Cat's Paw

by Nick Green

  Daniel piped up: ‘Anyone else hungry?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Olly.

  ‘Your hearing’s improved,’ said Ben. ‘Okay. Let’s make it short.’

  They climbed the steps into Leicester Square and felt the pull of an ice cream parlour. Tiffany got the last tub of Chocolate Midnight Cookies flavour and shared it with Cecile, who had brought no money. Perched on a window seat she let her eyes loose on the house-sized posters that crowned the cinemas, wondering which film she was missing most. An odd conversation made her turn round.

  ‘Mustelids form one of the broadest families in the order Carnivora,’ said Yusuf. ‘While some eat fruit, most have strong jaws that can slice or crush bone.’

  ‘What’s that? Cecile looked at the book Yusuf had opened on the table. ‘“We are the Weasels: A guide from badger to zorilla.” What’s a zorilla?’

  ‘Sounds like an ape with a sword,’ said Olly. ‘You know, like Zorro?’

  No-one laughed.

  ‘Got it from the library,’ said Yusuf. ‘It can’t hurt to know a bit about these creatures, can it?’

  ‘Creatures?’ Ben poked the book with his plastic fork. He had a tub of vanilla that was still untouched. ‘We can’t think like that. Those kids aren’t polecats any more than we’re really cats.’

  ‘I know.’ Yusuf looked at him oddly. ‘I’m talking about the animals. We read up on the polecat family to try and understand Fisher’s gang. That’s all I meant.’ He turned a page. “‘The ferret and the polecat are close cousins, ferrets being the domesticated form. Some experts joke that ferrets are just polecats with addresses.”’

  Ben picked at his ice cream. Tiffany could tell his mind was elsewhere. His gaze kept wandering through the window.

  ‘“Ferrets are commonly used as hunting pets-”’

  ‘There!’ Ben pointed, sending Susie’s sorbet flying. ‘Over by the Odeon.’

  A squad of four figures was breaking through the crowds of cinema-goers, moving with one wilful stride. They circled round a busker with a banjo and on past the Vue cinema towards Charing Cross Road.

  ‘That’s them.’ Ben pulled Olly and Daniel from their chairs. ‘Come on!’

  ‘I was still eating that,’ protested Susie.

  Tiffany slurped one last chocolate chunk and flicked her tub sadly and accurately across the room towards the bin. They piled out after Ben into the Square.

  ‘That guy with the messy hair is Gary. The girl’s called Antonia. I don’t recognise the other two.’

  The gang crossed the road. Ben and Yusuf broke into a run, following them across the road and into the Tube station. Tiffany, lagging behind the others, made her way down the congested steps and got sour looks from all the people Ben had barged aside.

  She was surprised to see that the four youths – the polecat kids, as she now thought of them – were still in the ticket hall, loitering outside a tacky souvenir shop. Ben had gone into full shifty mode, lurking near a ticket machine and casting suspicious glances. Yusuf did better by burying his head in his book.

  ‘“Like cats, ferrets are insatiably curious, a trait which gets them into no end of trouble,”’ he read. ‘“Sadly, unlike cats, ferrets have very little homing instinct, so a lost pet rarely survives as a stray unless some kind person takes them in.”’

  Tiffany pretended to study her nails so she could stare at the group through her fingers. The three boys wore wolfish grins and had an aura of danger that cleared space around them. The willowy black girl watched the crowds. She wore her bandana as a head scarf, while her companions had tied theirs round their necks. These were masks, Tiffany reminded herself. Bandit masks.

  ‘Are they waiting for someone?’ Susie hovered at her side.

  ‘Look,’ Cecile murmured. ‘They’re splitting up.’

  Two of the boys ambled towards the gateway to the Piccadilly line.

  ‘“The American fisher, martes pennanti,”’ read Yusuf, ‘“resembles a very large mink. An adult male can weigh as much as a terrier dog. They don’t actually fish; their name comes from fitch, an old word for polecat.’”

  A logjam of tourists was forming at the top of the escalators. They appeared to be foreign students. Some fiddled in purses or wallets for unfamiliar Travelcards, while the more confident filtered through the barriers into the ticket hall. Tiffany’s keen ears plucked a thread of their conversation.

  ‘Il est pour ma mère. Maman aime des ours.’

