The Great Escape

by Natalie Haynes

  ‘And I saw the man in the white coat.’

  Arthur Shepard bit back the obvious reply.

  ‘Which man?’ he asked, in what he imagined was a patient voice.

  ‘The one looking for . . .’ Millie trailed off. She couldn’t remember exactly what the man had said. Had he mentioned a cat? She didn’t think so.

  ‘The one looking for . . . somebody. He seemed pretty upset. Did he find him?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. We’re still trying to help him do that now. Did you see anything?’

  ‘No. He asked me that before. Did you ask my dad? They were higher up, they might have seen someone. Oh, they were probably looking at the windows, though. It’s the best way to get them clean, I think.’ Millie’s heart was racing. Should she have said ‘something’, not ‘someone’? Maybe not – she was supposed to think it was a person who was missing, wasn’t she? He’d asked her if she’d seen ‘anything’, though, and not ‘anyone’. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. This was the trouble with lying, it was so hard to think how you would behave if you were telling the truth.

  ‘Yes, I fear they were. Well, thank you for your time, young lady.’ Millie tried to remain calm, as there was still time to make a mistake. ‘You can get back to your work now.’

  ‘OK.’ Millie stood up and turned round. There was a filing cabinet behind the door which she hadn’t been able to see as she came in. On top of the filing cabinet was a bendy plastic robot which Millie knew was expensive, because her friend Claire’s little brother, Joe, had wanted one last Christmas. The toy was of some kind of special plastic that meant it moved like a toy robot, and came with a remote control, but it was also stretchy and flexible, like Plasticine, if you held it in your hands to warm it up a bit. Claire’s mum and dad had tried to get him one, but everywhere had sold out by mid-November, and he had been pretty disappointed on Christmas Day. Then it turned out that none of his friends had got one either, and he minded a bit less. The toys were still in extremely short supply, and Joe was now hoping to get one for his birthday, or even next Christmas.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Arthur Shepard firmly, opening the door for her.

  Mille smiled gormlessly as the woman reappeared to take her back downstairs. But she was curious: in an office otherwise devoid of personal things – no pictures, no photographs, no funny cartoons pinned to the wall – why would a man like Arthur Shepard have a children’s toy sitting on his filing cabinet?

  ‘Now, how old are you?’ asked Elaine, as she walked Millie back down the corridor.

  ‘Twelve,’ she replied.

  ‘Goodness, are you?’ the woman said, betraying not even the slightest hint of interest in her voice. ‘I hope we won’t get in trouble with Personnel for having an under-sixteen working here.’

  ‘I’m just helping my dad,’ said Millie. This woman was beginning to annoy her.

  ‘Well, so long as you’re not on the payroll, I suppose what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Now, do you think you could carry some bags of rubbish down to the rubbish room? The cleaners aren’t in today. They’re not heavy. They’re all paper, really.’ Millie restrained herself from asking if the cleaners were really made of paper, and from pointing out that paper can be extremely heavy if you have enough of it, and nodded. Maybe this was her chance to get a look at some of the scientists’ work. Riffling through bins wasn’t terribly glamorous, but needs must. They had now reached the stairwell which she had come up earlier, and she turned as if to go back down. The woman reached out and stopped her.

  ‘Good,’ she said, and pointed up to the third floor. ‘I’ve had the staff put the bags at the top of the stairs – just up there. I think they’re technically a fire hazard until you’ve moved them, so the sooner the better, really. The rubbish room is at the bottom of these stairs – ground floor, first door on the left. Just dump them all in there.’

  ‘OK,’ said Millie.

  The woman turned around and stalked back towards Arthur Shepard’s office. Millie ran up the stairs – finally, this was her chance to see what was going on. There must have been twenty black bin liners full of rubbish. She was just about to open one of the bags when a tiny noise caught her attention. She followed the sound and saw the little CCTV camera winking at her across the stairwell. She couldn’t assume that she would be lucky twice. She sighed and picked up the rubbish bag, and began to carry it downstairs. The woman might have been rude, but she had also been right – it wasn’t heavy at all. She manoeuvred open the doors downstairs, banging one elbow painfully as she went, and put the bag in a large empty room, with bolted doors that presumably led outside for the rubbish to be picked up by lorry. She looked around quickly. There were no cameras in here. This was her chance. She carefully, carefully untied the top, so she could retie it when she was finished and leave it looking just the same. She opened it, looked inside, and gasped in disappointment. No wonder the bag was light. The small amount of paper inside had been shredded into tiny pieces – there was no hope of reading even a single word. She bit her lip in annoyance, retied the bag, and went back upstairs. Surely one of them would have something in that wasn’t less than half an inch square? Or maybe someone used a very small font, so she could at least find out something off one fragment.

  Seventeen bags later, she realised that the scientists were obviously more thorough than she had thought. Each bag had been filled with shreds and nothing else. Millie felt like crying, she was so frustrated. Here was possibly all the information she could wish for, handed to her like a Christmas present, only one that was missing its batteries, and had additionally been stamped on by a weighty and malevolent sibling. She had four more bags to go, but she was still going to check them all, just in case.

