Cat's Paw (11 page)

‘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 escalator 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.

‘Let me tell you something,’ said Geoff. ‘Felicity and I were once so close that, even hundreds of miles apart, we could look up at the same new Moon, at the same moment, and
we would
know
. But now. . .’ His voice went over a bump. He stared out at the dark sky, sniffed the breeze through the window, turned his head as if to listen with each ear, seeming to
reach out with every volt of his senses before sinking back into himself. ‘Nothing. I can’t feel her. We’ve drifted too far. That’s what happens, Tiffany. The closest ties
you have, they decay, they wither away if you let them. And the people you loved become strangers.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tiffany.

Geoff touched her forehead, where the M of her face paint faintly tingled.

‘Don’t be. All I want is for you to understand. What you think will make you happier may end up doing the opposite. It can be better to let go.’

She bit her lip.

‘Forget the Oshtian Compass,’ said Geoff. ‘Focus on the friends you still have.’

‘But – I can’t just forget –’ Her reply fell apart as she heard her phone wailing. ‘Ohmygod! What’s the time? My dad’ll be waiting outside the
church hall!’

‘That way.’ Geoff pointed. ‘Go dead straight and skip over the wall. Remember to scrub your face.’

Tiffany caught the pack of tissues that he tossed to her, grabbed her bag and hightailed it out of the door.

Top speed and some reckless grave-hurdling meant she was only ten minutes late, so all she got was a lecture. By Sunday, Dad had calmed down enough to let her go out again. Cecile and Susie
would meet her at the cinema to see
Croftville
, the hilarious new Scottish rom-com. After twice losing her nerve, Tiffany rang Ben to invite him too. He couldn’t, he said. He had
plans. She tried not to sound disappointed.