The Great Escape

by Natalie Haynes

  This sounded like an excellent idea.

  Jake gave her his address. ‘Come round at ten – Mum and Dad will be long gone by then.’

  Millie agreed, hung up and told Max the plan. ‘I’ll leave a note here for Dad. She looked at the clock, considering. ‘He’s gone straight to work, I guess, from what’s-her-face’s house.’

  ‘Is that her real name?’ asked Max innocently.

  ‘Yes. It’s on her birth certificate, next to a surprisingly late year,’ said Millie acidly. ‘Now, let’s have breakfast, and then I’ll fix that puncture.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As Millie reached up to ring Jake’s doorbell, the door swung softly open on its own.

  ‘Come in,’ muttered Jake, from behind the door.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Millie suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing, really.’ He reached behind her and pulled her bike inside, propping it up against the wall. ‘I just thought you might be being followed.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Max, his head popping out of her bag like a well-trained magician’s sidekick. ’I’ve been keeping my eyes open. We haven’t seen that man, or his car. And I didn’t see the other man either.’

  ‘What other man?’ asked Jake. Max could be quite confusing, he thought.

  ‘The one I watched search Millie’s house the other day.’

  Max jumped down onto the carpet. Millie looked at Jake properly for the first time, and saw that he was holding his left arm awkwardly. His long-sleeved T-shirt concealed a bandage.

  ‘I fell quite hard,’ Jake confessed, seeing concern in her face. ‘I’ve twisted my left knee, and I think I’ve sprained my elbow – it’s the size of a melon,’ he added, sounding reasonably proud of this fruity achievement. And now Millie looked closely, his arm did seem to swell out in the middle.

  ‘Ouch,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ he sounded rueful. ‘You should see my bike.’ He pointed out of the hall window and Millie saw a mangled bicycle leaning against the wall like a crippled crane fly.

  Max jumped up onto the sill and had a look for himself. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I know. I dunno what I’m going to tell my parents,’ he sighed. ‘The truth, I suppose.’

  Millie looked extremely surprised.

  ‘Not all of it,’ he explained. ‘Just the bit where I fell off. Not the bit where I was following a guy in the dark without my lights on round the unlit roads outside of town, after acting as a diversion for two burglars.’

  ‘I should leave all those parts out,’ agreed Max. ‘No point worrying them if you don’t have to.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t worry you two, either.’ Jake looked apologetic. ‘I tried to call you, but there was no signal for a while. And by time I had a signal . . .’ He paused awkwardly. ‘By the time I had a signal again, my phone was in three separate pieces,’ he finished.

  ‘Can you fix it?’ asked Millie sympathetically. She would be lost without her phone. It had been on her top ten list of things not to forget before attempting the break-in, along with maps, food, quiet shoes and Max.

  ‘Not a hope.’ Jake shrugged.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I forgot my puncture repair kit, so we had to walk home.’

  ‘She forgot tissues, too,’ said Max.

  Jake shook his head sadly. ‘Dear dear,’ he said. ‘You forgot tissues. What a shambles. I dunno how you managed to break in anywhere with that kind of slacker attitude.’ He grinned at them both.

  ‘I have a question,’ said the cat. ‘Why did you try to follow Arthur Shepard at all and get into this mess’ – he nodded at Jake’s bike and his many injuries – ‘if you can simply get his address from your, what is it, reverse directory?’ Millie had told Max all about this on their way over.

  ‘I didn’t know I could then,’ explained Jake. ‘That was another one of my brother’s bright ideas. He mentioned it this morning.’ He shrugged wearily and then winced.

  Millie was just about to ask about Jake’s elusive brother, when they were interrupted.

  ‘Are they here? Are they here?’ called a child’s voice from upstairs.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Millie.

  ‘This is Ben,’ said Jake, as a small boy appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Hello, Ben,’ said Millie.

  ‘Hi,’ Ben said shyly, looking down at the cat. ‘Is this Max?’

  ‘Hello,’ said Max.

