The Crims #2 Page 10

  “Sure, Imogen!” said Ava, waving good-bye to her confused group of friends. “What’s wrong?”

  Imogen crossed her arms. “You can stop the ‘I’m really nice’ act,” she whispered. “Where are my cousins?”

  Ava’s brow furrowed photogenically. “What do you mean? Aren’t they in class? Have you lost one of them? There are a lot of them to keep track of.”

  “Three of them disappeared, and you know it. What did you do to them? Where are they?”

  Ava gasped prettily. “This is terrible!” she said. “Have you called the police?”

  “Who took them? Was it Gunther?”

  Ava frowned beautifully. “Who’s Gunther?” asked Ava. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was at the charity committee meeting till seven. You can ask your friends.”

  Imogen decided to try a different tack. “How do you know where I live? I never told you.”

  Ava’s eyes widened gorgeously. “Yes you did! You sent me a note about that loot your dad wanted to donate to the charity drive, to ask if I could come and pick it up. Remember?” She reached into her schoolbag and pulled out a letter—written on Imogen’s monogrammed stationery, in Imogen’s handwriting, with Imogen’s favorite words in it: “serendipitous,” “alack,” and “Yours sincerely.”

  Imogen stared at the letter, as if it might make more sense the more she looked at it. She had no recollection of sending it whatsoever, and she usually remembered everything, even Wi-Fi passwords. Did I write this note to Ava and then forget about it? she thought. Am I going mad? It has been pretty stressful lately, what with readjusting to life at home, and trying to rule Blandington Secondary School, and all that crime homework, and no one in the family committing any crimes, and the Kruks kidnapping my father. . . . She suddenly felt quite overwhelmed. What are the chances that Ava is a Kruk, really? It seemed horribly unlikely. She wanted to go home and get into bed and stay there until everything went back to normal.

  “Are you okay?” Ava asked, touching Imogen’s arm. “Is there anything I can do? I know a lovely therapist. I’ve never needed therapy, obviously, but she really helped my friend. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone—”

  “No!” said Imogen, pulling her arm away. She had now completely forfeited any remaining queen bee standing she may have had. Not that that’s important, she reminded herself. What matters is finding out if Ava is a Kruk—and what she’s done with my family.

  By the time Imogen got home, she felt dazed and frantic and as though she might start crying at any moment. She picked up Isabella, who was on the front path gnawing at some wires marked “Electricity Supply, Danger of Death,” and opened the door. She wished that Nick and Nate would come bounding downstairs with Barney, or that Delia would make fun of her for staying for a full day of school. But the house was silent, apart from a low whirring noise that seemed to be coming from the kitchen.

  Big Nana was chopping up a rutabaga, a Jerusalem artichoke, and a turnip—the three most miserable vegetables known to humankind—all of which looked bashed and battered and as though they needed someone to put them out of their misery. Big Nana, unfortunately, seemed to be causing them even more misery.

  “There you are!” Big Nana shouted over the vacuum cleaner, which, for some reason, was running full blast in the corner of the room. “Ratatouille will be ready in twenty minutes.”

  “Shall I turn this off?” Imogen said.

  “No!” said Big Nana, slapping Imogen’s hand away from the vacuum cleaner. “The house might be bugged. We can’t be too careful.” She dropped the vegetables into a pot of tomato sauce.

  “Did you steal those?” Imogen asked.

  Big Nana sighed, closing her eyes. “No,” she said. “I found them on the ground after the farmers market had gone. This is what this family has come to! We can’t steal a thing, there’s a huge hole in our house, and three of your cousins have disappeared like child actors who aren’t Miley Cyrus after the age of twenty.” She started stabbing at the ratatouille with a wooden spoon, flicking tomato sauce around the kitchen. The splashes of tomato on the white kitchen tiles looked like fresh blood—and that gave Imogen an idea.

  “Look,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for action. Maybe we should strike against the Kruks now, before they do anything else. We can’t just sit back and wait for Dad and Delia and the twins to come back home. We have to find them.”

  Big Nana put down her wooden spoon. “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see how much you’ve learned. What do you suggest we do?”

  Imogen hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Three words no Crim should ever utter,” said Big Nana.

