The Great Escape (19 page)

‘Nah, he’ll have destroyed it all by now, even if he’s a complete moron.’ Ben was matter of fact about it. ‘Don’t worry though,’ he continued.
‘We’ll just forge whatever else we need.’

‘Brilliant,’ said Millie.

‘Make false documents?’ Jake looked aghast.

‘Yeah, of course,’ said his brother. ‘Well, fake images. They speak a thousand words, you know.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, they won’t be false. If Millie had had
more time, she’d have got pictures herself. There wasn’t time, because she had to escape from a horrible man, so we’re going to recreate what she saw. We’re doing something
a bit bad. Not as bad as torturing cats, though, is it?’

‘That’s a very good point,’ said Max.

Millie agreed and Jake shrugged.

‘Being in a room with you two and my brother is like being the henchman to a trio of Bond villains,’ he said.

‘You like James Bond? Me too,’ said Max happily.

‘Then let’s get on with it,’ said Ben. ‘This is going to be the
pièce de résistance
.’

‘You don’t have the vocabulary of normal nine-year-old boy,’ said Max.

‘You don’t have the vocabulary of a normal cat,’ Ben pointed out.

Max shrugged. ‘Meow,’ he said carefully.

‘We did French at summer school,’ replied Ben, grinning.

‘Summer school?’ asked Millie.

‘He goes to a special camp for geniuses without social skills,’ said Jake.

‘I’m not listening. Anyway, this is the good bit.’ Ben had a set of shelving units on the opposite wall from his desk which were almost cubes, with the front side missing, and
they were crammed with DVDs and books. As he talked, he emptied one and said, ‘Could you fit in there, Max?’

‘Yes,’ said the cat, looking a little bemused.

‘Jake? You know when Dad fixed the fence?’

‘Which fence?’

‘At the bottom of the garden.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was there any spare wire? Could you go down to the shed and see?’

‘Sure.’ Jake sloped off and returned minutes later with a small piece of fine wire mesh.

‘Is this enough?’

‘Yup. Now, Max, you sit there.’

The cat leaped into the small space with an easy jump.

‘And you two hold the wire in front of him.’

Millie and Jake held the mesh, which was more than the size of the opening, in front of the box.

‘Perfect,’ said Ben, as he produced his digital camera and started snapping. ‘Max, could you look more unhappy?’

Max pulled a sad face, trying to look as miserable as possible. ‘How’s this?’ he asked.

‘You look really wretched,’ said Millie. ‘It’s ideal.’

‘OK, you can come out now,’ said Ben, and he transferred the pictures onto his computer.

‘Those are brilliant,’ said Millie, as the photographs sprang onto the screen.

Max looked on approvingly.

‘That’s exactly how the cages looked, you know,’ he said, amazed.

‘Told you he was a genius,’ said Jake.

‘I think that’s everything,’ Ben said, admiring his handiwork. ‘Now, how many copies do we need?’

Millie counted on her fingers: ‘Local newspapers, nationals, telly – how about twenty-five of each?’ she asked.

‘Easy.’ Ben began to print them out.

‘Hang on,’ said Jake. ‘Can’t we just email them?’

‘I’m worried they’ll think it’s spam,’ admitted Ben, ‘and not read it. I’ll send electronic versions too, though.’

‘But there’s nothing here that proves they did it.’ Jake was worried. ‘I mean, actually got the cats to speak.’

‘We can’t prove that,’ said Millie.

‘We
could
prove it if I spoke to the press,’ Max pointed out.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘They’ll think it’s a trick. And if they don’t, that’s even worse. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life doing
interviews on daytime telly and celebrity pet shows.’

‘Tempting, but no,’ grimaced Max.

‘We don’t need to prove they did it,’ said Ben. ‘We need to prove they
tried
to do it. That’s enough.’

‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘Whatever you say.’

They made twenty-five sets of the documents and printed address labels for twenty-five envelopes. Millie and Jake would go out and post them at different postboxes across the village.

They met back at Ben and Jake’s half an hour later.

