The Great Escape

Chapter One

Millie looked at her watch for several seconds before she remembered it was broken. It still glinted sadly at her, water misting its face, with the time stuck immobile at five past ten this morning. She glared at it – it was supposed to be waterproof. A bubble popped apologetically by the minute hand, and she sighed heavily. Bad enough to be bored and wet. Worse not to even know how long you’d been there, or how long you had to stay. And she reeked of washing-up liquid, or whatever the stuff was in the bucket. Whichever way you looked at it, her summer holidays were not going well.

Her dad was around the side of the huge, ugly glass box they were cleaning. He was up on the third storey, standing with his friend Bill on the platform, a cradle on ropes which took them up to the higher floors. She could just about hear them laughing, as she scowled at her reflection in the office doors. The security man, sitting at the reception desk, looked back at her in mock alarm. As though she were scowling at him. Adults could be so self-centred, she thought, ignoring him. How come Bill and her dad got to have fun together on the platform, while she had to sit down here on her own? No wonder she was bored. But her dad wouldn’t let her go up above ground floor, in case she fell.

‘It isn’t designed for someone as small as you,’ he’d explained.

‘I’m not small,’ she had snapped.

‘I know, you’re twelve. And for twelve, you’re a colossus,’ he said.

‘Did you just call me fat?’

‘Nooooo!’ Her dad couldn’t help laughing. That was really why she didn’t make too much of a fuss. He didn’t laugh very much these days. Not since he’d lost his job, anyway.

‘What did you call her?’ Bill had shouted, loading up their equipment.

‘A colossus,’ replied Millie. Her dad looked expectant. She rolled her eyes and continued, ‘It’s a big statue. There was one of the Emperor Nero outside the Colosseum in Rome, that’s where it got its name.’

‘You’ve got a pretty smart kid, Alan.’

‘Nah,’ said Millie, squirming. ‘I just have a really dull father.’

‘Come here, you!’ Her dad had made to chase her, and she’d laughed and dodged out of reach.

That had been weeks ago, or at least it felt that way. It was probably just a few hours. Her dad had said she didn’t have to come every day, if she didn’t want to. She could stay at home, if she preferred, and the woman next door could look in on her from time to time. Millie had given it a nanosecond’s thought, weighing up the pros of being able to sit and read in the garden all day against the cons of Mrs Ellis coming round every twenty minutes to ask her what book she was reading, how long it was, what it was about, whether it was as good as Enid Blyton, and so on and so on, until Millie felt like jamming a fork into her own arm, or even Mrs Ellis’s arm, either of which would probably be considered rude. She had decided to take the bucket, at least for now, but as choices went, she couldn’t help but think it was a lot like being asked if you’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp pencil or a blunt one.

She had wondered a few times over the past week – since their last visit to clean the windows, in fact – if she’d made the right decision. Last Tuesday, she had been milling around the van, fetching water and adding to it the industrial cleaning fluid that gave her a perpetual scent of washing-up liquid and swimming pools – a perfume people rarely tried to buy from shops – when an estate car had suddenly drawn up outside the back of the office. Millie couldn’t work out where on earth it had come from – the building was at the end of a long drive, set back about half a mile from the main road. And that drive stopped at the front of the building. This car seemed to have appeared, fully formed, from the fields behind her, like a metallic shrub. A man had sprung out at her.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit young to be a window cleaner, aren’t you?’

‘I’m just here helping my . . .’ Millie began, before she lost the will and trailed off. If he was going to come up with the same tired joke that every person in every office had come up with so far this summer, she wasn’t going to the trouble of giving him a full sentence in return. She wondered if painful predictability and a need to state the obvious came with an office job. Maybe that was why her dad had started cleaning windows – to get away from the people in offices. Maybe, she thought, when she left school, she’d become a dentist. They didn’t have to deal with people who were too chatty. Still, though, they did have to deal with other people’s teeth. Urgh. Better than a dentist, she’d become an undertaker – more scope for mistakes, and probably fewer teeth.

