In the Bag Read Online Free Page B

and offers the rest to me.
    I put my hand out and he puts the money there. I look at him. ‘What?’
    Ash smiles. ‘We deserve a reward, even if we end up giving it back,’ he says. ‘Don’t you think?’
    I look down at my hand, at the money. Two hundred quid. I think of all the stuff that I could do with it. I smile and put the money in my pocket.
    Ash smiles too. He gets up and grabs the bag, takes it over to his wardrobe. He shoves the bag up on a shelf right to the back. Then he grabs his clothes from the floor and shoves them in, hiding the bag. ‘Let’s not tell anyone,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’
    I nod my head.
    ‘You’d better get going,’ he says. ‘Get some sleep.’
    ‘I’ll come round tomorrow morning,’ I say. ‘Then we can decide what to do.’
    Ash nods.

Joe
    I wake up and look at my clock. It’s nearly ten. Light’s streaming in through the window where I didn’t pull the curtains properly last night. I stretch and rub my eyes. I feel rubbish. I didn’t sleep properly last night. I couldn’t switch my brain off. When I got in I was buzzing, thinking about the money: who it belongs to, why it was just lying there in the forest, what I’d spend it on if it was mine. And if I wasn’t thinking about that, I was thinking about the crashed car. I fell asleep eventually, though. The last time I checked it was after three.
    I sit up in bed and stare into the distance, thinking. I feel a bit weird, kind of nervous. About the bag and the money and the car, like I’ve done something I shouldn’t have. I get out of bed and pull my dressing gown on, walk over to my computer and switch it on. I drum my fingers on the table as I wait for it to start up, look out of the back window at Mum in the garden, hanging out the washing, pegs in her mouth.
    My computer eventually comes to life. Straight away I go to the search engine and think about what to type in to find out about the money. I try ‘bag full of money’. Which is obviously a mistake cos right away it comes up with about 25 gazillion results. Far too many to search through. And all the top results are just about songs called ‘bag full of money’. So I add ‘Dorset’ to the search term and press Enter. This time there are only 24,000 results. But they’re still all about song lyrics.
    So I sit back and think. What if the money in the bag was stolen? I mean, why else would there be twenty grand in notes in a bag? Normal people don’t carry that kind of money with them, do they? Normal people have bank accounts and debit cards and internet banking and stuff. I type ‘stolen money Dorset’ into the computer, press Enter and watch as the results come on to the screen. I scan through them. The second one looks promising: ‘Money stolen in armed robbery’. I click on it. The Dorset police website opens up. The story’s from a few months ago. It doesn’t say how much money was taken. But I don’t think it has anything to do with the money we found. It’s too long ago. If it was stolen a couple of months ago, they wouldn’t still have it lying around, would they? I look back at the results, try the next one, about some money stolen from a funeral. But the link’s broken. I look through a couple of pages of results, but they’re all links to stories of highwaymen and people stealing chickens off farms. So I try a new search: ‘Stolen bag money Dorset’. I press Enter. The results are useless – they’re all about handbags being stolen and stuff.
    I give up on the bag and try and find out about the car instead. I search ‘car crash Fayrewood’. The results come up. There are 2,920 matches. They’re all for things like car insurance and car repair shops and stuff. No good. Not what I’m looking for. I sigh. Nothing about the car in the forest last night. Nothing about the bag of money.
    I sit and stare into space. I think about where I could find out about the crash last night or the money. Then I have an idea. I turn back to