  A girl with a brown fringe and glasses was holding a teddy that wore an I Love London T-shirt. A gift for her bear-loving mother – Tiffany understood that much. She’d been working hard at her French, supposedly for her school Paris trip which Mum and Dad were still umming and ahhing about. The happy faces of the French students made her wince. They were having fun in her city, while she would probably never visit theirs.

  ‘“Fishers are exceptionally fierce and agile predators,”’ Yusuf read. ‘“They can outclimb a squirrel and are one of the only animals able to kill porcupines.” Hey, this is good. “The fisher’s cry is notorious, often mistaken for a human scream. Shaken Boston residents have even imagined it to be the sound of a child being murdered–”’

  ‘Shut it, Yusuf,’ said Ben. ‘I think something’s happening.’

  The two boys had lapped the hall and were now strolling back towards Gary and Antonia, quickening their pace. The barriers were now clogged with bemused Europeans, forcing an inspector to unlock a side gate.

  ‘“As well as preying on everything from mice to small deer, fishers have been blamed for slaughtering domestic cats–’

  ‘I said that’s enough!’ Ben tried to snatch the book and so missed the moment. Tiffany felt a spark jump between the polecat pairs. The four pulled their masks over their eyes. Then they moved like the wind. They really did, for they themselves were harder to see than the path they blew through the crowd. Tiffany’s cat vision slowed other moving figures to a crawl as her eyes tracked the attackers. The leading pair shoved people hard, knocking them off balance long enough to let the others breeze past and harvest purses, phones, money-belts and iPods. What most witnesses might later describe as a random smash-and-grab was in actual fact an elegant and orderly dance. Someone screamed. The girl with the teddy bear groped on the floor for her glasses.

  Dreadlocks flying, the boy named Gary vaulted the ticket barriers, two handbags and a plastic carrier hooked in his right arm. He had hardly hit the ground before his friends leaped over. The whole strike, from first nod to breakaway, had taken all of five seconds. Tiffany stood dazed for the sixth. Then:

  ‘After them!’ Ben cried.

  ‘We can’t go down there,’ Tiffany blurted, ‘we haven’t bought tickets–’

  Ben cleared the barrier in one bound. Susie was right on his tail, flinging herself aloft with the help of both hands. Tiffany heaved a sigh, called on her inner cat and leaped. She landed on the other side in the path of a cross mother’s pushchair, skipped aside with a quick apology and grabbed the nearest shoulder, Olly’s.

  ‘What’s he playing at? Geoff said to watch, not chase them.’

  ‘Uu-uh.’ Olly gulped. ‘This looks hairy–’

  The packed escalators hadn’t slowed the thieves’ escape. The polecat kids had jumped onto the partition between the staircases, making its sloping surface into a slide. As for Ben, his splayed shape was already halfway down it and dwindling fast, with Daniel and Susie close behind. Olly shut his eyes, whooped and hurled himself after them. Hey ho, thought Tiffany, why not? As soon as she was plummeting she remembered why not.

  ‘Yow!’ Olly yelped, slithering down below her. ‘Mind the– Yerk! Mind the No Smoking signs. They’re lethal!’

  Just in time Tiffany tilted herself, bobsleigh style, to slip round the side of the first jutting sign. Olly continued to hit every single one until he reached the bottom and plopped off the end in a groaning heap. Tiffany skimmed over his head for a prim toe-pointed landing.

  ‘Ben?’ The escala
tor hall was bedlam, hoards of taller people hurrying, blocking her view. ‘Olly, did you see where they went?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks for asking,’ Olly whimpered.

  Perspex-faced posters for the latest shows and films lined the corridors leading to the two Tube lines. The Piccadilly line was closest. Taking the passage straight ahead she zig-zagged against the tide of alighting passengers, took the steps in one jump and caught up with Susie on the westbound platform. A train was leaving, whining up to speed.

  ‘Where are they?’ Tiffany demanded.

  ‘Here.’ Ben stood in the thinning crowd, arms folded, staring after the train. Before its lights dimmed into the tunnel, Tiffany spied two small figures hitching a ride on the rear carriage’s back bumper.

  ‘We lost them,’ Susie panted.