‘Do you think it’ll do any good?’ Jake asked, looking rather doleful, as he watched Millie put her bike up against the wall, next to the mangled remains of his.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?
I
think it’s a big story, but I don’t know if the press will. They might not
think cats are very important. Or they might think we’re crazy and just file it all in the bin. I suppose they have to check the facts before they publish anything, in case Arthur Shepard
sues for libel, or slander, or whatever it’s called. But he stole Max and all those other cats; he ordered illegal experiments to be carried out on them. We just have to hope that the papers
go with it.’

‘When do you think we’ll know?’

‘Well, the stuff should arrive there tomorrow, shouldn’t it? So it can’t be in the papers before Saturday, maybe even Monday. It could be on telly sooner, I suppose.’

They went inside and called up to the others.

‘Did you send them all?’ asked Ben, hopping up and down in excitement. ‘I’ve sent the e-versions to everyone.’ This was certainly the best week of the holidays, and
probably the best day of his life.

‘We certainly did.’ Millie slung her bag onto the floor. ‘What do you want to do now?’ she asked Max.

‘Find Celeste,’ he said simply.

They had all been thinking hard about where Celeste could be, but none of them had come up with anything. Eventually, Max announced, ‘I will go and look at the houses of
Arthur Shepard and his thugs.’

‘No,’ said Millie. ‘What if he sees you? He might catch you again.’

‘He would never catch me,’ said Max. ‘I am like smoke, like mist—’

‘They did catch you last time, mate,’ said Jake. ‘Sorry to bring it up,’ he added, as Max gave him a very hard stare.

‘Last time,’ he said huffily, ‘I was unprepared. This time, I am ready.’

‘He’s the smallest,’ Ben pointed out. ‘He’ll be the hardest to spot.’

Millie looked unconvinced, but the others all agreed. Max had the best camouflage and would attract the least attention from neighbours or passers-by. They showed him a map with the suspicious
houses circled in red, and he disappeared through the hedge at the bottom of Ben and Jake’s garden.

Ben, Jake and Millie waited impatiently for several hours, but Max came back shaking his head. There was no sign of any of the men, nor of Celeste. He’d had a good nose
around each house, and snuck into their gardens to peer in through the windows, but there was no trace of Celeste anywhere, not even her scent, which Max could have detected in a perfume factory.
Regretfully, they agreed to try again the next day, although Millie admitted privately to Jake that she had no more ideas at all.

The next morning, the four of them searched in vain for any sign that their story had been believed.

‘Maybe they all binned the electronic ones as spam,’ said Millie. ‘And the snail mail hasn’t got there yet.’ She knew this sounded feeble, even as she said it.

‘I think the letters arrived,’ said Max glumly. ‘I just don’t think anyone is interested.’

‘Of course they’re interested,’ said Ben, patting Max on the head, an indignity the cat might not have tolerated from anyone else. ‘They just don’t know it yet. I
think the problem is that we didn’t think it through properly – we didn’t know any journalists to send the stuff to in person. We just sent it to the offices of the newspapers and
studios. We need to find someone who’s interested in animal rights stuff, and get them to see what we found.’

‘Good idea,’ said Millie. ‘Where do we start?’

They searched the online archives of every major newspaper, trying to find the names of writers who had been sympathetic to animal rights protests in the past, or who had written critically of
animal testing. They came up with three names – Patricia Forsyth, Edward Davies and Scott Bradley.

‘Let’s send the stuff to these three,’ said Millie, and Ben emailed all the evidence over to them.

‘Something is definitely going to happen now,’ he said, as the emails disappeared one by one.

‘Still, we could do something more,’ said Max.

‘What like?’ Ben’s eyes were glinting already.

‘I am not an expert in computers, of course,’ began Max, ‘but you found the website for Playmatic, did you not?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said.

‘And they had many staff, only a few of whom knew about this?’ The cat turned to Millie.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

‘Could we, perhaps, tell the remainder of the staff what has been going on?’ asked Max.

Ben nodded eagerly. ‘I could just send all those emails to all the staff with net access,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Jake. ‘Would they even care? They’re not going to make a big fuss, are they? I mean, they might lose their jobs if they got found out, or if
Playmatic got into real trouble. I’m not saying they’re all animal experimenters, but they might just not be interested.’

