The Crims Read online

  Imogen tried to imagine her criminally minded cousins sitting quietly in front of a show for preschoolers, but she couldn’t—that seemed about as likely as Big Nana coming back from the dead or Aunt Bets being voted president of the local Womens’ Institute.

  “So . . . is there something I can help you with?” Freddie said again. “Sorry if you’ve already told me. Memory’s not been the same since I forgot how tall I was and hit my head on the ceiling this morning. Mind you, I suppose it wasn’t all that great before that. . . .”

  “Yes, actually,” said Imogen, deciding that honesty was the best policy. “I’m looking for the stolen lunch box. Do you have any idea where it might be?”

  “Of course I don’t!” said Freddie. “I’m me! Why do you need to find it, anyway?”

  “If we give it back to Jack Wooster, maybe we can get the adults out of jail. And we won’t have to look after the Horrible Children anymore.”

  “I like your thinking,” said Freddie, nodding. “I’ll help look. You take the back half of the cellar, and I’ll search in the front.”

  Imogen nodded and walked to the darkest, dampest, most disturbing corner at the back of the cellar, where the very first stolen goods were stored. She felt a prickle of awe as she looked around at the reminders of her family’s criminal legacy—there was so much history here in this room. She picked up what looked like a Tudor ruff and called to Freddie excitedly. “Do you think one of our ancestors stole this?”

  Freddie turned to look at it and hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “That’s where it is! I was supposed to wear that to play the Ghost of Christmas Past in last year’s Crim Family Pantomime, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I was recast as a ‘Kicking Boy.’”

  “What’s a ‘Kicking Boy’?” asked Imogen, handing him the ruff.

  “It’s a boy who everyone kicks.”

  “That’s not a real thing, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Freddie said sadly, shoving the ruff into his pocket and failing to notice when it fell out of the hole in the bottom. “I think Nick and Nate made it up so they could get back at me for getting them mixed up all the time. My bottom was quite sore by the end of the show.”

  Imogen made a mental note to try to work out which twin was which once and for all. “The Crim Family Pantomime won’t be much good this year if everyone is in jail, will it?” she said. But Freddie had already walked back to the front of the cellar and was busily sorting through a shelf of broken saucers.

  It took a very long time for Imogen to finish searching her half of the cellar. Her arms had started to ache from reaching up to take things from shelves, and her eyes had started to hurt from looking at so many hideous, pointless, worthless objects. She stood up and brushed the dust from her hands. “Haven’t found anything,” she called to Freddie. “You?”

  “I’ve found something!” he said.

  Imogen felt her heart leap in anticipation as her cousin appeared from behind a broken cuckoo clock, carrying some sort of scroll. Not the lunch box, then. Maybe some sort of paperwork that says where it was stored? He came closer, passing it to Imogen, being careful not to tear it.

  She opened it slowly. And then she looked at Freddie, as disappointed as she had been when she’d realized that Father Crimemas wasn’t real.

  “What?” said Freddie, still smiling. “It’s a Magic Eye poster!”

  “What does it have to do with the lunch box?” Imogen asked.

  “Nothing!” Freddie said cheerfully. “But it’s so cool. Look at it again and relax your eyes. Can you see the tiger?”

  Imogen reached out to smack him, but he dodged away, surprisingly quickly for someone so uncoordinated.

  Imogen put her head in her hands and sank to the floor, leaning against a full-size cardboard cutout of the cast of Home Alone 7: Slightly Disoriented in Milwaukee. She motioned for Freddie to sit down next to her. “Look,” she said. “I just don’t get it. If Uncle Clyde and the others did steal the lunch box, it should be in here. Right?”

  “Right,” said Freddie.

  “But I’ve checked my entire section.”

  “And I’ve checked mine!” Freddie said proudly.

  “Unless they’ve hidden the lunch box inside something else?” said Imogen.

  “Ooh,” said Freddie. “You are good at thinking, aren’t you?”

  “Come on,” said Imogen, turning to him. “Try to help me out here. What do you remember about the day of The Heist?”

