The Crims #2 Page 17

  “Let’s not worry about that now, my prize turnip. We need a plan.”

  “I have one,” said Imogen. “I think. Play along.”

  “I haven’t brought my flute,” said Big Nana.

  Imogen looked at her.

  “Sorry,” mouthed Big Nana, and she squeezed Imogen’s hand. “I trust you, whatever your plan is. Let’s do it.”

  Imogen closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and started twitching and yelping; eyes rolling and mouth agape.

  “She’s having a seizure!” screamed Big Nana. “Stop the car! My granddaughter has diabetes, and she hasn’t had anything to eat today! She’s going into a coma!”

  “Ah well,” said Stefan, eyes firmly on the road. “I was going to kill her anyway. It’ll save me the effort.”

  “Pathetic!” said Big Nana. “You’re not man enough to kill her yourself.”

  “Of course I am,” said Stefan, taking his eyes off the road. “I am extremely man. I have extra man chromosomes and everything.” As if determined to prove it, he pulled the car over, climbed out, and walked around to the back seat. . . .

  Imogen waited, eyes closed.

  She had to get the timing just right.

  Click. The door opened. And so did Imogen’s eyes. She head butted Stefan, knocking him back into the street, and ran as fast as her gold-medal-in-the-hundred-meter-race legs would carry her, which was really quite fast.

  “I don’t think so!” Stefan shouted, catching up.

  If she could just push a little bit farther . . .

  But she couldn’t. Stefan grabbed her by the hair and shoved her to the ground.

  Imogen tried to get up, but Stefan’s grip was too strong. She lay there, defeated.

  But then she heard Big Nana scream from the car behind her: “Keep going! I’m counting on you! All the Crims are!”

  Stefan looked up. He was obviously debating who was the bigger prize—Imogen or Big Nana. Imogen took her chance. She swiveled herself around and kicked Stefan as hard as she could in a place that men really don’t like to be kicked, and then she pelted away as fast as she could.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IMOGEN RAN THROUGH the streets of Blandington, not daring to look back. At first she heard Stefan’s footsteps chasing after her, but at some point he must have given up and turned back to Big Nana, because by the time she arrived at Crim House, she was alone.

  Imogen wasn’t really sure why she’d come back here. And she wasn’t really sure what to do next. She stood on the street corner, panting, trying to get her breath back, watching the house for signs of movement.

  Were the Kruks still inside?

  It didn’t look like it. . . .

  Using Big Nana’s Extremely Silent and Sneaky Walking technique, she crept up the back path, stepping around Freddie’s booby traps, and opened the door.

  The house was silent. It was also extremely messy. More messy than usual, which is saying something, because you usually had to step over several tortoises and a couple crossbows to go to the bathroom.

  The place had been ransacked. Every cupboard was open; stolen takeout containers and jewelry and balaclavas were scattered across the floor. Pictures had been ripped from their frames, and every single book had been torn from the bookshelves. Imogen spotted Delia’s signed Kitty Penguin poster lying on the living room floor and carefully picked it up. Delia will be home soon, she told herself. Although I could use her help right now. . . .

  Imogen picked her way downstairs to the Loot Cellar. The door was hanging from its hinges. It had been blown open, by the looks of things. Imogen stepped inside, fear spreading up her spine.

  What have they taken? Imogen had spent a lot of time looking around the Loot Room—too much time, you might say. Time she could have spent doing something useful, like learning Mandarin or figuring out how to stop her relatives being kidnapped. She worked her way around the Loot Room from front to back, but as far as she could tell, everything was still here—Uncle Knuckles’s tap shoes; the original Broadway cast of Cats; even Uncle Clyde’s million-pound lunch box.

  Imogen was puzzled, and not by the sudoku collection Sam had stolen from the local old people’s home. Sure, the Crims’ collection contained a lot of rubbish. But there were some valuable things down here, too. The lunch box, for instance.

  If the Kruks weren’t interested in the Crims’ valuable belongings, then they must have been looking for something specific.

  But what?

  Could it possibly be . . . ?

