The Crims

by Kate Davies

  “You were amazing,” Lucy said adoringly.

  “We’ve missed you,” Alice said needily.

  “We have?” said Catherine. “Why, have you been off sick or something?”

  “Never mind, Catherine,” Imogen murmured, just as she had a thousand times before. In fact, nothing at Lilyworth had changed. Imogen had slipped back into her old life so easily that her time with her family seemed like a lifetime ago. She couldn’t quite believe that just one week ago she’d been running through a theme park, chased by giant cartoon characters. Her friends would never believe her if she told them where she’d really been. Luckily, she didn’t need to. Ms. Gruner hadn’t wanted any of the parents to hear about Imogen’s criminal connections, so she had told everyone that Imogen had gone home to care for her sick grandmother. Now that Imogen was back at Lilyworth, though, she felt strange about lying to everyone. More than ever, it seemed that she was living a double life.

  Mrs. Pythagoras was back on the stage now, tapping the microphone. “Hello, girls!” she said. “Please welcome to the stage our second candidate for head girl. She’s like a prime number—you can’t help but love her! It’s . . . Bridget Sweetwine!”

  Everyone clapped as Bridget Sweetwine skipped onto the stage, her curls bouncing pleasantly. Imogen felt the old, familiar hatred rise up inside her. She was almost grateful for the feeling—it was a change from the numbness that had taken her over since she’d come back to school. As she watched Bridget curtsey to Mrs. Pythagoras and arrange her notes on the podium, she thought, I could learn a thing or two from Bridget Sweetwine. She’s been living a double life for years, but only I’ve guessed the truth about the evil beneath the sickly sweet surface.

  Bridget Sweetwine smiled out at the audience. “Thank you so much for clapping for me!” she trilled. “Isn’t clapping just the loveliest thing? Almost as lovely as a daisy chain. Or a bunch of sunflowers. Or daffodils, dancing in the breeze. Or . . .”

  Imogen took a deep breath and zoned out for a moment. She worried that if she listened to Sweetwine much longer, her eardrums might spontaneously explode. When she zoned back in again, Sweetwine was still talking.

  “And the nicest thing of all is having Imogen back with us! Everyone give Imogen a round of applause!”

  Imogen blinked.

  Everyone was looking at her and clapping and smiling.

  Imogen tried to smile too, but it just looked as though she was baring her teeth.

  What was Sweetwine up to?

  “I think it’s clear from Imogen’s brilliant speech tonight that she’s by far the best candidate for head girl,” Sweetwine continued. “And that’s why I’ve decided to pull out of the race. So congratulations, Imogen! You’re head girl of Lilyworth!”

  Everyone got to their feet and cheered, hugging Imogen and congratulating her.

  It was over.

  She’d won.

  But Imogen felt nothing at all.

  This was typical Sweetwine. Stealing her thunder. Raining on her parade. Being passive-aggressive with all sorts of weather. Imogen watched in a daze as Bridget Sweetwine simpered her way through the crowd and left the great hall through the back door. And then she began to feel angry. Really, really, really angry. Her face grew red. Her hands begin to shake. She’s trying to deprive me of winning fair and square! She knows I would have won, so she’s pulling out before she can be humiliated!

  She was not letting Bridget Sweetwine get away with this.

  Imogen caught up with her nemesis in the corridor outside the dormitories.

  “Sweetwine,” she said, cornering her. “Just what are you up to?”

  “Right now?” asked Sweetwine. “I’m just going back to my dorm to write in my diary. Why? Do you want to have a midnight feast tonight or something?”

  “You know what I mean,” said Imogen, leaning toward her. “Why did you pull out of the race? What’s your endgame?”

  “Endgame?” asked Bridget Sweetwine, her blue eyes as wide and round as two incredibly innocent dinner plates. “I don’t know what you mean! I’m just so happy you’re back!”

  “Oh really?” asked Imogen, crossing her arms. “If you’re so glad I’m back, why did you try to get me kicked out in the first place?”

  Bridget Sweetwine looked at her blankly. “Kicked out? Of where?”

