The Great Escape (7 page)

‘So, Lance is the one who is supposed to watch the cameras, keeping an eye on everything. But it
is
a boring job, you know, sitting in a room all day on your own, watching pictures
of the building with nothing happening. You and your
colleagues
’– he said the word with an annoying emphasis, like they weren’t really her colleagues because she was just a
kid – ‘were the highlight of his week. Some people to watch, for a change.’

‘Oh, right.’ She nodded. This was so unlucky. The man with the world’s dullest job had been watching her just because he had literally nothing else to watch. He
must
have seen her, then.

The security man continued, oblivious: ‘Only, I guess you lot have been coming too long, and he’s not interested in you any more, either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he wasn’t watching the cameras this week. He was watching TV. He’d brought in a little aerial, and he was watching
Murder, She Wrote
when one of the big bosses
came in to ask him a question. You know
Murder, She Wrote
? The one where the lady detective writer goes around solving crimes, and there is a new murder every day, and no policeman ever
says, “You know what? I think it is you who is murdering everyone, and then bamboozling people with your detective books. I think they are a smokescreen for you being the most successful
serial killer ever. You are under arrest. And do not threaten me with a new book, because it will not work! You will be in prison, where you belong – and you will not have a
typewriter!”’

Millie was getting more and more bemused, but she nodded encouragingly. He obviously felt strongly about this.

‘So Lance is out on his ear. No references, nothing. So you and me should be getting on with our work, in case the same thing happens to us.’

‘Yes, absolutely.’ Millie smiled at the man with relief and delight. She turned back to the window. They hadn’t seen her, because the man had been watching a murder mystery and
not the front door. There wasn’t a tape, because it was immediately recorded over. She might have got away with it after all.

‘Excuse me, Millie?’ A woman was standing right behind her and Millie jumped about three feet in the air.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘You didn’t,’ Millie lied. ‘I just didn’t hear you come up behind me.’

‘I’m Elaine, Mr Shepard’s secretary. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions. Would you come with me?’

‘Sure.’ Millie smiled without sincerity, hoping it would disguise her nerves. Who was Mr Shepard? And how did the woman know her name? She guessed her dad or Bill must have mentioned
it. ‘Shall I leave my things here?’ She pointed down at her bucket.

‘No, bring them, too. We don’t want anyone tripping over them and suing us.’ The woman gave a mirthless laugh.

Millie wished she
could
leave her bucket so her dad might wonder where she was. Although since he’d disappeared ten minutes ago himself, maybe that wouldn’t help. Millie waved
to the security man and called, ‘See you in a minute,’ as she walked off towards the staircase. He mimed a question at her and she gave a big pantomime shrug back. No, she had no idea
where she was being taken, either.

Elaine took Millie up two flights of stairs, down a corridor, turned right, and then down another corridor. Millie thought she must now be at the back of the building, but she
found her sense of direction impaired by the fact that all the corridors looked the same. They came to a door on the right and the woman knocked briskly.

‘Come in,’ called a voice.

She opened the door into a smart, functional office. There was a large wooden desk in the middle of the room, and behind that sat a pasty-looking man who might have been about the same age as
Millie’s dad. It was hard to tell. He was the kind of person you forgot about the second after you laid eyes upon him. He was average height, average weight, had mousy hair and eyebrows,
boring glasses, a grey suit, a navy tie and no distinguishing features whatsoever. Behind him was a row of filing cabinets, and on his desk was a grey computer that could have done with a good
dusting. Apparently, in the absence of the cleaners, absolutely nothing got cleaned.

‘This is Millie,’ said Elaine.

‘Hello, Millie,’ said the forgettable man, in his forgettable voice. ‘My name’s Arthur Shepard.’

‘Hello.’ Millie stared back at him, trying to absorb what she could about him and his office without seeming too interested. ‘Did you want your windows cleaned?’

‘Ah, no, perhaps not today.’

‘Oh,’ said Millie, as Elaine left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

‘I wondered if I could ask you a few questions,’ said Arthur Shepard.

Millie was entirely familiar with this grammatical construction, as she had had a particularly poisonous woman teaching her physics the year before who had phrased her sentences in exactly the
same way: it sounded like a friendly question or a polite request, but it was always, definitely, an order. There was never the option to reply, for example, ‘How interesting for you. Well,
keep wondering,’ and wander off happily with no further information about sound waves, for example, clogging up your brain.

‘Sure,’ Millie said. ‘About windows?’ This was the technique she had generally employed with the toxic Mrs Greenaway. Helpful, but stupid, so she had nothing to work
with.

‘No, no.’ He smiled insincerely. ‘Not about windows.’

‘Oh.’ Millie stared again. Hopefully, he would soon decide she was too dense to have helped a cat escape from a pet shop, let alone a secure testing laboratory.

‘You were here on Tuesday, were you not?’

‘What day is it now?’ Millie decided that if she were going to play dumb, she might as well enjoy it.

‘Thursday.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

Millie was pleased to note that he sounded a bit tetchy now – he didn’t have Mrs Greenaway’s legendary patience, then.

‘Er, I think so, then, yes. Yes,’ she said.

‘You were cleaning the doors downstairs, I think?’

‘Oh, you want to talk about doors. Not windows.’

‘Not entirely, no. Just the doors downstairs, that lead to the outside of the building.’

‘Right. Yes, then.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, I was cleaning those doors.’ Millie could see that the man was getting very tired of her unhelpful helpfulness. Good.

‘Excellent. That’s what I thought. Now, while you were cleaning the doors, at around five past three, did you see anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ The man now sounded exactly like Mrs Greenaway when someone explained that they didn’t know quite how light travelled across the
vacuum of space, but that bicycles might be involved.

‘I don’t know what time it is, ever. My watch is broken.’ Millie hadn’t quite got round to telling her dad that she’d drowned it, and was therefore still wearing it
to fend off awkward questions. She held it out for the man to see, so he could verify her story. He didn’t even glance at it. She carried on: ‘It’s not waterproof, you see, and I
put my arm in the bucket, and so it . . .’ She trailed off, as even the stupidest person could see he wasn’t listening.

‘Did you see anything at any time at all?’ His forgettable voice had now taken on a distinct tone of irritation.

‘I saw the security man on the desk through the doors. He’s nice.’

‘Apart from him.’

‘I saw my dad and Bill up on the platform. I never get to go on that.’

Mr Shepard looked torn between telling her this was a good idea – as she was obviously too young and stupid to be allowed near anything dangerous, starting with cutlery and ending with
window cleaners’ cradles – and telling her she should immediately be hoisted three floors up, surrounded by kitchen knives, blindfolded, and forced to fend for herself.

‘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.