  Imogen ran to Big Nana’s room. Her grandmother’s things were everywhere—the framed photographs had been pulled from the walls and trodden into the carpet; the pillows had been slashed open and lay on the floor, as if a duck massacre had recently taken place there; and Big Nana’s clothes were all over the bed. The only thing missing from the room was Big Nana.

  Imogen pushed aside the mattress, which had been thrown against the closet, which had been ransacked—but the secret door at the back was shut. She pressed on it, and it sprang open once again.

  The space behind the closet was untouched. The toy hippo and the picture book were still inside.

  Imogen picked up the book and flipped through it. What was it that Big Nana had said? That she never went back to finish reading the story. . . . Imogen turned to the very front of the book and read the inscription. To Elsa.

  Everyone said that Elsa was crazy. And word just got out that Big Nana was still alive. How crazy was Elsa, exactly? Crazy enough to destroy an entire family because she didn’t know the ending to a picture book?

  “Barney!” Imogen called.

  She heard a bark, and sure enough, Barney came bounding toward her, wagging his creepily realistic tail. The Kruks must have left him behind to guard Crim House.

  She held up the book.

  “Is this what you want?” she asked.

  The dog made an assortment of beeping sounds and lunged toward the book. Imogen yanked it away just in time. Barney growled a metallic sort of growl that made Imogen shudder, and then he lunged at her again. He missed and chewed through Big Nana’s iron bedpost instead, as though it was no more substantial than a stick of licorice.

  “Not so fast,” Imogen said. “I’ll come on my own, in my own time. And if you don’t want me to destroy this book, you won’t touch a single hair on the head of a single Crim. Unless it’s one of Josephine’s gray hairs—she’s always asking people to pull them out for her, so she’d probably be quite grateful. Got it?”

  She didn’t wait for a reply. She reached for the switch under Barney’s ear and flicked it off. The dog gave a strange, metallic sighing noise and crumpled to the floor.

  She pulled on her coat, put the picture book in her pocket, and, staggering under the weight of the robot dog thrown over her shoulder, she left Crim House and headed down the hill. Time to pay a visit to the Guds . . .

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IMOGEN STOOD OUTSIDE the Guds’ white picket fence, eyeing the garden gno, watching for signs of life (or death) at the windows. She saw a curtain in one of the upstairs rooms twitch. Mind you, if she were a curtain belonging to a Kruk, she would twitch too; the poor thing was probably traumatized by whatever horrors it had witnessed.

  She had no idea what was going to happen next, but she had a feeling—a strong, unpleasant, terrifying feeling—that she wasn’t going to like it.

  Imogen powered up the robot dog again. It stood up and shook itself off, and then Barney was back, barking and licking Imogen’s face. She looked into Barney’s eyes. “I’m here,” she said, hoping she sounded braver than she felt. “And I want to see my family.”

  The door to the house creaked open, and a stiff-looking butler appeared on the doorstep—the same stiff-looking butler she’d met at Krukingham Palace, who had been so keen on coloring books and poisoning people with cyanide.

  “Welcome,” he said, but he didn’t sound as though he meant it.

  Imogen stepped into the house. The inside wa
s just as boring as the outside—the floor was covered in the same beige carpets favored by everyone in Blandington (apart from the Crims) and the walls were papered in a revolting floral pattern that managed to be simultaneously dull and exhausting to look at. Gold-framed, soft-focus family portraits were dotted around: a school photograph of Ava; Ava with Elsa, laughing on a beach somewhere; Elsa with a strange-looking boy, who Imogen knew was strange because he was wearing a T-shirt with “strange” written on the front . . .

  “Follow me,” said the butler, and led Imogen down a hall, and down some stairs, and down some more stairs, and then down an escalator, and then down an elevator, until Imogen started to worry he was taking her right to the center of Earth to be melted to death by molten rock. But he wasn’t, luckily.

  The elevator opened on a gold-plated entrance hall. Of course, Imogen thought as she followed the butler out of the lift. The Kruks’ Blandington headquarters isn’t just an ordinary, boring house. The ordinary, boring house is a cover for a very extraordinary, exciting underground palace. And from the looks of things, the Kruks had really gone to town this time. Literally—they had stolen landmarks from all over London to decorate their Blandington pad. The statue of Eros from the middle of Piccadilly Circus was taking up most of the entrance hall, and Imogen noticed the London Eye—a huge Ferris wheel that usually sat next to the river Thames—in what looked like a children’s playroom.

