Lori and Max

by Catherine O’Flynn

  Nan’s right, we need to be doing more. I’m going to help all I can with the campaign, but there’s something else I can do, too. The only way to get the police to realise that Max hasn’t run off is to prove that she didn’t steal the money. If I can do that, then maybe they’ll start looking for her properly. I open my notebook and look for the hundredth time at the only solid, indisputable facts I have.

  Fact: the money was in the box on the morning of March 12th

  Fact: the money was gone by lunchtime of March 12th

  Fact: the only people with access to the box between those times were Miss Casey and the rest of class 6B

  Fact: everyone’s coats, bags and desks were searched thoroughly as soon as the theft was noticed.

  This all points to something but I can’t quite work out what. It feels like I’m trying to reach a jar on a shelf that’s a bit too high for me.

  It’s 2.28 a.m. when I’m woken up by the realisation. I sit straight up in bed, put on my light and reach for my notebook and pen. There can only be one answer and it’s so obvious I’ve somehow missed it. I write in big, capital letters on the first clear page.

  ‘MONEY STILL IN CLASSROOM!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Although she can’t see outside, the little daylight that escapes around the edge of the boards tells Max that she has been in the room for five days now. Where the room is, though, she still has no idea. She remembers a housing estate, and that it wasn’t far from New Heath, but that’s all. She can’t get used to the silence. No buses rumbling past, no schoolboys shouting and throwing chicken bones at each other, just birds endlessly tweeting. No one seems to live on the estate, or even pass through.

  Julie visits three times a day. She brings Max whatever food or drink she wants, along with comics and books and clean clothes. Max just gives her a list and she gets it. A bit like Father Christmas, thinks Max, but with a key. It’s as if Julie thinks it’s not really kidnapping if you buy someone sweets.

  Today when Julie arrives bringing breakfast from McDonald’s, she’s beaming. ‘Thank God for Mrs Pam Southwell.’ She holds up a newspaper.

  Max splutters. ‘What is that?’ The front page is covered with a photo of Lori’s nan giving a thumbs up. She’s wearing a baseball hat with a picture of Max’s face on the front. ‘Where did she get that hat?’

  ‘Never mind that. Look at the headline!’

  ‘£50,000 reward!’

  ‘£50,000, Max! Don’t you feel special? It’s all down to that little old lady. I was beginning to think I’d made a bit of a mistake. The runaway story wasn’t helping us at all. Nobody cared. Well, your mum, bless her, did her best in the local paper, but no one was really that bothered until Granny Hat here started up her “Find Max” campaign. It’s tugged on the heartstrings of local business owner, Keith Barker, and he’s stumped up all that cash.’

  ‘Where did they get that picture of me? It’s terrible!’ In it Max is wearing a red V-neck jumper. She realises that it must be a forgotten school photo that her mum never bought.

  ‘It’s brilliant, isn’t it. Look at those big, sad, brown eyes. You’re like a lost puppy.’

  Max has never been very good at smiling in photos.

  ‘You watch, there’ll be sightings of you all over the place now there’s money around. “A girl fitting Max Ellington’s description spotted in Hastings, …in Edinburgh, …in Paris.” The police are going to be running all over the place.’

  ‘So is it over? Can I go? You can get your reward?’

  Julie shakes her head. ‘Oh no. Julie’s smarter than that.’

  Max hasn’t noticed Julie being especially smart but she says nothing.

  ‘Nah. You claim the reward straight away and it looks fishy. It’s got to look realistic, Max. We need to wait a few more days. Who knows? Granny Hat carries on the way she’s going, they might even put the reward up!’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sometimes detectives have to approach a case from the side – crab-style – and this is exactly what I’m doing. This is why I’ve been extensively researching hamsters, which to some onlookers might appear to be a waste of time and nothing whatsoever to do with finding Max. Some onlookers, however, would be wrong wrongington. My notebook now contains everything I know about hamsters.

  Hamsters do not even like other hamsters (let alone human beings).

  Hamsters like to be alone. When put together they get stressed, aggressive and may even kill each other!

  Hamsters can horde so much food in their cheek pouches that their heads may double or even triple in size!

  Hamsters eat their own poo!

  Hamsters are crepuscular, which means they are mainly active around dusk, which means they are inactive for most of the time, which means they are not very exciting pets. Unless you are also crepuscular.

  Lady hamsters are even more aggressive than men hamsters.

  Sometimes, if a lady hamster is in a really bad mood, she will eat the man hamster after mating.

  If a lady hamster is disturbed whilst giving birth, she might eat her babies. Some lady hamsters pretend that they were just trying to look after their babies in their cheek pouches when they accidentally swallowed them, but nobody believes them…

  …because regardless of being disturbed during birth, if a lady hamster is left alone with her babies for more than three weeks, she will probably eat them anyway.

  Hamsters like privacy. If hamsters do not have a private shelter within their cage, they will become stressed and depressed.

  I’ve underlined the last item on the list several times.

