The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

‘You’re right, Ted. Gabriel’s ex-boyfriend is a horrible person. But he still gave Gabriel an alibi. Gabriel couldn’t have stolen the painting.’

  Kat was right. And I came to a conclusion. Gabriel had not had anything to do with the robbery. There was no other way the painting could have gone out of the skylight without someone noticing, and so we could cross one off our list.

  FORTY

  Which Door?

  We had two possibilities left. I imagined them as my fingers, index and middle.

  Index, two, was taken out of the back entrance, but after the van left.

  Middle, three, was taken out of the front entrance, but we didn’t see it leave.

  ‘What about the loading bay?’ said Kat. She had drawn a heavy line through one, out of the window. ‘And if it was taken out that way, does that change our suspects?’

  I thought about this. ‘It still has to be someone who had access to the Guggenheim offices, and who could have stolen Aunt Gloria’s credit card and called the removal company on Monday,’ I said. ‘That’s Lionel and Helen, and Sandra. Ben and Hank, Lana, Ty and Jacob couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘But it still has to be someone who could have carried that heavy painting,’ said Kat, nodding. ‘So Sandra’s still out.’

  Then I had an idea. It had to do with the loading bay. ‘If we’re investigating two, we have to go talk to Billy again!’ I said.

  Kat wrinkled up her face. ‘We’ve already spoken to him,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but I think Billy might be a person who only answers the questions you ask him!’ I said. ‘Like me. We didn’t ask him if he saw anything that day. We asked him if he saw any vans that morning.’

  ‘Ted’s right!’ said Kat. She was whirling, her hands flying, her eyes shining. ‘Come on!’

  We ran past the policeman again, and up to 89th Street. Billy was sitting exactly where we had left him, under the sign that read NATIONAL ACADEMY MUSEUM. He was still wearing green trousers and a blue shirt, and the shirt still had two buttons missing. The only difference I could see was that the cardboard he was sitting on said AID RAISI instead of UNMAID R. This meant that he had moved, although not by much.

  ‘Salim!’ shouted Billy, when he saw us. His mouth opened and I saw his missing incisor again.

  ‘Billy, we’ve got to ask you something,’ said Salim. He was panting, and his camera thumped on his chest.

  ‘What happened to your tooth?’ I asked, because it was something I wanted to know.

  ‘Swallowed it,’ said Billy. ‘Ate an apple wrong, and it went down into my stomach. Never saw it again. But it’s still there. Did you know that teeth sit in your body for years? They don’t move.’

  I did not think this was true.

  ‘That’s not what we wanted to ask,’ hissed Kat, jabbing me with her elbow. ‘We wanted to know – after you saw the van stop and the driver pick up that crate, the day the painting was stolen. Did you see anyone going into the Guggenheim by the back entrance – or coming out again? Holding something?’

  Billy nodded, flicking through his notebook. ‘The police,’ he said. ‘There was a guard on the back door from eleven fifteen a.m. A van from Ultimate Security Cameras at two twenty p.m. And a guy in a blue uniform, with the Guggenheim logo on the shoulder, earlier. Tall black guy. Round face. Kinda heavy. He carried something out at ten fifty a.m., and then came back ten minutes later. After the alarms went off, but before the police turned up.’

  ‘Lionel!’ said Kat and Salim together.

  ‘Where did he go?’ asked Salim, his voice wobbling up and down. This meant that he was upset. Even though Lionel was one of our remaining suspects, he was Salim’s friend. ‘And what was he carrying?’

  ‘Down 89th to his car,’ said Billy. ‘Blue Toyota Corolla. He was carrying a box. Medium size, brown cardboard, kinda this big.’

  My heart sped up. Then he waved with his hands, about forty centimetres apart. I was confused. This could not be the painting. It was not big enough. But if not, what was it? What had Lionel wanted to take out of the museum before the police arrived?

  FORTY-ONE

  The Opposite of a Panopticon

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’ shouted Kat.