  ‘He really talks!’ Ben was delighted, a huge grin splitting his face in half. ‘Come on up.’

  ‘Are you sure you should have told your little brother about us?’ Millie tried to sound less annoyed than she felt. The more people who knew about this, the more danger she and Max, and maybe her dad or even Bill, might be in.

  ‘Er . . . he already knew,’ Jake mumbled.

  ‘How?’ she demanded.

  ‘Well, you know, from helping us yesterday.’

  ‘How did he . . .?’ Millie’s voice trailed off as Max’s jaw dropped.

  ‘That’s your brother? The computer hacker?’ She was horrified.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jake sounded embarrassed. ‘He’s a lot cleverer than people think. I mean, he’s way cleverer than me. He has an IQ of 168. He’s a genius, really.’

  ‘Your baby brother did all that yesterday?’ asked Max, who looked as shocked as Millie felt, which was some consolation.

  ‘He’s not a baby. He’s nearly ten.’ Jake was getting defensive.

  ‘I’m glad you saved this information till now. To think you were so rude to Millie about being a “little kid”.’ Max glared at Jake.

  ‘Well, who knew she’d be exactly like him?’ Jake sounded genuinely affronted. ‘I spend half my time being told what to do by one child genius. I didn’t realise she was another.’

  Millie blushed.

  ‘Anyway, he got you in, didn’t he?’ asked Jake.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Millie conceded.

  Max shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he puzzled. ‘I spent years of my life thinking children were simply noisy and sticky. I get kidnapped, I escape, and every child I meet is some kind of master crook. Millie is like an arch-villain, plotting away with her nerves of steel, you are able to elude large dogs and disappear at will, and your brother apparently controls the electricity supply for this entire area.’ Jake shrugged modestly, and Millie blushed again. Max continued shaking his head. ‘I am either the luckiest cat in England or this country is populated entirely by unusually gifted children with criminal tendencies. And yet, you all look so innocent . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ shouted Ben, poking his head over the banister above them. ‘Jake says we’ve got another cat to rescue. And then we’re going to nail the bad guys.’

  Millie raised her eyebrows briefly.

  ‘He likes those American police shows,’ said Jake.

  Max and Millie nodded mutely.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  If Millie’s room had seemed to Max to be a good place in which to plot an escape, Ben’s room could have belonged to an international criminal mastermind with an unusual fondness for cartoons. Computers, scanners, printers and web-cams all gleamed on a huge desk, beneath a giant poster of several animated superheroes on the wall. The computer had already been in action and printouts littered the table.

  ‘Here are the registered owners and addresses of all the vehicles you saw,’ said Ben, waving them at Millie.

  Obviously Jake had also reported back. She scanned them quickly.

  ‘So, the van that came to pick up the cats belongs to a company in Lincolnshire.’

  ‘It’s a front. Another testing lab,’ said Ben.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Max.

  ‘I ran the company name through a search to get the names of the directors. Then I searched for other companies in their names. That’s where I found this.’ Ben handed them another bit of paper. It was a copy of the home page of an animal research centre.

  ‘Tha
t’s theirs, too.’ Millie nodded as she read.

  ‘So the orange cat—’

  ‘Ariston,’ supplied Max.

  ‘Ariston?’ asked Jake. ‘What kind of name is that?’

  ‘Apparently, it means “The Best”,’ scoffed Max. ‘We always said it should stand for “Best at Annoying Every Other Cat in the Room”.’

  ‘Well, it pains me to say it, but “Ariston”’ – Millie rolled her eyes – ‘was right. They were being shipped off to another lab. Lucky we went when we did. And lucky you saw the van and got the registration. There’s no way Max and I could have seen it without getting caught.’

  Jake smiled proudly.

  ‘And the guy who came to our house last night was . . .’ Millie leafed through the sheets Ben had given her.

  ‘. . . Ray,’ finished Jake.

  ‘He works for Arthur Shepard directly, not through Vakkson,’ offered Ben.