‘Ah yes. Well, I hope I didn’t scare you, coming in the back way.’ He must have seen her jump when she heard the engine. ‘It’s just difficult to get in at the front, you know, with the protesters . . .’ He trailed off.

‘What protesters?’ Millie asked.

‘Haven’t you . . .? Ah, no, of course, you probably get here too early. They’re not up with the larks, are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Millie replied. She had no idea what time larks got up. Or what time protesters did. This man was pulling off the rare trick of being both boring and a bit weird.

‘Well, they’re not. But they don’t like what we do, so they’re here most days, making their point. Well, not here, precisely.’ The man looked around, as if to reassure himself that a small protest hadn’t sprung up behind him, armed with placards, banners, and the occasional klaxon, booing him.

‘They’re not allowed on our property, obviously – that’s trespass. But, you know, they’re out on the main road most days, shouting and chanting. It’s like a religious cult, if you ask me.’

Millie forbore to point out that she hadn’t asked him. But since he was so talkative, she asked the question that had popped into her head the first time he’d mentioned protesters.

‘What is it you do that they don’t like?’

‘Well, you know . . . some people are against any sort of progress at all, and – my goodness I’m running late,’ the man said, rushing round to the back of the car as though his shoes were on fire and he kept an extinguisher in the boot for just such an eventuality. ‘Must dash. Don’t let me keep you.’

Millie assumed he hadn’t noticed that she had continued mixing detergent as they spoke, so he really hadn’t kept her from anything. He opened the tailgate of the car, and pulled out a trolley, which he stood next to him. He lifted out one crate, then another, placed them on the trolley, then slammed the boot shut. He spun round and pushed his crates quickly towards a small door.

Millie couldn’t be quite sure, but she was almost certain she heard meowing.

Chapter Two

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, love?’

‘What do they do there?’

‘Where?’ Her dad looked bemused. Millie often began conversations as though the other person had been listening to the inside of her head for several moments before she started to speak. Sometimes her dad caught on straight away. Other times, like now, he was a bit slow.

‘The Haverham lab.’

‘Oh. Scientific research,’ he said airily.

‘I know it’s scientific research, Dad. It’s a laboratory. I mean, what kind of research?’

‘I don’t really know. Medical?’ He looked too shifty to be telling her the whole truth.

‘They’re animal testers, aren’t they?’ Millie said, glaring at him.

‘What gave you that idea?’ Her dad was playing for time.

‘A man told me earlier that there were protesters at the front gate. He had to come in through a back way.’

‘Well, people protest against lots of things, love. War, globalisation—’

‘Animaltesting.’

‘Yes, people do protest against that. But that doesn’t mean that’s what they do there. It could be anything.’ He had now adopted an air of quiet reasonableness that made Millie grind her teeth.

‘You think they’re conducting a war from Haverham?’ she asked, her eyebrows raised.

‘No.’

‘Because that would be a pretty small war, Dad. Will it engulf all of East Anglia, or just Haverham, do you think?’

‘OK, they’re not protesting about a war. But that doesn’t mean it’s animal research.’

‘The man was delivering crates of cats, Dad.’

‘Did you see them?’ he asked quickly.

‘No. I heard them.’ She wasn’t going to let this go.

‘Well, maybe you misheard.’

‘Yes, Dad. Maybe they had a crate of things that meow but weren’t cats being taken into a laboratory that has people protesting nearby about how they test on animals.’

‘Ah, well . . . still . . .’ Her dad seemed to have realised that he was fighting a losing battle.

‘No, Dad, still nothing. The cats aren’t part of a war effort, are they?’

‘I wouldn’t think so. Unless the war is on mice.’

‘Don’t joke, it’s not funny.’ Millie was resolutely stony-faced.

‘I know, Millie, I know. You love cats. They use them for work. It’s not funny.’

‘It isn’t. What if they stick pins in them, like in those pictures?’ Millie and her dad had walked past a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals stand at Strawberry Fair last summer. The pictures they had exhibited had put her off eating meat for life. Ever since, she’d made her dad buy soap and stuff that said it wasn’t tested on anything.

