The Catnappers. Ann Pilling

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      “Now come on, Kitty,” Miss McGee said sensibly when she saw the bag, and she tucked her arm into her friend’s. “It’s no good crying over spilt milk.”

      This is nothing to do with spilt milk, Kitty said to herself, while allowing Miss McGee to propel her along the pavements of Golden Square. It’s to do with a burnt pudding and throwing pan lids and shouting and a lost cat. But she didn’t say any of this out loud because Miss McGee was being so kind and, after all, it was Kitty who had burned the pudding and made the quarrel. So instead she said what, in her heart, she did not actually believe, which was, “He’ll come back, McGee, when he’s forgiven us.”

      “Oh, I’m sure he will,” murmured Miss McGee, not believing it either, because Nicholas always came in very promptly for his meals, he was a greedy little cat. Something must have happened to him, something was wrong.

      As they passed Number 26, the front door suddenly opened and the tall lady with the curly fair hair, the one whom Kitty had taken to be an angry, all-in-red monster, came out and peered down the street. She held Timothy Joe in her arms and he was wearing white pyjamas with blue dots on. In a lighted window, they could see the head of a great, black rocking horse.

      Kitty tried to slow Miss McGee down. “Hello,” she called out in a friendly voice. “Horrid old evening, isn’t it?” And she was just going to ask the lady if she’d seen a cat resembling Nicholas when, having looked quickly down the street again, to left and to right, the red lady went inside and shut the door with a loud slam.

      “Charming!” said Miss McGee, quickening her pace so that Kitty was almost sliding after her along the pavement. “If that’s the kind of neighbour she is, then I don’t want neighbours, thank you very much.”

      But Kitty was thinking how very sad the lady’s face had looked, and how sad it had looked in the garden, under the crossness. “I think they might have some sorrow, McGee,” she whispered. But her friend didn’t hear, she was too busy trying to find her door key in one of her many pockets. She believed you could never have too many pockets in your clothes, a view with which Kitty didn’t always agree, though if she had had two pockets in her skirt the day before, she would have been able to put Big Time into one of them and taken it with her into Golden Square. Then the pudding wouldn’t have burned. Then Nicholas wouldn’t have run away.