Cat's Paw (8 page)

Ben’s tale upset Tiffany in two ways. The first shock was how much it got to her. She saw Susie’s incredulous face, Daniel craning forward. Yes, they looked alarmed, but no more than
if Ben had been telling a ghost story round a camp fire.

‘How long was you tied up?’

‘Ugh, you’ve still got the marks. . .’

‘Didn’t they give you any proper food?

‘You went to fight this kid and he
beat
you. . .?’

‘But who was it in that room under the stairs?’

‘If I’d heard that scream I’d’ve been outta there. . .’

They were lapping it up. For Tiffany it was different. It came too close. The more Ben talked of his ordeal, of loneliness and helplessness, darkness and captivity, the more her own nerves rang,
like a glass, in the note that would shatter them. This made the second shock even harder to bear. When Ben revealed that his prison was a derelict station called Hermitage, Tiffany fled the church
hall in tears.

‘I knew where you were,’ she said the next day, when an anxious Ben phoned her from his school during morning break. ‘Something in me knew.’

In the dead of Saturday night she had stood in Hermitage Road, drawn by a gut feeling. Turning to the internet she proved her guess correct. In the 1960s, when the Victoria Line was dug, a
station had been planned between Finsbury Park and Seven Sisters, before construction was abandoned for reasons unknown. It would have been on that very spot.

‘I was right there,’ said Tiffany. ‘Directly above you. And I left you down there to rot.’

‘You didn’t know I was missing, remember?’ said Ben. ‘It’s okay. Geoff got me out.’

Yes, exactly
, Tiffany cried inside.
It should have been me. Not some stranger.
Her cruel words to Ben had turned out to be true. ‘I said you’d never get any help from
me. And you didn’t.’

But she was wrong about that.

On Friday she dragged herself to the pashki class, arriving last of all. Geoff White was there again. His leather jacket and jeans had been replaced by a rumpled black outfit he called a
pashkigi, its sleeveless tunic showing off arms that looked hard as iron. He asked her if she minded him taking the lesson. She sat in silence while the others pelted Geoff with questions: who were
the sinister kids who had abducted Ben? What was that Hermitage place? He quelled them with a stare.

‘No,’ he said. ‘First you’ve got to give me something. I don’t like wasting my time, and I don’t like putting minors in danger. So I need to know. How well
did Felicity teach you?’

Better than you ever could
, thought Tiffany. Geoff lined them up in the Sitting Cat pose and put them through their paces. He watched Daniel’s Chasing the Bird, Olly’s
ungainly Felasticon, Susie’s Tailspin and Yusuf’s Ratbane Lunge. Most of the time his face was unreadable, although when Ben ran up the wall to place a glass of water on the high window
ledge, he clapped.

‘Nah,’ he said, when Ben offered to fetch it down. ‘Let the Sunday School figure it out.’

Tiffany felt as if she were watching her snowman melt. It wasn’t fair. She was the one who’d kept this club going. Who’d booked the stupid hall and collected –
tried
to collect the money. Who’d vainly trawled the net in search of new things to teach the class.
Her
class.

As for her, nothing went right. Her balance wavered and she couldn’t feel her whiskers. It was like being back in Miss Fuller’s P.E. class. When Geoff brought round a plank of
scratched chipboard to test their Mau claws, her heart sank. Summoning that invisible cutting energy at one’s fingertips required total concentration, and hers was miles away. She bodged her
way through the remaining exercises, sat down and sulked.

Geoff held the chipboard aloft and, with a flick of his wrist, scored his right hand across the four deep marks made by Ben. The top half fell off with a splintering sound as Geoff’s Mau
claws cut clean through. The class gasped. Their teacher gave a slow blink.

‘You’ve got some promising talent here,’ he said. ‘Felicity must’ve been thrilled to find you, Ben. Yusuf, nice footwork, tight circling. Cecile, good sharp senses.
The rest of you. . . ah, you’ll soon be up to scratch.’