  When she went back up to get the next one, she found that the bags had been hiding a door. Maybe she could sneak through it and explore the third floor – this was where Max had been kept, after all. Millie felt her heart begin to pound for maybe the fifth time that day. She leaned gently on the door, and it moved slightly. She leaned a little harder, and it opened a few inches.

  She was just about to try and look round, when a voice said, ‘Hello? Can I help you?’ A man opened the door slightly further and peered round the side of it. He was wearing a white lab coat and holding onto the door suspiciously, like a dressing-gowned homeowner with his door on a security chain.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Millie, thinking that at least after today she knew her heart contained no defects or weaknesses, because if it had, she would have died several times over. ‘I fell into the door,’ she said, rubbing her elbow to give some conviction to the story. Luckily, she had smacked it so many times on the doors downstairs, it was already quite red.

  ‘Easily done,’ said the man. ‘Take more care of yourself, won’t you?’ He shut the door firmly in her face, and she picked up another bag and carried it grimly back downstairs.

  She opened it with no expectation of finding anything more than she had in the others, but this one was slightly different. On top of the shredded paper were several sheets of newspaper, folded over. Millie sniffed – she could definitely smell something that wasn’t newsprint, and she thought it was almost certainly cat. Maybe they used newspaper to line the cages. She would ask Max. She looked through the pages and realised it was a paper from last week, almost complete, though it appeared to be missing the middle sheet. She sighed, returned the newspaper to the bag and retied it. The last few bags were soon done and checked, all containing exactly the same shreds as the rest. Millie had only one more idea, and that was to leave the outer doors unbolted, so that maybe she and Max and the protesters would be able to get through one evening, and try to free the other cats. She unhooked the bolts and left the doors shut, putting a couple of bags in front of them, so you couldn’t see the bolts. Almost immediately, the inner door opened and Elaine walked in.

  ‘All done?’ she asked and, without waiting for a reply, went on: ‘Good. Now, if you could just unbolt those doors, so the men can pic
k this lot up in the morning . . .’

  Millie stared. They left the doors open overnight? She would have no problem coming to rescue Max’s friends – they were practically being invited in. She went to the doors and tried to look like she was undoing the bolts.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the woman, and held the inner door open for her to go back to the lobby. Millie walked past her, then watched as the woman produced two enormous keys and locked the inside door from the corridor side. Stupid – of course they didn’t leave the building open overnight. Mille sighed inwardly one more time. Breaking the rest of the cats out wasn’t going to be quite as easy as she’d hoped.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Millie arrived back home dying to tell Max about everything that had happened. She was sure that Arthur Shepard was the one behind the cat-napping. No, that didn’t sound quite right. Kit-napping. That would do. She’d asked her dad and Bill where they’d gone off to, and they both muttered something about cleaning the upper floors. Millie wanted to ask them what they’d seen up there, but realised her dad wasn’t going to say anything very much, in case she got upset about testing animals again. Too late, Millie thought grimly – I’ve got one of their animals already. She went to the back door and opened it for Max, pretending she wanted to let some fresh air into the house. She expected to see him come darting in immediately, but there was no sign of him. She wandered around the kitchen for a while, making a drink, finding a biscuit, looking out of the window. Still nothing. Weird. Her dad came in to boil the kettle, and the opportunity was lost. She went up to her room and shut the door behind her, feeling at a loose end.

  ‘Psst,’ said a voice from under the bed.

  ‘Max?’

  ‘Of course Max. Who else would be hiding under your bed? Is this a comic opera?’ The sleek blue-grey cat sidled his way out from beneath the bed with a grace that was only slightly marred by the large balls of dust behind his ears.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Millie. ‘What’s a comic opera? Is it drawings of fat people?’

  Max rolled his eyes. ‘You have no culture at all,’ he replied.

  ‘Never mind that. How did you get in? I’ve got so much to tell you.’

  ‘And I have a lot to tell you. You want to know how I got in? I got in when the people who came to search your house opened the window.’

  ‘What? You’re joking.’ Millie gaped at him.

  ‘I’m quite serious. Two men arrived after you had gone.’

  ‘How long after?’ she asked.

  ‘I meant to check my watch, but then I remembered. I can’t find one that looks right against my fur.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Millie rolled her eyes back at him.

  ‘Before lunchtime, definitely.’

  ‘How did they get in? Did they have a key?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was in the back garden. I didn’t see them get in, I just saw them when they went into the kitchen. The side-window of your garage is open, though, and the brickwork beneath it looks scuffed, so I think they got in there. I watched them going up the stairs, so I jumped onto the garage roof, and then I waited outside the bathroom window. I knew they would open a window upstairs, because it’s been so hot today. When they left the bathroom one open, I jumped in.’

  ‘Are you mental? What if they’d seen you?’ Millie cried.

  ‘I am not, as you say, mental,’ Max said stiffly. ‘I am silent and cunning. I heard them talking in your father’s room, I knew the coast was clear, I jumped in and I hid. This is what cats are good at. One of the many things we are good at,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘But the risk was huge.’ Millie was still appalled. ‘What did they do next?’

