The Great Escape (14 page)

‘Really?’ Max raised his eyebrows. This was a side of Millie’s father he knew nothing about.

‘Yeah. There’s a woman Bill introduced him to that he has the occasional fling with, when he thinks I’m not around to notice.’ Millie sounded very casual, almost as
though she had been practising.

‘Ah,’ nodded the cat sagely.

‘She’s a bit annoying. I think that’s why nothing serious has come of it,’ confessed Millie.

‘Ah.’ Max nodded again.

‘Ah, what?’

‘Ah, nothing. He is a man. It is allowed.’

‘I know. It’s a shame she’s not, you know, better, though. Then he could actually have a proper girlfriend,’ Millie said rather sadly.

‘Better at what?’ asked Max, confused.

‘Better at anything,’ she replied, rolling her eyes.

The woman had obviously made quite an impression, thought Max, but he was too sensible to say anything other than, ‘Ah.’

‘Oh, shush. There’s only so much manly wisdom I can take from a cat.’

‘Sorry.’ But Max didn’t sound very sorry. He sounded as though he thought it all rather funny.

‘Anyway, let’s get back and find out. We’ll come up with Plan B if we need one,’ she finished.

Finally, Millie pulled her bike up onto the lawn and wheeled it around to the back of the house. The gate squeaked a little as she pushed her bike through, but it
couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t loud enough to wake anyone up. She went to the back door and peered in. The house looked deserted. There was only one way to be sure, though. She walked
softly around to the front and put her key in the bottom lock. Sure enough, it turned. She undid the latch as well and they crept inside.

‘Thought so,’ she said. ‘He only locks the bottom one if we’re out. And you can’t double lock the top one except from outside.’

‘Good,’ said Max. ‘Let’s go and get some sleep. It must be two o’clock.’

‘Pretty much,’ she replied, looking at her watch as she went to the stairs. ‘Actually . . .’ She went back to the door and relocked the bottom lock. ‘Since
we’re here on our own,’ she added. Max nodded, and they disappeared upstairs to get some sleep, after what had been a very long day.

Arthur Shepard was undone by fury. Someone had broken into his laboratory while he was here, while he was downstairs, no less, waiting for a useless damned idiot to drive a van
here and collect these pestilential cats. How had the intruders got through the doors? How had they known where to go? How, in fact, had they known there were cats here at all, unless they had the
escaped one? That was it. He seethed with rage, tiny spots of foam fizzing on his lower lip. Either the cat had run away and found someone to help it steal the others, or those sodding window
cleaners had done it. He stormed up to the third floor and into the laboratory. He hurled Celeste into a carrying cage and locked the door.

‘Ouch,’ she hissed at him, her eyes turned to slits.

‘Shut up,’ said Arthur Shepard, ‘or I will
make
you be quiet.’

Celeste realised that this was not an empty threat and sulked at the back of the cage. Shepard marched back downstairs, the cage swinging precariously from his hand. He stomped into his office
and slammed the cage down on the floor. Celeste hissed again.

He picked up the phone to call security to set them onto the problem. Then he remembered once again that security should have been guarding the outer perimeter of the building. How had these
thieves got in undetected? Didn’t he pay these men decent money to stop just such an eventuality? The answer to this question was, of course, no. He paid them dreadful money and thus had
useless security guards like Dave.

Now Arthur Shepard dialled Dave’s number three times, making mistake after mistake as he tried to press the correct buttons while shaking with anger. The first number was unavailable. The
second number he called turned out to belong to an irate fireman, who was trying to get some sleep, and called him a lengthy list of names before explaining helpfully that were his (Arthur
Shepard’s) house to catch fire, he would have only himself to blame if it burned to the ground because he (the fireman) would be too tired to come and put it out, on account of having been
woken up by idiots (Arthur Shepard) in the middle of the night. Arthur Shepard apologised insincerely, which was the only way he knew, and tried to call Dave again. He thought he had misdialled a
third time when the phone was answered by someone apparently having a severe asthma attack.

‘Hello? Hello?’ he snapped.

