The London Thief by Laura Sieveking

Author:Laura Sieveking
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760265717
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The next day, we headed back to the gallery. We wanted to do some more investigating, and Mrs Hodges was going in to check on the rest of the exhibit, so we didn’t need to be accompanied by Lottie. Mrs Hodges was happy for us to look around the gallery ourselves, as long as we didn’t leave the building and stuck together.

We eagerly ran up to Margaret, who was on the information desk that day.

‘Any news?’ Grace asked hopefully.

Margaret shook her head sadly. ‘Nothing yet, I’m afraid. But we’re still looking!’

‘Isn’t there some kind of security footage or something we can review?’ Archie asked.

Margaret told us to go and see Geoff, the security guard, and ask him if he had found anything on the gallery surveillance.

Geoff was sitting at the entrance scanner and waved to us happily.

‘Hi, kids,’ he said.

‘Any news on Grace’s missing art?’ Sara asked.

Geoff motioned for us to come behind his desk, which had several small TV monitors on it.

‘I’ve reviewed the footage and, unfortunately, there’s nothing,’ he said sadly.

‘How can there be nothing?’ Sara asked. ‘Don’t the cameras stay on overnight?’

‘They do,’ he said, ‘but all systems have blind spots.’ He pulled up a video which had the date of the day the painting went missing on it. The area which housed the school exhibition had a single camera, which rotated around the room. Geoff put it into fast forward so we could watch the hours pass quickly. We saw all of us students come in, look around and leave. Then nothing, until Margaret and a team of staff came in and started pulling down the artworks and moving them into different groups for re-hanging. We watched Margaret take Grace’s portrait down from the wall herself and lean it up against a stack of other paintings. The camera kept moving and the pile of artwork was no longer visible on the screen. Then it rotated back.

‘Wait, stop there!’ Grace said.

Geoff paused the footage.

‘Look, my painting is now gone,’ Grace said, pointing to the stack.

We all squinted.

‘How can you tell? There are a whole pile of them in that stack,’ Geoff said, leaning in.

‘You could see my painting’s frame sticking out before. And now it’s gone.’

Geoff sat back and sucked in a breath. ‘You’re right. But there’s no footage of someone taking it.’

We nodded grimly.

‘Hey, wait, look!’ Sara said, peering at the screen. On the far right, at the very edge of the camera view, was an arm.

‘That could be anyone’s arm,’ Geoff said, shrugging.

‘No, look,’ Sara insisted, pointing at the sleeve, which looked like a rugby jersey with a stripe down the arm.

‘That looks like the Crestwood Hall rugby jumper,’ Archie said.

‘Kai,’ Sara whispered.

We all nodded.

‘We need to confront him again as soon as we get back to school,’ I said resolutely.

Geoff turned the video off and apologised that he didn’t have any other information to report on the missing painting.

We decided to keep looking around the gallery for more clues, while we waited for Mrs Hodges.

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