  ‘How do you know that?’ This was far more information than Millie had managed to unpick from the net.

  ‘He runs a security firm. Pretty scuzzy one, though.’ Ben handed her another sheet of paper. ‘It says they offer security for people and property. But Vakkson uses a different company for their site security – this one.’

  Ben brandished another sheet, and Millie recognised the colours of this home page – they were exactly the same as the uniform of the security man who sat at the front desk – maroon and grey. She began to laugh.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Jake helps,’ he replied, trying and failing to look modest.

  Jake nodded, and pulled a face.

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘I load the paper into the printer. And sometimes, I staple things together.’

  ‘So we know all about the van and the heavies. And that just leaves . . .’ Millie reached out and took the last sheet. ‘Arthur Shepard’s home address?’

  ‘No.’ Ben was irritated. ‘His car’s not listed to his home address. It’s listed to a business address, and that turned out to be a mailbox, not a real place at all.’

  Millie pressed her lips together in annoyance.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ben.

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’ She felt guilty now. ‘It’s not your fault. We’ll just have to think of another way to find out where Shepard might be keeping Celeste. I don’t think he’d have taken her to his house, anyway. He’s very secretive about his business dealings, isn’t he? I can’t see him taking Celeste home – his neighbours might see her.’

  Max looked worried.

  ‘We’ll think of something, mate,’ said Jake to the cat.

  ‘We will,’ promised Millie.

  ‘So, what next?’ Ben had obviously had more sleep than the other three put together and was bursting with energy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Millie. ‘I was hoping we’d be able to get proof of the cats being held in the lab when we raided Shepard’s office. But then he turned out to be in the building, so we just made a run for it.’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ said Jake fervently, and rubbed his sore arm again.

  ‘Hmm. We still need to find an answer to the most basic question,’ said Ben.

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Max.

  ‘Which is, who wants talking cats?’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘We’ve tried to figure this out before,’ explained Millie. ‘But we couldn’t find anything online and we couldn’t think of any reasons ourselves.’

  Ben looked pained – he hated failure. ’I’ve tried too,’ he admitted. ‘There’s nothing, is there?’

  ‘Not that I could find. But you’re better at this kind of thing. I mean, how did you do that stuff with the electricity last night?’

  ‘Oh, it was easy. Their electricity grid was hardly protected at all. And the different circuits weren’t even encrypted. They’d practically labelled them. If they’d put the cameras and the doors on the same loop, that would have been tricky, but honestly, it was as if they wanted someone to break in. I turned the cameras back on after you’d left, by the way. Just because it was funny.’

  Millie grinned at him. She wondered how funny Arthur Shepard had found it.

  ‘But I can’t find anything that connects Vakkson to cat research at all. They usually deal with rodents.’

  ‘Mmm. That’s what we thought. But Max doesn’t reckon there were any other animals in the building.’

  ‘If there had been mice, I would have smelled them,’ he said patiently. ‘Mice, birds, little helpless voles – cats know.’

  The others nodded.

  ‘So, if they aren’t doing any rodent research at Haverham,’ said Jake, ‘is it anything to do with Vakkson at all? Is the cat thing Arthur Shepard’s pet project?’ Millie, Max and Ben all stared at him. ‘Sorry,’ said Jake. ‘That pun was unintentional.’

  ‘It’s a good question, though,’ said Ben, tapping away at the keyboard, flicking through page after page of information, his eyes barely seeming to scan the screen before he dismissed it and moved on.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Vakkson don’t seem to be doing anything in this country.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’ asked Jake.

  His brother shook his head.

  ‘Well, why do they have a lab in Haverham, then?’ Millie asked.

  Ben frowned and typed some more.

  ‘They don’t, really,’ he exclaimed. ‘They used to have a department here, then they moved operations to Germany two years ago. They tried to sell it, but there were no takers, so they’ve leased it out.’

  ‘He is even more alarming than you, Millie,’ said Max, looking at Ben with awe.

