The Crims Read online

  She decided to try a different tactic. “Look, Mum,” she said. “I’m trying to be a good daughter. I’m following the Code of the Crims—I’m trying to get you out of here. Don’t you realize how much trouble you’re in?”

  The other Crims just stared at her.

  “But that’s the brilliant thing!” said Josephine. “We were on the news. On the television, sweetie!”

  Imogen sighed. Being a celebrity criminal was the ultimate goal of all the Crims, though only Big Nana had achieved it. Imogen remembered the time her grandmother had been arrested for dressing up as Prince Charles and stealing 578 silver spoons from a Buckingham Palace garden party. The family had thrown a big party to watch her arrest on television. There had been balloons and cupcakes with Big Nana’s face on them, and everyone had danced to “Jailhouse Rock.”

  And just two weeks later, during the Underwater Submarine Heist—a terrible idea, in retrospect—Big Nana had died, and Imogen’s whole world had fallen apart. The person she aspired to be exactly like when she grew up (only with more teeth) had been killed. She had never even considered that Big Nana could die—she’d assumed Big Nana was pretty much immortal, like a god or a cockroach. And she’d never really considered that committing crimes was wrong or dangerous—it was just what her family did. But Big Nana’s death put everything in perspective.

  Big Nana was the best criminal Imogen had ever known, and crime had still killed her.

  That realization had ended Imogen’s criminal career. She’d headed off to Lilyworth, vowing to use her cleverness to secure a future for herself.

  It seemed, however, that none of the other Crims had learned similar lessons about crime paying (or not).

  Imogen sucked in a breath and turned back to her mother’s delighted face. She thought of the two years she’d spent at Lilyworth, not even coming home during school vacations. Then, she’d only been able to imagine the very stupid ideas her family was involved in. Now here it was, smacking her in the face. And suddenly, it made her furious.

  “Why are you all so STUPID?” she yelled, looking from her mother to the others. She caught the eye of her father, biting his lip in the background, but quickly looked away. “How can you still think it’s glamorous to break the law? You’re going to be in prison for the rest of your lives—and you got me kicked out of school, too, the school I love and have been doing very well at. NOT THAT ANY OF YOU EVEN NOTICED!”

  Shaking, she turned away and stomped up the corridor.

  “Darling! Wait!” called Josephine.

  “Imogen, dear!” her father called after her. But Imogen was already back at the front office. The police officers were playing Scrabble now. They looked up, seemed to notice her beet-red face, and laughed at her. All except PC Donnelly.

  “Reunion going well, is it?” asked Detective Sergeant White. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  Imogen swallowed. She wanted to knock his block off, to explode in a hail of expletives—and Imogen Crim would have. But Imogen Collins was Teflon. She would not let them get to her. She took a few deep breaths, then smiled her most Bridget Sweetwine–like smile, and said in her most head girlish voice: “I have a proposition for you: If my family can show you how sorry they are—and if they return the stolen lunch box to its rightful owner—will you let them go?”

  The police officers looked at one another. “That’s an interesting proposition,” said Detective Sergeant White.

  “Is it?” said PC Donnelly.

  “Maybe if they were really, really sorry . . .,” said Inspector Jones.

  “Maybe if they sang us a song about how sorry they were?” suggested PC Phillips, scratching his head.

  Imogen’s heart lifted. Her plan might work after all. “I’m sure that could be arranged!” she said. Uncle Knuckles could be quite musical.

  The police officers looked at one another again and started to laugh.

  “As if !” said Detective Sergeant White. “The Crims have been the scourge of Blandington for two whole generations now! We finally have the evidence we need to put them away for good! Did you really think we’d let them go?”

  Imogen’s heart crashed back down. She turned before they could see how disappointed she was and pushed the door to the police station open, the horrible sound of police laughter ringing in her ears.

  “Wait!”

  Imogen looked around. PC Donnelly was hurrying down the corridor after her, like an uncoordinated elk.