Millie agreed, but Max shook his head. ‘Some of them may feel that what is right is more important than what is convenient,’ he said rather loftily.

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Ben. ‘We’d only need a couple to make a fuss and it might start something.’

‘OK,’ said Millie. ‘Let’s make the story as easy for them as possible.’

The four of them sat at Ben’s desk, making a mock front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture of Max in a cage was in the middle, with a banner headline,
Playmatic
Embroiled in Animal Torture Scandal!
, above it. They produced a short description of the research project and Playmatic’s involvement, naming all the board members and quoting the
juiciest of the emails between Marsden and Arthur Shepard. Eventually, when they were all satisfied with their work, Ben posted it as the home page on the Ethical Science website that he and Jake
had been running for the last six months. He mailed a link to the page to every Playmatic staff member whose address they could find.

‘That should stir them up a bit,’ remarked Jake, very satisfied with the morning’s work. ‘Let’s see what happens now.’

They wanted to wait for replies, but Ben assured them that they couldn’t reuse the address from which they had sent out all this mail.

‘If Playmatic has even half-decent web security, they could track us down,’ he insisted. ‘We’ll just have to hope they all go to the ES home page – I’ve had
time to protect that properly.’

‘I think we’ll start seeing things happen tonight,’ said Millie confidently.

And she was right.

That evening, a small piece ran in the local paper saying that a story was breaking. A major toy company and a local laboratory had been accused of stealing pets and testing them for purposes
unknown. A local man was also rumoured to be involved in the project.

Arthur Shepard felt that he was running out of options, and he didn’t like it one bit. In the twenty-four hours following the break-in, he had done all he could to try to
put things back on track. He had saved one of his cats and made sure it was safely stored at Elaine’s. He had demolished his computer and all signs of his involvement in the project. He had
then sent Mickey and Ray on holiday for a few days, just to make sure they wouldn’t be around if any journalists
did
find out about the cats and tried to approach them. He had spent
many hours trying to contact Dr Hunt and let him know that the research project had been compromised, and that they would need to set up a second base elsewhere. He had been sure the stupid fool
was at a conference in Milan, but could find no trace of him anywhere. He even went to check the personnel files for more information, before remembering that he had pulverised them with a buzz saw
and they were consequently of little help.

A day or two had passed with no word from Playmatic, and no talking cats on television at all. He had begun to breathe a little deeper, feeling that things might be working out for him after
all. And then, just as he was congratulating himself on victory pulled from the very jaws of defeat, his world began to cave in. The directors at Playmatic called in a furious rage, demanding to
know why their staff were being bombarded with highly sensitive information about their illegal toy-development programme. He tried to explain, but no one seemed interested in his viewpoint. They
just fired him, Arthur Shepard, then and there, over the phone. He still couldn’t quite believe it. He had spent the last few nights at Elaine’s, telling his wife that he was away on
business, and now even this sanctuary seemed in jeopardy. If the story had been leaked to Playmatic’s employees, it could be only a matter of hours before he was named in the media and hunted
down like an animal. He now had only one choice, he realised. He pulled the air ticket and his passport out of his suitcase, his face rigid with irritation. He drove to the airport and left his car
in the long-stay car park.

He thought hard about the remaining cat – was it any use to him at all? Probably not, he supposed, given how things had worked out. Maybe in another country, though . . . he might yet be
able to sell it to another bidder, one less squeamish than Playmatic had turned out to be. He supposed there was no point in damaging an expensive prototype if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Still, he couldn’t pretend to himself that it didn’t pose a risk. He began to text:

Just because the other cats had kept quiet didn’t mean this one would, after all. He saved the message as a draft – he would see how the story played out over the next day or two,
and send it to Elaine if he had to.

The next morning, the story was running on the local television news. Edward Davies, the television contact Millie had chosen, stood outside the road which led to the Haverham
lab, reporting that a series of thefts and other dubious goings-on were being linked to the site. It was also on the national news, as PETA had issued a statement accusing Playmatic and their staff
of crimes against animals. Even the RSPCA was threatening to investigate them.