Cat's Paw (9 page)

They poised for a long minute upon their left toes while Geoff studied them, pacing up and down. ‘And. . . sprawl at ease.’

Down they sank upon their sky-blue yoga mats. A blackbird twittered from the rafters and whirred off through the pointed window.

‘Hey! No dozing,’ said Geoff. ‘That was meant to help you concentrate. You know all those questions you’ve been bugging me with?’

Everyone sat up.

‘I’ll be straight with you.’ His uneasy glance flicked towards Tiffany. ‘Not everyone is thrilled to have me here. I know that. But I won’t throw a strop if you
don’t like me at first. All I ask is that you hear me out. Because this is to do with what happened to Ben. And it’s one story I really don’t like repeating.’

Fourteen autumns ago, in the village of Kings Langley, it was a grey and misty morning. It was too grey, too misty, around an old farmhouse. Fire had left only a shell of charred beams. The
house’s registered occupant was Charlie Gladwell, an elderly recluse with no family or friends. Firemen found his blackened skeleton in the bathtub.

Nearby was a large shed untouched by the blaze. The first man inside was a paramedic and the stench made him throw up. The building was stacked with what looked like rabbit hutches, though
nearly all contained ferrets. Later the RSPCA also counted four mink, twelve polecats, eight stoats, a pine marten, a blind weasel in a box and one dead bitch otter. The hutches looked as if
they’d never been cleaned. However, the paramedic found somebody cleaning one.

It was a boy. He looked under ten, though later guesses put his age nearer fifteen. Pictures of him taken at the time were considered too upsetting for the newspapers. Police also photographed
chains and shackles bolted to the shed wall. It seemed that Charlie Gladwell had kept this boy imprisoned here. For how long? There was one clue. The boy wailed and struggled when they tried to
take him outside, only calming down when he’d fetched a scrap of rag, which he cuddled tight. Later, when hospital staff got a look at this comfort blanket, they saw it was a tiny frayed
shirt. The label inside said
2–3 years
. A nurse was taking the stinking thing to the incinerator when a doctor stopped her and put the rag, filthy as it was, back in the sedated
boy’s arms.

Who was he? No relative of Gladwell’s, that much was clear. The police re-opened every case of missing boys as far back as a decade and a half. Blood tests were carried out on three
families. All were negative and the boy went unclaimed.

Emma Leech, the psychologist on his case, held little hope. Living in chains, in the dark, alone except for caged animals. . . what would that do to a child? This boy, instead of crying, wailed
like a polecat. He gibbered, he hissed, he curled up to sleep. With a mind as starved as his body, he would be a feral child, lacking human speech, probably insane.

After a week he startled Dr Leech by throwing his uneaten sandwich at her and demanding, ‘Mouse.’ He could speak. She found, to her astonishment, that he had a reading age of six.
Apparently Gladwell had read him newspapers, not so much to entertain the boy as to lord it over him. While the old man basked in the sound of his own voice, his sharp-eyed prisoner was learning to
read, literally behind his back.

Charlie Gladwell thought his captive docile. He was wrong. After months of patient work, the boy filed through his chains with a stone. That night he stole into the house and torched it with
white spirit. True escape proved more difficult. Terrified by the vast outside he fled back to his shed, to the warmth and cosy stench of the ferrets.

With proper food and medical care he grew quickly, filling out into a tall teenage boy. His carers had called him Adam but he hated this, so Dr Leech encouraged him to choose his own name. By
now he had a favourite book, all about the mustelids – animals such as ferrets, pine martens, fishers and minks – and soon his choice was made. But carers quit their jobs in tears
rather than look after young Martin Fisher, who seemed more beast than human. The slightest upset could spark off his temper, and in one savage tantrum he bit through Dr Leech’s index finger
(it was successfully reattached). On other days he would curl into a ball at the mere sight of human beings. Emma Leech was desperate for someone who could help. Unfortunately, she got Geoff
White.

Geoff took a swig from a water bottle. The blackbird was back on the window ledge, its beak full of fluff.

‘I’ve tried many day jobs over the years,’ said Geoff. ‘At that time I’d found a niche in mental health. St. Hubert’s in Middlesex had a top psychiatric unit,
so that was where Martin Fisher ended up. Given his background, they wondered if animal therapy mightn’t be a way to reach him. You know, traumatised kids can express their feelings with pets
–’

A phone made a noise like an air-raid siren. Tiffany blushed and answered it.

‘Yes. . . No. . . Yes Dad. I’m at Susie’s house, like I said. What? That’s because we’re in the garden. Yes. Yes I will. No I won’t. Okay. Bye.’ She
shut the phone with a loud snap. ‘Sorry.’