  Freddie shrugged. “Obviously I completely forgot that The Heist was happening at all,” he said, “seeing as I didn’t turn up at Wooster Mansion and do what I was meant to do.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket (the one without the hole in it) and sighed. “I really don’t know how I forgot that, though. I usually set a phone alarm for important things.” He passed his phone to Imogen. Four alarms were going off at the same time: “Get mole checked out,” “Pick Imogen up from the station,” “Brush teeth,” and “Take the roast out of the oven.”

  “You’ve turned the sound off,” said Imogen, passing his phone back to him. “That might be why you haven’t noticed the alarms.”

  “Good point,” said Freddie, fiddling with the phone.

  “By the way, I can actually smell smoke,” said Imogen, sniffing.

  Freddie glanced at the ceiling, as though he might see through it into the kitchen. “I think I put the roast in the oven yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday was Tuesday, right?”

  “Yesterday was Thursday,” Imogen said.

  “Ah,” said Freddie, standing up. “Excuse me just a moment!” He put the phone back into his pocket—the one with the hole in it this time—and it fell to the floor as he ran out of the room. Imogen started to say something, then thought better of it. Instead, she scooted over, picked it up, and slipped Freddie’s phone into her pocket.

  While Freddie was gone, Imogen began to search his half of the cellar, just in case he’d missed something, which wasn’t exactly beyond the realm of possibility. After about half an hour, she came across something interesting. Not the lunch box—she was becoming more and more convinced that it wasn’t in the cellar at all—but the criminal plans journal Big Nana had made her keep when she was a kid. Big Nana gave each Crim a blank notebook for their fifth birthdays to record their ideas for future crimes. She encouraged them to “use their crimaginations” to decorate the front of their notebooks, too. Henry had defaced his with graffiti and burns, Delia’s was covered in signed photos of her favorite master criminals, but Big Nana had been most proud of the way Imogen had decorated her journal—she had written “Photographs of My Favorite Verrucae” on the front. “That way no one will ever want to look inside,” she’d told Big Nana. Big Nana had kissed her on the forehead and said, “You’re the pomegranate of my eye.” (Big Nana didn’t like apples.)

  Imogen opened her criminal plans journal and flicked through the pages, smiling as she read through some of her old ideas: a plan to steal Uncle Knuckles’s false teeth and use them as hair clips, a scheme to replace Freddie’s cologne with bathroom cleaner so he smelled a bit like a toilet all day, and a plot to hack into the police’s walkie-talkies, pretending to be their chief constable, so she could shout at them and get them to call her “ma’am.” She still quite fancied giving that plan a go, actually . . . but she was getting distracted. She had to focus on finding evidence of The Heist.

  She slapped the journal shut and took out Freddie’s phone. It was protected by a password. If I were Freddie, what would my password be? she asked herself. Maybe it’s “FREDDIE”? No . . . no one would use their own name as a password. . . . Except Freddie, it turned out—the phone unlocked as soon as she tapped it in. Imogen went to the calendar and looked back through the days, searching for the alarm Freddie would have set to remind himself to take part in The Heist. Her family had only just been arrested, so The Heist must have taken place some time in the last couple of months. But she went back through the whole of the pre
vious year, and she didn’t find a single reminder about The Heist. Maybe Freddie hadn’t set one at all? But that was unlikely, she thought, as she flicked past reminders saying “Go to the toilet,” “Eat breakfast before it gets dark,” and the one he’d set that day: “Collect Imogen’s bags from station.” Could that mean— No. Her family was crazy, but surely they weren’t crazy enough to serve time for a crime that someone else had committed? They had seemed so proud earlier. And she wanted to believe that they could pull off The Heist. But—

  “Sorry! That took a bit longer than I expected,” said Freddie, stumbling back into the cellar, his hands and face covered in bandages.

  “Are you okay?” Imogen asked, slipping his phone back into her pocket. “Was the roast on fire?”

