The Crims #3

  DEDICATION

  For Anna and William, for when they’re older

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Kate Davies

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  IMOGEN CRIM STARED at her phone, rereading the text message she’d just received: Hey, loser, stealing a Norwegian Cruise liner. Party time in the Caribbean! You in?

  Even though the text was from an unknown number, she knew exactly who had sent it: Ava Kruk, her former nemesis and current best friend. Ava was the only person in the world capable of stealing a cruise ship single-handed, apart from maybe Big Nana, but Big Nana always said, “Never steal a vehicle designed for tourists. There’s always a risk there will be a Celine Dion impersonator onboard.”

  Imogen would have loved to join Ava on a Norwegian cruise to the Caribbean—she loved nothing more than eating herring while listening to old Bob Marley records—but she was busy. So she texted back: Sounds fun, but I can’t. Kind of in the middle of something . . .

  A heist, to be exact. A heist that she had planned herself, with the help of her irritating but criminally talented cousin Delia. A proper heist, designed to get the Crims’ street cred back. The Crims were supposed to be a terrifying crime family. But they’d had so much positive media attention since they chased the Kruks—a much more terrifying crime family—out of Blandington that they had lost all their cred. Even their schoolyard cred and their convenience store cred. People had started to stop the Crims in the street to shake their hands, which definitely made a change from having rotten tomatoes hurled at them, and the Blandington Times had run the headline: “Crims Save Blandington from International Crime Ring!”

  Imogen’s mother, Josephine, had been thrilled by this—she loved publicity and the word “ring,” though she preferred her rings to be of the stolen diamond variety—but Imogen was frustrated. She hadn’t actually meant to save Blandington from the Kruks. In fact, the Kruks had never really been a threat to Blandington at all. They were far too busy stealing major London landmarks to use as interior decor to bother committing crimes in such an insignificant town. Imogen had just been trying to save her family. Elsa Kruk, a children’s book–obsessed psychopath who seemed unpleasantly fond of feeding people to tigers, had kidnapped them all, but a headline like “Girl Saves Her Own Family and Doesn’t Really Care About Anyone Else in Blandington” probably wouldn’t have sold as many papers.

  Now the Crims were practically national treasures, like Kate Middleton and the crown jewels and fish and chips. And no one’s scared of fish and chips. (Apart from Uncle Knuckles, who once had a very traumatic experience in a potato patch involving a sharp trowel and a lot of mud.) If a crime family isn’t scary, it’s basically just a family—an ordinary, boring family like every other family in Blandington—and, as Big Nana always said, “There’s nothing worse than being ordinary and boring. Except being dead. Because then you’ll be boring anyway; corpses never have much to say for themselves.”

  So, Imogen had taken things into her own hands. Things like walkie-talkies and loot bags and several extremely flattering balaclavas. She and Delia had masterminded a proper heist. A heist that would restore the Crims’ reputation as hardened, if slightly eccentric, criminals. Imogen was getting on unusually well with Delia at the moment. Apart from Big Nana, Delia was the one other member of the family with any true criminal potential, as far as Imogen was concerned. At fourteen years old, Delia was still not quite as good as Imogen, who was only twelve, but hey, some people were late bloomers. The night they’d stayed up putting the final details to the plan had reminded Imogen of the bad old days, when the Kruks had been plotting to kill them all, and everyone had thought Big Nana was dead. Now stage one of the heist was underway.

  Imogen looked at Delia and grinned. “You ready?” she said.

  “Of course,” said Delia.

  And they walked over to their other cousins, the Horrible Children, who were standing outside the back entrance to Mega Deals, Blandington’s biggest and least exciting electronics store, waiting for their orders.

  “Does everyone know what they’re supposed to be doing?” asked Imogen.

  “Yes,” said seven-year-old Nick. “I’m going to collapse on the ground and pretend to faint, to distract the store clerks.”

  “And then I’m going to collapse on the ground too, and the store clerks will think they’re seeing double and get really confused,” said Nate, Nick’s identical twin.

