The Eye of the Serpent

by Simon Cheshire

  ‘Not as far as I could see,’ said James. ‘Like I said, they were a pretty posh bunch. They all seemed rather snobby and proud of the fact that they all had these printed card invites they could hand me.’

  ‘Which means,’ I said, more to myself than to James, ‘that at least we can be sure who was there. There were a lot of them, but we know their names.’

  Several possibilities were beginning to solidify in my mind, rather like school custard if you leave it standing on your dinner tray too long. This case was already worryingly baffling, but at this point three questions occurred to me. Three questions I should ask James, all of them relating directly to the guests.

  Can you guess what I wanted to know?

  Question No 1: Did you see anyone amongst the guests who looked suspicious?

  James thought carefully. ‘No, not at all. Several of them I’d seen before because they know my dad. Most of them were strangers to me but I didn’t see anyone who looked shifty or who did anything odd. They were a pretty dull and over-serious crowd to be perfectly honest. Most of them seemed to spend the evening guzzling the free nibbles and wine and seeing who could boast the loudest about how much they knew on the subject of art.’

  Question No 2: Did anyone else see the statuette vanish?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, so someone did see something?’

  ‘No, I mean I’m sure they didn’t.’

  ‘Oh . . . right. I knew that.’

  This struck me as very strange. Here were seventy-seven guests, plus gallery staff, plus James, and only James saw that the statuette had suddenly gone missing.

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’ I said.

  ‘Well, now I come to think about it, yes,’ said James. ‘I suppose it does.’

  ‘So, you raised the alarm,’ I said, ‘and nobody else could confirm that they’d seen the statuette disappear?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s very strange,’ I muttered. ‘There it was, the Eye of the Serpent, a really important part of the exhibition, and it gets stolen at precisely the moment when nobody is looking at it. Possibly the only moment when nobody is looking at it.’

  James started chewing at his lip again, an expression of fear slowly sliding over his face like a slug sliding on wet leaves. ‘And you’re still telling me there’s nothing supernatural about all this?’ he trembled. ‘Stolen at such a precise moment? What are the chances of that happening? I bet the Eye of the Serpent spotted that nobody was looking at it, saw its chance and did a runner into another dimension, or something.’

  ‘Oh, pack it in,’ I grumbled. ‘Wasn’t there even anyone standing next to it?’

  ‘Not at that exact minute, no. There were about half a dozen guests a couple of metres away, I think. The gallery manager was giving them catalogues.’

  ‘Catalogues?’ I said, puzzled. ‘What, you mean like home-shopping catalogues?’

  ‘Nooooo, the catalogue of items in the exhibition. A sort of guidebook to what’s on display. Well, more a leaflet, really. Well, more a fold-out, kind of —’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah, I get the picture,’ I said.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Question No 3 yet. A-ha! The answer to this question would definitely shed some light on the matter! Definitely definitely!

  Question No 3: What happened when the police turned up and questioned the guests?

  ‘They didn’t,’ said James. ‘The guests were all so shocked at what had happened that they were sent home. Then I went home. I think the police turned up later.’

  So, no light shed on the matter whatsoever . . .

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I gasped. I shut my eyes and let out a long sigh. ‘Obviously I didn’t expect you to tell me that the guests were searched and the statuette was found in somebody’s handbag. Obviously. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have needed to come to me in the first place. But are you really telling me that every last witness to the crime just went home? Without being asked a single question? By anyone?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ shrugged James.

  ‘The police were actually called, were they?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said James. ‘The gallery manager said he’d do it as soon as his panic attack had eased off a bit.’

  ‘Is that man an idiot?’ I spluttered. ‘Why didn’t he stop the guests?’

  ‘Be fair, he wasn’t thinking straight,’ said James. ‘The poor man was in a right flap. His prize exhibit was gone. From what I heard, he’d spent a year persuading the statuette’s owner to let the gallery borrow it. That owner must be furious.’

