The Great Escape
Authors: Natalie Haynes
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
This edition published in 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Text copyright © 2007 Natalie Haynes
Cover illustration by Adam Stower © Simon & Schuster 2007
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Natalie Haynes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PB ISBN 978-1-4711-2184-5
Ebook ISBN 978-1-4711-2296-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Garamond by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
I’d like to thank Kate Shaw, Lesley Thorne, and Venetia Gosling for all their sterling work on this book, and equally for their efforts to ensure a future generation of
readers.
I should also thank my dad, for his cheery encouragement, and my mum, for being the first to hang out with Millie and Max, and for getting them so completely. I am beyond grateful to Christian
Hill for designing and running the website. This book wouldn’t have been finished without Dan Mersh, to whom I owe, oh, I don’t know, most things.
The Great Escape
is dedicated to my grandmother, Georgette. I wish I’d finished it in time for you to read it.
Contents
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.
‘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.’