The Crims Read online

  “I can’t believe it!” said Delia, shaking her head. “Poodles should never be fed to tigers! Tigers much prefer Jack Russell terriers. And why do the Kruks care so much about Charm Inc. trying to hide Captain Crook?”

  “I don’t know,” Imogen said grimly. “Mum said she thought it was the Kruks when I visited them at the police station. At the time, I thought she was crazy, but . . .” She paused and shook her head. “Based on this letter, I think they actually might have stolen the lunch box.”

  BY FOUR O’CLOCK the next day, Imogen was behind bars. Not because she’d been arrested—though she had tossed and turned all night, worrying that Derek Hornbutton would figure out who she was and send the police after her—but because she wanted to update her family on her progress. Her family was on the edge of their seats as Imogen told them about the trip to Charmtopia. Uncle Knuckles actually fell off his seat and had to be helped back up by Uncle Clyde, all while rubbing his back and telling everyone he hadn’t been doing enough yoga since he’d been arrested.

  “Anyway,” Imogen said when her uncles were back in their seats. “Nick and Nate managed to pull off the trench coat–man disguise—”

  “Me and Jack Wooster invented that, you know,” said Uncle Clyde.

  “And then we tricked our way into the big blue castle by pretending to be rich!”

  “That’s my girl!” said Josephine, stroking her fake diamond necklace.

  “And then . . .,” said Imogen, building up the tension. “You’re going to love this. . . .”

  “What?” chorused the Crims.

  “We tricked Derek Hornbutton into leaving his office, and when we were going through his files, Delia found . . . this.” She held up the letter from the Kruks.

  Aunt Bets snatched the letter from Imogen’s hands. “The Kruks?” she said, her eyes wide.

  Josephine grabbed the letter from Aunt Bets and read it, growing pale. “Oh. Oh no! If the Kruks really are caught up in this, then . . . then . . . we are in the most terrible danger!” She shuddered, as though she couldn’t bear to look at the letter anymore, and handed it to Al.

  “This is definitely from them.” Al nodded grimly. “I did an MA in letter forgery, and this is genuine Kruk stationery.”

  Al passed the letter to Uncle Clyde, who seemed almost reluctant to read it. When he did, his shoulders slumped. His face fell. Even his hair, which usually stuck straight up, seemed like it couldn’t be bothered to look messy and sat limply on his head. “The Kruks are . . . very dangerous,” he muttered. “They’re not like us at all. If they have my lunch box, I’ll never get it back.”

  Josephine started to cry. She pulled a handkerchief with a P embroidered on it from her pocket—she’d probably stolen it from someone named Peggy or Polly or Petunia—and dabbed her eyes. “You can’t go after the Kruks, Imogen, darling!” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed!”

  Imogen scowled, feeling frustrated. She’d done such a lovely job of pulling off the Charmtopia plan! She thought they’d be proud of her, but instead they were . . . worried? She had never seen her family worried before, even when they really should have been worried, like when they were locked up for a crime they didn’t commit. The Kruks must be really terrible if her family didn’t want her to go after them. “But, Mum,” said Imogen, “you’re the one who told me the Kruks were behind this in the first place. Don’t you remember?”

  “Well,” said Josephine, looking a bit sheepish, “I didn’t really believe it—I just got caught up in the drama of it all. Wouldn’t it be glamorous if the Kruks did want to fight us for our territory? But they don’t, of course. Who would want Blandington?” Uncle Clyde frowned at Josephine. Aunt Bets raised her knitting needle and shuffled toward Josephine’s direction, but Uncle Knuckles grabbed it from her and shook his head. “They just want Clyde’s lunch box for some unrelated reason. Anyway,” said Josephine, “it’ll be fine. We don’t need to prove our innocence. We’ll just go to prison for The Heist. That’s what we’ve been aiming for all along, anyway!”

  “Actually,” said Al, raising his hand, like a shy kid in the back of history class, “strictly speaking, what we’ve been trying to do is get away with crimes. Not get caught. It’s a technicality, I know—”

  “Oh, hush, Al,” said Josephine, crossing her arms. “I was just trying to look on the bright side.” She started weeping again.