  It’s break time before I’m finally alone in the classroom. When I’m sure the coast’s clear – after Elijah Stephens has been back for his jumper, then his asthma inhaler and then his tissues – I stop pretending to finish off my English comprehension and head straight for Cuddles’ cage. I won’t deny I’m nervous. I remember that normal hamsters eat their own babies. What will a psychopathic one do to my fingers?

  I reach out very gently to open the cage and slowly, slowly inch my hand inside. Cuddles doesn’t move. He really isn’t the hamster he once was. Back in the old days he’d have leapt at the chance to give a nice juicy hand a good savaging, but now he just sits in a pile of wood shavings and watches sadly. My target is the little wooden house in the corner of the cage where he used to spend most of his time. I’m not sure what he actually did in there. Slept? Read? Plotted a global hamster takeover? I’ve neither known nor cared much. The only thing I do know is that he hasn’t been in that house for some time.

  I carefully lift Cuddles’ little wooden house from the floor of the cage and inside is an Asda carrier bag: the kind Nan refuses to pay 5p for. I let out a small victory yelp. The bag’s heavy and, when I look inside, I see exactly what I’d hoped to see: a higgledy-piggledy jumble of notes and coins.

  Now we have the bait, we need to set the trap. I go and find Miss Casey and tell her the news and the plan.

  Miss Casey makes the announcement straight after lunch:

  ‘Now, Class 6B, if you could settle down, please, I’m afraid I have some very sad news. Some of you may have noticed something missing from the classroom this afternoon.’ No one has, a few heads now look around half-heartedly. ‘I’m sorry to say that during lunch break it was discovered that our dear own little Cuddles had sadly died.’ A murmur of surprise passes around the room. ‘I think we’ve all noticed that Cuddles has not been himself recently and it seems that he has not been a well little hamster for some time.’ Perhaps everyone in 6B is too preoccupied by Max’s disappearance to get upset over a hamster that never seemed to like us very much, anyway. For whatever reason, no one seems too bothered by Cuddles’ passing. No one, that is, except for Josh Ryman who gets really quite agitated.

  ‘Miss! Miss! I’m Hamster Monitor. Why wasn’t I told first?’

  ‘Josh, it happened during lunch break and you were out playing. I decided to deal with the situation
and tell the whole class together.’

  Josh’s hand’s up again.

  ‘But, Miss, where’s the cage?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, I’m afraid I had to be a little drastic there. When I found poor Cuddles, I noticed some strange, dark spots on his tummy. After a little research I discovered that Cuddles had contracted a very unpleasant hamster disease called Spottitummitosis. I’m afraid this disease is actually transferable to humans. It doesn’t kill us, but it can lead to a nasty rash and so, I’m afraid, I have had to dispose of Cuddles’ cage and everything in it.’

  ‘What?’ blurts Josh.

  ‘I’m sorry, Josh. What was that?’

  ‘I mean … how did you dispose of it, Miss?’

  ‘Well, Josh, I understand that, as Hamster Monitor, this has all come as a bit of a shock to you and you must be rather upset. I don’t really see the fact that I’ve put the cage in the large bin at the back of the school canteen is really a pressing concern of yours, though.’

  Josh runs his hands through his hair and looks as if he might be sick.

  After school Miss Casey says I can wait with her. We sit at one of the large empty tables in the canteen. It doesn’t take long for a weirdly twitchy-looking Josh Ryman to creep up to the large dustbin outside. Miss Casey texts Mr Wilson as we watch Josh carefully lifting the bin’s giant swing lid. He peers into the bin for a long time, moving his head from side to side. He climbs up to perch on the edge and uses a cardboard tube he finds to poke about inside. After a minute or two, something catches his eye and he leans in further and further to reach as far as he possibly can, until, finally, he stretches too far and falls in. The bin wobbles and the giant plastic lid falls, slamming shut with a big, echoey bang. When Josh emerges some minutes later, he has traces of egg shell in his hair, some banana peel on his arm and he’s holding an empty Asda carrier bag. Mr Wilson is waiting for him, holding up a plastic folder filled with money.

  ‘Is this what you were looking for, Josh?’

  Chapter Twenty

  If there’s one thing that Max has learned from Lori and her detective books, it’s that even the smartest criminals make mistakes and Max realised early on that Julie was not really in the smart criminals’ league. It seems to Max that there are very obvious problems with Julie’s so-called masterplan. After Max is ‘found’ the police are going to have lots of questions for her. Julie has told her to keep her answers vague. But Max knows that the police don’t like vague; they like specific, they like detail, they like evidence. Where has she been all this time? Where exactly did she go when she left her house? Why hasn’t she been spotted on CCTV? Where has she been sleeping? There’s also the awkward question of her appearance. She doesn’t look like a runaway. She’s never had so many takeaways and sweets in her life. She’ll be the first runaway ever to have gained weight.

  Max misses home. She misses her Wildlife Atlas of the World. She misses hearing Lori’s detective theories. She even misses the permanent smell of chicken fat. But most of all she misses and worries about her mum. She remembers how happy she seemed on that last morning. She knows it’s stupid, but she keeps imagining her mum still waiting in the kitchen for her to come back with the milk.