  “Listen,” he said quietly, “if you can persuade your family to give the lunch box back, they’d definitely get a reduced sentence.”

  “Really?” Imogen didn’t want to get her hopes up again.

  “Really. It’s still worth trying to convince them.”

  Imogen smiled at him sadly. “Not sure how easy that’s going to be,” she said, “seeing as going to prison is the culmination of their lives’ ambitions.”

  PC Donnelly put his hand on her shoulder. “If anyone can persuade them, it’s you,” he said. “You’re a smart girl. You know what ‘culmination’ means.”

  “I’ll try,” said Imogen, feeling slightly better. “Thanks, Donovan.”

  Imogen dragged her feet as she walked back to Crim House. The sky was as gray as the streets of Blandington. It seemed as though the sun had realized what a terrible day it was and retreated behind the clouds. Maybe I’ll just give up, too, thought Imogen. Why should I bother trying to help my family? If the Code of the Crims meant anything to them, they’d be trying to help me—they’d be doing everything they could to get out of prison so that I could go back to Lilyworth.

  Imogen stopped walking, staring up at the unexciting trees and reminding herself of something her English teacher at Lilyworth had once said: “Imogen, your essay about the use of symbolic chickens in Great Expectations brought tears to my eyes. It made me ponder the meaning of my own existence. It’s not every eleven-year-old who realizes that chickens are the perfect symbol for hope.” Imogen breathed in, remembering her teacher’s hand on her shoulder, and mouthed the words along with her memory. “Imogen, you have such a bright future ahead of you. You could run a company or a charity or an entire country. I hope that you’ll stay at Lilyworth and try your very best. You can’t let anyone or anything prevent you from realizing your full potential.”

  My full potential. Imogen opened her eyes. It occurred to her then that this wasn’t about helping her family. This was about helping herself. She just had to get her family out of jail and prove them innocent—somehow—and then she could go back to Lilyworth and become head girl and destroy Bridget Sweetwine and then go on to run the actual world, as God intended.

  And then she realized—it was Friday. Which meant the head girl election was only three weeks away. Which meant Imogen had less than fourteen days to find the lunch box and get her family to give it back to Jack Wooster and persuade the police to let them go and beg her headmistress to let her come back to school, and deliver her incredible campaign speech to get all her fellow pupils to vote for her. . . . She felt dizzy. Her heart began to race. Don’t panic, Imogen, she told herself. You can do this. But she was panicking. Because she wanted to get out of Blandington more than she’d ever wanted anything, and she had absolutely no time to lose.

  COMING BACK TO Crim House was the exact opposite of relaxing. Imogen walked into the living room, hoping to jump right on the computer and Google sightings of the missing lunch box and techniques for getting hardened criminals to repent their ways, but the living room was very much occupied. The Horrible Children were all there, sitting in a circle playing poker and smoking. Even Isabella was puffing on a cigarette, as if she’d been smoking since birth. Which she probably had, Imogen realized.

  There were piles of unmarked banknotes on the table—at least £10,000, Imogen calculated. She was good at mental arithmetic, particularly when it involved stolen goods. She’d once had to calculate exactly how many croissants they’d need to steal to keep them going on the way home from a particularly diffi
cult snail-smuggling trip to the south of France. Scattered among the banknotes were gold necklaces, silver bracelets, and some half-melted chocolate buttons.

  Delia saw Imogen looking at the chocolate buttons. “That’s Isabella’s first haul!” she said, smiling at their little cousin fondly. “She stole them from a baby in the park all by herself!” She shifted over on the sofa and patted the space next to her. “You can play poker with us if you like,” she said. “We’ve only just started. Isabella’s a natural, but she might need a bit of help with her hand.”

  Imogen looked at Isabella. She was sitting on Henry’s lap, chewing her cards and spitting them all over the floor.