  “We could go to Krukingham Palace,” Imogen said, “and . . . set an alligator loose in there, or something?”

  “Ha!” laughed Big Nana, though not in a fun way; more like in a you’ve-just-said-something-incredibly-stupid way. “‘You come at the king, you best not miss.’”

  That didn’t sound like one of Big Nana’s usual sayings. “Is that Shakespeare?” Imogen asked.

  “No!” said Big Nana. “I thought you were top of the class in English.”

  “I don’t think I am anymore,” said Imogen, trying and failing to not care.

  “That was from The Wire,” said Big Nana. “I bingewatched a lot of TV when I was pretending to be dead. There isn’t much else you can do when all your friends and family think they’ve been to your funeral. The point is, we shouldn’t waste time thinking of petty ways to annoy the Kruks. When we strike, we need to deal a deathblow.”

  Big Nana was right, as usual. “All right, then,” Imogen said. “In the meantime, I have some money left over from my birthday, if you want me to go to the store. I could buy some eggplant or zucchini or some kind of vegetable that’s actually supposed to go in ratatouille.”

  “NEVER!” screamed Big Nana, brandishing her spoon like a weapon. “Even these pathetic, hard-to-digest, slightly brown vegetables will taste better than bought food.” And to Imogen’s horror, Big Nana started crying—really crying. Her tears dripped into the ratatouille pot. “Just as well!” she wailed. “We’ve run out of salt!”

  Imogen had never been good at dealing with other people’s emotions, so she turned off the vacuum cleaner and snuck out of the kitchen.

  Without the vacuum running, the house was very quiet. Imogen walked through to the living room, where she found Isabella sitting alone on the couch, sucking on her pacifier and staring at her as if to say, “I’ve got my tiny, two-year-old eyes on you.” Imogen felt a little unnerved. Where were the other Horrible Children? When you couldn’t hear them, it usually meant they were making trouble—stealing a cat, or experimenting with glue, or inventing new uses for anthrax. But this time she had a feeling that they might be in trouble.

  She searched the house, the sound of her footsteps echoing in the empty rooms.

  “Sam?” she called. “Henry? Freddie?”

  “In the bathroom!” It was Freddie. “Give me a second?”

  A second later (Freddie was a very accurate timekeeper these days), Freddie appeared on the landing in an inside-out dressing gown (old habits die hard). “I was just having the loveliest bath,” he said. “I put a bit of lavender oil in the water, had a meditation podcast on, and I managed to relax! I haven’t relaxed in thirteen years.”

  “Right,” said Imogen. “Because that’s when Delia was born.”

  “You’re right! That’s what was different!” said Freddie. “The cousins didn’t interrupt me once! They didn’t hammer on the door, or make fun of my rubber ducks, or throw a toaster in the bathwater—”

  “And you don’t think that’s weird?” said Imogen.

  Freddie’s face fell. “A very good point. The house is eerily quiet. It’s almost as if—”

  “Exactly,” said Imogen. “I’ll look upstairs. You look downstairs.”

  Imogen searched everywhere for her cousins. She found her mother in the ups
tairs apartment, looking at a Harry Winston catalog and weeping at what might have been, and Uncle Clyde in his room, drawing up a plan to kidnap a princess from a European country that didn’t exist, not even in the Eurovision Song Contest. But she couldn’t find Henry or Sam anywhere.

  “Freddie!” she shouted. “Have you found the boys?”

  “Nope,” said Freddie, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. “Unless you mean the Backstreet Boys?”

  “Why? Are they down there somewhere?”

  “No.”

  Imogen took a deep breath. I can’t with him today. “What does this mean, Freddie?”

  “It means that if we want to listen to really good nineties pop music, we’ll have to go on Spotify.”

  “No!” shouted Imogen. “It means that the Kruks have struck again. Sam and Henry are missing.”

  Henry and Sam went to the skate park after school, as they often did. Sam liked skateboarding almost as much as he liked prank-calling Delia, pretending to be the ghost of a ferret she’d run over while joyriding a stolen car. Henry liked things that were made of wood, like skateboards and ramps, because they were easy to burn holes into.

  Sam was showing off his kick flip, and Henry was kicking a small child whose name happened to be Philip, when a strange boy walked up to them.