  She can’t forgive her dad. Every time she looks at the boarded-up window or the locked door she blames him. Not because of his gambling, or his debts, or his lies, but because he took her snake charm. The one thing that had always kept her mum and her safe and he stole it for whatever money he could get. It won’t be bringing him good luck, she feels sure of that.

  In the long hours when Julie’s not there, Max sits at the little table and tries to think of ways out, but her ideas never get past the locked door and the shuttered window. She makes a list.

  Negatives:

  Locked door

  Boarded-up window

  Don’t know where I am

  Everyone thinks I’ve stolen money and run away

  Positives:

  Julie’s not very clever

  It’s not much to go on, but it’s all she has. If Julie was clever, she’d have checked Max’s backpack the first day she took her and found the Kommunicator 150 walkie-talkie Max now keeps hidden under her pillow.

  ‘Come in, Lori. Lori Mason, can you hear me?’

  Every night Max tries all the channels but gets nothing back. She keeps trying, though. Lori might not always be out of range. She might pass nearby. She might have her walkie-talkie with her. Max tries her best to believe that a miracle might happen.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Nan hands me a package. ‘I got you a present, love.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just open it, will you?’

  I smile and tear the paper. Inside is a genuine, tweed, deerstalker hat, exactly like the one Sherlock Holmes wears.

  ‘Nan! It’s magnificent.’

  ‘Do you like it? Put it on!’

  I lift it up carefully and try it on.

  ‘Do I look the part?’

  ‘What do you mean: “look the part”? You are the part! You solved a mystery, sweetheart, all by yourself. You’ve cleared your friend’s name. You’re an actual, real-life detective now.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Mind? Why would I mind? I couldn’t be more proud of you.’

  ‘But I thought you didn’t really like all the detective stuff. I thought you wanted me to be more, you know … normal.’

  Nan waves her hand in the air. ‘Normal? Love, you’ve got no chance of being normal. Your mum spent half her childhood talking to an invisible gorilla called Tarquin. And look at me – the mad old lady with the hats. Who wants to be normal? I only ever wanted you to be happy, love, and if being a detective makes you happy, that’s good enough for me. Now, more importantly, tell me all the gossip. What’s the latest on that villain, Josh Ryman?’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I got the whole inside story from trusted sources.’

  ‘What trusted sources?’

  ‘A bit from Miss Casey, a bit from Tariq and … well, I eavesdropped after Mr Wilson fished him out of the bin.’

  ‘Go on then,’ says Nan, leaning in closer.

  ‘Motive – that’s always the key. Framing Max wasn’t Josh’s main motive, that was just an added bonus. His main motive for stealing the money was … well, to steal the money.’

  Nan frowns. ‘But why would he do that? I thought he was spoilt rotten, had everything he wanted.’

  ‘No, that’s what he wanted everyone to think. His dad never really bought him all the stuff he said he did. Remember I told you he was always going on about his iPhone – how he couldn’t bring it to school because it might get confiscated – it was all lies. He never had an iPhone, or an X-box and his dad never gave him £20 a week pocket money. Josh stole the money because Tariq got a phone for his birthday and started texting Josh. Josh was running out of excuses for why he wasn’t replying. He had to get a phone somehow.’

  ‘So what was the money doing in Cuddles’ cage? He wasn’t going to get a phone in there,’ Nan asks.

  ‘He got scared. He was waiting for the fuss about the theft to die down before he smuggled the money out of school, but then Max went missing and there were police in school every day. He realised that by planting the key he’d made everyone think Max had run away, and he got really scared about how much trouble he’d caused. He didn’t know what to do, so he did nothing. He thought the money was safe where it was.’

  ‘Hadn’t banked on you, had he, love?’ says Nan.

  ‘He really loved Cuddles, you know. When he found out that Miss Casey made up all the Spottitummitosis stuff, he hugged her. She let him go and spend some time with Cuddles in the staffroom while he was waiting for his dad to take him home.’

  ‘Well, maybe being expelled might be good for him: a fresh start. He can go somewhere new and not have to pretend to be Mr Rich Kid.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  Nan looks at me. ‘I know that face, Lori. I know you’re st
ill worried about Max. But you’ve done a good thing. This is going to help them, isn’t it? They’ll find her soon, don’t you worry.’

  I go upstairs to do my homework. I keep the deerstalker on. I reckon it makes a good thinking hat. I’m colouring in arable farming areas on a map of East Anglia when I hear a noise. At first I think it’s coming from outside and carry on colouring Norfolk. Then I hear it again: a click and then a crackle. It takes me a few moments to recognise it as the static crackle of my walkie-talkie. Suddenly I remember. Max still has the other walkie-talkie! How could I have forgotten that? What kind of detective am I? I stand up and start frantically running around the room looking for it. I find it in my drawer and quickly press the receiver button.

  ‘Hello! Hello! Max? Is that you?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Max. It’s me, Lori! Where are you?’

  ‘Hello?’ says a voice again. It doesn’t sound like Max.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Where’s Martin gone? I was talking to Martin. Who are you?’

  ‘What? This is Lori. Lori Mason.’