  ‘Calm down, girly,’ said Billy. ‘You didn’t ask about people, just vans. How was I supposed to know you wanted to know about the people too?’

  ‘This is it!’ said Kat. ‘This is it!’

  I was not sure. The box Lionel had been carrying was the wrong size to be the painting, after all. And what about the van that Billy had mentioned that afternoon, from Ultimate Security Cameras? Did that have anything to do with the mystery?

  ‘We have to go and see Lionel!’ said Kat.

  ‘Hey,’ said Salim. ‘Billy – thanks, man, you’ve been amazing. We’ve got to go.’

  ‘Any time, Salim,’ said Billy, grinning.

  As we ran away from Billy, back towards the Guggenheim, Salim’s phone beeped. He looked at it. ‘It’s Ty,’ he said. ‘Wants to know if we’ve cracked the case yet.’

  ‘I mean – Lionel’s one of our last suspects,’ said Kat. ‘He’s the security guard, and so no one would have wondered why he was walking out of the back entrance. He did go around the museum on Thursday morning, remember? That could have been his opportunity.’

  I was very interested in what she had said about no one noticing Lionel. It is true that most people only see things when they aren’t normal. They can walk down a street and not see that there are ten men and twelve women and five children on it, and that the third building along has three windows on the first floor and a tree in front of it that sticks out of the pavement one metre from the shop front and is encircled by twenty-seven thin grey bricks. They only notice when something is odd or out of place, like someone wearing a flamingo hat.

  A security guard walking around and in and out of the building that he is guarding is like three windows in the third building – nothing is broken or funny or wrong, and so to most people it is invisible.

  I was thinking this as we walked back through the Guggenheim entrance. Lionel wasn’t at his usual place. He was halfway up the ramp, staring around the Guggenheim as though he was trying to watch all of it at once.

  The technical term for a place from where you can watch everything at once is a panopticon. Usually, Lionel’s guard station would have been a panopticon, but now that the cameras were down, it wasn’t. And then I remembered what Billy had said about the Ultimate Security Cameras van arriving at 2.20 p.m. Thursday, and the two memories stuck together in my head and turned into one big conclusion.

  ‘Hello!’ called Lionel, waving at us, and then he hurried down the ramp until he was standing in front of us.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to him. ‘You didn’t call the security company until after the painting had been stolen and the police had arrived, even though you must have known on Thursday morning that the cameras and alarms were not working.’

  The skin on Lionel’s face turned greyish.

  He took two steps backwards and moved his hand from his stomach to his heart. ‘Listen, I never said—’ His eyes went to the camera above us, and then down to his stomach. I couldn’t see how those two things were connected.

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. She stepped forward. ‘Did you tell the police that you knew the cameras weren’t working?’ she asked, sticking out her chin.

  Lionel held up his hands and sighed. ‘Yeah, I did,’ he said. ‘I had to, as soon as they arrived. They would have asked to see the tape at some point. Some of the cameras went out on Tuesday afternoon. I thought that they’d just been knocked out by the crew, when they came in to start work on the new exhibition. And usually it doesn’t matter. If people see the cameras and the alarms on the wall, they think they’re on. It’s enough of a deterrent.’

  ‘Which ones aren’t working?’ asked Salim. His eyes had gone very narrow. I saw that his hands were shaking against the strap of his camera, where it looped down onto his chest. He
was angry because he knew that if the cameras had been on and the alarms had been working, the police would already have been able to work out who the real thief was, and Aunt Gloria would not be in trouble.

  ‘The whole left side. That means the cameras and alarms on this side of the rotunda, as well as in the tower: the gift shop, the tower gallery, the café, the stairwells and the loading bay,’ said Lionel. ‘This place – it’s always breaking, and everything needs a special fix. Floors crack, you’ve gotta call the crew. Lights go out, you’ve gotta call the crew. Cameras and alarms, you’ve gotta get someone from the security company. And I did. Well … I called them Thursday morning, but they couldn’t get here till later. Till after the painting was stolen. When the Director finds out that I didn’t call them in on Tuesday, I’m gonna be fired, and I can’t be fired. I’ve got kids to look after.’ His mouth went down. He was upset.

