The Cat Lady reaches into her shopping trolley and brings out a stack of plastic food containers and rips the tops off. I get a real whiff of cat food this time and wonder if I was wrong about the vestigia. That’s the problem with magic, it takes practice to separate it from the everyday noise inside your head.
And my head can get pretty noisy sometimes.
The cats are falling upon the food, as they do, and the Cat Lady reaches out and grabs the big tom by the scruff of its neck and lifts it in front of her face. She peers at it, turning it this way and that, still making her weird noises.
The cat hangs limply and – although I can’t really see from where I am and, of course, it’s a cat – it looks bored. As if it’s willing to hang a bit for some free food.
The Cat Lady puts the tom down, which cuffs one of its fellow felines out of the way and claims a food container to itself. The Cat Lady reaches down and picks up the tortoiseshell one. This one is hissing and clawing – I see a scratch appear on the sleeve of the lady’s coat and another, red and glistening, on her hand. She doesn’t flinch but keeps peering short-sightedly at the cat squirming in her grasp.
Then she is putting down the tortoiseshell and picking up the next cat – the Siamese with the limp. This one is different because the Cat Lady is reaching out with her other hand to touch the injured leg. The cat mewls and twists as she grasps its paw and manipulates it like my dad buying mangoes in Ridley Road.
The Cat Lady is nodding to herself and smacking her lips as she drops the little Siamese into the open neck of her shopping trolley.
I’m tensing because I don’t like the look of this. I’m not in love with cats but I don’t hold with unnecessary animal cruelty. One part of me is thinking that she’s an old lady and it wouldn’t be hard to liberate the cat, but another part of me, the part that knows magic is real, is thinking that some olds aren’t really what they look like. You don’t want to start a beef with something until you know what it is – that’s just common sense, isn’t it?
So I hold off and a few minutes later the old lady opens the cardboard box on the bench beside her and pulls out a scruffy black and white cat with a bandage around its hind leg. She holds it up by the scruff and checks the leg – which gets her a grumpy look and a whine. She gently places it in amongst its fellow cats who, still nomming up the cat food, pay it no attention.
‘She feeds them,’ says Simon as we walk back down the viaduct path. We’re not jogging but that’s probably only because there was an ice cream van at Whitestone Pond and we each got a 99. ‘And she takes the sick ones to cat hospital.’
Simon says he’s been watching the Cat Lady all summer but hasn’t told anybody until he told me.
‘Mum says that feeding stray cats should be against the law,’ says Simon.
‘Only if it constitutes a public nuisance,’ I say, which I don’t know if that’s actually true but for some reason I want to sound clever in front of Simon.
‘Should we tell the police?’ he asks.
‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Feds got better things to do.’
4
Feds at the Gate
And, speak of the devil, there’s Feds waiting for us at the Parliament Hill Road gate, although actually they don’t know they’re waiting for us and we ain’t about to tell them. There’s two of them, a man and a woman, both white, both sweaty and red-faced in their uniforms. I don’t want to be unfair, but the man really wanted to let his stab vest out a bit around the middle because he didn’t look comfortable at all. They’re both wearing the same professionally friendly smiles that Feds have when they do school visits.
The female Fed is writing something on a clipboard but the male Fed is tracking us like he was a radar.
‘Hello,’ he says, and waves at us.
I try to keep walking but the man strides over to stand in our way.
‘I wonder if I might ask you a few questions,’ he says.
‘Are we in trouble?’ asks Simon.
‘No, not at all,’ says the female Fed as she joins us. ‘We just want to ask you a few questions.’
‘What about?’ I ask, and both the Feds narrow their eyes at me.
‘Have you heard about the missing girls?’ asks the male Fed.
‘The ones in the village?’ asks Simon.
The Feds are looking puzzled, so I help them out because I’m public-spirited that way.
‘Rushpool,’ I say.
Which is where Peter is, and not here running interference for me like he should be.
‘Local girls,’ says the male Fed, and me and Simon solemnly shake our heads even though I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Confirmed when the female Fed flips some pages on her clipboard and shows me a picture of Natali.
I shake my head again and she flips the page to show another white girl, about my age, with blonde hair and a pointy nose and chin.
‘Jessica,’ says Simon.
The female Fed is all interest now.
‘Do you know her?’ she asks.
Simon says nothing, but tilts his head to the side as if thinking about it.
The male Fed opens his mouth to speak, but Simon says, ‘No, not really.’
But that never works with the Feds, which is why I said nothing. If you admit to anything they’ve always got more questions like, ‘When did you last see her?’ Which is what they ask him.
‘Yesterday,’ says Simon,
