‘Urgh,’ said Ben, poking his brother in the ribs. ‘She looks like a giraffe in a dress. And that’s not even really a dress. It’s more like string.’
‘Well, that’s why the page was taken out,’ said Jake simply. ‘I’d have taken it myself if I’d seen it.’
‘There must be something else,’ said Ben, turning the page.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Millie. ‘But if there is, I don’t know what it is.’
Ben scanned the business pages, just as Millie had, shaking his head in disappointment as he finished reading.
‘Well, I’m still taking this upstairs,’ he said.
They all read and re-read the missing pages.
‘Share prices,’ Jake moaned. ‘What do they even mean?’
‘It’s how much a company is worth, I think,’ said Millie. ‘The share price is high if lots of people want to buy them, and low if no one does. People want to buy shares in companies that are doing well – you know, selling lots of stuff, or whatever.’
‘What do they buy from telecom companies? What do they sell?’ asked Jake.
‘I have no idea,’ she admitted. ‘But, see, this company, Playmatic’ – she pointed to a brief article about a toy and games manufacturer – ‘their shares are worth less, because they’ve lost their director. He’s left, and taken some of their best-selling toy ideas with him. See, it says that they’re trying to sue their lawyers, for letting him have a contract that . . .’ Her voice petered out as she noticed that Jake’s eyes had glazed over. He came to with a jolt.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Were you still talking?’
‘She does that a lot,’ sympathised Max, thinking of how he had felt when Millie tried to explain computer security to him.
‘I don’t get that,’ said Ben.
‘Really?’ asked Jake, cheering visibly.
‘No, I mean, I understand it,’ said Ben. ‘I just don’t understand it.’
‘Oh,’ said Jake.
‘I mean,’ said Ben, loudly, ‘why would Playmatic not be worth loads? They make the Plastidroids. Those are so cool.’
‘Plastidroids . . .’ Millie murmured. ‘Those bendy robot things?’
‘They’re just the best,’ agreed Ben. ‘I wanted one so badly last Christmas, but you couldn’t get them any . . .’ He stopped talking, distracted by Millie’s expression. She suddenly looked as if someone had switched on a light in a dark corner of her brain.
‘What is it?’ asked Max, who had noticed this as well.
‘Arthur Shepard had one,’ she said. ‘In his office, when I was there. On the filing cabinet. Why would he have a Plastidroid?’
‘Present for one of his kids,’ said Jake promptly.
They all stared at him.
‘Does he have children?’ Max asked in some horror.
‘Yup,’ said Jake. ‘Three, aren’t there?’
Ben absent-mindedly picked up a sheet of paper with ‘Confidential Census Information – Do Not Print’ written across the top.
‘Urgh,’ said Millie. They all shuddered. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Arthur Shepard is the kind of man to buy presents for his kids, do you?’
‘No,’ said Max.
‘So, why did he have a Plastidroid?’ asked Ben.
‘Could we look up Playmatic?’ asked Millie.
Ben began to type. ‘Here we go,’ he said.
‘What does it say?’ asked Jake.
Millie summarised: ‘Playmatic’s share price has gone way down, even though they made the coolest toy in the world last year.’
‘Why?’ asked Max.
‘They underestimated demand,’ explained Ben. ‘It says here that they made about a hundred thousand droids. The writer reckons they could have sold ten times that many in this country alone.’
Millie took up the story again. ‘So then the men who run the company had a meeting and decided to fire the director. They blamed him for messing things up. They could have made loads more money if they’d made more toys.’
‘I see,’ said Max.
Ben had now read another article and said, ‘The director was forced to leave, even though the Plastidroid was his idea. And when they got rid of him he took his idea with him, and now he’s set up another company to make them for this Christmas.’
‘They let him take their best-selling toy with him when he left? Surely they would have been better keeping him and the toy?’ asked Max, thoroughly confused.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ whispered Jake. ‘Normally I’m the one asking stupid questions.’
Max raised his eyebrows infinitesimally, then remembered that Jake had sustained an injury helping him to rescue his friends and lowered them again.
