58 pages • 1 hour read
Siobhan DowdThe London Eye Mystery
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “The Coriolis Effect”
As he walks, Ted thinks about the Coriolis effect. At the North Pole, looking south, the Earth rotates counterclockwise. If a missile fires from that point, it will head south and land slightly to the right of the original target because the Earth has rotated under it. The opposite is true from the Southern Hemisphere. The Coriolis force causes weather patterns to arc away from a straight line. Ted thinks that maybe something has caused Salim to be deflected off-course.
Ted quickly gets lost on the streets. He locates the giant cloud forming over downtown, turns, walks toward it, and locates the road to the Tube station. Once there, he studies the Underground map, finds Earl’s Court, and plans his train route there. He buys a ticket and boards the next available train.
Alone in the train, he’s nervous, but he carefully tracks the stations he passes. He notices a man with a scowl and plaster on his face who’s staring at an ad for car insurance. Trying to think like Sherlock Holmes, Ted reasons that the man was in a car crash and is mad because he didn’t have insurance. Thus distracted, he nearly misses his station and must hurry from the car before it continues onward.
Once at the station in Earl’s Court, he hears hail from the big cumulonimbus cloud outside striking the roof. He looks around, wondering which way to go. A station guard points him toward the exhibition hall.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Biker Hell”
The hall’s entrance is crowded, mostly with men wearing black leather. They remind him of the rough boys at school. At the ticket barrier, guards check visitors for weapons. The guards wear T-shirts that read “FRONTLINE SECURITY.” Ted and Kat got it right.
Ted buys a ticket. Inside, he finds a bedlam of motorcycles, scooters, chrome, noise, videos, and the smell of polish and gasoline. One sign welcomes the visitors to “BIKER PARADISE,” but Ted thinks it’s more like “Biker Hell” (215).
A special event in the next hall causes the crowd to move. Ted gets carried along with it. A gleaming white motorcycle roars up a ramp, soars through the air, and lands some distance away. It makes Ted feel sick in his chest. The rider pulls off a helmet: It’s a woman. The audience, surprised, cheers. More riders line up to make the jump.
Ted sees Kat near the front of the crowd, watching the riders with awe. He tugs at her sleeve. She sees him and gets angry: “Bloody hell, Ted! What are you doing here?” (218).
Chapter 28 Summary: “Meetings”
Kat is relieved that Ted is alone and has kept their secret. When they spot Christy talking on a radio, they approach him and ask if he might help them find their lost cousin, Salim. Christy recognizes them and recalls giving up his ticket out of fear of heights, but says he knows nothing about the lost boy. He suggests they visit the scooter-riding station and try out a scooter, then walks away.
Kat’s disappointed. She rides one of the scooters through a short course of street cones. She loves it. She tells Ted that, on the scooter, everything got quiet, and she could think. She realized that the man lied to them. Ted agrees: Christy claimed fear of heights, but at the Eye he said he had claustrophobia. Also, he tried to distract them with the scooter rides. Because Ted himself has lied twice now, he understands it better.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Pursuit”
The search again for Christy, but he’s gone. They ask a security woman at the entrance if she’s seen Christy. She’s suspicious, but Kat says she’s supposed to give him a private message. The woman is grumpy because Christy left work, claiming illness: “With him it’s always the same. Sick this, dentist that, dead uncle the other. Never rains but it pours […] Just like his name” (230). She says if they see him to tell him he’s fired.
Kat and Ted hurry to the Tube station and see Christy heading for one of the trains. They board the same train and keep an eye on him for several stops. When he exits at Mile End station, they follow.
Christy walks head down as if deep in thought, then enters a pub. Kat and Ted decide to wait across the street next to a TV showroom. All 18 sets are playing the same news show: Gloria and Rashid’s video plea, filmed in the living room, airs. Kat is stunned. Ted realizes he’s forgotten to tell her about it, so he explains what happened. The video shows a picture of Salim.
Suddenly Christy grabs them. His eyes are narrowed. He hisses, “You again” (235).
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Road to Nowhere”
Christy realizes they’re connected to the newsreel about Salim. He repeats that he doesn’t know about their cousin, but he admits that he got the ticket from a dark-haired woman who called him over, said she had an extra ticket, and asked him to give it to the kids. He did it as a favor and didn’t think anything of it. He says they need to find that woman.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Tornado Touchdown Time”
Kat and Ted find their way back home, where their father confronts them with their swimming suits, hugs them, scolds them—she’s been worried sick—and expresses shock that Ted told a lie. She hustles them inside, saying the neighbors are watching. Kat says all Faith worries about are the neighbors, while her kids are trying to find Salim. Faith nearly slaps Kat but holds back. Kat runs to her room, wailing that she hates her father.
Ted calls it “Tornado Touchdown Time […] This is my way of describing what it’s like when people have really bad arguments and it is the worst place to be in all the world” (245).
Chapter 32 Summary: “Solar Wind”
Ted fretfully paces in the backyard, making growling noises and studying cloud patterns, but nothing calms him. Everyone in his family is upset, Ted can’t solve Salim’s disappearance, and he feels like he’s about to melt down.
He kicks rhythmically at the garden shed until his thoughts and feelings empty out. It feels as if his mind has been swept clean by the flashing, charged particles of a “solar wind.” Suddenly he knows how Salim disappeared.
Chapters 26-32 Analysis
Chapter 26 signals the final shift of children versus adults as Ted leaves the home to follow Kat in the search for Christy. Their bond becomes solidified when Kat realizes Ted’s first dishonest act to help her learn what happened to Salim. On his journey to reunite with Kat, Ted notes the changes in the weather as he takes in his unfamiliar surroundings. As he boards a train and recognizes familiar cloud formations in a setting that he doesn’t know, his observations highlight meteorology as a way for him to symbolically process the world around him.
Meteorology continues to weave through the novel as Kat and Ted return home, back into conflict. Kat and Faith fight, and Ted likens the argument to a tornado, illustrating how the conflict feels to him; his spontaneous use of metaphor demonstrates his character development as he uses the figurative language to make sense of interpersonal tumult. In the first chapters, he was perplexed by his father’s hurricane metaphor describing Faith and Gloria’s relationship, but Ted now uses a similar metaphor to describe other familial discord. The reader can see how uncomfortable Ted is when his family fight with one another, and he stims in his backyard as he tries to puzzle out how Salim went missing. After pacing, he desperately kicks rhythmically at the garden shed—and he does so until his tormented thoughts feel washed away by a clean energy that he calls a “solar wind.” Ted marks his epiphany with yet more symbolic meteorological language—and through his skill of deduction and logical analysis, the theme of The Benefits of Neurodiversity is pushed to the forefront again as Ted solves the mystery. Many famous public figures have reported coming upon an answer to a puzzle while out for a walk, and Ted’s breakthrough after pacing in the garden subtly alludes to Albert Einstein, whom Ted pondered in Chapter 5, hoping that he and the famous scientist shared characteristics. Einstein is famous for his daily walks, which helped him process his thoughts and reach his own breakthroughs.
The boy’s challenge now is to communicate his discovery. Ted has shown he is more than capable of Solving Problems Without Parental Guidance, but he now needs his family to listen to those solutions. His family is already highly distressed, and, between their anxiety and their dismissiveness toward him, Ted’s solution to Salim’s mystery may have trouble finding an audience.