  ‘So am I!’ I cried. ‘What a twit! If there was a book called The Rules of Detective Work, then Rule 1 would be Don’t Let All Your Suspects Go Home!’

  ‘But he’s not a detective, for goodness’ sake,’ said James. ‘He runs an art gallery. The shock turned him into a nervous wreck. He was looking quite tearful by the time I went home.’

  ‘But don’t you see what this means?’ I cried. I started bouncing up and down on the desk in frustration. But then the heaving mountain of stuff behind me started wobbling again. So I stopped. ‘Someone in that room stole the Eye of the Serpent. And if everyone just went home, then this whoever-it-is has got clean away with it! That statuette could be halfway to Peru or something by now!’

  ‘Er, yes, well,’ said James. ‘Never mind, you’re a brilliant schoolboy detective. You’ll soon be hot on the trail of the culprit, right?’

  I felt completely lost. It seemed like I had nothing to base my investigation on, no clues from which I could form any kind of theory. I felt like whimpering: ‘Help’. Instead, I said, ‘Er, yeah, right. I guess the first step is for me to visit the gallery and take a look at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Come over later today,’ said James. ‘I’ve been roped into helping out again. The gallery manager is holding a press conference and I’m helping do the seating. He’s going to ask the media to launch a huge public search.’

  ‘A fat lot of good that’ll do,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘what did your dad make of all this?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t actually there last night,’ said James. ‘He was really busy – it’s late-night opening at the museum on a Friday these days.’

  ‘Late-night opening?’ I said, amazed. ‘I thought your museum struggled to get half a dozen visitors a week?’

  ‘It did,’ said James. ‘But ever since you solved that Pirate’s Blood mystery, we’ve had loads of people coming to see where those robbers planned their raid. We’re on the tourist map these days – my dad’s delighted.’

  ‘Good grief,’ I mumbled to myself.

  ‘I’ll see you later then,’ said James, standing up and opening the shed door. ‘Be there by about four.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, reaching across for my notebook. ‘Mind you don’t slam the —’

  Whump!

  As soon as the door slammed shut behind James, the heap of junk behind me started creaking forwards. I barely had time to scurry out of the way before a stack of plastic plant pots clattered on to the desk, spraying dried mud all over the place. The plant pots were followed by the lawnmower, which crashed down with its electrical cable unravelling like excited spaghetti.

  I sat there, grumpy, watching the dust settle as it swirled in the light coming through the shed’s perspex window. I was going to have to start this tidying-up thing all over again.

  No time for any of that now. Thank goodness.

  A Page From My Notebook

  Observation: This must be the most peculiar case I’ve ever come across. HOW can you steal something that’s brightly lit, in front of a roomful of people, from behind a security net? I can see WHY – it’s very valuable – but the total mystery is HOW!

  Other observation: I have at least seventy-seven suspects. This is not good. I get into enough confusion dealing with two or three! Also, th
e police will now be talking to those seventy-seven guests well out of earshot of ME. I have no access to anything the police get up to. I’ll have no way of investigating the guests. (Well, I COULD get the guest list from James, and go to see each of them one by one. But that would take weeks. And I don’t think this case will wait weeks to get solved.)

  Other, other observation: The gallery manager’s assistant was the one who told James about the Bottomby curse. Can this person be trusted? SUDDEN THOUGHT: Does this person have a reason for wanting people to believe in a curse?

  Possibility 1: Is the Eye of the Serpent all it seems? If pieces by Enid Bottomby are so rare and so shrouded in stories, could there be something about the statuette ITSELF that I don’t know about yet?

  Possibility 2: Should I take what I’ve heard at face value? Surely the security system MUST have been tampered with, somehow? Otherwise, the theft really DOES seem impossible.

  Possibility 3: Could the celery nibbles have been secretly drugged, so that everyone fell asleep without knowing it and then . . . No, forget that one. It’s silly.