  ‘My mum’s been arrested!’ said Salim.

  ‘I know,’ said Lionel. ‘Salim, I’m sorry. Believe me.’

  ‘Salim,’ said Kat. She put her arm round Salim. Salim swayed, and opened his mouth without saying anything.

  ‘We were just talking to someone who was outside the Guggenheim on Thursday,’ said Kat, her chin sticking out once more. ‘And they said that they saw you going out of the loading bay with a box just before the police put up a cordon around it, and then coming back ten minutes later. Why did you leave the museum?’

  Lionel’s body twitched. His hands clenched. ‘That’s – that was nothing to do with the robbery,’ he said very quickly. ‘I just had to put something in the car. Something for my kids. Don’t – that’s nothing to do with the painting, all right? Look, I’ve gotta go. I need to talk to – I need—’

  And he hurried away without finishing his sentence.

  I thought this was unusual behaviour. I also did not believe that he was telling the truth about what the box had been, or when he had called the security company. Lionel was lying – why?

  FORTY-TWO

  Another Deductive Problem

  ‘I think Lionel was lying about calling the security company!’ said Kat, once he had gone.

  I was pleased, because Kat had made the same deduction as I had.

  ‘But the box he was carrying wasn’t the right size to be the painting!’ said Salim. ‘And … well, it just can’t be Lionel. He’s – he’s nice. I like him.’

  I thought that Salim should be more rational. But I also knew that there was one other possibility.

  ‘If it was three, if the painting was taken out through the front entrance of the Guggenheim, it could still be someone else,’ I said.

  ‘What if Hank from the fire crew hid the painting in his uniform?’ asked Salim.

  This was not a good deduction. I shook my head. ‘If the painting is too big to be in Lionel’s box, then it is too big to be hidden in a uniform,’ I said.

  How things fit in space is a language that I understand. I held my arms out in front of myself, approximately a metre apart. ‘Look, it’s nearly that big. It’s wider than a person. It is longer than their legs, even a tall person’s legs.’

  ‘But it’s thin if you turn it sideways,’ said Salim. ‘What if the fire crew had a ladder? What if Hank draped some material across the ladder and hid the painting under it?’

  ‘It could be!’ said Kat, her eyes widening.

  ‘The fire crew didn’t take in the ladder,’ I said. I remembered this.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Salim. ‘They might have!’

  ‘They didn’t,’ said Kat, sighing. ‘Ted knows.’

  Kat was right. I knew. My memory would have a ladder in it if there had been one.

  But remembering the ladder also made me realize something else, even more important. There was still something wrong with how we were thinking about the mystery. The world was full of possibilities, but there was one fact destroying each one.

  The painting was too big.

  It was too big for any of our theories to fit, now that the idea about the painting being put into a crate had gone. It couldn’t have been lifted out of the skylight, or taken out of the back door later on, or out of the front door, without anyone noticing. It was too big for that.

  So the thing that I had to change in my mind, and in all our theories, was In the Black Square’s size.

  I had to find a way to make it compress down into something smaller, and once I had done that, I would be able to see how the thief had stolen it. I imagined the big square of the painting, folded up seven times (which is the maximum number of times you can fold any object, no matter how large and thin it is).

  I shook my head, frustrated. It was a stupid thought, because I knew that if the thief had folded up the painting, that would damage it, and that would mean it wouldn’t be worth as much money any more. Besides, the painting had a wooden frame, and you can’t fold up a frame.

  But then I realized that, once again, I had been thinking in the wrong way. We had been imagining what was stolen as a large square, just like its title: the painting with its big frame, about a metre wide and a metre high. But what if we were wrong?

  What if the thief had cut the painting out of the frame? What if they had taken the square frame and broken it down, the way scaffolding breaks down, and hidden the pieces somewhere?

  A picture did not need to be framed. What if we were not looking for a square at all, but a rolled-up piece of canvas?