  “Of school, obviously.”

  “What?” said Bridget Sweetwine, apparently genuinely shocked. “I would never do that!”

  Imogen opened her mouth to argue with her, but she had a horrible, gnawing feeling that Sweetwine might be telling the truth.

  A terrifying thought occurred to her.

  What if Sweetwine really was just incredibly annoying and incredibly nice?

  What if she’d never actually been Imogen’s nemesis?

  But then, who got me kicked out of school?

  Imogen began to feel sick with rage. But she wasn’t angry with Bridget Sweetwine this time. She turned and ran down the corridor to her dorm room.

  She slammed the door behind her, heart thudding, and pulled her memory box down from the top shelf of her wardrobe, where it had been hidden since she’d first arrived at Lilyworth.

  The memory box was an old shoebox with “Ashes of Millie the Dachshund, 2005–2016” written on it in ballpoint pen to put off snoopers (a classic Imogen trick). She wiped the dust off the lid and opened the box. Her breath caught for a moment. The box smelled of Crim House.

  Imogen shook herself. She did not miss her family. Her family was awful and mad. She took a deep breath and started sifting through the things she’d brought with her from home: an old tie of her father’s, a lipstick her mother was always trying to get her to wear, the lyrics for a musical she and Delia had written for the Horrible Children to perform, called Burglar on the Roof. At the bottom of the box, she found what she was looking for—the “congratulations” card Big Nana had made for her when she’d stolen Freddie’s bike, aged seven. The message inside, written in spidery green ink, read:

  Dear Imogen,

  Congratulations—committing a crime against a fellow criminal isn’t easy, but you pulled it off. You remind me a lot of me when I was a little girl: innocent, fond of cats, and very handy with a crowbar. May this bike theft be the first of many.

  With love from

  Big Nana xxxx

  Imogen rooted around in her chest of drawers for the letter that had gotten her thrown out of Lilyworth. She’d kept it in its envelope, hoping that one day she’d be able to prove that Bridget Sweetwine had written it.

  But she’d never be able to prove that now.

  Because as Imogen compared the handwriting on the envelope with the handwriting in the card she was holding, she began to shake.

  The letter that got her kicked out of school had been written by Big Nana.

  Imogen slammed the letter and card down on her desk and curled up on her bed. Hot, horrible tears began to soak into her pillow. She had never felt so trapped—not even in Jack Wooster’s wardrobe or in the cell in the police station or onstage as Prince Charming, saying “I love you, Cinderella” to Bridget Sweetwine and kissing her on her horrible, smooth cheek. She hadn’t ever had control of her own life. She’d thought she’d get away from Big Nana by coming back to Lilyworth; she had thought she was safe from her here. But Big Nana had been controlling Imogen like a tiny criminal puppet from the moment she was born.

  And she was still controlling her now.

  A few hours later, Imogen sat on her bed in her dorm room. Her suitcase was still lying open on the floor next to her, half unpacked. Big Nana’s toy hippo stared at her from the top.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Imogen said to the hippo, walking over to pick it up. She scowled into its reproachful plastic eyes. “Big Nana’s the one who should feel guilty. Not me.”

  Big Nana clearly did feel guilty. She had sent Imogen several emails since Imogen had gotten back to Lilyworth, but Imogen hadn’t opened any of them.

 
Imogen had ignored Delia’s emails too, and the fifty missed calls from her dad, and duck-faced selfies from her mum with the message Come home, Sweetie. But she had opened an email from Freddie that morning by mistake, thinking it was her subscription to Ex-Cons Monthly. (Freddie had set up a new email account to trick her.) In the email, Freddie had told her that the Crims were having a big belated sixty-fifth birthday party for Big Nana that weekend, and begged her to come home. Everyone really misses you, he’d written. Isabella keeps naming her teddy bears “Imojim” and then sticking pins in them. It’s really sweet.

  Imogen hadn’t written back.

  She put the hippo back in the suitcase where it couldn’t stare at her, and she flipped the lid down on top of it. As she did so, something fell out onto the floor. It was the notebook with “Photographs of My Favorite Verrucae” written on the front—her old criminal plans journal.

