The Kidnapped Kitten (5 page)

Milly shot down the path like a rocket, her tail fluffing up. She remembered Max, all big teeth and flying ears. She wasn’t sure if he could get through the fence, but she wasn’t going to wait around to find out. She bounded into the front garden and jumped up on to the wall. She then
licked her paws furiously, swiping them over her ears. She felt hot and bothered and cross, and washing helped – a little.

The sun was warm, and slowly her tail smoothed down again. Milly’s eyes half-closed as she watched the cars going past.

One of the cars stopped, a blue van that she was sure she had seen before. A young man with blond hair got out. Milly pricked up her ears. She had seen him before. He always stopped to admire her in the window. She pretended not to notice the man as he walked up the street, and she gave him a haughty look as he made friendly kissy noises at her.

But she couldn’t hold out for long.

She padded gracefully down the wall to let the man stroke her ears and tickle her under the chin.

Milly didn’t even mind when he picked her up – she liked to be cuddled.

But then he locked his hand tightly around the scruff of her neck and hurried down the road with her. He opened the back of his blue van and stuffed her into a cat carrier.

And then he drove away while Milly howled and scrabbled and fought to get out.

Chapter Five

“Oh! Milly isn’t in the window,” Tia said, sounding surprised.

“Maybe she heard Christy singing and went to the door already,” Mum suggested. “I bet the whole street heard her.”

But there was no kitten rubbing lovingly around their ankles when Mum opened the front door.

Tia hurried into the kitchen to see if Milly was waiting by her food bowl. There was no sign of her at all. “Where is she?” she asked anxiously. “Did you shut her in upstairs, Mum?”

“No… She was definitely getting under my feet when I left,” Mum said. “Unless she managed to shut herself in somewhere. Go and check, you two.”

Tia and Christy raced upstairs, opening every door and calling frantically. Tia even looked in their wardrobe.

“Milly won’t be in there!” Christy told her, but Tia shook her head.

“You never know. Remember when she got shut in the kitchen cupboard?”

“She only went in there because that’s where the bag of cat food is,” Christy pointed out.

But all the cupboards were empty, and they hurried back downstairs.

Mum was starting to get worried. “I’ve looked everywhere down here,” she murmured. “You didn’t unlock the cat flap, did you?”

Tia shook her head, glancing at the cat flap. Then she frowned. “Hey, it’s not closed properly.” She crouched down next to it. It was definitely open, just a little – the flap balanced against the frame. Tia gulped. “She’s gone out.”

“But it was locked,” Mum protested. “How can she have gone out?”

“Look.” Tia pointed. “It’s still locked, but the lock’s only a bit of plastic, Mum. It stops the door opening out, but Milly’s so clever, she didn’t open it outwards – she pulled it
in
. And then she squeezed under the flap.”

Tia unlocked the back door and ran out into the garden. “Milly! Milly!” she called, hoping to see a toffee-gold kitten come darting through the grass. But all she heard was Max, whining next door.

“She’s gone…” Tia whispered, her heart thumping so hard it almost hurt. “Someone’s taken her.” She knew that it was silly – Milly could be in Mr Jackson’s garden again, chasing the
fish. Or messing about in that garden with all the brambles a few doors down. There was nothing to say that she’d been catnapped. But somehow Tia knew. She just knew.

Milly peered out of the wire cage. The man had tipped her out of the carrier, and she had felt so dazed and dizzy after the car journey that she had simply curled up in the corner with her eyes shut. But now that she was feeling a little better she was trying to understand where she was and what was happening.

Her cage was small – not all that much bigger than the carrier had been – and there was a tatty blanket
in it, a litter tray and a water bowl. There was a food bowl, too, but it was empty. The cage was stacked on top of another one and there were several more all round the shed. The whole place was grubby and cold, and it smelled as though the litter trays weren’t emptied often enough. It was dark, too – the only window was dirty and hardly let in any light.

But the strangest thing was that there were three other cats. Milly hadn’t seen that many since she’d come to live with Tia and Christy. Occasionally she would see one of the neighbourhood cats prowling through her garden, which she hated. But there wasn’t a lot she could do about it, except scrabble her paws on the window.

There was a cat in the cage right next to her, just on the other side of the wire. He was bigger than her, and he had a fat, squashed face and a lot of long fur in a strange blue-grey colour. He hissed angrily at Milly, and she took a step back and nearly fell over.

The big blue Persian hissed again and shot out a fat paw, scraping it down the side of the wire with a screechy clatter.

Milly’s tail fluffed up to twice its usual size, and she hissed and spat back. She might be small, but she was angry.
She had been stolen and stuffed in a box, and now she was shut up here.

The Persian was still hissing, but crawling backwards now, his golden-orange eyes fixed on hers. They glared at each other, both of them refusing to back down.

As Milly watched him edge up against the side of his cage she decided that there wasn’t much point in making a fuss. He was there and she was here, neither of them could get out – that was what they should be worrying about.

She let out a last little growl and curled herself up on the blanket, wondering how she was going to get home to Tia.

“Anything?” Mum asked, as Tia came in from the garden. She had been out to call for Milly again while Mum and Christy went to ask Mr Jackson if he’d seen the kitten, and Max’s owners too. No one had seen her, though.

Tia rubbed her eyes, trying not to cry. She didn’t want to scare Christy. “Do you think someone took her?” she whispered to Mum.

Mum hugged her. “No, Tia, I’m sure she’s just gone exploring. Don’t worry.”

But Tia
was
worried. Milly never went far. Whenever Tia called her, there’d always be a scrabbling on the other side of the fence and a little whiskery golden face would appear over the top. “Can we go and look up and down the road?” she begged.

They searched their street and the next couple of streets, calling for Milly and asking people if they’d spotted her. And they kept going until it got too dark to see.

Mum said Milly would probably come back when she got hungry, but the kitten still hadn’t returned by bedtime. Christy climbed the ladder to Tia’s top bunk, and the sisters curled up together.

“She’ll come back tomorrow, won’t she?” Christy asked.

Tia tried to sound confident. “Oh yes.”
Please let it be true
, she thought. “We’ll probably find her in her basket when we come down in the morning.”

“She could be there now!” Christy clutched at Tia’s pyjamas. “We should
go downstairs and see!”

“No… Not yet,” Tia murmured. She wasn’t sure she could manage not to cry if they didn’t find their lovely kitten.

“I really miss her…” Christy said sleepily.

“Me too,” Tia sniffed. “But she’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, trying to convince herself.