‘Hello, sir?’ gasped Dave, who had his head between his knees, like a much fitter man who had just completed an Olympic sprint.

‘Dave? Is that you?’ Arthur Shepard resented having to call this man ‘Dave’, as though they were friends. He would have much preferred to call him ‘David’,
indicating formally that they were employer and employee, but the stupid man never remembered to reply if called by his correct name, as he claimed to be known universally by the abbreviation, and
simply did not think of himself as a David.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where the devil are you?’ Arthur Shepard could barely contain his fury.

‘Outside, sir. Near the road. I saw some teenagers mucking around and chased them off.’

‘When?’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘When did you see these teenagers?’ asked Arthur Shepard, sounding more and more annoyed.

‘Ooh, must be half an hour ago, sir. At least. Maybe longer. They led me a right chase, running around the building and off up the road. They’re gone now, though, sir. No trespassers
here anywhere, I’ve checked.’ Dave was still panting feverishly, wondering if he should take a little more exercise these days. He belonged to a gym, but had seen no more of it than the
inside of the café and, unaccountably, that seemed not to have helped his fitness levels the way he had expected it to.

‘Excellent work, Dave,’ said Arthur Shepard, through thin lips.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Yes. While you were chasing ne’er-do-wells about the grounds, you left the building unguarded – wide open, in fact – and there has been a break-in.’

‘What? Sir?’ Dave began to panic. His job wasn’t usually this difficult.

‘Oh, be quiet. And, incidentally, you’re sacked.’ Arthur Shepard hung up the phone irritably, thinking that all this could have been averted if the security guard hadn’t
been so stupid. He didn’t think, even for a second, that perhaps the responsibility might lie with him for having paid for only one guard to look after a large building. He certainly
didn’t think about the fact that he had been in the building himself as it had been breached, yet he had heard and done nothing. He wished, briefly, that he had employed more than one man on
the night shift, but only because that would have brought the satisfaction of having more than one person to fire now. Firing people was probably the only part of Arthur Shepard’s job that he
actually enjoyed. He would have really liked to fire the van driver, and he felt a festering annoyance that he had been unable to do so, because, sadly, the man didn’t work for him. Perhaps
he could persuade someone else to fire him tomorrow.

Arthur Shepard realised he needed to regroup. He would have to take the remaining cat away from this laboratory – the security here was compromised. He thought for a moment, then dialled a
number he knew off by heart.

‘Hello? Hello, yes, it’s me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’ He paused, listening. ‘Yes, there’s a problem. I need you to look after
something for me.’ He paused again. ‘Yes. No, I don’t know for how long. See you later. Bye.’ He hung up and began to think.

He knew two things. One, that one of those window cleaners was responsible, at least in part, though he couldn’t prove it. His protesters had kept all other undesirable animal rights types
away from the lab and they had fed him information about the only person who had seemed to see through them – some boy who had nothing like the brains to pull this kind of thing off. Besides,
people had broken in to free the cats – it
had
to be someone who knew they were there. And the most likely candidates by far were the window cleaners – they were the only people
who had been on the premises when that mangy grey cat had escaped. This meant he needed to call Mickey and Ray, and get them out of bed and round to the houses of the two window cleaners straight
away, to see if they could find out if there was anything going on. He made another abrupt call and arranged this. One of them would go to each house, to save time.

The second thing he knew beyond a doubt was that his security cameras would have picked up this whole sorry mess. By the time his men were in their cars, speeding towards the little suburban
houses he was sure that the window cleaners lived in, he would have checked the tapes and would know how many people were involved. He realised that it was most likely they would have had
accomplices to help them break in – maybe journalists. He was always reading in the papers about some undercover hack who’d broken into a supposedly secure building – Buckingham
Palace even. God, it didn’t bear thinking about. But he would be able to see their faces, if they hadn’t realised the cameras would pick them up – he might be able to get them
arrested before they could publish anything about him. He would go straight down now to the CCTV room and view the tapes himself. He would call his men with new information in ten minutes. Maybe
less. He walked quickly, not seeing, in the dark, the trail of paw prints which would taunt him the next morning as he retraced the cats’ steps. He crossed the lobby, pulling a ring of keys
from his pocket. He thrust one of these into the CCTV room lock and began feverishly to check the camera footage from that evening. As he found the correct tape, he wound it back and played it.
Inexplicably, the picture was blanked out for all the vital minutes. For the second time that night, a howl of inarticulate fury rang out around the laboratory.