  Imogen sat back down on her bed and began to flip through the notebook. As she read through her old schemes, she smiled at how clever and creative her younger self had been. Sure, the plan to replace Freddie’s cologne with bathroom cleaner so he’d smell like a toilet was a bit immature, but she still liked the idea of hacking into the police’s walkie-talkies. What was clear from every page of the notebook was that Imogen had loved writing these plans—they were at least as ambitious as Uncle Clyde’s Heist, but better thought through. There were little notes from Big Nana in the margins of some of her best ideas—“Brilliantly nasty!” “Wonderfully evil!” “You, my little tangerine, are a genius!” She felt a bittersweet pang as she realized that Big Nana really did think she was gifted.

  Imogen read a few more pages and paused at a plan to steal the inflatable elephant that sat outside a car dealership near Blandington. It had been a natural progression from the octopus balloon, but she’d never finished this particular scheme for some reason. She studied her notes—the idea had been that she would dress up as a car, hide in the car dealership, wait until everyone had gone home for the night, and then cut the inflatable elephant free and float home on it, as if it were a hot-air balloon or Mary Poppins’s umbrella. But in order to do that, she’d need a way of controlling the elephant’s direction . . . and she’d never figured out a way. As she looked at the notes now, though, she had an idea. What if she managed to break into a car in the dealership, strip it of its controls, and build some kind of car-elephant hybrid? She sat down at her desk so that she could think properly. She opened one of her physics textbooks—she was sure that she could harness the helium from the inflatable elephant somehow, to power a small car engine. . . .

  Two hours later, Imogen looked up. It was dark outside. She’d missed dinner.

  But the plan was finished.

  She smiled to herself.

  She opened her laptop. Maybe she would email Freddie back, after all. As she waited for her emails to load, she scanned the latest news headlines on her homepage—and then she froze. Because a familiar face was staring up at her from her laptop.

  Derek Hornbutton.

  The headline above his head read: “President of Charm Ltd. Goes Missing.”

  Imogen remembered the letter they’d stolen from Charmtopia, where the Kruks threatened Hornbutton’s poodles. She felt sick. Clearly the Kruks had decided to up the ante. Once they’d realized that Freddie wasn’t really a Charm Ltd. lawyer, they’d also have realized that Charm Ltd. hadn’t responded to their threats. . . .

  Imogen remembered the smiling children in the photo on Derek Hornbutton’s desk. Hornbutton had been awful to her and the Horrible Children, but in his defense, they had been trying to implicate his company in a complicated and ridiculous crime. And she was sure that, just like the most eccentric members of her own family, Derek Hornbutton had people who dearly loved him.

  The Kruks couldn’t be allowed to get away with this. Someone had to find Derek Hornbutton fast—before he was turned into tiger food, too, or forced into cutlery-polishing duty or forced to go swimming with unfriendly sharks. . . .

  Heart pounding, Imogen opened the most recent message from Big Nana.

  I’m so sorry, Imogen. There’s no excuse for what I did. But we need you.

  Imogen swallowed. She couldn’t quite believe what she was about to do, but then a lot of unbelievable things had happened to her over the last couple of weeks. She unpinned her head girl badge from her blazer and threw it, clanking, into the bin. Then she picked up her suitcase and put it on the bed.

  She was going back to Blandington.

  AS IMOGEN WALKED down the Blandington Community Center’s corridor to the hall that Friday, squeaking past the balloons and ducking under the bunting, she thought back to all the happy times she’d had there as a child: the twins’ joint first birthday party (they’d ended up in the hospital after they tried to eat each other); Josephine’s fortieth birthday (she’d spent all night sobbing into her stolen handkerchiefs, wailing, “I’m so old!”); and her own tenth birthday, just after Big Nana had died. Everyone had been too shocked to buy her a present, except Henry, who had bought her a T-shirt and then ruined it by writing “Henry Crim Woz Ere” all over it in permanent marker.

