiful, but I don’t know how anyone knows that. To me she just looks like Kat. The second time I caught her at the computer she looked up and said, ‘Buzz off, Ted. I’m emailing my friend from school.’ Actually, she didn’t say buzz, she said a much more awful word that Mum would have whacked her for, but I am translating.

  I had a hunch (a figure of speech that means a deductive suspicion, not being crouched over) that this behaviour was suspicious. I knew that the person Kat was emailing wasn’t a friend from school. I knew this beca
use Kat does not email her friends, she texts them. Her phone is always going off at the dinner table and making Dad say, ‘Put it away, Kat.’ She would only email someone she couldn’t text. And the one person she knew who it would be too expensive to text, because he lived in the USA, was Salim.

  What could Kat and Salim be emailing each other about?

  Then, on 1 August, Mum and Dad told Kat and me properly about us going with her to New York. ‘REALLY?’ squealed Kat, making my ears hurt. She went whirling up to Mum and Dad and hugged them both, and then she tried to hug me. This was an easy emotion to understand: Kat was happy about going to New York. Then she ran away to Dad’s computer again and tapped away at it. Kat was emailing Salim, I thought. My deductions had been confirmed.

  And I was upset, because even though Salim had been my friend too when he was in London, he had not emailed me at all – not once, since I had helped to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Was this because he liked Kat better now? Were they becoming better friends through the words of their emails, and leaving no room for me?

  FOUR

  The Odyssey, Part One

  I thought about this more and more, and on the morning of our journey, Wednesday 8 August, I tried to talk to Mum about it. But she was too busy zipping shampoo bottles into plastic bags and saying, ‘Make sure you pack knickers, Kat! We’ll be there for eight days— oh, where is my good blouse?’

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘I think Kat’s doing something.’

  ‘Of course she is, Ted,’ said Mum. ‘She’s packing. Thank heavens, for once I know what she’s doing. Have you got your things?’

  ‘Hrumm,’ I said carefully.

  I had put my encyclopaedia, my new alarm clock, my radio, my toothbrush and two pairs of underwear into the suitcase Mum had laid out on my bed. On top I put my library copy of The Odyssey, which is the book about Odysseus’s adventures. Mr Shepherd at school gave it to me to read, and it seemed very suitable now that I was going on a long journey too.