  “And I’m going to prank call the store and pretend to be Barry White,” said Sam. He was thirteen, and his voice had just broken, which meant he was now much easier to understand but much less easy to make fun of.

  Delia twirled a lock of curly hair around her finger and rolled her eyes. “No one under the age of forty knows who Barry White is.”

  “Luckily, the youngest store clerk is forty-five,” said Sam. “And she has a tattoo of Barry White on her upper arm.”

  “How do you even know that?” asked Delia.

  “People put way too much information about themselves on social media these days,” said Sam, shrugging.

  “I bite ankles!” Isabella babbled happily.

  “Not everyone’s ankles,” Imogen said firmly. “Just the store clerks’.” She’d had enough of her youngest cousin gnawing at her body parts. Isabella, at three years old, had precociously sharp teeth.

  Freddie, Imogen’s eldest cousin, nodded. “And when the clerks’ backs are turned, me, Imogen, and Delia will steal all the electronics in the store.”

  “Except the Why?Phones,” said Imogen. “Don’t bother with them.” (The Why?Phone was Mega Deals’s own brand of smartphone, and it was so terrible that no one knew why it existed, hence its name.) Imogen looked at the checklist she was holding. “Freddie, did you remember to rent a getaway van?”

  Freddie rolled his eyes. “Of course I did,” he said. “Remember: I remember everything. How Big Nana takes her tea [nine sugars], Uncle Clyde’s birthday [Christmas Eve], the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated—March 15, 45 BC—”

  “No! It was 44 BC!” said Isabella, who watched a lot of documentaries. She launched herself at Freddie’s ankles, and he let out a yelp.

  “And then, as everyone is running out of the store, I’ll set fire to it,” said twelve-year-old Henry, flicking his lighter in preparation.

  Imogen smiled. “Perfect. Everyone playing to their strengths.”

  “Can we get on with the heist now?” asked Delia, who was always bored when she wasn’t the center of attention.

  “Just a second,” said Imogen. “Let me disable the security system. . . .”

  She crowbarred open the back door to Mega Deals and found a box, helpfully marked “Security System.” She pulled down a lever, conveniently marked “Disable.” Imogen was almost disappointed. They could have made it a bit more of a challenge.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Me, Freddie, and Delia will sneak in the back way. The rest of you, go to the front entrance. Send Isabella in first . . . People think she’s cute, for some reason, so they won’t pay attention to the rest of you. . . .”
>
  As the Horrible Children set off for the front entrance, Imogen felt the rush she always felt when she was committing a felony with members of her family. She hadn’t felt this rush for far too long. She grinned at Delia. “I don’t like to sound sentimental,” she said, “but it turns out working with you doesn’t suck.”

  Delia grinned back. “Working with you doesn’t suck, either. Except when we’re planning heists involving Popsicles, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” said Imogen. She beckoned Freddie over and tossed him and Delia the balaclavas that Aunt Bets had knitted for them. “Right,” she said. “Let’s steal some HDTVs we don’t need.”

  The heist started smoothly enough. Nick and Nate were walking past the home audio section when they collapsed, very convincingly, on the floor at exactly the same time. The clerks rushed to help them, leaving the electronic goods—and the tills—unguarded.

  “Whoa,” said a booming store clerk, looking from Nick to Nate and back again. “Are there two of them? Or did I eat too much cheese at the fondue party last night?”

  “Both,” said a large, frizzy-haired clerk. “There are definitely two of them. But you ate all the brie, and you left me with that boring lump of cheddar. Not cool.”

  While the store clerks were looking the other way, Imogen started to fill her loot bag with surprisingly expensive headphones. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Delia and Freddie loading their bags with laptops.

  “Well,” boomed the clerk who had telling grease stains on her polo shirt, bending over Nick, who was imitating a carpet. “It’s lucky we did that first aid course last week. . . .”

  Imogen and Delia looked at each other. They hadn’t counted on the clerks knowing how to do first aid.