  My Plan of Action: Keep a close eye on everything this afternoon, including the exhibit room, the security system, the gallery staff, the entrances and exits (through which the thief might have escaped), the . . . Oh, just EVERYTHING, OK?

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  BEFORE GOING TO THE ART GALLERY I went to see my great friend George ‘Muddy’ Whitehouse. He’s St Egbert’s School’s resident Mr Fixit. Anything you need that’s mechanical or electronic, see Muddy.

  He was busy in his garage – or Development Laboratory as he prefers to call it – working on ways to add a games console to a bicycle. So far he’d managed to link a video display to his cycling helmet and was now assembling housing for the console just above the front wheel.

  ‘It’s a kind of in-flight entertainment system,’ he said, sorting through some spanners.

  ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘playing games and cycling at the same time is extremely dangerous?’

  He thought for a moment or two. ‘Hmm,’ he said quietly, tapping a spanner against his oil-stained chin. ‘You know, you may possibly have spotted a slight flaw in my idea.’

  Once he’d put his bike back to normal, I explained why I’d come to see him. I asked him if he had anything which might help me. (You’ll see what I mean in a page or two!)

  ‘Ah,’ he cried, one finger suddenly pointing at the ceiling. ‘You’ll want the Whitehouse C-Anything Ultra-Vision Spex! I made them using some night-vision binoculars, the circuits from a video camera and a pair of my mum’s glasses. She needed some new ones anyway, these are hideous.’

  I promised to return them safe and sound, then headed off to the gallery. It was about three forty-five p.m. when I arrived there, and the line of trees outside was swaying and hissing in the wind.

  The gallery was a broad, sandy-coloured stone building. It had an immense, arched entrance into which had been fitted a revolving door made of thick, smoke-dark glass.

  Inside, the place had surprisingly little natural light. I say ‘surprisingly’ because there was no shortage of windows. It was as if the walls inside the building didn’t like being caught in daylight, and rudely pushed any stray sunbeams out of the way. Instead of light from the windows, everywhere was lit up with spotlights and large glowing domes, which gave the gallery an odd, almost spooky atmosphere.

  The floors were a gleaming pattern of black and white tiles. My shoes klumped loudly as I followed signs which pointed the way to The Art Deco Experience. Stuck beneath each sign was a neatly printed sheet which said: Temporary Closure Due to Major Crime Incident. Re-opens Monday. Tickets Available at Gallery Entrance and online.

  I wrinkled my nose up. I hadn’t realised that this exhibition was one of those attractions that charges you extra to go and see the one thing you came to see in the first place. If you see what I mean. That sort of thing really annoys me.

  I walked through several long rooms lined with paintings and dotted with old pots on plinths. There were quite a few visitors, wandering around in silent slow motion as if the paintings would fall off the walls in fright if someone so much as coughed. Most of them seemed to be grumbling about the fact that the Art Deco Experience was shut today.

  At last I came to a large partition with double doors in the middle of it, all made out of the same smoky-looking glass as the revolving door at the entrance. A large board with swirly, intricate lettering announced the exhibition.

  The double doors were shut so I tapped hesitantly at them, the smoky glass making the room beyond look like a haze of thick, grey fog. Two figures emerged from the fog, their outlines shimmering. As they got closer, one turned out to be James and the other was a young woman in a smart trouser suit. She was carrying an armful of papers which looked like they’d spill out of control at any moment, and she kept hooking her long dark hair around the back of her ears. Balancing the papers on one arm, she unlocked the doors and ushered me inside.

  ‘Hi! Saxby?’ she said in a posh accent, slightly out of breath.

  ‘That’s me,’ I said with a grin.

  ‘Great. OK. Must dash. Catch you later,’ she said, scuttering away. ‘Oh,’ she gasped, turning a full circle in mid-step, ‘I’m Davina. Hello! Sorry.’

  ‘Looks like she’s in a hurry,’ I said to James.