‘Pets,’ said Geoff, petulantly. ‘Animals have a calming effect. That was my thing, my specialist area. I found a good-natured calico kitten to see if Martin would enjoy
handling it. You live and learn. I had to put the poor thing out of its suffering.’

Cecile winced.

‘I probably cared too much,’ said Geoff. ‘About helping Martin. See, I had no kids of my own. Still don’t, come to that. Never met the right girl. But. . . where was
I?’ He stared at the window, where budding blossoms were peeping in. ‘Yeah. I was ready to try anything. I thought I’d teach him some pashki exercises, to relax him. Simple ones
like the Omu meditation. No good. Cats made him freak out. The only time his face lit up was when I gave him a ferret. Which is how I hit upon my genius idea. My ingeniously stupid idea.’

Geoff had wondered for some time. Was pashki unique? Ancient Egyptians revered the cat, so they had made an exercise system to awaken the feline inside them. But suppose they’d worshipped
a different creature? Might other animal selves lie hidden within us, waiting to be discovered? Geoff saw a chance to answer this question and help Martin at the same time.

He bought two more ferrets and an illegally-trapped Welsh polecat at no small expense. For many weeks he watched Martin interact with them, and stayed up whole nights to study their movements.
Geoff read every book he could find on the mustelid family. Step by step he adapted pashki routines to reflect these animals’ whip-like movements. As he gained confidence he began sketching
plans for a whole new system. At the time it did not seem crazy. He was younger, keen to prove himself, anxious to help this poor boy.

When Geoff explained his plan, Martin laughed for the very first time. Perhaps it was the one occasion when he knew happiness. Throughout his childhood he had watched the ferrets in their
hutches, the only beautiful things in his world. He had loved them but he envied them too, because – abused as they were – they had Charlie’s love and Martin did not. No wonder he
longed to be like them.

Geoff held secret one-to-one classes. They practised in the hospital’s basement rooms, or amid the expansive gardens, and no-one ever found them out. Martin attacked his training in the
manner of a boxer with a grudge. He proved fiercely intelligent. In another life, with proper parents, he could have been anything – a Grade A student, an athlete, anything. Soon he was
inventing moves of his own, forcing Geoff to work more nights writing up his notes. As the new system grew it became as much his creation as Geoff’s, though it was Geoff who named it
mustel-id
. He said this meant ‘Soul of the Polecat’, and Martin, who knew no better, devoured it.

Compared to pashki, refined by Egyptian priests and Eastern gurus over a hundred or more generations, mustel-id was brutishly simple. Against that, it was easier to learn. In less than ten
months Martin had grown quick, strong and acrobatic. He could fit through spaces that looked narrower than his waist and could sniff out a coin in a pitch dark boiler-room, even though his vision
would never reach cat levels. Mustel-id offered no equivalent of Mau claws, but still Martin’s fingers grew strong enough to tear the seams of a straitjacket. Trying to soak up this furious
energy, Geoff adapted Ten Hooks to create a mustel-id fighting system, and they sparred for hours at a time. And Geoff, who would cheerfully face in combat any pashki master you cared to name,
found Martin becoming quite a handful.

Then came the breakthrough. As Martin honed his polecat skills, he became at other times more like a normal teenager. It was as if his human and animal selves were drawing apart, so that they no
longer waged war inside him. Martin let carers into his room. He would talk and read storybooks aloud to Dr Leech, even though he never seemed to follow the stories. He learned not to smash
televisions, stopped asking for mice and grew fond of cookery programmes. Given a sketchpad he revealed a gift for drawing. The staff even introduced him to a visiting princess. Geoff patted
himself on the back. He’d done it. Martin was calmer, healthier, and at least half sane. And Geoff had achieved something extraordinary: a brand new form of pashki based on one of
nature’s deadliest predators. What could possibly go wrong?

‘To throw away a young life,’ said Geoff, ‘is an unforgivable thing.’

Ben had the nastiest feeling that he knew what was coming. Susie gnawed a corner of her yoga mat.

‘What happened?’ Yusuf murmured.

‘I betrayed him,’ said Geoff.

His words fell into silence.

‘Martin was transferred to a care home,’ said Geoff. ‘And how smug was I? I’d found his cure. He had a new room, his own TV, posters on the walls. He tolerated those
around him. There was even this boy named Carl who knew how to cook real pizzas and who might have become his friend.

‘So I left. I didn’t say goodbye, I just stopped visiting. Because that’s what pashki masters do, right? We’re footloose. Free spirits. You look for us and one day
we’re not there.’

Ben stole a glance at Tiffany.

‘I was three weeks and fifty miles away by the time I heard the news. The care home had been destroyed in a fire. One girl was dead and a boy was missing. Martin Fisher.’