  “I’ve been dying to practice resuscitation!” said the frizzy-haired salesclerk, kneeling down next to Nate.

  “And I’ll do chest compressions on the other one!” said the booming salesclerk, cracking her fingers. “I might break a few of his ribs, but they’ll sort that out when they get him to the hospital. . . .”

  Which is when Nick and Nate staged miraculous recoveries at exactly the same time. It wasn’t ideal, but Imogen didn’t blame them.

  Nick sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Where am I?” he said.

  Nate stood up. “We suffer from narcolepsy,” he said. “Don’t we, Nick?”

  Nick nodded. “A terrible affliction.”

  The clerks looked disappointed. “What a shame,” said the frizzy-haired salesclerk. “I didn’t get to do CPR! Or use an AED! Or any other acronyms!”

  Imogen tried to catch Nick’s attention. Keep distracting them, she tried to say with her eyes. Pretend to break your leg RIGHT NOW, or I’ll come over there and do it for you. But that’s quite a hard thing to say with your eyes, so Nick just looked at her blankly.

  And then it was too late. The salesclerks turned away from Nick and Nate—and came face-to-face with Imogen and Delia, who had their arms full of video game consoles and power drills.

  Imogen and Delia froze like criminal snowmen.

  The store clerks froze like law-abiding icicles.

  They stared at one another for quite a long time. It was all a little bit awkward.

  “Why hasn’t Sam called the store?” Imogen whispered to Delia. “Is he even more incompetent now that his voice has broken? And why isn’t Isabella biting anyone? Really, she’s chosen this moment to stop being a miniature psychopath?”

  “Don’t worry, Henry’s on the case,” Delia said, nodding over to Henry, who was standing behind a salesclerk, desperately flicking his lighter and trying to start a fire. But the flame wasn’t coming on. He’d obviously used up all the gas.

  “He’s literally as much use as a light bulb made out of socks,” whispered Imogen. She was starting to panic. What would Big Nana do? she asked herself. Her grandmother would probably just try to ride this out—smile politely and walk out of the store, loot in hand—which almost certainly wouldn’t work, but it wasn’t as though Imogen had many other options. At the moment, she and Delia and the store clerks were still just standing there.

  So Imogen smiled politely (not that the store clerks could tell, because she was, after all, wearing a balaclava) and walked, head held high, out of the store. And amazingly, the store clerks just stood there and watched her leave and then carried on with their jobs—pricing video games, ringing up purchases on the tills, pretending to know things about hard drives—as if nothing had happened. It was like she and Delia were invisible. Which they definitely weren’t, because she could see Delia admiring her balaclava in the TV screens as they passed.

  “That was weirdly easy,” said Freddie, once they were out on the street.

  “Weirdly is right,” said Imogen. She looked around for the getaway van. There were two trucks in the street. One had a logo on the side: “EZTV.” The other one had to be theirs— It had “Crims” written all over it. Literally. Spray-painted in Henry’s handwriting.

  “Henry,” Imogen said as the other Crims came running out of the store after her, “it’s not a great idea to write our name on the getaway van. We’ve been over this. The aim is not to get caught. Remember?”

  “But you said you wanted us to get our street cred back,” Henry pointed out. “You can’t get cred unless you take credit for your crimes.”

  “We want people to think we’re dangerous but not be able to prove it,” Imogen said as the Crims all scrambled into the van. She took the seat next to Freddie, who started the ignition, and turned to Sam, who was sitting behind her, wedged between the twins. “What happened to you? You were supposed to call the store and distract them for us!”

  “Sorry,” Sam said miserably. “I got a wrong number. First I accidentally dialed my math teacher, which was a shame, because it reminded him I hadn’t finished my homework, and then I ended up singing ‘You’re the First, the Last, My Everything’ to a pet shop owner in Nottingham for ten minutes.”

