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looks promising,’ said Millie, as she logged out of the account. ‘Let’s look for any more information we can find about the laboratory online. My dad’s not
going back there until next week, so we can’t find anything out from the building until then. Maybe I can try and find some more stuff here.’
    ‘We can’t do things any . . . faster?’ asked Max despondently.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Millie apologised. ‘I know we need to help your friends. But I think we need to know more before we can rescue them. It’s going to be
difficult.’
    ‘And dangerous.’ Max nodded.
    The Net search proved fruitless. The keywords ‘Haverham laboratory’ and ‘Vakkson’ only ever took them to animal rights protest pages, or angry chat-rooms where people
debated the pros and cons of animal testing.
    ‘I’m sorry, Max. I think we will have to wait for these guys to get back to us. Or for next week, when I can go out there with dad and see what I can find out.’
    They sat, disconsolate, in the garden – Millie eating her cake and Max rolling grumpily on the lawn. Neither of them had the slightest idea that Millie’s dad and Bill had already
received a phone call from the lab, asking if they could go back the next day for some extra cleaning work. And Millie’s dad, of course, had no idea when he agreed that the man who had
telephoned him couldn’t have cared less about the state of the windows. He was just sure that one of the window cleaners must have seen his missing property and was determined to find out who
knew exactly what.

Chapter Ten
    Arthur Shepard hadn’t ever intended to be what his children, had they known what his job entailed, would certainly have described as ‘a bad man’. He had never
been especially clever, and he had never worked especially hard, but the main reason he’d ended up with the life he had was because he didn’t especially care. About anybody, except
Arthur Shepard. He had seemed to, briefly, at various times in his life – for example, in job interviews, or when he met the woman he would later, only half-interested in the response, ask to
marry him, or when his children, whose names he could only sporadically remember, were born.
    This was very much the pattern of his life: he didn’t work, as he claimed, to provide for his wife and children; he worked to get away from them. If a lie detector had been taped to his
forehead and he had been asked if he loved his family, he would have said yes, and it would have registered nothing. Arthur Shepard genuinely thought he loved his family, because he had no idea
what other people meant by the term ‘love’. But the truth was that if someone had asked him if he would rather see his children ill or be ill himself, see his wife unhappy or be unhappy
himself, he would always, always have chosen for them to suffer, and to remain unhurt himself. He wasn’t ashamed of this, because he didn’t realise that someone else might answer the
same question differently.
    Nonetheless, Arthur had never expected to end up doing what he did now. He had moved from job to job over the years, and when he had begun to work for Vakkson, he hadn’t had any misgivings
about a company with such a poor record in welfare and research. It was simply a well-paid job. When this particular scheme had presented itself to him, he hadn’t hesitated before seizing the
opportunity with outstretched hands. The only problems that he had been able to see had been practical: where would they find the cats, where would they keep them, how would they transport them in
secrecy, how could they avoid the prying eyes of the bleeding hearts campaigning, if you could call it that, outside the front gate. As each problem was resolved, Arthur Shepard felt the buzz of a
job well done. The rights and wrongs of it simply never occurred to him.
    In the first place, he had realised that they would need a reasonable number of cats for the development stage – several