  Henry looked at the half-digested cards. “I think that would have been a royal flush,” he said proudly.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t fancy playing,” said Imogen, though watching them did give her a pang of nostalgia. By the time she had left for Lilyworth, she’d been the family Texas Hold’em champion three years in a row. Her poker face had been so good that she’d had to learn how to smile all over again when she went to Lilyworth. But she’d given that all up. Future World Leaders don’t gamble.

  “Suit yourself,” said Delia, pulling another cigarette out of the packet.

  “Delia,” said Imogen. “Seriously. When did you start smoking? And you’re letting Isabella smoke? Haven’t you heard of cancer?”

  Delia laughed. “God, Imogen—you’re so boring these days. Have one.” She picked up the cigarette packet and held it out to Imogen.

  Imogen took the packet. Now that she was looking at it closely, she could see that the cigarettes were made of candy. She took one and smiled despite herself. “I remember these!” she said. “Weren’t they discontinued years ago?”

  “Yes,” said Delia, trying to sneak a look at Henry’s hand. “But Uncle Clyde got a whole case of them in the Crunchybits Heist!”

  Ah, the Crunchybits Heist. Imogen remembered it well. About five years previously, the Crims had broken into a sweets factory and stolen a truckload of candy cigarettes and licorice cigars and chocolate machetes. (Crunchybits specialized in making sweets that grandparents disapproved of. Grandparents who weren’t Big Nana, that is—the toffee semiautomatic rifles were her favorite.) The Horrible Children had had a lot of dental work that year.

  “Are you sure these are still safe to eat?” Imogen asked.

  Delia scowled and snatched the packet back from Imogen. “What happened to you?” she said. “Don’t you take any risks now?”

  “Yes, actually,” said Imogen, folding her arms. “On the way back from the police station this morning, I crossed the road without looking both ways.”

  Delia shook her head. “You’re really not a Crim anymore, are you?” she said. “Why did you bother coming back here at all? Oh yeah, I forgot—because you’re a massive tattletale who loves spoiling everyone else’s fun.”

  “I am not a tattletale . . .,” started Imogen, her face flushing, but then Nate (or Nick) put down his cards and shouted “Four of a kind!” and Sam screeched “Cheater!” and Henry set fire to his cards and threw them on the floor, and Imogen got a bit distracted.

  “Fire! Fire!” shouted Isabella, clapping her hands as Imogen and Delia stamped on the flames to put them out.

  Imogen took a deep breath. She should be in her warm, safe room at Lilyworth, practicing her head girl acceptance speech. Instead, she was putting out a literal fire for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  Then a thought came to her, cool and refreshing as a summer breeze: This is not my problem. Her cousins might be a mess, but they were Freddie’s mess, not hers. She just had to focus on getting her family out of jail and winning back her place at school. She wasn’t getting sucked back into any Crim drama. She wasn’t going to let anyone or anything prevent her from reaching her full potential.

  Not even arson.

  Imogen left the Horrible Children in the living room fighting and shouting and giving themselves food poisoning. “Freddie?” she called. It was time for her to begin searching for the lunch box. And she knew just the place to start.

  “In here!” shouted Freddie. She followed his voice down the hallway into the laundry room. He seemed to be climbing into the washing machine.

  “It might be easier to have a shower,” said Imogen.

  Freddie emerged from the washing machine, hair rumpled, a pile of pale-pink clothes in his arms.

  “Doing Delia’s washing for her now, are you?” Imogen asked.

  “This isn’t Delia’s,” Freddie said miserably, holding up a single red sock. “What can I do for you, anyway?”

  Very little, probably, Imogen thought, looking at Freddie’s pink clothes and his wonky glasses and the sweater he’d managed to put on backward. “You might want to go to the living room,” she said, turning to leave. And then she paused. Maybe Delia is right, she thought. Maybe I have turned into a tattletale—although I prefer to think of myself as a whistle-blower. She shook off her worry and turned back to Freddie. “You have to go and sort our cousins out before they kill us all,” she said.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have left Delia in charge,” Freddie said morosely as he slumped off down the hallway, knocking over a box of laundry powder on his way.