  Al stood up and beckoned Imogen over. He gave her an awkward hug.

  “My dear,” he said quietly, motioning for her to sit down next to him. “I’m proud of you for getting this far in your investigation. And I don’t say this sort of thing very often, but your mother is right.” He smiled at her sadly. “You’re a sensible girl. I’ve always let you make your own decisions, haven’t I?”

  “Yes,” said Imogen. She remembered the hurt in her father’s voice when she’d told him she wanted to stay at Lilyworth for another year. But he hadn’t tried to change her mind.

  “So you know I wouldn’t ask this of you unless I thought you were in very real danger,” he said. “Please—I’m begging you—promise me you won’t go after the Kruks. Will you do that for me?”

  Imogen’s stomach twisted. Her father had never asked anything of her, and she wanted so badly to make him happy, but she shook her head. “I can’t, Dad. If I don’t go after the Kruks, you might never get out of here,” she said. “You’ll lose your bookkeeping business—”

  “I could cope with that if I knew you were safe,” Al said stoically, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Anyway, PC Donnelly lets me do the officers’ petty cash accounts to stay in practice. Please,” he said again. “Just go back to school and forget all about this. Once you graduate from Lilyworth, the world is your oyster!”

  Imogen winced. She wasn’t sure what about her father voicing her exact beliefs made her so uncomfortable. “I can’t go back until I’ve proven you’re innocent,” she pointed out.

  “You’re clever. You can argue your way back in somehow,” he said.

  Could I? The fact that her father believed she could made her wonder. But no—Imogen shook her head again. “Sorry, Dad,” she said.

  But her father wasn’t giving in. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know if you heard about what the Kruks did to those grizzly bears . . .”

  “I heard,” said Imogen, trying not to think about it.

  “The bears asked for it, really, Al,” said Uncle Clyde, overhearing. “They tried to bite the Kruks. Remember what Big Nana used to say?”

  “‘Never bite a Kruk if you want to keep your internal organs,’” the other Crims chanted in unison.

  Uncle Knuckles started to shake.

  Aunt Bets hit him over the head with her handbag to calm him down.

  “THANK YOU, MY PET,” he said after he had recovered. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’D DO IF THE KRUKS GOT TO YOU.”

  “Look,” said Imogen, turning back to her father. “I’m not even sure the Kruks were actually involved in The Heist. But I have to find out! Don’t worry, all right? I won’t do anything unless I’m absolutely certain I’m safe.”

  Her father smiled at her sadly again. “I know you won’t,” he said.

  Uncle Clyde pushed Al aside so he could give Imogen a hug too. “Take care of yourself, now,” he said. “You know, the way you’ve thrown yourself into getting us out of here . . . It’s just the sort of thing Big Nana would do.”

  “Oh,” said Imogen, flustered. She wasn’t entirely sure what she thought about that comparison. She wasn’t really sure what she thought of a lot of things lately.

  But she left the police station surer than ever about one thing: She had to get her family released from custody.

  And if she could get herself back to Lilyworth in the process . . . that would be good, too.

  A couple of hours later, Imogen was walking home from Blandington Library. She had planned to spend the rest of the afternoon in the true crimes section, researching the Kruks, but the more she read about the murder
s they’d committed, and the millions of priceless works of art they’d stolen, and the number of wild animals they’d pushed a little closer to extinction, the more impossible it seemed that she’d be able to get close to them without being killed, painfully and humiliatingly, along with an unfortunate panda.

  She flipped through Kidnapped by the Kruks and Forced to Wear a Tutu: A Victim’s Story in the hope that she’d get some tips on how to escape from them if it came to that, but the author had only been saved when a freak tornado destroyed the dungeon they were holding him in. Imogen wasn’t sure she could rely on extreme weather events to save her. Heists, Guns, and Badly Stuffed Animals: Life with the World’s Strangest Crime Family was even more chilling. She hadn’t known you could use kitchen utensils to commit so many terrible crimes. Eventually, Imogen couldn’t bring herself to read anymore. She needed to get home to think.