‘Millie, I know.’ He sounded tired. ‘I know it’s wrong. I don’t know exactly what they do, and I don’t want to, because I have to work if we’re going to eat. Whatever they do won’t be any nicer if someone else gets the cleaning work.’

‘But Dad, you’ve seen in through the windows. Have you seen any animals being hurt?’

‘No, Millie, I haven’t. I promise.’ He looked at her and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite get it to work in the face of her hard stare. ‘I know it’s not very nice, but beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘We’re not beggars,’ she said softly.

‘No, but we will be if I don’t clean some windows every day, and their windows once a week. Besides, Bill has a contract with them, and I don’t want to let him down. He’s been a good friend to us. It’s not for ever, love. Just for a while.’

Millie sighed as her dad walked off upstairs.

‘You don’t need to clean anything. You just need to get another computer job, and we’ll be fine.’ But she whispered this to herself, because there was no point having this argument again. Her dad had lost his job a few months ago, and had flatly refused to apply for another. Instead, he had spent two weeks sitting in their house, reading constantly and barely going out. Bill had eventually offered him some temporary work in his window-cleaning business, and he had reluctantly accepted. Millie couldn’t see why he was being so difficult about things, but Bill told her, rather gruffly, that her dad needed to ‘rebuild his confidence’. Millie couldn’t see how much more confident her dad needed to be about writing software and virus protection – he’d been doing it her whole life. Longer, in fact – he’d been a computer buff, as he liked to call himself, before she was even born. But at the moment, he seemed incapable of doing anything very much, and she didn’t understand why. Nor, she suspected, did Bill, but at least he was trying to help. He had also, she was sure, tried to persuade her dad to go on a date with a desperately boring woman they’d met at Bill’s house. Millie’s mum had died when she was small, so long ago that she could barely remember her at all, and she did realise her dad needed to spend some time with people who weren’t her. But she had been hoping, if not for a fairy godmother, then at least for someone who could talk with authority about something other than her own shoes.

But, ten days later, here she was, back at Haverham. At first, she had been absolutely determined never to come here again. Then she thought that maybe, if she came back, she could find some evidence about what was really going on here. And, if her dad saw that, then he might be persuaded to go and clean somewhere else’s windows instead. And then she could write to their MP, which is what her dad had said to do last year, when she was upset by the PETA stand and their pictures. Millie had written, and had received a letter back, saying that her concerns had been noted and would be looked into. Nothing more had come of it.

So here she was again, cleaning the ground-floor windows, and the ugly glass doors.

The security man seemed to have tired of pulling faces at her, and had buried himself in his newspaper again. Frustratingly, he was the only person she had seen all afternoon – no more delivery men had appeared round the back, not even a harassed suit had left the building. She knew nothing more than she had done last week.

She wished she knew what time it was. It was ages since they’d stopped for lunch. She was sure it must be nearly time to go home. Her dad was on the last side of the building, she was just finishing the front. She reckoned it would be another fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, and then they could leave. She just had to do the front doors and that would be it.

As she bent down to get some more water, her eye caught something moving inside the reception. It was speeding towards the oblivious security man from the end of a long corridor to his left. Millie peered down to ground level – it was coming towards the doors. It was moving too quickly for her to be sure – just a grey blur – but Millie was fairly certain that whatever was flying in her direction had four legs and a tail. As it approached the doors, she flipped the switch to open them. The security man still didn’t look up – why would he? She had been mucking around with these doors for twenty minutes. The cat belted outside, and stopped so suddenly that dust flew up around it. It looked up at her appealingly.

‘Hello,’ Millie whispered, as the doors slid shut again.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the cat, ‘there’s really no time for pleasantries. Could you hide me, please, and we’ll introduce ourselves properly later?’

Chapter Three

Millie jumped a clear six inches into the air. ‘Wha—?’ she struggled.

‘There’s no need to be so scared. I’m a cat, not your natural predator. You don’t even have a natural predator. Well, maybe if you were in Kenya, and the lions were . . . Shh, there is no time for this.’ He glared at her, as though she’d been the one talking. ‘I am in a bit of a mess, so if you could help . . . Your jaw is hanging loose, by the way.’

‘You can—’

‘Talk,