Tiffany sat with her chin in her hands, wondered what TV she was missing tonight. She felt a touch on the head.

‘Hey now.’ Geoff winked at her. ‘An off-day, was it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘I think so,’ said Geoff. ‘You’re better than this. When did you learn to use the Oshtian Compass?’

‘The what?’

Geoff looked perplexed. ‘Ah. Felicity may have called it something different. The Lodestone of Pasht?’

His words meant nothing to her.

‘Interesting,’ Geoff purred. ‘You’ve no idea what it is. Yet you used it anyway. Like a great jazz pianist I knew. Never had a lesson, couldn’t even read music. But
a wizard on the keys.’

He orbited them on tiptoe and they craned their necks to follow him.

‘You know what cats are famous for, Tiffany? I mean apart from the falling thing and the indestructible thing and the mice thing. . . all those things. Look, what should you do with a cat
if you move house? Shut them indoors for a week. Or they go looking for their old home.’ He paused. ‘
And they will find it.
Cats have this homing instinct, as strong as a
pigeon’s. Ten miles, a hundred miles, it doesn’t matter. If the cat loved his old territory, he’s likely to find his way back.’ Geoff made a sudden bound, springing over
their heads to land crouched before them. ‘It’s another skill we’ve copied from them. The Oshtian Compass. And it was helping us to get around long before they thought of
Sat-Nav.’

Olly chuckled. Daniel elbowed him into silence.

‘But Tiffany, you look puzzled. As you should. For what I’ve told you is only part of it. The easiest part.’ Geoff held all of their gazes with his own. ‘More remarkable
yet is when a cat’s owner goes away. Leaving it behind.’

Her heart kicked. She’d read about this.

‘As bizarre as it sounds,’ said Geoff, ‘some cats can actually follow them. I met a Nottingham lad when I was in the army. He was three weeks into basic training when his cat
Garibaldi showed up at the barracks, in Surrey. A hundred and fifty miles away. And he knew it wasn’t a lookalike because Gari was missing two vertebrae in his tail. These stories
aren’t rare. I heard of one cat crossing the width of the USA, coast to coast, two thousand miles, just to find the sick lady who’d had to give him away when she moved.’

Geoff looked up at the lead-crossed window. Speaking in a murmur, he seemed to be addressing the night outside.

‘That the cat has such a power is astonishing, I suppose. I’ll tell you what’s more incredible. The wish. The
will
. What kind of force could drive a creature from warmth
and safety, make it trek day and night across hostile wilderness, through illness and starvation, in search of one special person? That is what gives me chills.’

He closed his eyes.

‘That night,’ said Tiffany, beginning to grasp it. ‘Something
was
guiding me.’

‘The Oshtian Compass,’ said Geoff. ‘Drawing you to Ben.’

‘And someone. . .’ she groped for the memory, ‘was following me.’

‘Yeah, that was me.’

Geoff made a guilty face. He’d been watching them both, he confessed. He’d moved to this area after noticing signs that there were pashki students about. It was nothing much –
distinctive footprint patterns in the park, a spent Christmas cracker on the church roof – but it got him searching. He set a simple test in the yard behind his pub, which soon netted a
catch. After that he kept a watchful eye on Ben, and a good thing too. When Ben didn’t come home one Friday night, Geoff feared the worst (‘More than my dad did,’ said Ben,
wryly). Geoff started shadowing Tiffany in case she too was in danger. He couldn’t believe his luck when she helped him by setting out across the rooftops.

‘Why didn’t you come and tell me?’ asked Tiffany.

‘Too risky,’ said Geoff. ‘You were following the merest thread. You meet me, you’re distracted, it snaps. My best bet was to track you unseen. Turns out you did see me.
What can I say. You’re good.’

A smile caught Tiffany unawares.

‘And it worked,’ said Geoff. ‘You led me right to him. To use the Compass without training is remarkable. The fact that Ben was in trouble might have helped.’