  ‘They searched your dad’s room for a while, and the other bedroom. Then they tried yours. They checked for cat hair on the bed – it’s lucky I am too polite to moult. Also, I think they were put off by all the dust. One of them kept sneezing.’

  ‘That’s lucky. I knew it would come in handy sooner or later – I keep telling Dad that housework is dangerous. What did they do then?’

  ‘Then they turned on your computer.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘Badly for them.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘They accessed your email account.’

  ‘My regular one?’

  ‘Does it have two messages in, one from your grandparents in Australia and one from your friend Claire who is in Italy on holiday?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Yes, they checked that. They seemed a little disappointed that you didn’t have more mail.’

  ‘I’m a surprisingly efficient correspondent.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Did they check the Deleted Items?’

  ‘Apparently you have none. Just a few emails from somewhere, asking you if you’d like a special-offer DVD, whatever that might be.’

  ‘I empty it pretty often. I leave those ones in so it doesn’t look suspiciously empty.’

  ‘Suspicious to whom? Have you lived your whole life expecting something like this to happen? You are extraordinary.’

  ‘I told you – my dad is nuts about computer privacy. That’s why I have a Mac – they’re harder to attack with viruses.’

  ‘The computer can become ill?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. And people can send you stuff which can get them information about your machine. They’re called Worms. Or Trojans.’

  ‘Oh.’ Max looked confused.

  ‘Anyway, my dad thinks that if you only store the things you can’t keep in your head on the computer, there’s less for someone to steal, so I delete everything I can, and keep my vital stuff on a memory stick, which I carry ar—’

  ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m impressed, and yet simultaneously not interested.’

  ‘It’s fine. I slightly wish I’d rescued another cat.’

  ‘I slightly wish you had, too.’ Max looked huffy.

  Millie laughed.

  ‘Ah, I am interested in one thing,’ said Max.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your father is a computer expert, yet he is cleaning windows for a job. Why is that?’

  ‘Oh, well . . .’ Millie looked embarrassed, as though she were giving away her dad’s secrets. ‘He lost his job about three months ago. And I thought he’d be applying for other jobs, but he doesn’t seem to want to. Or maybe he does want to, but his friend thinks he’s lost his belief in himself. Only, we don’t have very much spare money, because there’s only my dad and me. My mum died years ago, and my grandparents are in Australia, and they don’t even know he’s lost his job, so . . .’ She trailed off.

  ‘That is nothing to be ashamed of,’ Max said. ‘He is earning money the best way he can, until the right thing comes along. I think that’s very dignified. Very fatherly.’

  ‘Me too, I guess.’ Millie smiled. ‘Anyway, what happened next? I mean, today?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘They tried to check your internet history, but that didn’t seem to work at all.’

  ‘Yup. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Then what did they do?’

  ‘They gave up. They thought it had been a waste of time from the beginning. They put everything back where it was, and let themselves out of the front door.’

  ‘Interesting. Let me tell you what was happening to us at the same time.’

  Millie told him everything, and watched the disappointment flit across his face, mirroring her own, when she explained about the locked doors, the too-attentive third-floor staff, and the endless frustration of the fruitless rubbish search. He confirmed that the cats did indeed sit on newspaper, and made acerbic comments about the taste in reading matter of two of the lab techs. He listened carefully as she told him the part about Arthur Shepard. But Max didn’t recognise him from her description – he had no idea who had captured him, because he’d never seen the man’s face. And inside the laboratory, he had only seen the scientists and technicians.

  ‘
I’m sure he’s the one in charge of this thing,’ Millie finished. ‘Let’s look him up and see what we find out.’

  She googled Arthur Shepard, and tracked down his work history right up to his current employment at Vakkson. There wasn’t a huge amount of information. ‘I’ll try the library tomorrow,’ she decided. ‘I can probably find out where he lives and stuff from there.’

  ‘You are a little frightening sometimes,’ said Max.

  ‘He started it.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’ll check the mailbox, too – see if the protesters have got back to us.’

  Millie found a new mail from the .co.uk protester, whom she’d decided she liked less than the other one, and clicked on it. It was just one line:

  can find out nothing about a project using cats there. will look into it. do nothing till you hear from us again.

  ‘That’s pretty firm,’ said Max.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Millie. ‘Do you get the feeling they’re freezing us out?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said the cat, sighing. They hadn’t really got their metaphors sorted yet.

  ‘I mean, we’re not supposed to do anything till they find out more. They’ve had two days to find stuff out, and they haven’t. Look what we’ve been doing in that time. They just stand outside the laboratory each day and shout. What more are they going to find out, doing that?’

  ‘You think there is something . . .’ Max cast around for the phrase, not to be outdone, ‘something, ah, fishy, going on?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Millie, trying and failing to suppress a grin. ‘That is what I think. Well, maybe not fishy, exactly – they might not be suspicious, but they’re certainly no help.’

  ‘What should we do, then?’ he asked.