‘No – well, yes.’ Millie was very excited. ‘That’s what the thing was about in the paper. His contract should have prevented him from taking any ideas away if he left. Or even working for any other toy company for ages—’
‘Five years, minimum, it says here,’ said Ben, who was still reading happily as he spoke. ‘But some lawyers messed things up. Look, there’s a quote from a spokesman at Playmatic. He says they’re going to have the best Christmas toy ever this year. He says no one’s going to want anything except what Playmatic is bringing out. Apparently, they’re going to make Plastidroids ancient history.’
‘They have Plastidroids in ancient history?’ asked Jake. ‘I thought it was just Romans and sandals and stuff.’ Ben looked at him in disgust. ‘Sorry,’ he finished.
‘That’s far stupider than what I said,’ Max pointed out.
Jake sighed. It was true.
‘What will the new toy be like?’ wondered Ben, tapping eagerly on the keyboard. Several minutes later, he still looked puzzled. ‘Hmm. It doesn’t say anywhere.’
‘Let’s think about that later,’ said Jake. ‘Why did we even start talking about this?’ He was regretting having brought up the fact that he didn’t understand share prices.
‘Arthur Shepard,’ said Millie. ‘He had one of the robots in his office. They were virtually unobtainable – Ben couldn’t get one, nor could anyone else I know. So how did he get one? Could he have contacts at Playmatic?’
Ben scoured the internet again. ‘I’ll be a few minutes,’ he said.
‘I’ll go and get some food,’ said Jake. ‘Anyone else hungry?’
Max’s ears pricked up and Millie nodded – they hadn’t eaten for hours. She and Max went down to the kitchen with Jake. Max was delighted to discover that Jake’s parents weren’t vegetarian and had a fridge well stocked with ham and cold chicken. Millie and Jake made sandwiches and took one upstairs to Ben. He was concentrating too hard to hear them come, it seemed, because suddenly he shouted, ‘Jake!’
‘Aahhh,’ said Jake, dropping the sandwich on the floor. ‘Don’t shout!’
‘Sorry,’ said Ben, picking the sandwich up off the carpet, dusting it off, and beginning to eat, his eyes never leaving the screen. ‘I’ve found it,’ he said.
‘Found what?’ asked Jake.
‘Playmatic has been paying Arthur Shepard hundreds of thousands of pounds a month,’ said Ben, hopping up and down with glee.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Millie, racing over to look at the screen. ‘I wonder if he took that page out of the newspaper. I guess he’s probably quite interested in their share price, if he’s working for them.’
‘Excuse me,’ asked Max. ‘Is that Arthur Shepard’s bank account that you two are looking at?’
‘Mmm,’ said Ben. ‘This bank should work a bit harder on its security if you ask me.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ said Max.
‘They’re paying him how much?’ asked Jake.
‘Two hundred thousand pounds a month. Some of which goes to Vakkson, some to the security men, a big chunk to some other people who, I think, must be the lab techs, and about a quarter he keeps,’ said Millie, reading quickly.
‘So what does that tell us?’ asked Jake. ‘I told you I always have to ask the stupid que
stions,’ he muttered to Max.
‘It tells us that Playmatic are very confident that their new toy is going to be a huge hit,’ said Millie. ‘So confident, they’re investing a fortune in it.’
‘And Arthur Shepard is involved? What is the new toy?’ asked Max.
Millie looked at Ben, her eyebrows forming a question. He nodded slowly.
‘Well, don’t take this the wrong way,’ said Millie. ‘But you are.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Max’s fur bristled like a force-nine gale had just passed through the room.
‘What?’ he said softly.
‘I said, you are,’ Millie repeated. She looked at him, her brow creased with concern. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, realising as she spoke how feeble she sounded.
Ben and Jake looked embarrassed, both feeling that they were intruding on a private scene. Max was still rigid: his tail, his fur, his ears were all pointing at the ceiling. Millie just couldn’t think of anything else to say. Max hadn’t been stolen by someone trying to find a cure for cancer or a treatment for Alzheimer’s, and even if he had been, she would still have found it appalling. But this was so much worse than anything she had even considered. He had been stolen to make a toy, a disposable plaything for spoiled children and their loathsome parents who thought that an animal was no different from a plastic model that you controlled with an aerial and a battery pack. Millie was suddenly deeply ashamed to be human.
‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ she said hopefully. ‘Maybe—’
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Jake. ‘It’s the only explanation that fits, isn’t it? Playmatic are paying money to Arthur Shepard, he’s using it to hire a laboratory, where they’re operating on stolen cats and giving them voices, for no other reason we can think of. And at least two of us are really smart, so if you two can’t think of it, it’s because it isn’t there to be thought.’
Millie looked slightly confused, but Ben had had more practice at following Jake’s trains of thought.
Jake went on: ‘Playmatic wouldn’t invest money in this for a laugh, would they? They’re a business, and a business in need of some help, from what we’ve read. Why else would they be paying Arthur Shepard, and what other interest could they possibly have in animal experiments? It’s not like they’re bringing out a line of cosmetics, is it?’ He looked sternly at Millie, who couldn’t think why – she didn’t own so much as a lip-gloss. Sometimes, she couldn’t even find a hairbrush.
‘But who would want such a horrible . . . not that I’m calling you horrible,’ Jake added hastily, trying to placate Max, who didn’t seem to be really listening to what he was saying anyway. ‘Who could possibly want . . .?’
There was a long pause.
‘Me,’ said Ben.
‘What?’ Millie and Jake were shocked.
Max still sat in total silence.
‘Shut up, Ben,’ said Jake, flushed with embarrassment.
‘No, I mean, I wouldn’t want Max to have been kidnapped. I wouldn’t want him to have been brought miles away from home and kept in a cage; I wouldn’t want him to have been operated on without his consent; I wouldn’t have wanted that to happen to any of the cats, even Ariston, and he sounded horrible. I just mean, if I didn’t know all that, if Playmatic had just announced in November that you could have a talking pet, I would have wanted one more than anything, more than a Plastidroid, more even than a really cool new laptop.’
‘I said, shut up,’ snapped Jake, as Millie whimpered. ‘I’m really sorry about him. He’s just a kid.’
‘He’s quite right,’ said Max, so quietly they could barely hear him, especially since Ben was now crying.
Millie tilted her head, asking him a silent question. She looked like a bird when she did that, Max thought. Although not the kind he would eat, obviously. The other kind.
‘He’s right. That’s how it would have worked, isn’t it? Children love animals. They would have gone crazy for the idea of a talking cat. They wouldn’t have thought about the thefts, the imprisonment, the torture; they would just have seen the most exciting pet they could ever have hoped for.’
‘That’s true,’ said Jake, patting Millie and Ben awkwardly on the shoulder with each hand. ‘When I was a kid, I wanted a woolly mammoth, like, a miniature one. About the size of a small dog. I would have given anything for one of those, if they’d worked out a way to make them small.’
‘And transport them through time,’ added Ben.
‘Yeah, that too, obviously.’ Jake tried to look like someone who knew that woolly mammoths were extinct. He had always vaguely assumed that they lived in China or somewhere.
‘But, surely . . .’ Millie seemed unable to grasp it at all ‘. . . surely they couldn’t have expected people to believe that talking cats had just appeared out of thin air? People would have realised that secret research had gone on, that these animals had been given unnecessary surgery. They would have been appalled, wouldn’t they? There would have been an outcry, like there was about testing cosmetics on animals. Like there is about fur.’
‘Is there?’ asked Jake bitterly. ‘You can buy fur in loads of shops nowadays, even in Britain, and we’re supposed to be a nation of animal lovers. We once went into a department store in Paris and they had a whole fur section. We were going to take paint and throw it on them, but Mum rumbled us.’ He looked at Ben, and they both eyed a state-of-the-art water pistol on one of Ben’s shelves and sighed sadly at another wasted opportunity for criminal damage. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘they sell fur in half the shops on the high street now. People aren’t as high-minded as you think, Millie. If they’ll wear the skin of a dead cat – sorry,’ he said to Max, who nodded to show that he understood that Jake wasn’t trying to be rude, ‘they won’t think twice about buying one that’s been mucked around with, will they?’