  “This way,” said the butler, stepping into the hall—and slipping over straightaway. Gold floors are pretty slippery, it turns out. The butler swore under his breath and gripped on to the handrail on one of the walls. This was clearly a regular problem.

  Imogen followed suit—the butler was wearing a very distinctive suit—and the two of them slipped and slid their way down the entrance hall, crashing into Eros more than once, gripping on to the handrail like people who have never been ice-skating before and never want to go again.

  Eventually, after falling over a few more times, they arrived at a big, black door with a sign that read: “Basement Torture Room. Protective Clothing Advised.” This is a bad sign, Imogen thought. She’d never seen a nastier sign, not even the one in Krukingham Palace that read “Sensory Deprivation Chamber.”

  The butler unlocked the door with a massive key, and the door swung open. Imogen stepped onto the tiles that lined the outside of the room, and suppressed a scream—because inside the room, which was really more of an indoor swimming pool, was her family. Imogen was glad to see them, but what made her scream was that they were suspended above the swimming pool in a small, square wire cage, looking a bit squashed and unhappy. The adult Crims were standing on the floor of the cage, but there wasn’t enough room for the Horrible Children down there, too, so her cousins had climbed up the walls of their prison and were clinging on, looking terrified. Delia spotted Imogen, and her eyes widened. Imogen shook her head just slightly: Don’t say anything. Not yet. . . .

  Big Nana was right at the front of the cage, the side closest to Imogen. She caught Imogen’s eye and jerked her head toward the pool. Imogen glanced down and noticed that the water seemed unusually dark and writhe-y. She looked at it more closely—and then wished she hadn’t. Because swimming around in the pool, thrashing their small but powerful tails and gnashing their small but powerful teeth, were too many piranhas.

  Now I get why Big Nana made me do laps in the piranha pond, thought Imogen. But there are only about eight piranhas in our pond. It looks as though there might be eight thousand in there. . . .

  “Imogen, darling!” Josephine blowing her a kiss from the back of the cage. “I knew you’d come! You could have dressed up a bit for the occasion, though. I always think silk is the best fabric to wear when staging a dramatic rescue.”

  “Is it really you?” said PC Donnelly, who was squashed up next to Uncle Clyde, looking particularly miserable. “I’ve never been so pleased to see a Crim in my life! No offense,” he said to Aunt Bets, who was baring her teeth at him.

  “Hurry up and get us out of here!” said Delia. “The finale of The Z Factor is tonight!” The Z Factor was Delia’s favorite show—a load of people who had failed to make a career in show business competed for the title of world’s worst entertainer. Not being forced to watch it had been the one good thing about Delia going missing.

  Imogen felt a little surge of joy at seeing her family back together again, despite the piranha-filled circumstances. But there was one person she was particularly anxious to see. . . . “Is Dad there?” she asked.

  A hand and a spectacle-wearing head appeared beneath Nick and Nate. “Hello,” said Al. “It’s been a while. Thirty-four days and nineteen minutes, to be exact.”

  “I love it when you’re exact!” said Imogen.

  Then a blond, curly haired woman stepped into the room from the gold entrance hall—the same blond, curly haired woman Imogen had seen at school with Ava—and the joy surged right back out of her.

  Elsa Kruk.

  Imogen had been hoping against hope that Elsa wouldn’t appear until she had freed her family. But here she was. Things had just gotten even more dangerous.

  And next to Elsa, panting, still looking ridiculously cheerful, trotted Barney.

  “Barney!” said Nick and Nate.

  “Don’t bother,” Imogen told them. “He’s the mole. The second one. And he’s got a circuit board instead of a heart.”

  The Crims all gasped.

  “I knew I was right to hate that dog,” muttered Aunt Bets.

  “YOU HATE EVERYTHING, THOUGH, YOU DELIGHTFUL SOCIOPATH,” pointed out Uncle Knuckles.