  As Imogen walked through the streets of Blandington, she was grateful, for once, for the predictable, gray, non-Kruk-filled town she lived in—and she was even grateful for her family. At least they had never stolen the contents of the British Museum and murdered the guards with an ancient Egyptian spoon. Despite their . . . eccentricities, they all really cared about one another. And they really cared about her, too, she realized now—she’d seen that in the way they’d reacted to the idea of her going after the Kruks.

  She was beginning to feel ashamed that she’d felt ashamed of them for so long.

  Crim House was eerily quiet when Imogen got home. Clean, too—Mrs. Teakettle must have been there. She walked through to the kitchen and found a note stuck to the fridge with a “Crime Pays” magnet:

  Hello, Imogen dear,

  I’ve taken the little darlings to a local production of Mary Poppins. They’ve promised to be practically perfect in every way! I’ll bring them home in time for tea. Spit-spot!

  Mrs. Teakettle

  Mrs. Teakettle was another thing that Imogen was grateful for. She decided to make a cup of tea in her honor, but as she was boiling the kettle, she heard voices coming through the vent in the kitchen wall. Were there people in the house?

  She stood on her tiptoes and put her ear close to the grate. One of the voices was slightly mumbling and very, very familiar—she could have sworn it was Freddie. But he was out at his bookkeeping class.

  Wasn’t he?

  Imogen abandoned her cup of tea and picked up a kitchen knife. She wandered around the house, trying to work out where the sounds were coming from, but all the rooms seemed to be empty.

  Imogen remembered Uncle Clyde’s hidden doors. She checked the one behind the bookshelf in the library, but she only found a stash of stolen comic books. She looked under the trapdoor beneath the toilet and discovered a tank full of surprisingly healthy-looking tropical fish. She knew there were other secret doors somewhere in the house, but she’d never come across them. Well, there was no time like the present.

  Imogen started in the dining room, prodding at paneling and pulling vases in case they were levers. Imogen hadn’t spent much time in here as a child—the adults held very argumentative dinner parties in the dining room on Friday nights, and Imogen had been only too glad to stay up in her room, updating her crime journal. Which is why she had never looked properly at the portrait that hung on the wall: the portrait of Sir Henry Joseph Crim, the Crims’ most illustrious ancestor, who was rumored to have started the Great Fire of London while trying to burgle a bakery. Now that she looked at it properly, she noticed that the wall below the portrait was a slightly different color from the rest of the room.

  Imogen put her ear against the wall below the painting. Yes, this was definitely where the voices were coming from. And one of the voices was definitely Freddie’s. But why was he hiding in his own house? Surely he couldn’t be that desperate to get away from the Horrible Children? They weren’t even home.

  She felt the wall until she found the lock for the hidden door under a loose piece of wallpaper. She jimmied it open with the kitchen knife—she hadn’t lost her touch—and pushed the door open.

  Imogen had to bend over slightly to peer through the small doorway. On the other side was a dark, smoke-filled room—so dark and smoky that it took her a while to see anything except shadowy silhouettes at first. When her eyes got used to the lack of light, she could make out a round table in the middle of the room, with a single dim lightbulb hanging over it. Six men were sitting around the table, playing some kind of card game—poker, maybe. Imogen took a step forward, being careful to stay in the shadows, so that she could see the men more clearly.

  One of the men was Freddie.

  No one noticed Imogen at first. The strangers were too busy staring at Freddie, and Freddie was too busy threatening one of them in a low, steely voice.

  “You’ve got to pay up, Pete,” said Freddie, leaning toward him. “You owe me for last week, too, remember? That’s seven hundred pounds in total. Do you know how many monogrammed shirts I could buy with that much money?”

  Wait, thought Imogen. Freddie doesn’t wear monogrammed shirts. This is very weird.

  But things were about to get even weirder.

  “When are you going to get me the money?” Freddie said in his quiet but extremely threatening voice.

  “I don’t know!” said Pete, holding his hands up in surrender. “I don’t have a penny, I thwear! I have nothing left—I gave you my vinthage denture collection lath month!”

  “Some of those teeth weren’t even that old,” Freddie said coldly. “I only got 240 pounds for them on eBay.”