‘But’ – Millie was at a loss – ‘surely the cats would tell their owners that they’d been tortured?’
‘You’d do it to kittens,’ said Ben pragmatically. ‘Operate on them when they’re really tiny, too small to remember anything, and then sell them when they’re a few months old. Sorry.’ He winced as he caught Max’s expression.
‘Is there time to do that?’ Jake asked. ‘Between now and Christmas, I mean?’
Ben thought for a moment and nodded. ‘I think so. Max is a prototype. I really am sorry.’ He grimaced. ‘So they’ve finished the experimental stage of the process.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Jake.
‘Max talks perfectly. The other cats all did too,’ said Millie dully.
‘They don’t need to do any more testing,’ said Ben. ‘They need to breed kittens. And then they need . . .’ He paused and looked at Max, who gave a tiny nod. Ben sighed and continued: ‘They need a production line.’
‘So they could have kittens for sale in time for Christmas?’ Jake said. ‘How long does it take to make a kitten?’
They all turned to Max.
‘Er . . . maybe two months?’ he hazarded.
Ben clicked on his mouse. ‘Was that a guess?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ admitted the cat, who hadn’t ever thought about kittens much.
‘You were right.’ Ben smiled at him. ‘It fits perfectly. They’ll start breeding the cats at the end of this month. The kittens’ll be born at the end of October. They’ll operate on them in November and sell them in December . . .’
‘Just in time for Christmas,’ finished Jake.
‘But they’d know that the cats had been experimented on, and that it was cruel. Max is the end of the process, isn’t he? How many cats died in that laboratory, do you think, before they got the surgery right? How many do you think they botched?’ Millie was almost in tears.
‘Millie,’ said the cat, jumping up onto Ben’s desk, so he could look her straight in the eyes, ‘other people are not like you. They wouldn’t think about the ugly history, the cruelty or anything else. They would see the shiny – well, furry – new toy, and they would
want it. That is how people behave the world over – they see what they want and they take it. They don’t think about anything else. Animals are the same, you know – they just have fewer opportunities for kidnap and financial gain, and so on.’
Millie looked at him sadly. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, sounding uncertain.
‘Anyway, how else would it have worked?’ asked Max. ‘Shepard and his friends wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t thought it was an idea that would sell.’
‘I know you’re right,’ said Millie. ‘I’m just so sorry that anyone could do this to you. I feel bad being part of the same species.’
‘Millie, you shouldn’t feel bad. Humans are not always good. But you are a good person. And so are you two.’ Max looked at Jake and Ben. ‘You have risked a lot to help me, and to help a lot of other cats you hadn’t even met. Some of whom weren’t even grateful. One of whom was really quite rude.’
‘Well, no wonder,’ said Millie, who now felt so bad about everything that she was beginning to come round to Ariston’s way of thinking. ‘I would have been angry with me too, in their position.’
‘A few people don’t make a species bad. They just make themselves bad.’
‘Why did you say humans weren’t good people, then?’ asked Ben.
‘If I hadn’t met you three,’ said Max, ‘I might have hated people too, after the past few months. But you have been kind and helpful, and now you are going to help me even more.’
‘Are we? How?’ Ben was eager for more plans.
‘By destroying Playmatic. And Arthur Shepard,’ said Millie.
‘But first we must find and rescue Celeste,’ Max reminded them.
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘Uh oh,’ said Jake, looking at the clock in the top right-hand corner of Ben’s computer screen. ‘Look at the time.’ It was almost two o’clock.
‘Oh, no,’ said Ben. ‘I’m afraid we can’t do anything else now. Can you come back tomorrow?’ He looked pleadingly from Millie to Max.
‘Er . . . yes,’ said Millie, confused. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Mum’ll be home in a few minutes,’ said Jake gloomily. ‘The boy wonder has a piano lesson on Thursdays at three.’
The Great Escape Page 13