  Barney stayed by the doorway while Elsa walked around the edge of the room to the tiled area closest to the cage and rested her hand on a lever on the wall—a lever that seemed to be attached to the cage. . . .

  And then two Kruk boys, who Imogen realized must be Ava’s brothers, followed their mother into the room, with the air of children who have been dragged to their mother’s office when they’d much rather be outside playing football. Except that they were wearing tuxedos, because they were Kruks.

  “It’s you!” said all the kidnapped Crims at once, pointing at the boys because the taller of the two was the one who had shoved them all into sacks. And the shorter of the two boys was the strange boy who had tricked them all. They could tell it was him at once, because he had “strange” written across his cummerbund in Swarovski crystals (the Kruks must have been cutting back, diamond-wise).

  Imogen recognized them both—they had been two of the children who had sung at Luka Kruk’s birthday party, which she and her cousins had crashed for complicated reasons—but they had clearly started experimenting with hair dye.

  And then an even more familiar figure followed the boys into the room and hovered behind them, near the door, as though she’d rather not be there—a figure with a great ponytail and a perfect grade point average.

  Ava Kruk.

  Imogen hadn’t seen her since Ava had tried to kill her and they’d made a temporary peace. She looked different—like she hadn’t slept much recently. And for the first time since Imogen had met her, she looked a little nervous.

  Imogen tried to catch Ava’s eye, but she was staring at the floor, like there was something really interesting about it, which there was (the tiles were made of solid unicorn bone).

  Elsa looked annoyed and bored. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?” said Elsa. She removed her hand from the lever, took up her evil monologue pose—one arm on her hip, one in the air—and cleared her throat.

  “Four score and ten years ago it has been since you betrayed me, Big Nana.” She stared right at Big Nana, who was watching her, apparently quite unimpressed, from her position at the front of the cage.

  “I don’t think that’s quite right,” piped up Al from the middle of the cage. He was just as pedantic as Imogen and much worse at knowing when to shut up. “A score is twenty years, so that would be ninety years ago—”

  “SILENCE!” screamed Elsa
. “But point taken.” She cleared her throat again. “One score and ten years ago, you, Big Nana, betrayed me. ME! Elsa Kruk! And I have never forgiven you. And I never will.”

  “If you could just tell me what I did, maybe we could clear this whole thing up,” said Big Nana. “We’ve all been absurdly curious.”

  “You know what you did!” shrieked Elsa like a very bad actress delivering a hammy, amateur performance of Lady Macbeth. “You never finished reading me my story!” She pouted like a six-year-old, but she was thirty-six, so it looked all wrong—like a baby in a suit, except a lot less adorable than that sounds.

  I knew it, thought Imogen. She couldn’t resist giving herself a mini–high five. A clap, essentially. But no one noticed, which was okay.

  “I never got to finish that book!” wailed Elsa. “And it was my favorite book! And I’ve never been able to find another copy—not on eBay, not even on AbeBooks. I have trawled the internet for years! I have trawled the seas, too, for good measure! All I have to show for it is a very advanced knowledge of cyberslang and a lot of halibut. I’ve even looked in libraries. LIBRARIES! Do you know what libraries smell like?”

  “Books and rubber stamps and ink and self-adhesive tape,” Imogen muttered wistfully.

  Ava looked over from the doorway and gave her a warning “shut up” look.

  “WRONG!” shouted Elsa, stamping her food. “They smell of DUST AND OBEDIENCE!”

  None of the Crims said anything. There isn’t really anything you can say in answer to the phrase “dust and obedience” except “Wouldn’t that have been a lovely name for a Victorian novel if someone had thought of it at the time?”

  “And now,” said Elsa, her evil monologue building to its crescendo, “NOW I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!” She looked at Imogen. “You. Get in the cage.”

  “It looks quite full already,” said Imogen.

  “I SAID GET IN!” screamed Elsa, leaning toward her, her eyes squeezed shut in fury.

  The butler rushed over and grabbed a ladder that was leaning against the wall near the lever, and then rested it against the cage. He climbed up, pressed a button, and the top of the cage popped open. He climbed down and bowed to Imogen. “After you,” he said.