Cat Kin (14 page)

‘Get the Four-seven-six!’ he yelled. Its rear-end swung out and they flung themselves onto it. Ben fought a wave of dizziness.

‘This is the last time I’m going out with you,’ said Tiffany.

Shouts rose from behind them as more and more pedestrians caught sight of the two crazy kids clinging to the bus’s roof. Riding down a one-way street, Ben saw the silver car take a
left.

‘Here’s our stop.’

They hopped onto the next bus shelter and scrambled down to the pavement, ignoring the dumbstruck looks from waiting passengers. Stanford had driven into a road lined with dignified Victorian
terraces. A short way down it they found his car, parked at an angle outside a three-storey town house.

‘What now?’ asked Tiffany, breathless. ‘Do we go in?’

Ben shook his head. ‘He said he was on his way somewhere. He’s just picking something up. I want to know where he’s going.’

‘We can’t bus-surf around London all night.’

‘No.’ Ben tried the boot of the car. It opened.

‘Tell me you’re joking.’

‘I’m not asking you to come, Tiffany. It’s not your problem.’

‘It is, if you get in there,’ she said. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’

The tremor in her voice was enough to make him reconsider. Then a lit window of the house went dark. Time to decide. To his dismay he found himself climbing into the boot.

‘Ben,
please!
’

‘Go home and wait,’ he said. His heart was hammering. ‘If you don’t get a call from me in the next two hours, phone the police.’

Tiffany ground her teeth. ‘Oh, you fool. Right. Shove up.’

‘What?’

Tiffany crawled in beside him. There was barely enough room for them both and he got her feet in his face. He curled up smaller and squirmed to find a more comfortable position.

‘Now who’s being stupid?’ he muttered. ‘Nobody knows where we are.’

‘Then we’ll just have to take care of ourselves, won’t we?’ said Tiffany.

Ben eased the hatch of the boot down, being careful not to close it all the way. Under him something rustled in the darkness, maybe a plastic bag.

He heard Stanford come out of the house and open the driver’s door. Then Stanford muttered to himself. His footsteps drew nearer and Ben knew, with horrible certainty, that he had walked
round to the back of the car. A heavy hand shut the boot hatch with a firm and final clunk.

The car roared into life and began to move. Muffled music reverberated through the chassis. Then they were speeding off in an unknown direction, locked in the boot of John Stanford’s
car.

‘And now…the end is near…And so I face…the final curtain.’

Two muffled voices seeped into the cramped darkness, one smooth as brushed velvet and accompanied by a band, the other singing along almost half a tone off-key. The car veered, tyres squeaked,
and the second voice broke off to curse at another driver. Ben banged his head on a wheel-arch.

‘It’s locked.’ Tiffany was struggling with the boot mechanism. ‘Ben, we’re stuck in here. He locked us in. We’re—’

‘Stop saying that, okay? And move your foot, it’s in my face.
Ow
, not there!’

‘Sorry.’

‘We’ll be all right,’ said Ben, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. ‘He’ll open the boot sooner or later and then we’ll leap out and
disappear.’

‘I did what I had to do…’ sang the voices, ‘and saw it through…without exemption.’

‘Why?’ breathed Tiffany. ‘Why do you think he’ll open the boot? There’s nothing in here.’

Ben tried to straighten his crooked neck. ‘Doesn’t feel that way.’

‘Please be serious! Nothing that he knows about, I mean. We could be trapped for hours. Days. We’ve got no water or anything. Ben, we could suffocate in here! We
could—’

‘Ssshh!’

The stereo had gone silent. A lone voice quavered, ‘I did it myyyy wayyyy…’ and trailed off. The car slowed and swung to the left.

‘What’s happening?’ Ben couldn’t help himself.

‘We’re stopping.’

‘I guessed
that
part.’

‘Oh no,’ whispered Tiffany. ‘He got out of the car.’

The door clunked. Amidst the swish of passing vehicles Ben caught the sound of Stanford muttering.

‘He’s coming round to the back!’ he hissed. ‘He must have heard us!’

Leaping out of the boot suddenly seemed like the worst plan ever. But that hardly mattered since it wasn’t going to happen. Ben found his legs had gone to sleep. If the boot opened now,
Stanford would find them lying here, helpless as sardines. Ben tried to shrink into the floor of the boot, seeking a hidden spot, anything. Something dug into his back. He was lying on a polythene
bag with knobbly objects inside. In desperation he pulled it free, just in case the bag was big enough to cover them like a blanket. It wasn’t.

The boot opened. Cool air and car headlights swept in. A foolish instinct made Ben shut his eyes, as if this could make him invisible.

‘Excuse me, sir.’

A deep, unfamiliar voice.

‘What?’ Stanford barked in annoyance. Ben opened one eye. Stanford was turned away from them, holding the boot ajar with one hand. He hadn’t yet looked inside.

‘You can’t park here, sir.’ Ben glimpsed the luminous sleeve of a traffic policeman. ‘It’s a zebra crossing. I must ask you to move.’

‘There’s something wrong with my car, you—’ With a visible effort Stanford wrestled himself under control. ‘I mean, I’m terribly sorry, officer. I was
checking a fault in the boot. I heard noises. Probably didn’t shut it properly.’

At this Ben snapped out of his daze. He wouldn’t have another chance. He twisted the plastic bag into a rope.

‘Sympathising as I do, sir, you’ll have to deal with it elsewhere.’ The policeman indicated the angry hoards of traffic that were massing behind the silver saloon. Ben hooked
the twisted carrier bag around the boot door’s locking mechanism just as Stanford, with a petulant sigh, slammed it shut. Ben checked the door just in time to stop it bouncing back up.

