Cat Kin (19 page)

Slouched behind the wheel of the car, Ben lowered the sun visor as the sun sank to blind him. He floored the accelerator but, unsurprisingly, the car didn’t move. The
Volkswagen was parked on top of another car, with another stacked upon its own roof, just one more wreck in a mountain of them. Ben knew Hamish’s Car Dump from when he and his rougher mates
from the high-street arcade used to mess around on dull weekends. How he had ended up here today, alone in this metal elephant’s graveyard, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was the last place
he could feel at home.

Just once, he had plucked up the courage to go back to the flat. It wasn’t there. Even the rubble had been carted away. Yet home still called to him piteously. He had heard that people who
lose a limb can still suffer pain in it. He believed that now.

After watching the walls fall he had fled to Dad’s flat. There he found Mum, sitting on the sofa with a whisky glass trembling in her hand. Bit by bit the story came out. It seemed that
John Stanford had lost patience. Suddenly there were builders outside. There were lawyers in her home, bearing deeds that explained it was her home no longer. Lucy Gallagher had no time to wonder
how Stanford had conjured this. She packed what she could fit into her car and the demolition crew closed in. Most of what she’d decided to save, it turned out, was Ben’s stuff.

Dad was being a rock. He was managing to smile and joke. Mum kept repeating that she’d been a fool, now she’d lost everything, every penny. Dad refused to listen. He talked of court
battles, of compensation running into millions of pounds. There was no question of it: Stanford had broken the law. Now they’d take him to the cleaners. Mum nodded. She didn’t believe
it. Nor did Ben.

Sitting down to dinner that evening had been weird. Ben couldn’t help noticing that Mum and Dad were back together. At least, they were sitting at the same table. But no-one ate or spoke
much and Dad was clearly struggling to keep up the flow of good cheer. They hadn’t got back together. Mum was only here because she had nowhere else to go. Dad would sleep on the sofa. They
weren’t a family. They were three shipwrecked strangers clinging to the same chunk of driftwood.

The springs in the old car seat were like a bed of nails. Ben got out and climbed to the ground. A taste of rust hung in the air. He saw a metal bar jutting from a chassis and worked it
loose.

Stanford had destroyed them. Stanford and his sick friend Cobb. Their lives had been nothing, hedgehogs dazed and blinking in the fast lane of the M1. Now it was over.

Ben swung the bar like a tennis racket. It connected with the Volkswagen’s near headlight and he had to cover his face as glass sprayed over him. He shook the fragments out of his hair and
smashed the other headlight too.

Hefting the bar he took a roundhouse swipe at a windscreen, turning it to crushed ice. Yelling, he walloped a door until it crumpled like foil. Hands black with rust, he beat at the cars until
he had no strength. The bar dropped and he fell to his knees.

Bit by bit his senses returned. Smashing up a scrap yard was not the answer. It was a waste of anger. He got shakily to his feet.

An idea had been lurking in his mind for some time, but he had avoided it, like a suspicious package. While in the grip of a strange power he had hurt someone he loved. Well, then, if he had no
choice but to hurt people, he could at least choose the right ones. He had a weapon. He had spent the past few months learning how to use it. Now was not the time to cast it away.

Ben drew deep breaths and bent in the Arch On Guard stance. His legs were stiff; it was a fortnight since he’d done any pashki. After a few warm-up poses, which twanged his tendons like
the first PE lesson of term, he knelt to run through his catras. At first he saw only darkness. After an age a blue glow flickered on his retinas. He tried the others, green Mandira, golden Parda.
All he saw were faint blotches, as if he had stared too long at a light. What was the matter?

He was out of practice. That was all. Best to start from scratch, with the pashki rudiments. He picked a clear path through the junkyard and Eth walked along it, imagining thin posts under each
foot. Halfway, he wobbled. Something tripped him and he went sprawling.