  “By the way,” Imogen called after him, “is the code to the Loot Cellar still the same as it used to be?”

  Freddie stopped and turned to look at her. “Yes,” he said. “Why?”

  “No particular reason,” Imogen said, cursing herself—the last thing she needed was Freddie interfering in her lunch box–finding mission.

  And then a scream came from the direction of the living room, followed by a crash, followed by Isabella saying, “KNIFE! So shiny!,” and Freddie dashed off.

  Imogen hurried down the corridor, past the kitchen and the dungeon and the coin-counterfeiting room, until she reached the door to the cellar. If the Crims really had stolen the lunch box, this is where it would be. For as long as she could remember, the Crims had stored their stolen booty in the Loot Cellar. Each of them took the spoils of their crimes straight to the cellar after every heist or burglary or trip to the aquarium. And each of them had taken an oath to protect the location of the Loot Cellar with their life! Although unfortunately, Imogen considered for the first time, the name “Loot Cellar” was a bit of a giveaway, and pretty much anyone could have worked out it was in the basement of Crim House.

  Big Nana had stolen the door to the Loot Cellar from a local circus school. It had a clown’s face painted on the front and was completely terrifying. In the middle of the door, on the clown’s red nose, was a complicated combination lock featuring numbers, letters, the Chinese alphabet, and pictures of the Smurfs (Big Nana had been a huge fan). Imogen took a deep breath and typed the code into the lock: “Papa Smurf,” “Lazy Smurf,” and the word “RECIDIVISM.” The door popped open. Imogen’s heart beat loudly in her ears as she stepped inside the cellar, shutting the door behind her.

  She shivered. The Loot Cellar was freezing, partly because it had been carved out from beneath the house and partly because Freddie had a thing for stealing industrial-sized fridges and a terrible habit of leaving doors open. The cellar was far fuller now than it had been when Imogen had last visited it over two years before. She gazed up at the rows and rows of mostly useless items that had been stolen over the years—shelves and shelves of VHS tapes packaged in boxes that read “Blockbuster,” a painted life-sized cow, countless sets of encyclopedias from the year 1994, a badly stuffed otter . . . She felt her stomach twist as she caught sight of the first thing she had ever stolen—a packet of balloons that she’d taken from another child’s treat bag back at Delia’s fifth birthday party. She took them down from the shelf and looked at them fondly. She bet Isabella would get a kick out of blowing them up and then bursting them. Then she shook off the thought. I’m not getting sucked back in.

  And then, in the gloom, Imogen saw something else—a painting. She stepped toward it, and ga
sped—it was Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, famously stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston by thieves dressed as police officers. Big Nana had taught all the Crim children about art history, so they’d be able to appreciate beautiful works of art before they slashed the canvasses and sold them to the highest bidder. Imogen had never really believed her hopeless relatives could pull off a sophisticated art theft . . . but here was the evidence, right in front of her. Is it possible? Maybe I really have been underestimating them. . . .

  Imogen walked gingerly over to the painting. She leaned down to pick it up—but it fell over. And that’s when she realized that it wasn’t a painting at all—it was just a poster of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee that someone had stuck over a picture of a crying clown on black velvet.

  Imogen sighed. She felt a rush of relief. Of course there wasn’t anything really valuable in the Loot Cellar. Except the lunch box, supposedly. But even if that was here, how was she going to find it among the eight track players and Bart Simpson T-shirts and disturbing amateur taxidermy?

  Which is when someone cleared his throat behind her.

  Imogen spun around guiltily to find Freddie standing there, framed in the doorway. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  Imogen paused. There was a steeliness to Freddie’s voice that she hadn’t heard before. “How are the Horrible Children?” she asked, filling time while she figured out how much she was going to tell him.

  “Slightly less horrible,” said Freddie. “I told them off and settled them down in front of a Postman Pat DVD.”