  Freddie looked confused for a moment, and then he said, “Oh—the roast! No. It looks like I forgot to put the roast into the oven, too. But the cousins set the back porch on fire. Again. But it’s fine! Totally fine. I caught it before the fire consumed the steps. It’s just a bit smolder-y now.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, the kids are all cozied up together on the sofa, watching the Madagascar DVD. That’s their favorite.”

  Imogen couldn’t help being suspicious. “Have you definitely taken the lighter away from them this time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the matches?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the blowtorch?”

  Freddie put his hands on his hips. “Imogen,” he said. “We can’t completely stifle their freedom of expression!”

  Imogen put her hands on her hips, too. “Freddie,” she said, “you are hopeless!”

  “That’s not true,” said Freddie. “I have a lot of hopes. I hope that the cousins will behave themselves. . . . I hope the grown-ups will be coming home soon. . . . I hope there’ll be spaghetti Bolognese for dinner—you don’t happen to know how to make that, do you?”

  Imogen decided not to respond to that. “You have to hire a babysitter,” she said in her best head girl voice. “Preferably with some experience in the youth justice system.”

  Freddie looked at her for a moment. “That is actually not a bad idea,” he said, nodding slowly.

  “Of course it isn’t,” Imogen said, offended. “I never have bad ideas.”

  “Except that time you tried to steal Uncle Knuckles’s teeth and use them as hair clips.”

  “Come on . . . That was ingenious,” she said, a little put out. “Anyway, look at this.” Imogen pulled Freddie’s phone out of her pocket and showed him the calendar screen. “What do you see?”

  “Numbers and dates.”

  “Okay. What don’t you see?”

  “I don’t see lots of things. I don’t see a penguin, or a no-smoking sign, or a Turkish carpet, or—”

  “Or any notes about The Heist?”

  “Or that.”

  Imogen sighed. “When did The Heist actually happen, anyway? Was it last week? Last month?”

  Freddie pulled his thinking face. It looked uncomfortable, like he didn’t think very often. “I’m not sure,” he said. “There is a date that sticks out to me for some reason—December 25. No, wait, that was Crimenas. . . .”

  “Do you even remember being asked to take part in The Heist?”

  Freddie thought again. “I don’t think I do,” he said.

  “Do you remember the other Crims coming home very excited one day? Maybe as though they had just pulled off the heist that Uncle Clyde had been dreaming about for twenty years?”

  Freddie frowned. “There was one night a few weeks ago when everyone was very happy about something. . . . We had some balloons and cake and presents.”

  “Presents?”

  “No, wait! That was Isabella’s birthday. You should have seen her—she was adorable. She took the cake and threw it—”

  “FREDDIE!” yelled Imogen. A horrible certainty was coming over her.

  “YES?” Freddie yelled back. “WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?”

  “BECAUSE I’M GETTING ANNOYED WITH YOU!” yelled Imogen.

  “YOU ARE?” yelled Freddie.

  “Yes,” Imogen said more quietly; her throat was getting a bit sore. “Listen: We can’t find the lunch box. There’s no evidence of The Heist on your phone. You have no memory of anything strange or unusual or exciting happening. Do you know what this means?”

  Freddie looked confused for a moment. And then his eyes lit up, like cheap fairy lights. “It means I have narcolepsy!” he said.

  “NO!” yelled Imogen, shaking her head in frustration. “It means . . .”

  “THERE WAS NO HEIST!” yelled Imogen.

  “THERE WASN’T?” Freddie yelled back.

  “No!”

  “So I’m not a narcoleptic?”

  “Probably not!”

  “But you’re still annoyed with me?”

  “A little bit!” shouted Imogen. “But I’m more annoyed with the others. I can’t believe they’ve confessed to a crime they haven’t committed.”

  “I can believe it,” said Freddie, looking thoughtful. “Do you remember when Uncle Knuckles learned Italian and went around eating ice cream all the time so people would think he was a mafia boss?”

  “Sadly, yes,” said Imogen, her mind still buzzing. So her family really was innocent. She hadn’t underestimated them—or overestimated them—or, well, she wasn’t sure anymore. Once again, she was surprised to find herself feeling disappointed that her family hadn’t actually pulled off the crime. But she shook that thought away—this was a good thing. Her family was every bit as useless as she’d assumed, which meant she didn’t have to get them off for a crime they’d actually committed—she just had to prove that they hadn’t pulled off The Heist. She’d be back at Lilyworth in no time.