Millie couldn’t sleep, even though she was exhausted. Her brain couldn’t stop whirring through the events of the night – the lucky escape they had had, the
panic she had felt when the laboratory doors wouldn’t open, the near capture by Arthur Shepard, and how on earth she was going to rescue Celeste. She turned over and tried to think about
something else.

She woke with a start seconds later. She looked at the clock and found that it really was only five minutes since she had last checked it. Max was sitting bolt upright, his ears rigid.

‘Someone’s trying to get in through the front door,’ he hissed.

‘What?’ Millie jumped out of bed. The noise had been too quiet to wake her up, but now she was awake, she too could hear the unmistakable sounds of someone trying to unlock the
door.

‘What shall we do?’ she whispered. ‘Hide?’ She looked around frantically. The house wasn’t really designed for secret hiding places.

‘No. Bluff,’ said Max.

‘What do you mean, bluff?’ she asked, as the noises continued from downstairs.

‘Turn on the lights,’ replied the cat calmly.

‘What? Are you insane? They’ll know we’re here.’

‘Exactly. We want them to think we’re here. And other people too. Lots of them. Now hurry. Turn on the lights and shout to your dad that you’ve had a nightmare.’

Millie’s eyes narrowed and she nodded. She opened her door and flipped on the light.

‘Daaad,’ she howled. ‘
Daaad!
’

The scratching at the door stopped abruptly.

‘Dad, there’s someone in my room. I’m sure there is. In the wardrobe.’ She was wailing like her life depended on it. She hoped it didn’t.

‘What?’ shouted Max, in his deepest, most English-sounding voice. ‘Don’t worry, love. It’s just a bad dream.’ He pulled a face.

‘It isn’t! I saw them,’ she cried again.

‘Millie, shush. You’ll wake Sarah and her parents,’ he bellowed. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have let you girls watch a scary film.’

They listened carefully and heard nothing. Then a few quiet steps. Max was poised to jump onto the windowsill to see if the man was leaving, but Millie put her hand down, warning.

‘He’ll see your eyes,’ she said.

Max nodded. She really was a smart girl. Cats’ eyes reflected far more light than human ones, he knew. And his eyes were bigger and oranger than most other cats’ eyes.

Millie slipped through to the spare room, where the curtains were open, and crept on all fours to the window. She peered over the ledge, and saw a large man get into a car, start the engine and
drive away without lights on. She ran back to her room and picked up a pencil.

‘W202 FYF,’ she said, scrawling it down.

‘Sorry?’ Max was confused.

‘The registration number. Of his car. In case we need to give it to the police.’

‘Ah. Very clever.’

‘Not as clever as you, giving us a houseful of guests. How quick was that?’

‘Thank you.’ Max preened.

‘I think you should let us watch another horror film tomorrow, though. You’re such a square. All the other dads let their daughters do it.’ She grinned at him.

‘Shush.’ The cat rolled his eyes in mock exasperation.

‘Sorry.’ They started to laugh, as a night’s worth of tension finally caught up with them both.

‘Are you still tired?’ Millie asked.

‘No. Maybe . . . I think I am hungry.’

‘Me too.’

They went downstairs and Millie made toast, her solution to virtually any crisis that didn’t require three-dimensional building plans and minor law-breaking. Max ate some cat food in a
half-hearted way and, eventually, they went back to bed.

Then at eight o’clock, her phone began to ring.

It was Jake’s brother’s number on the screen. Millie picked it up and said nothing, just in case.

‘Is that you?’ asked Jake.

‘Is that you?’ she asked back.

‘Yes. I mean, it’s Jake. I’m using my brother’s phone.’

‘It’s Millie. Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Well, a bit bashed up. Did you get them out?’

‘Yes, all except one,’ said Millie. ’We have to find her and get her back.’