  “What?” said Pete, horrified. “That wath my life’th work! Thothe teeth were worth at leath 260 pounth!”

  “Shouldn’t have got into debt, then, should you?” said Freddie. He crossed his arms. “So, Pete. What are we going to do about our little problem? You know I can’t allow players to get away with not paying what they owe.”

  “I know,” said Pete, hanging his head.

  “And most men would turn to violence in a situation like this. But I’m not most men. I’m just one, quite young, extremely peace-loving man,” said Freddie.

  “I know,” said Pete again.

  “So what are you going to do?” Freddie asked, his voice dripping with malice.

  “I’m going to punch mythelf in the fathe,” Pete said, miserably raising a fist.

  “That’s right,” said Freddie. “Not as hard as you did last time, though; I’m still picking up your teeth from the floor! I’ve saved them for you, actually, in case you want to start a new denture collection.”

  Pete looked even more miserable. “Thothe were my real teeth!” he lisped. “They’re worthleth on the denture market. You’ve taken everything from me, Crim!”

  Freddie, unmoved, nodded toward Pete’s fist. “Not quite everything,” he said. “Maybe the pain of punching yourself in the face again will remind you of where you can find that seven hundred pounds, eh?”

  Pete shook his head, letting out a pitiful sound somewhere between a growl and a whimper. He screwed up his eyes and raised his fist. . . .

  Imogen couldn’t take it anymore. She walked into the light and screamed, “Stop this madness!”

  “It’s all right, Imogen,” Freddie said absently. Then he realized what he’d just said, and did a double take. “Wait—Imogen?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  The men all turned to look at her.

  “What are you doing here, more like!” she said.

  “Well,” said Freddie, going a little red, “these kind fellows were just doing some role-playing with me to help me prepare for my bookkeeping exam. . . .”

  “You’re gambling,” said Imogen. “Actually, are you running a gambling ring?”

  Freddie held up his hands. “Fine. You’ve got me. But it’s just a little lighthearted bingo, isn’t it, chaps?”

  But Freddie’s fellow “bingo” players were tripping over themselves to get out of the room, none faster than unfortunate Pete. Freddie shrugged at Imogen.
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br />   Her heart was racing. This man looked just like the Freddie she had always known—toothpaste on his collar, a large hole bitten out of his sweater, mismatched shoes—but she realized now she hadn’t known Freddie at all. “Is this where you’ve been disappearing to?” she said, trying not to let her nerves show. “I just figured you were getting lost coming from your bedroom to the living room or searching for clean underwear!”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Freddie. “It must be my turn to do the washing up.” He stood up and tried to leave the room.

  Imogen blocked his path, her hands on her hips, hoping she looked a lot braver than she felt. She could still hear Freddie’s new, cold voice threatening poor Pete. “You’re not getting out of here till you admit what you’re doing. And until you tell me exactly how it works,” she said.

  Freddie sighed. He straightened up, ran his hand through his hair, and wiped the toothpaste from his collar. He seemed to notice the hole in his sweater for the first time, frowned, and adjusted it so it wasn’t quite as noticeable. “All right,” he said, not sounding like the Freddie she knew; his voice was smoother and deeper and more confident. “I run Blandington’s most popular illegal gambling ring, that’s all.”

  “Most popular gambling ring?” said Imogen. That was the most surprising thing of all.

  “It’s quite profitable, actually,” said Freddie.

  “So . . . is that how you’ve been paying Mrs. Teakettle?” She’d been wondering. She thought maybe he’d been selling items from the Loot Cellar on eBay.

  Freddie nodded. “See? I’m using my money for the good of the family.”

  Imogen didn’t know what to say.

  “The police are always trying to figure out who’s running the poker ring, but they don’t suspect me at all,” continued Freddie. “I’ve perfected the being-hopeless-at-everything routine.”

  Imogen’s head was spinning. She sat down on one of the chairs around the table to try to gather her thoughts. “You mean forgetting to put your trousers on in the morning is an act? And you do know what day it is and what your name is and how to spell the word ‘butter’?”