A jolt, a screech of tyres, and they were moving again. They had been thrown around three sharp corners by the time Ben trusted himself to speak.

‘That was close.’

‘You idiot. Why didn’t you shout to the policeman? He would have helped.’

‘I didn’t hear you shouting very loud.’

‘Your foot was in my mouth!’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, look…I can open the door now. So we’re safe.’

‘I’ve been safer, thanks.’

‘Like I said, I want to know where he’s going.’

Eventually the car drew to a lazy halt. Ben felt the chassis rise as Stanford got out. He held his breath until he could no longer hear footsteps.

‘He’s gone.’

‘Can we get out now, please?’ begged Tiffany.

Ben lifted the door. The evening smouldered orange with street lamps. They were in a deserted alley bordering a patch of waste ground. Far off he saw a gang of youths bouncing on a discarded
mattress. Shadows of trees moved like eels in oil against a towering wall to his left. He had a strange feeling. At points on the journey he’d been convinced that he knew where they were
going. Insistent tugs in the pit of his stomach while the car veered through the winding streets, as if he had swallowed a glowing, pulsing red magnet…
Oshtis feels and knows
. But
the sensation kept slipping away. Now he strained to recognise the view before him. Finally it clicked.

‘The old factory…’

‘What?’

‘We’re back where we started,’ said Ben. For some reason this made him more uneasy than ever. Over there was his own apartment block, a ghostly outline, and looming above
them…

‘That building,’ he whispered. ‘You can see from our flat. It’s been deserted for years.’

‘Is that where Mr Stanford went?’

‘Might be.’

A great black chimney, like a wizard’s tower, loomed against the paler sky.

‘You said it was a factory?’

‘A long time ago, yeah.’

‘I think my dad mentioned it once,’ said Tiffany. ‘He grew up in this borough. He said they used to make dog biscuits here and it stank for miles.’

Whatever this place had been, once upon a time, it was dead and silent now. Or appeared to be. Ben clambered out of the car. The carrier bag that he had used to jam the lock fell to the ground.
Tiffany picked it up.

‘Hey.’ She reached inside. ‘Oh my—Ben! I don’t believe this.’

Something had drained the colour from her face. She pulled out a brown jar, a cardboard packet and some printed leaflets. Each bore the same bold word.

And under this, in yellow:
For strength, for health, for life.

Ben didn’t get it.

‘This is the medicine!’ She shook it at him. ‘It’s what my little brother takes for his muscular dystrophy. What was it doing in the back of this car?’

‘Search me,’ said Ben. ‘Do you reckon Stanford’s ill with it too?’

‘Of course not. You don’t know anything. He’d hardly be able to walk around.’

‘Well…’ Ben was at a loss.

The dusk light cast two tiny images of the factory in Tiffany’s eyes.

‘
He
can’t have anything to do with Panthacea, can he?’

‘Uh…maybe he has a friend who…’

‘I want to know.’ Tiffany shut the bag in the boot. ‘We have to follow him.’

Suddenly Ben didn’t feel so keen.

‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘You said your parents would be wondering where you are.’

‘Well, they
might
,’ said Tiffany. ‘But I can’t leave it like this.’

‘They’re only pills.’

‘Pills my little brother takes every day.’ Keeping low, she stalked towards the building.

‘We can come back in daylight.’

‘Darkness is daylight for us.’

‘Tiffany,’ Ben hissed. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this but…you don’t know this guy like I do! He’s a nutter. He is one badly dangerous
headcase.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Tiffany. ‘If he’s connected with Panthacea, even slightly…’

They flattened themselves beside an ancient fire escape, the only visible entrance. There was a shackle on it, unlocked.

Ben made one last effort. ‘You know what they say about curiosity and the cat, don’t you?’

Ignoring him, Tiffany shunted the door open and tiptoed into the blackness. Ben knew he had no choice but to go with her. Tiffany opened a second door. A glow picked out the edges of a yawning
space. On silent feet they crept into a gloomy hall, drawn by a murmur of voices off to the right.

At the heart of this dead cavern, where it seemed that only rats scuttled unseen through decades of dust, something was alive. Beyond stout pillars, inlaid with surprisingly
ornate brickwork punctuated by rusted signs, two figures faced each other across a pool of light. Dust-ghosts twirled in these harsh yellow beams, rising to the arc lamps that glared from their
wall-mountings. Ben willed his whole being into the soles of his feet, bidding them to pad upon the air above the floor, in the silence of Eth walking. Luckily the factory was webbed about with
shadows; it was easy to slip among them as they stalked towards the light.

‘…so what can I do for you, John?’ The gangly figure in the brown camel-skin coat looked at his watch, which he wore nurse-fashion on the inside of his wrist.

‘You asked me here.’ It wasn’t hard to catch the irritation in John Stanford’s voice.

‘Did I? In that case come into my office.’

The thin man beckoned with his right hand. His left, Ben noticed, was tucked protectively under his coat, as if his arm was hurt. The two men moved into an area enclosed by cardboard boxes,
where a desk, a computer and a cabinet stood forlornly like a furniture shop display.

Seating himself on the desk, the man fixed his pale eyes on Stanford. Ben was reminded of the sick snake he’d once seen in a pet shop. ‘You have the architect’s
drawings?’

‘Here.’ Stanford fished in his pocket. The thin man dropped the folded papers to one side without a second glance.

‘I’ll study them at leisure.’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘So, how’s the work going?’

‘If that’s all you wanted to ask me, Doctor Cobb,’ replied Stanford, ‘you could have mentioned it on the telephone—’