  Imogen heard footsteps behind the van. She looked into the rearview mirror—and there, running out onto the sidewalk, were the salesclerks. “Quick, Freddie, let’s go!” she shouted. “They’re shaking their fists at us. Excellent!” But then she looked at them again and realized that they were actually . . . waving.

  As Freddie screeched away from the curb, Imogen felt a prickle of anxiety, and not just because she was sitting on Doom, Sam’s nervous pet hedgehog. “Don’t you think that was all a bit too easy?” she asked Delia, picking up the slightly squashed hedgehog and handing him back to Sam.

  Delia pouted. “You’re such a spoilsport. It wasn’t too easy. We’re just good at this!”

  Imogen looked at Delia. How could she think that the heist had been a success? Everything that could have possibly gone wrong had gone wrong. Something, Imogen thought, was up. Any decent criminal would be feeling uneasy right about now. And if Delia wasn’t, that meant she wasn’t a decent criminal yet. Imogen sighed. She was sick of being dragged down by mediocre people. Even if those mediocre people did let her borrow their hair straighteners.

  The van skidded to a halt outside Crim House, the Crims’ exciting-looking but dangerous family home, which featured an extension made out of a bouncy castle, a garden mostly made up of plants stolen from cracks in the pavement (otherwise known as “weeds”), a lot of secret passageways that didn’t lead anywhere, and a resident chicken that had escaped from an industrial poultry farm and wished it hadn’t. Imogen’s mother, Josephine, was on the doorstep, waiting for them. Which was, to say the least, unusual. Josephine was usually too busy “shopping” (i.e., stealing rich old women’s jewelry) to notice when Imogen and her cousins came home. Or, indeed, when they’d been kidnapped.

  “Darlings!” said Josephine, spreading her arms wide, which looked like an effort; they were weighed down by diamond watches (two on each wrist); sapphire bracelets; and a live, rabid fox that she was wearing as a stole. Which was odd. Josephine liked luxury clothes, sure, but she usually saved the rabid fox
for special occasions—the local dogs tended to attack her when she was wearing it. Odder still, Josephine wasn’t alone. She had been followed out of the house by a group of people wearing headphones and carrying weird, unwieldy-looking pieces of equipment: a microphone, a camera, lights, a director’s chair. . . . Wait, thought Imogen. Why is there a camera crew at Crim House?

  Imogen stepped out of the getaway van and walked up the front path, her sternest look on her face. “Mum,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Josephine laughed a tinkling laugh, stroking the rabid fox’s head. The fox foamed at the mouth and tried to bite her. “Surprise, my dears!” said Josephine. “Now that we’ve saved Blandington from the Kruks and become celebrities, I’ve signed us up to star in our very own reality TV series! Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “No,” said Imogen.

  Josephine ignored her. “Just think, darlings!” she said. “We’ll be able to tell the world who we really are in our own words. Words like ‘loving family’ and ‘criminal masterminds’—”

  “And ‘terrible parents,’” said Imogen, grabbing her mother’s sleeve and dragging her away from the cameras. “This is literally the worst idea you’ve ever had,” she hissed. “And you once tried to steal the Duchess of Cornwall.”

  “No, darling, I tried to steal her dress. Her Royal Highness just happened to be wearing it at the time.”

  Imogen felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck. She had the feeling she was being watched. She turned around and realized that the camera crew was filming her. “You can’t use this footage,” she said, putting her arm up to cover her face. “There’s no way I’ll sign the contract to appear in this stupid show.”

  “Silly Imogen!” tinkled Josephine. “You’ve already signed it!” She pulled the contract out from underneath her dangerous fur stole.

  Imogen took the paper and studied it. There, in a variety of garish inks, were all the Crims’ signatures. All forgeries, of course. Forgery was one of Josephine’s specialties, crime-wise. “Now, excuse me, darling,” she said. “You keep the camera crew company while I run upstairs and change into something a little more comfortable. Why don’t you give them a tour of the grounds? They haven’t met the snakes yet!” She touched the sound guy on the arm and said, “The boa constrictor’s called Kevin, and he gives the loveliest hugs.”