  He had piercing blue eyes—he looked at a BMX wheel, and the tire exploded—and curly black hair. They knew he was strange right away because his skateboard had “strange” written across the top in big letters.

  “Nice board,” said Sam.

  “Danke,” said the boy, blinking his extremely blue eyes. “Why do you have such a squeaky voice?”

  “Why are you speaking German?” asked Sam, who was still pretty sensitive about the squeaky voice situation.

  “Ich bin nicht!” said the boy. “Which means ‘I’m not.’ In skater slang.”

  “Let’s see what you can do, then,” said Sam, sitting down on the ramp.

  “Okay,” said the boy. “That means ‘okay’ in skater slang. I should warn you, though. Some of the tricks I’m going to do are a little unusual. They might blow your Gehirn. Which means ‘brain’ in skater slang.”

  “Skater slang really does sound a lot like German,” said Henry.

  “All beautiful things do,” said the boy. He kicked off and skated down the ramp—and then fell off his board and slammed face-first into the ground. “I meant to do that,” said the boy. “That move is called ‘a Nasenschnur.’ All the Brooklyn skaters are doing it these days.”

  “Right,” said Sam, who was beginning to think that the boy was even stranger than his skateboard suggested. “Can you do any flips?”

  “Watch this!” said the boy. He kicked his board into the air, tripped over it, and then did a sort of somersault and landed on his back.

  He didn’t move for a few moments. He twitched a bit. “Oof!” he said eventually, wheezing. “That was called a full-body flip. It’s quite an experimental move.”

  “Looked painful,” said Henry.

  “No pain, no skateboarding trophies, no million-pound sponsorship deals,” said the boy.

  “Want me to show you some of my tricks?” said Sam.

  “Ja,” said the boy. “But first I need to go to the toilet, which means ‘bathroom’ in skater slang. Do you know where the nearest one is?”

  There was a bathroom just behind them, but the boy clearly hadn’t seen it. Which was lucky, because Sam had a plan. . . .

  “The nearest one is actually in the next town,” said Sam. “It’s a real pain. Literally, if you’re desperate.”

  “You can get the bus from that stop there,” said Henry, pointing to the bus stop just outside the park. “The 19.”

  “Thank you for your Freundschaftsbeziehung,” said the boy. “Which means ‘demonstrations of friendship’ in skater slang.”

  “Skaters are weird,” said Henry, eyeing the boy’s skateboard. It looked so flammable . . . so easy to destroy . . . “Want me to look after your board for you?” he grunted.

  “Yes, please!” said the boy, handing it over.

  Sam and Henry grinned at each other. They’d gone days without committing a successful crime. This almost seemed too easy.

  Which, of course, it was.

  As soon as the boy was out of sight, the boys high-fived each other, picked up the skateboard, and ran out of the park.

  Henry beamed at Sam. “Big Nana is going to—” he said.

  But we’ll never know what Big Nana was going to do.

  Because at that moment, two extremely strong hands grabbed Sam and Henry and threw them into a sack.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IMOGEN STAYED UP late that night, trawling the internet for information about a Kruk girl Ava’s age. There was loads of information on all the other Kruks—far too much of it, in fact. She discovered Gunther Kruk’s shoe size, and Elsa Kruk’s favorite brand of blond hair dye, and some terrible poetry written by fifteen-year-old Dieter “Strange” Kruk, who she could tell was strange, because his name had “strange” in the middle of it. There was even a list of every Kruk’s preferred dog breed—they seemed obsessed with dogs, particularly poodles and poodle mixes. But there was absolutely no record of a teenage girl Kruk.

  So did that mean Ava wasn’t a Kruk after all . . . ?

  Imogen felt deeply confused, but she decided not to take any chances. She took out her criminal plans journal and scribbled down ideas for a plan to defeat Ava, until her eyelids began to droop and she found herself falling asleep and then jerking awake again, like a puppet with narcolepsy.

