So I did.
But it wasn’t enough.
I came home one day to find Mum crying in the sunroom. Kit Kat was missing. Despite buying the kitten for me, she loved it just as much as I did, and I had never seen her so upset. Not even when my dad disappeared. We did all the things other people did when their cats went missing in Blackdown. It happened so often that I’d never quite understood all those homemade posters people put up around the village—every telephone pole in the high street seemed to be permanently covered in them—but, as with so many things in life, it is different when it happens to you.
We searched the streets and the woods, asked neighbors if they had seen Kit Kat, and put up our own Missing posters all around town.
Then a parcel arrived with my name on it.
Inside, I found a black felt hat, with a gray fur trim.
I knew that Zoe had made it; I recognized the messy stitching. And the fur.
I only just made it to the bathroom in time before throwing up.
My mother didn’t understand, thank god. She thought I was ill and let me stay home from school. As soon as she left, I got dressed and took the shortcut through the woods to Zoe’s house. When nobody answered the front door, I walked around the back, but there was no one home. I had a crazy idea to break in, but didn’t know how. There was an old shed, right at the very end of the garden, and I thought there might be tools inside that I could use.
I’ll never forget the sound of cats crying when I got closer.
The shed door had a padlock and I had to use a rock to smash it open. When I did, the first thing I saw was that the wood inside was covered with scratch marks.
There must have been ten cats in there, all skinny and starving. I felt sick and a little unsteady on my feet as I realized that the fur coat Zoe had made for Rachel hadn’t been fake at all. I recognized some of the cats from the Missing posters dotted around town, and suddenly the twisted pieces of the puzzle slotted together to reveal a very ugly picture. Zoe had been stealing people’s pets, returning them if owners offered a cash reward, keeping them for her sewing projects if not. The horror of it was hard to conceive, but I knew I was right.
The cats ran out, leaving just one in the corner: Kit Kat.
She looked thin and scared, and had a bloody stump where her tail used to be.
I picked her up and carried her home, tears streaming down my face the entire time. I put her in the cat carrier, where she would be safe until Mum got home. Then I went up to my bedroom to write a letter.
I never stopped feeling terrible about what happened to Catherine Kelly. I thought it was all my fault; I invited her that night. I didn’t know whether the rumors about her committing suicide were true, but I decided that if anyone deserved to die, it was me. I wrote it all down, everything that had happened, so that my mum wouldn’t blame herself when she found me.
I planned to use my school tie to end it all, but I couldn’t go through with it, so I tore up the note and threw it into the fireplace in my bedroom.
I did nothing but study for the next few months. I got straight As in my GCSEs, and won a scholarship to a boarding school far away. It broke my mother’s heart, but the school had a fantastic reputation and she didn’t try to stop me. I never told her the real reason why I wanted to leave.
* * *
My fingers frantically search for the phone I just dropped in the dark, feeling among the dead leaves and mud on the forest floor. When they find it, accidentally illuminating the screen, I see that I have one bar of signal. I stab the Contacts button and dial Jack’s number.
“Pick up. Pick up. Pick up,” I whisper.
I’m so surprised and overjoyed when he does, that I don’t know what to say. Then the words rush out all at once.
“Jack, it’s me. I’m in trouble and I need your help. I know who the killer is. The fifth girl in that photo is a woman called Cat Jones. She’s a BBC News anchor, but we went to school together and something bad happened. It was twenty years ago, on my birthday, maybe that’s why. There’s a house, I don’t know where, but I’m in the woods. I think she’s killed him, I think she’s killed them all and she’s coming for me. Please hurry.”
“Ms. Andrews, this is DS Patel. Jack is driving at the moment,” says a voice on the other end.
Her words are obscenely relaxed, as though the person who spoke them didn’t hear a thing I just said.
“I need to speak to Jack, right now.”
I am shouting and crying at the same time. I hear a branch snap somewhere behind me, but when I spin around, all I can see is eerie darkness and the ghostly shapes of dead trees.