  Okay, maybe “happy times” was a bit strong.

  Imogen took a deep breath and pushed the hall doors open just as everyone started singing “Happy Birthday.” The room was packed—she hadn’t realized Big Nana had so many friends. And they weren’t all petty criminals, either—the curator of the Blandington Art Gallery was there, for some reason, and so, incredibly, was the entire Blandington Police Department. Maybe they were just there for the free cake. Now that the Crims were free, Imogen didn’t bring doughnuts to the police station anymore.

  And there, in the middle of the room, was Big Nana. Imogen felt her stomach twist as she saw her grandmother again for the first time since the scene at the train station. Despite Big Nana’s many, many, many flaws, Imogen still loved her, and she had decided to forgive her. After all, nobody was perfect. Big Nana was just slightly less perfect than everyone else.

  Imogen hovered by the doors and watched as Big Nana blew out the sixty-five candles on her very large cake. She fluffed up her bright red hair and got to her feet to make a speech.

  “Thank you all so much for coming,” she said, smiling around at everyone. “It’s so good to see all my friends and family and former enemies here together. And it’s so good to be alive again—officially! Like I always say, ‘It’s better to be alive than dead, unless you’re a chicken. They don’t have very happy lives, so you might as well eat them.’”

  Everyone cheered again, and Big Nana bowed—she loved to bow, even when she was in the stand on trial for eating public property or impersonating a spaceship. As she stood up straight again, she noticed Imogen standing at the back of the room. She gave a little cry and ran headlong through the crowd toward Imogen. It was quite scary, actually; like standing in the path of a small, red-haired train.

  Before Imogen could say anything (or get out of the way), Big Nana launched herself at her, giving her a very painful hug.

  “Happy birthday, Big Nana,” Imogen said—or rather tried to say, because her head was wedged in Big Nana’s armpit.

  “You came!” said Big Nana.

  “I did,” said Imogen. “And I brought you something.” She held out a brown-papered parcel.

  Big Nana snatched the present from Imogen’s hands and unwrapped it. “My hippo!” she cried, hugging the stuffed animal and then hugging Imogen again. “I wanted it so badly that day, when I was pretending to be Mrs. Teakettle and I saw it in the hallway. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” said Imogen, smiling.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “The Kruks’ Loot Room,” Imogen said casually.

  Big Nana shook her head. “I don’t understand how I missed it,” she whispered. “I looked all over their Loot Room to find the perfect hiding place for the lunch box—just hidden enough for it to be a challenge, but not so hidden that you’d g
et murdered by the Kruks before you found it. . . .”

  “Is that why you babysat for the Kruk children?” Imogen whispered back. “So you could hide the lunch box in the Kruks’ Loot Room?”

  “Of course.” Big Nana shrugged, as if she did that sort of thing all the time, which she probably did. “I had to make sure you’d think the Kruks had committed The Heist.” She went back to gazing at her hippo adoringly.

  Now that Imogen thought about it, it was sort of flattering, the insane lengths Big Nana had gone to make Imogen a true Crim again. Sort of flattering—and sort of completely mad.

  “Were you lonely in that horrible Loot Room, my darling?” Big Nana cooed, stroking her hippo, just as Uncle Clyde had stroked his lunch box. The family resemblance between them had never been stronger.

  “How did your hippo get into the Loot Room in the first place?” Imogen asked.

  “How does anything get into the Kruks’ Loot Room?” Big Nana shrugged. “The Kruks are all-seeing and all-powerful! You know the Bermuda Triangle?”

  Imogen nodded.

  “It’s not real! The Kruks have just been stealing aircraft and ships from that patch of sea for years! And you know how socks always go missing down in the washing machine?”

  Imogen nodded again.

  “They don’t, really! It’s the Kruks. They have a huge secondhand mismatched sock empire in Norway. If you ever go to Oslo, you might spot someone wearing half of your favorite pair.”

  “But . . . How do they . . .,” started Imogen.

  “Best not to ask,” said Big Nana, tapping her nose. “The Kruks move in mysterious ways, just like antelope do.”