‘Can’t you do the Oshtian Compass, though?’ asked Cecile.

‘Course he can!’ chided Susie.

‘Actually,’ said Geoff, ‘the answer is yes and no. For Ben, I couldn’t. I’d only met him once, you see. And you couldn’t really say we bonded. In fact, I
think you told me to get a haircut.’ He paused for the class giggle. ‘That’s why I talk about the will. It’s the driving force, the magnetism in the needle. To put it
simply, your Compass can only point to a person if you already have a very strong bond.’

Tiffany saw Ben turn away. Were his ears normally that red?

‘Okay then,’ said Yusuf. ‘How did we score? Sixes? Sevens?’

Geoff frowned. ‘Come again?’

‘He’s talking about your side of the bargain,’ said Susie.

‘Are you going to tell us who those creepy kids are, why they kidnapped Ben, and why they’re living like moles in a hole,’ said Olly, ‘or have I just knackered myself out
for nothing?’

‘Moles? No. They’re not moles.’ Geoff laughed darkly. ‘Okay. You’ve proved yourselves. And it is safer if you know. Though not much.’

His eyes darted around.

‘Not here. I can’t talk about this next to a drawing of Winnie the Pooh.’

‘Sorry.’ Tiffany felt frosty again. ‘This hall was the best place I could find. Or afford.’

‘I’ll find us somewhere better,’ said Geoff.

Ben had always liked Abney Park Cemetery. There was no better place to chill out. Here in a walled-off corner of Hackney the evergreens grew thick as a witch’s wood.
Trees and shrubs sieved out the street noise, letting birdsong bubble through the stillness. Sleepy, creaking boughs watched over the graves and the wind whispered with the rustlings of squirrels,
foxes and field mice. This cemetery was a place of life, not death. Only once had it made Ben afraid.

He’d been eight years old, walking with Mum and Dad, back in the days when they were still together. Then he lost them in the labyrinth of graves. Sighting a church spire above the
leaf-line he headed towards it, for he knew his own way home from Stoke Newington church. To his shock and bewilderment, the path took him not out of the graveyard but to a clearing, where stood a
hollow-eyed chapel he had never known was there. Its doors were planks, its rose window broken. It seemed to howl with loneliness.
Lost
. He had turned in terror, running through a nightmare
of ivy-bound headstones until Mum and Dad’s distant shouts finally brought him back.

‘He’s right!’ Daniel, clinging to the rose window, peered out through the stone petals into the thicket. ‘This place rules.’

‘Well. It’s still a church.’ Tiffany’s voice rang flatly.

‘A shell of one,’ said Geoff. ‘No-one’s used it for years. Most classes we can hold outside, so long as you hide from passers-by. Then if it rains we can exercise in
here. We are allowed to be wimpy about the rain.’

Ben wandered up the twilit nave, long since stripped of pews. He had to admit (with a twinge of disloyalty) that Geoff had found the perfect headquarters: secret, vaguely sinister, walled in by
woodland. They didn’t even have to bring three pounds. The old chapel was tiny really, far smaller than the horror-film abbey in his memory. Funny to think he had once been scared of it. Then
the gloom brought to mind a similar place, a lost and forgotten Tube station, and the laughter stayed inside him.

‘Duh-duh daaaaah!’ Arms raised, Olly mimed playing a huge church organ.

‘It
is
a bit creepy,’ Susie frowned.

‘Hey, if there were ghosts around, I’d see ’em,’ said Geoff. ‘Everyone find a space to stretch.’

During the rigorous warm-up, Ben noticed something interesting. Geoff had his own way of performing certain pashki movements. For instance, he did not kneel for the Sitting Cat pose, preferring
to squat flat-footed instead. In his Hunter crouch he curled one hand flamboyantly behind his head. He showed them a new Freeze stance which he called Siamese Stone. Other moves he performed
exactly like Mrs Powell. He had learned a lot from her, Ben guessed – but not only from her.