He lay for a long time, a fan belt snagged around his ankle. Out of practice? It was worse than that. A simple Eth walk had defeated him. The pashki movements were clear in his head, but his
muscles were on strike. He strained one last time to summon up a catra and saw nothing but the black of his own eyelids. It was as if his Mau body had withered away like a disused limb.

A sound roused him. His mobile phone. He plucked it from his pocket and saw the name on the screen. Tiffany. It continued to play the James Bond theme at him. At the fourth repetition it fell
silent.

With a cry of disgust, at himself, at everything, Ben hurled the phone into the mountain of scrap metal.

‘Ben…’ A soft click. ‘
Doesn’t answer. Please leave a message at the tone
.’

Tiffany hung up. That was it. If she ever got the chance to speak to him again, she wouldn’t. The one person she thought she could rely on had let her down.

She checked her phone messages just in case her parents (or Ben) had tried to call. They hadn’t. A proper mum or dad might have wondered where she’d got to by now, but no. Hardly
surprising. She turned the phone off.

Seeing Theobald Mansions she walked faster. After a whole day dithering and killing time in clothes shops, she knew who she had to see.
Please
, Tiffany wished,
please be back from
India.

She reached the entrance of the run-down block and pressed the entry buzzer, leaning close to the speaker for an answer. She buzzed again and waited a long time. Nothing. Mrs Powell wasn’t
there. Tiffany turned from the doorway with a sniff, ready to burst into tears. She stopped. She breathed in again. A familiar scent hung in the air. She couldn’t have described the sensation
in human words, but she knew it was Mrs Powell as surely as if she’d seen a photograph. She’d stood on this spot in the last twelve hours.

Tiffany stepped back from the entrance and looked up at the top-floor flat. Her heart rejoiced to see the balcony window ajar. Perhaps Mrs Powell had only popped out for cat food. Tiffany sat on
the step for half an hour before the other, fouler smells from the lobby got the better of her. This was no place to linger. She considered the open window, five floors up. It would be silly to try
and climb up there. She’d promised not to do anything silly.

The next thing she knew, she was running next door to the leisure centre. Partly for the convenience, and partly so she could practice slipping past the attendant unnoticed, she’d got into
the habit of storing her pashki kit in one of the lockers. She donned it quickly in a deserted corner of the changing room, daubed her face-print with blue and grey paints and pressed the tabby
patterns onto her skin. Thus camouflaged, night-black from neck to ankle, she slunk out of the fire exit into the lowering twilight.

The flats in Theobald Mansions had square, concrete balconies, like giant window boxes. Tiffany looked at them and they became, in her mind, a ladder.

A short, sharp run took her across the forecourt. She sprang for the lowest balcony and after a moment’s wriggling panic pulled herself up. Balancing on the balustrade she worked out her
route. She’d have to jump to the balcony diagonally above, one-along and one-up, and carry on like that, in zig-zags, all the way to the top.

Which meant truly heart-stopping leaps. She was risking her life quite unnecessarily, yet there was no question of turning back. Her nerves were alive with the same fire that had caused near
disaster on Hampstead Heath: the bloody-minded determination of cats to finish whatever foolish adventure they started.

A jump, a moment’s delirium, and she was clinging to another ledge and not lying broken on the ground. That was good. She quivered on her perch, gathered her strength. The exact same leap
again. Third floor. There was a rhythm to it. On the fourth landing she slipped, but brushed it off as lightly as if she’d tripped on a step.

It was with a cheeky pirouette that she vaulted over the side of Mrs Powell’s balcony. Stairs, who needed them? She reached through the open window, unlatched the French windows and parted
the curtains. Her eyes adjusted to a gloomy room she’d never entered before. There was a bookcase, a telly and an ancient record-player. Jim’s scent hung in the air and his hairs coated
the sofa like hoar-frost. She hoped Mrs Powell wouldn’t mind her coming in like this.