  ‘The doors closed!’ Ben thumped his palm. ‘And then they went and jumped on anyway. We could have done that! They use the doors between the carriages to get inside the train.’

  ‘An idea that I give zero out of ten,’ said Yusuf. ‘Those guys have had a load of practice, Ben. If you’d tried it we’d be scraping you off the tracks.’

  ‘Lucky for you I chickened out, then.’

  ‘There were four of them,’ said Susie. ‘I wasn’t going to get on their train. We’d have been ambushed and beaten up and dragged off to that nasty place.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been there before,’ snapped Ben. He glowered at the tunnel until the train winked into darkness, and Tiffany could not guess his thoughts.

  Had she said she didn’t mind Geoff taking charge? No, she minded, she minded lots. The Cat Kin was meant to be her group, yet now, for much of the week, she was the outsider. On most weekdays she had to languish safe at home while the others met without her. Her contact with Ben was reduced to snatched phone calls, and even then he seemed cagey, as if there were things he wasn’t telling her. She was forced to scavenge scraps of news from Susie, Yusuf or Olly during school lunch breaks. Apparently Ben (and anyone free to join him) was spending every spare minute on the Underground, tracking the polecats’ movements.

  ‘We think they target four stations, mostly,’ Yusuf told her on Wednesday, speaking English instead of French after she threatened to throw water at him. ‘Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly, and Leicester Square.’

  ‘Those stations link together on four different lines.’ Olly showed her on his tattered Tube map. ‘This helps them avoid being caught, Ben reckons. If someone raises the alarm, then pow! they switch lines at the next stop. We’re calling this rectangle the polecat patch.’

  ‘Nice of you to let me know.’

  ‘We tell you as soon as we can,’ protested Yusuf. ‘You’re just not around as often as the rest of us.’

  ‘When I was the teacher, it was you lot who weren’t around. How come Geoff can get you to come four times a week when I was lucky to see you once?’

  ‘There’s just. . .’ Olly smiled weakly, ‘more stuff going on now.’

  Tiffany gritted her teeth. So much was happening without her. It wasn’t jealousy, well, all right, it was a bit. But more than feeling jealous she felt afraid – afraid they were getting in over their heads. Most of the Cat Kin were treating this as a game. Then there was Ben, who seemed to be taking it far too personally, and Geoff, who was simply doing his job, she supposed. None of them saw things the way she did. Yes, a man like Martin Fisher ought to be stopped. She just didn’t remember volunteering. Her homework timetable said nothing about fighting a maniac per week. She had been there, done that, nearly died.

  Here was a horrid thought. Maybe her parents really had turned her into a wet blanket. Was this common sense or cowardice? If only someone would help her tell the difference.

  That evening she lay on her bed, stubbornly learning French verbs in the hope that Mum or Dad might entre and find her. Instead it was Stuart who interrupted, calling from his room. ‘I need you to push in some pins.’

  Beside his board of newspaper cuttings, a map of the British Isles had been tacked to the wall. It was speckled with many coloured pins, which Mum had presumably swiped from her office and then helped Stuart to push in.

  ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘I’m keeping track of mysterious sightings around the country,’ Stuart explained. ‘Yellow pins are UFOs. Blue ones are ghosts, and so on.’

  ‘You’re branching out.’

  ‘There’s so much to keep track of. Scotland’s full of ghosts, look.’

  ‘What are these ones?’ Tiffany fingered the black pushpins that were clustered in England’s south-western foot.

  ‘Black pins are. . . mysterious big cat sightings. Green pins are the Loch Ness Monster –’

  ‘Did you say big cats?’

  A headline on Stuart’s notice board leapt out at her. Dartmoor’s Sheep Slayer. He had printed it off a news website. Mutilated carcass resembles ‘jaguar kill’ say experts.

  ‘How long have you been collecting these stories?’

  ‘Not long. I only started on the cats last week. You gave me the idea. I’ve been finding old reports. . .’

  She was no longer listening. Her mind was in a spin. Where was this wild thrill of hope coming from? She couldn’t help noticing that all the black pins were stuck in one corner of England. Devon, to be precise.

  Tiffany came early to Friday’s pashki class, hoping to speak to Geoff alone. As the shadowy chapel loomed through the leaves she heard low voices. Ben had got there before her. He and Geoff were talking about the polecat gang, as usual, though they stopped when she walked in. She waited until the class was over, then went to help Geoff roll up the mats.