  But when she finally went to bed, she couldn’t get to sleep. She was used to a lot of background noise—Delia’s snoring, Nick’s night terrors, and Nate’s all-the-time terrors (caused by Nick trying to kill him during his night terrors)—and tonight there was nothing, apart from the occasional howl from Barney, who missed his masters. I know how he feels, she thought as she stared at the ceiling, the headlights of a car occasionally flashing past the window. As she lay there, she became more and more certain that Ava Gud was somehow involved in her father’s and cousins’ disappearances. She had to be. Imogen hadn’t given her that letter—she was sure of it. No one her age wrote letters. Which meant Ava had forged that, too—and it was a forgery of Kruk-level sophistication. Plus, Ava was far too rich and glamorous to be in Blandington without a good reason—or a very bad reason, like wanting to destroy the Crims.

  How was Imogen going to face her tomorrow at school? How was she going to bear it as everyone else fussed around Ava, laughing at her jokes, telling her how brilliant she was?

  How was Imogen going to get her family back?

  The next day, Imogen walked into class to find Willa and Penelope sitting on either side of Ava, like lip gloss–wearing henchmen. Penelope gave Imogen a bit of a puppy-dog look, but Imogen quickly looked away. It was official—Ava was queen bee. With a sigh, Imogen reached up and pulled her ponytail out. Ava nodded at her with a superior, satisfied look. Imogen put the hair tie in her pocket, though—because she was determined that Ava’s reign would be the shortest reign in history.

  Still, for now, Imogen realized, Ava was winning at life. She had raised thousands of pounds on the charity drive. She was getting top marks in every class, which wasn’t surprising since Imogen had stopped doing her school homework. And she’d taken Imogen’s friends. Only one person remained unconvinced of Ava’s greatness, and that was Imogen.

  She’s destroying my life, Imogen thought. And now she’s destroying my family.

  But one question kept niggling at the back of Imogen’s mind: Why hadn’t Ava targeted her yet? The whole throwing of the gold paperweight had seemed like a spur-of-the-moment thing—more to keep her out of the way than do any deadly harm. She could have poisoned her lunch, or kidnapped her after the charity meeting, or stabbed her to death with a compass. . . . She probably wants to take everything from me first—my friends, my queen bee status, my family, my self-respect—befo
re finally putting me out of my misery. Then an even worse thought occurred to her. Or maybe she doesn’t care about me— Her real target is Big Nana.

  Hannah slid into the seat next to Imogen’s—the seat that used to be Penelope’s. “Penelope didn’t want to join them,” she whispered. “But then Ava invited them to stay in her parents’ holiday home in Beverly Hills. Now they’re pretty excited about it.”

  “They’re easily pleased,” muttered Imogen.

  “I know,” said Hannah. “Who wants to go to Beverly Hills, anyway? Just a load of movie stars and palm trees and swimming pools. And the weather is great every day. Boring.”

  She looked sideways at Imogen and grinned. Imogen smiled back gratefully. Hannah was still her friend.

  “They don’t really like her,” Hannah said. “She’s annoyingly perfect, all the time. They’re just too scared of her not to do what she tells them. The other day Ava told Penelope to start laughing in the key of C, and Penelope’s been walking around with a tuning fork ever since. And Ava said that if Willa didn’t learn to look people in the eye, she’d pay the Rock to elbow her in the face.”

  Imogen tsked. “The Rock would never do that,” she said. “Have you seen his Instagram feed? He seems like a really nice guy.”

  “You know that and I know that,” Hannah said confidentially, “but Willa doesn’t.”

  Indeed, when Imogen looked over at Willa, she saw that Willa was staring at everyone, looking terrified, barely daring to blink. Penelope and Willa were so weak—as weak as two extremely milky cups of coffee that barely tasted of coffee at all and were just slightly brown and warm and revolting. Again, Imogen suddenly missed Delia with a pang: She was a double espresso all day long.

  But Imogen shook off her sentimental musings. Penelope, Willa, Delia . . . They’d all fallen victim to Ava in some way—she was sure of it.

  And she was determined to get to the bottom of Ava’s evil plan.

  Hannah dashed off to netball practice at the end of class, so Imogen was alone, packing up her books, when Ava sauntered over to her. She sat on the edge of Imogen’s desk, swinging her well-moisturized legs back and forth. “I’ve brought you a present,” she said, holding out a bag of what looked like dried weeds. “It’s herbal tea,” she explained, noticing Imogen’s blank look. “I find it really calms me down.”