  ‘She’s always in a hurry’ replied James.

  The exhibition room was exactly as James had described it. So I won’t bother telling you all about it again. The only thing he hadn’t mentioned was that the floor space was neatly arranged with various displays too. Statues and glassware sat on tall, round stands with elegantly printed information notices positioned beside them. Images of artists and reproductions of old photos were set alongside paintings, ornaments, and even a couple of designer chairs.

  This looks really good,’ I said. My voice echoed slightly against the high ceiling and the shiny, highly polished tiled floor.

  ‘Davina designed it all,’ said James. ‘They’ve got some fabulous gear in the office. I’ll show you in a minute.’

  ‘First things first,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a look at the Eye of the Serpent. Or rather, the gap where the Eye of the Serpent used to be.’

  James led me across the room, weaving around the display stands. I looked about me, trying to picture the scene from last night.

  The alcove in which the statuette had been placed was the middle one of seven, which were evenly spaced along the length of the back wall of the exhibition room. The wall itself was flat and smooth, painted a rather insipid eggshell colour.

  Each alcove was the same shape: a precise, rectangular recess into the wall, about twenty-five centimetres wide and about forty centimetres high. Their back surfaces were curved, so that each formed a kind of deep, semicircle scoop out of the wall.

  In the alcove that was a few metres to the left of the empty Eye-of-the-Serpent-less one, there was a delicate-looking, white figurine of a lady with elongated arms and legs. In the alcove to the right was a vase, its shape composed of gliding curves. Beneath every alcove was a printed sign, decribing the piece and its place in art history. The one in front of me began:

  The Eye of the Serpent

  c.1929

  A rare example of the work of Enid Bottomby, almost the greatest artist of the 20th century . . .

  The sign seemed rather lost and lonely, sitting there underneath an empty space, describing something that was long gone.

  I walked up and down from one alcove to another, glancing at the lights suspended from above and the thin metal strip that ran along the floor a thumb’s-width in front of the wall.

  ‘You have to stand quite close to these alcoves to see what’s in them, don’t you?’ I said. ‘They’re quite deep.’

  ‘Yes, they were originally meant for putting trailing houseplants in.’

  ‘In fact,’ I said, pacing to and fro a couple of times, ‘you have to look at them almost straight on. Are th
e lights always kept like this? One pointing at each alcove?’

  ‘So I’m told,’ said James. ‘This end of the room gets very little light from the window. You have to have the spotlights on all time.’

  Peering into the empty alcove, I flipped the Whitehouse C-Anything Ultra-Vision Spex out of my top pocket and put them on.

  James stared at me. ‘Where did you get those hideous glasses? They look like something Muddy’s mum would wear.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I muttered.

  Through the specs I could suddenly see a spectacular network of red laser lines. They criss-crossed up from the metal strip in the floor, forming a tightly woven net across the entire wall.

  ‘That’s really cool,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Those glasses aren’t,’ mumbled James.

  I’d wondered if perhaps it was possible for someone to reach through the net of beams and take the statuette that way. But the only way it could have been possible would be for the thief to have fingers like pipe cleaners. And for the statuette to be equally narrow.

  I was so tempted to reach out and break the beams! Just to see what would happen.

  ‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ said James. ‘Don’t. I did it yesterday by accident, before the guests arrived. Those alarms are deafening.’

  Keeping the C-Anything Ultra-Vision Spex on, I turned around to look at the rest of the room. I could now see that every display had a net of laser beams around it!

  ‘That’s really cool too,’ I said, grinning.

  Then I suddenly stopped grinning. I took the specs off again. I made sure I was standing in front of the empty alcove, looking away from it. Something very odd was going on here.

  ‘Are the display stands positioned like this for a reason?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said James. ‘They’re all movable. They can go anywhere. You can put them in different places for different exhibitions.’

  This was very odd.

  ‘Where were you when the statuette vanished?’

  James pointed. ‘On that seat over there.’