  ‘You’ve certainly found your form,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘A shaky start’s nothing to worry about. New teacher and all. You’re a Powell pupil through and through, that’s your only problem. My style’s a bit different.’

  ‘You’re still great, though.’

  ‘Purrr-r-r-r-r.’ Geoff rolled the word with his tongue. ‘Now then. No-one’s ever nice to me unless they want something.’

  ‘Um.’ Tiffany flushed. ‘You know the other week. You said I’d used this pashki skill. The Oshtian Compass.’

  ‘Oh. . . yeah.’

  ‘That was an accident. I don’t know how I did it. When are you going to teach it to us?’

  ‘One day.’ Geoff paused in his mat-rolling. ‘It’s not top of the list.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too hard. If pashki had belts this’d be the black one.’

  ‘You could show me, though.’

  ‘Eventually,’ said Geoff. ‘I can’t see the Compass being much use to you now. We’re in London, right? You’ve got the A to Z if you get lost.’

  His tone irked her.

  ‘Not much use? I found Ben for you!’

  ‘I would have found him anyway, given another day.’

  ‘What if I need it again?’

  ‘Give me strength–’

  Tiffany stepped backwards. He had never raised his voice before. The place felt very quiet and dark. Isolated. Geoff scratched his nose.

  ‘Let’s leave it, yeah?’

  She was trembling slightly. ‘I don’t understand. I want to learn. Won’t you teach me?’

  Geoff slapped a mat as if to brush away dust. ‘You know the catras, don’t you? You know how they work. If this. . . parlour trick is so important to you, figure it out for yourself.’

  For a ridiculous moment Tiffany feared she might cry. At last Geoff’s blue eyes met hers. They had softened.

  ‘Oh. Hey.’ He held up his hands. ‘Can I say sorry? That was mean.’

  Tiffany went to gather her things.

  ‘I’m not stupid, Tiffany.’ Geoff half-smiled. ‘Not all the time. I see what’s on your mind. All you are doing is tormenting yourself.’

  She tried for a poker face.

  ‘You want to be taught,’ Geoff said. ‘But not by this teacher. Right?’

  Tiffany
looked away.

  ‘It’s Felicity you want,’ said Geoff. ‘Mrs Powell.’

  ‘She,’ Tiffany swallowed, ‘she never even said goodbye.’

  ‘It’s hard.’ Geoff wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘I’ve been there myself. But she’s gone, Tiffany. And she means to be gone. If she’d wanted the pair of you to meet again, it would have happened by now.’

  ‘She wasn’t any old teacher, though. She was my. . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Geoff. ‘For what it’s worth, Tiffany, I’m sure she counted you as a friend.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  Geoff looked surprised.

  ‘I mean,’ Tiffany stammered, ‘you call her Felicity. I call her Mrs Powell. So it feels, I don’t know, like we’re talking about different people.’

  ‘You want to meet the person I knew?’ Geoff pondered the chapel roof. ‘To me Felicity was lots of things. First she saved me from a wasted life. I was a young thug who robbed people on the streets, till I chose the wrong lady’s bag to snatch.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Go on, laugh.’ Geoff played with a coin, rolling it to and fro across his knuckles. ‘Anyway, she took pity. Said I had potential. Etcetera. She paid for my air ticket so I could travel to see her mentor, Mr Singh. For years I lived at a hill station in Kashmir, the most beautiful place in the world. I learned my pashki rudiments in the snow.’

  A vision of mountains swept Tiffany away.

  ‘Then I stayed in Cairo. I was in my twenties when I met Felicity again. She looked young as ever. We became. . . colleagues. Her life was this great mission, of course, and she roped me into it. Hunting big cat poachers in places like Thailand, smashing the trade in bogus medicines. It was fun. I got to see the world, meet interesting people, and ram their illegal tiger bones down their throats. And gradually I became more than just her henchman.’ The coin fell from his fingers. He let it twirl on the floor to a stop. ‘Friends can be scarce in a life like ours, but without a doubt she was the closest friend I ever had.’

  Tiffany felt suddenly foolish. How could she compare her troubles to his? She’d hardly lived. Her deepest feelings were mere paddling pools.