  I was very excited.

  ‘If it was rolled up, it could have been hidden in the museum!’ I said. ‘We might have a fifth theory!’

  FORTY-THREE

  Inside Out

  I said that. Then I looked around. The curl of the Guggenheim around me was smooth. There were no cupboards, no floorboards, no corners. There were side galleries, but they had all been checked. The police had been here on Thursday – they would have found it when they searched. There was nowhere to hide a painting, not even a rolled-up one. Another possibility exploded into billions of atoms of air.

  ‘Wait!’ said Kat, waving her arms. ‘What did Helen say, about working on fake walls? What if it’s hidden behind one of those?’

  We all looked at each other. Then we went running up the ramp, towards the place where Helen and Lana had been working.

  A plywood wall had been built in front of the real wall, so that a big painting could be hung on it. Kat scrabbled with her hands and stuck her head through the narrow gap between the fake wall and the real one. Then she stuck one of her arms in after it, and waggled it around.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Salim.

  Kat made a noise. ‘Urk!’ she said. ‘Hold on … there’s something—!’ She wriggled back out of the wall, her face very red. ‘Look!’ She had something in her hand, a grey plastic packet done up with tape. ‘It’s too small to be the painting!’ she said, her mouth turning down and her forehead wrinkling. ‘It feels … knobbly.’

  ‘Open it!’ said Salim.

  Kat scrabbled at the tape and the packet came open. Nails came pouring out, all over the shiny ramp floor.

  ‘What on earth …?’ asked Kat. I didn’t know. This was very strange. How did this fit into the Guggenheim Mystery?

  Kat pulled out eight more packets, four with screws or washers in them instead of nails, three with screwdrivers and other tools and one with hammers of different sizes.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Salim. ‘There’s no painting in there!’

  Kat shook her head.

  I turned and stared around at the Guggenheim. Smooth white walls. Smooth stone floor. Smooth white ceilings and smooth white light fixtures.

  Salim’s shoulders went down.

  ‘Wait!’ said Kat, sitting back on her heels. ‘I know! What about the offices in the tower? You said there are lots of them. Anyone could hide some rolled-up paper in a pile of papers!’

  This was a good deduction from Kat. I was impressed.

  But Salim still didn’t look cheerful. He shook his head again. ‘It’s
a paperless office,’ he said.

  I imagined an office with no papers, the printers whirring, people opening empty paper file after empty paper file.

  ‘Paperless office means that everything is stored on computers,’ Salim explained. ‘It’s meant to be better for the environment, but it’s stupid, ’cos Mum can never find anything she needs. She keeps a box of printouts at home.’

  So my imagining had been right. I was pleased with myself.

  ‘So?’ said Kat, sticking out her chin. ‘Come on! Don’t give up! Even paperless offices have cupboards, don’t they?’

  Salim just shrugged. He was thinking something, but I could not deduce what it was. He led us down the ramp to the first floor, and we went up the triangular stairs again. I looked up and saw triangular lights, the same shape as the long banks of lights winding up the ramps, but individual triangles instead of an unbroken line. It reminded me of Times Square, with all the lights together.

  We went up five flights of stairs, past the gallery and the café (Salim went in and dug through the drawers behind the counter, but there was nothing inside them but a few bags of pasta), and then Salim waved Lionel’s pass against a panel in the wall and pushed open a door.

  And I understood why he had not been cheerful.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Literally Paperless

  We were staring at a bright white box with wide, white-framed windows and a white-tiled floor. There were six desks with six white computers balanced on them and grey chairs tucked underneath. There was a very small white set of drawers next to each chair, and on the desk nearest to us were two books and three plastic folders. There was a label that said GLORIA MCCLOUD. That was all I could see, and I knew that my eyes were not lying. There was nowhere to hide a metre-long painting and its frame in this room – even if the painting was rolled up and the frame was broken into pieces.

  A smooth blonde head of hair rose up from behind the computer at the desk opposite Aunt Gloria’s. Sandra was staring at us.