  ‘They leased it to Arthur Shepard?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this is his . . . private project,’ said Jake. ‘But why does he want to make talking cats?’

  ‘I’ve tried to remember everything I heard while I was there,’ said Max. ‘But the technicians didn’t seem to know anything. They hardly spoke to us at all, except to ask us stupid questions about whether or not we felt nauseous.’

  ‘Well, let’s think.’ Millie was frowning again. ‘It’s going to cost a huge amount of money to rent a building that size, isn’t it?’ They all agreed. ‘And you were there for at least a few weeks?’ she checked with Max, who nodded his head. ‘And you weren’t the first cat there? So some of them might have been there for a few months?’ He nodded again, his long, grey whiskers waving as he moved. ‘And,’ Millie continued, ‘Shepard’s paying for separate security, well, house-breakers, on top of the guards who look after the building, who are paid for by Vakkson?’

  ‘That explains why that guard was so useless – Vakkson probably use good people for places which they actually use. All they need for a lab they’re renting out to someone else is a bloke to make sure windows don’t get broken, or squatters don’t move in,’ said Jake.

  ‘And he’s paying for the technicians . . .’

  ‘And he has a really nice car,’ added Jake.

  ‘So it’s probably a big company that’s bankrolling him, but not Vakkson, do we agree?’ asked Millie.

  Everyone nodded. Then they all stopped, realising they had come to a dead end.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘Did none of you see anything? Anything that might give us a clue?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jake.

  ‘No,’ said Max.

  They all looked expectantly at Millie.

  ‘The only thing I did see . . .’ She trailed off. It was too stupid. She had checked it once and found nothing. But it was the only thing she could think of that had been out of the ordinary. ‘There was a newspaper in the rubbish,’ she said. ‘They lined the cages with paper, which I think is why it was there. Only, it was missing its middle pages, and I thought someone had taken them out to read them – it was just one big sheet, you see, which wasn’t enough to line a cage with. So I thought maybe there was something important in the paper, and that’s why the
y’d kept it away from the cats.’ Millie carried on, aware that Ben and Jake were looking increasingly underwhelmed: ‘And I checked it at the library, but I think it was just a picture they’d taken out. Only, why take the whole page?’

  Ben twisted his mouth as he thought. Jake patted Millie on the shoulder and said, ‘You know that just because they can talk doesn’t mean they can read, don’t you?’

  Max pulled a huffy face, and failed to mention that he wasn’t much of a reader himself yet.

  ‘Which newspaper was it?’ asked Ben.

  ‘The Times,’ said Millie, surprised he was taking it seriously enough to ask.

  ‘Mum and Dad get that,’ said Jake. ‘What was the date?’ he asked.

  ‘Erm, about three weeks ago,’ she said, as she struggled to remember.

  ‘Jake!’ exclaimed Ben. ‘Have Mum and Dad taken the papers to be recycled yet?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, little bro.’ Jake ruffled his hair. ‘Have you heard an almighty crash as Europe’s largest paper mountain collapses to the floor of the garage?’

  ‘Not since about May,’ admitted Ben.

  ‘Then the papers are all still there, aren’t they?’ said Jake. ‘Why do you ask?’ Ben gave him a hard look. ‘Oh,’ Jake grinned. ‘I see.’

  They traipsed out to the garage and gingerly approached the leaning tower of papers. They took them carefully from the top, trying not to damage the infrastructure of this impressive piece of engineering. Max remained out of harm’s way, as he rightly suspected that if this pile of paper collapsed, he might never be seen again.

  ‘How came the council don’t collect your paper?’ asked Millie. ‘They take ours every week.’

  ‘Mum and Dad never remember to put it out, till there’s so much the council won’t take it,’ replied Ben.

  ‘Sometimes we think about doing it, to save them the trouble,’ added Jake cheerily. ‘But it just encourages them.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Millie, as they reached the edition that she had fished out of the rubbish. ‘Here.’ She flipped through the pages until she found the middle sheet.

  ‘Phwoar,’ said Jake, looking at the large picture on the front.