‘I heed no words nor walls,’ Tiffany said aloud. She picked a pamphlet off the coffee table, attracted by pictures of tigers. It was a glossy newsletter about a place called the
Periyar Reserve in Kerala. That must be the wildlife park Mrs Powell had been visiting. Tiffany lapped up the snapshots of Indian rainforests, of flame-coloured beasts lurking through the leaves,
forgetting her troubles in a fleeting daydream. Mrs Powell had said she was a patron of the park, so Tiffany hunted for mentions of her name, but found none. She put the pamphlet down and the hairs
on her scalp stiffened as one.

On the coffee table, previously covered, was a copy of New Scientist magazine, open at a centrefold. Tiffany didn’t have to read a word to recognise the man in the full-page photograph.
Clad now in a white coat, with a jar in his shrivelled left hand, was Dr. J. Philip Cobb.

She couldn’t hold the magazine steady. She also seemed to have forgotten how to read. Stumbling through the article, as if she were fleeing a vampire in a dream, she caught only snatches:
sensational wonder-supplement, groundbreaking research, Panthacea, Only Nature’s Own, soon to be expanding. Multi-million pound new laboratory. It wasn’t the article itself that had
made her brain crash. It was the fact that she’d found it here.

The sofa creaked as she sat heavily. Her thoughts, which had frozen like packed ice, began to move again. Soon they were in avalanche. Why had Mrs Powell been reading an article on Doctor Cobb?
What had Cobb said to Stanford?

‘
Where did I get them all? Private collections. Imports. One or two I’ve had for years…
’

It made a horrible sense. If Cobb needed to import more big cats, as he surely would, who better to ask than someone who really understood them? Mrs Powell lived within sight of the derelict
factory. And she had access to a steady supply of exactly the creatures Cobb desired. Tiffany jumped up from the sofa, feeling as if the walls were closing in on her. Could Mrs Powell really be in
league with that monster? It was impossible. It was unspeakable. It…

It meant she had to get out. Now.

She burst onto the balcony, panting for breath. One look over the side told her it was hopeless. If she hadn’t been afraid before, she was now. Climbing down the way she had come up would
be suicide. She ran back inside. It would have to be the stairs. The room had darkened, as if her cat eyesight now ran on fading batteries. A hard tug opened the door (the rug had wedged under it)
and she was in the hallway. The flat’s front door—was it left or right?

Before she could choose, her legs were swept from under her by a scything low kick and an unseen figure pinned her to the carpet, pressing a knee in the small of her back.

Tiffany squirmed and cried out. To her amazement the weight lifted off.

‘Tiffany Maine! What in the name of Anubis are you doing here?’

Tiffany scrambled away before twisting round to face the dark figure. ‘N—nothing. I was just leaving.’

Mrs Powell held up a hand. ‘You know I’ve no patience for this sort of thing. Just skip the fibs and get to the facts.’ She turned on a light and tightened the cord on her
dressing-gown. Underneath it she was wearing pyjamas. Her hair was a mess but her lined face had a healthy olive tan. ‘Well?’

It would be safer to stay silent. Then she’d merely be told to leave, never to return. But Tiffany had to know.

‘Did you…’ she whispered. ‘Are you…are you part of it, then?’

‘Part of what?’ Mrs Powell shot back.

‘Only Nature’s Own,’ Tiffany said. ‘Dr Philip Cobb. Panthacea. Are you in on it? Please tell me,’ she swallowed, ‘please tell me you’re not.’

Mrs Powell looked her in the eye.

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Anything else, while you’re here?’

The relief that flooded her was so great, she could have wept. ‘You’re not helping him? You’re really nothing to do with that man?’

‘You know of him.’ It was half-question, half-statement. ‘And Panthacea?’

‘A lot, yes.’ Tiffany began explaining about Stuart and his illness, then stopped.

‘Go on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tiffany. ‘You said we should stay out of trouble.’

It was a physical effort to tell the story. She related what had happened when she and Ben followed John Stanford. Where they had gone, what they had seen. ‘I had to talk to
someone,’ she finished. ‘You were the only person I thought might help. But then I saw that article about Doctor Cobb on your table, and I…’