  Except, she realized . . . she had no real plan for how to prove that. Where would she even start? If her family didn’t know where the lunch box was—and if they kept insisting on taking credit for a crime they hadn’t committed—how was she ever going to get out of this mess?

  Imogen went to bed early that night. As she lay there, listening to Delia and the twins chatting in the living room below, she thought about her dorm room at Lilyworth. Lucy and Alice were probably eating chocolate and reading ghost stories by flashlight, laughing at Catherine’s snoring. They would probably stay up far too late without Imogen to tell them when it was time for lights-out.

  No matter, though. This time next week she’d be back there with them.

  She had to be.

  The alternative was too awful to even think about.

  The next morning, Imogen put on her best twinset and her most serious facial expression and walked back to the police station. She ignored the jeers of the police officers and marched to the cells to see her family.

  They were all asleep. They actually looked quite sweet when they were asleep—even Aunt Bets. Her head was resting on Uncle Knuckles’s shoulder, like she was an ordinary old lady rather than someone who had once stolen the playground from the local park because she “hated the sound of happy children.”

  Imogen rattled on the bars to wake them up.

  “Darling!” said Josephine, rubbing her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know what I’m doing here,” Imogen replied in her best Future World Leader voice.

  The Crims looked at one another, their faces blank—except her father, who looked at the floor.

  “I know,” said Josephine. “Have you come to bring us some of those lovely chocolate croissants from the bakery down the road?”

  “No,” said Imogen, getting impatient.

  “You want to tell us how brilliant we are for pulling off such an impressive crime?” said Uncle Clyde, raising his extremely large eyebrows.

  “Pretty much the opposite, actually,” said Imogen. She crossed her arms. “Come on. Admit it—PC Phillips won’t hear you. There wasn’t really a heist, was there?”

  Josephine gasped. “Darling! How could
you? Of course there was a heist!” She picked up a newspaper and held it up so Imogen could see the front page. Her family was there, grinning out at the camera. The angle was a little unfortunate—Imogen could see right up her mother’s nostrils. “See?” said Josephine. “We’re on the front page again today! Not the most flattering of photos, but that’s the paparazzi for you! The point is, would the Blandington Times really pay so much attention to a crime that didn’t happen? I think not!”

  “So maybe there was a heist,” Imogen said slowly.

  “Thank you,” said Josephine.

  “The lunch box was clearly stolen.”

  “Precisely!” said Josephine, sitting down and crossing her legs.

  “But you weren’t the ones to steal it.”

  There was a silence.

  Imogen watched her family intently to see how they’d react.

  Josephine was staring at her nails. Al looked relieved, Imogen thought, and seemed to smile at her with a hint of pride. But Uncle Clyde seemed very, very angry indeed. He marched up to the bars and rattled them.

  “Excuse me, young lady!” he said. “How dare you suggest we didn’t pull off The Heist? I was only working on it, refining it, thinking of ways to involve pigs in it, for twenty years. Or isn’t that enough time for us to get it right?”

  Imogen maintained a dignified silence.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Uncle Clyde, with a nasty laugh. “You think we couldn’t have pulled it off because you weren’t around to help. Is that it? You don’t think we’re clever enough to do it without you.”

  Pretty much, thought Imogen, but she didn’t say that, because she could see Aunt Bets sharpening a knitting needle behind him.

  “You think we’re nothing without Big Nana, don’t you? You don’t think we could pull off a crime of this scale without her.”

  Right again, thought Imogen, but she didn’t say that either, because Aunt Bets had pulled a hairpin out of her wiry gray hair, and she was sharpening that, too.

  “Well, let me tell you something, Little Miss Perfect. I’m a CRIM! Crime runs through my veins, just like it runs through yours—even though you’ve spent the last two years trying to deny it! And getting that Captain Crook lunch box back has always been . . . MY DESTINYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”