Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

The boy shook his head. He seemed very shy.

‘Are your parents meeting you here or at your destination?’ Andrew went on delicately.

The boy looked as though he’d been thrown a lifeline. ‘My mum’s coming to get me,’ he said hurriedly, perhaps thinking that his answer would buy him a little more time in the shelter of the station.

He had a strong southern accent and Andrew could tell instantly that he wasn’t a local. Though he had a lovely manner about him and his reply seemed convincing, it was evident nonetheless that he was extremely vulnerable.

‘OK, that’s fine,’ Andrew said slowly, not wanting to scare the boy off – he was safer by far here at the station than out on the streets and he didn’t want the child to panic and run. ‘Do you want to wait in the waiting room? Can I get you a drink?’

The boy nodded again, and Andrew took him into the waiting room and fetched him a hot drink from the back office. The lad clasped his hands around the warm cup eagerly, blowing on the steaming brew. As he drank his drink, Andrew tried to keep chatting with him in order to find out more about his background, asking him where he’d travelled from and similar queries. None of the boy’s answers added up.

‘My mum’s coming to get me,’ he kept saying, over and over, but it plainly wasn’t true.

In the end, the boy realised that Andrew wasn’t fooled and started opening up to him, explaining what had gone on. He’d recently been moved to a care home up north and had run away from it on impulse, without any kind of itinerary or plan. He obviously had a fair few issues and Andrew knew he’d have to call the police. Not wanting to alarm the boy, he told him he’d be right back and quietly slipped away to the office where he could make the call. He informed them of the situation, and they told him they would come and collect the boy – but they couldn’t be there for half an hour or more. It was up to Andrew to try to keep him safe on the station.

To begin with, it wasn’t too hard. The boy was a rail enthusiast, and when a freight train began to rumble by languorously, he asked if they could go out onto the platform and watch it pass. Andrew went with him, a bit concerned that the suggestion was just an excuse for the boy to leg it – but it wasn’t. The train’s lights lit up the child’s face and for the first time since Andrew had met him he looked happy, watching the freight train pass.

But after its red taillights had disappeared into the darkness, the young lad and Andrew were left alone in the cold night, with the clock ticking by so slowly. The boy didn’t know the police had been called, and Andrew wanted to keep him there until they showed up. Half an hour wasn’t long at all in the grand scheme of things, but as each second ticked sluggishly by on the orange-digit display boards above their heads, it suddenly seemed like an eternity.

Andrew was just starting to panic when a brainwave hit him: Felix . If anyone could keep the boy safe, it was her. She was just having a wander about, so Andrew picked her up and placed her on the bench next to the boy.

‘Have you met Felix?’ he asked him brightly. ‘She lives here on the station.’

The lad, who’d been staring glumly at the ground, looked up in surprise to find a black-and-white cat sitting next to him. Felix’s fame hadn’t spread down south and the boy didn’t know that the station had its own cat. He stared in some astonishment at her, uncertain what to do next.

Felix sat very still on the bench, as though assessing the situation. Her tail, hanging off the back of the seat, flicked to the right, to the left, as she considered the child before her. Then, very slowly, as though conscious of his vulnerability, she stood up and edged towards him.

‘Why don’t you give her a treat?’ Andrew asked the lad. He handed him some Dreamies. Felix sat down again at once, knowing the drill.

‘Would you like one?’ the child asked her hesitantly.

In response, she flickered and flashed her green eyes at him, almost as if she was rolling them and saying in affectionate amusement, ‘Stupid question, my lad.’

A bit timidly, the boy extended an upturned hand towards her, the treat nestled in the middle of it. Felix very gently bent her head to his hand and took the treat from his palm with her rough pink tongue. She licked her lips afterwards, as though to say politely, ‘Thank you so very much indeed.’

‘Another?’ the boy asked, warming up, taking pleasure in her pleasure.

Felix didn’t need asking twice.

The two of them sat together on the bench, and Felix entertained that child as only she knew how. After the treats had been eaten, she happily let him pet and stroke her, sitting calmly by his side and never once showing the slightest grumpiness. In truth, she was simply doing her job as part of the customer-facing team of Huddersfield station – and doing it brilliantly. The boy was still stroking her when, thirty minutes later, Andrew saw two uniformed officers walk out onto the platform.

He went to meet them and together they cautiously approached the runaway. Now calm, he didn’t flee – or lie. The police took a statement from both him and Andrew, then told the child that it was time for them to take him back to the care home.

The boy stood up bravely. Before leaving, he turned back to face the railway cat.

‘See you, Felix,’ he said, with a slight smile twitching at the edges of his lips. ‘Goodbye.’

29. Felix the Facebooker

‘Do you reckon it’s Angie Hunte?’ asked the gateline worker at Huddersfield station. ‘Could she be the one who’s set up this Facebook page for Felix?’

Chris Bamford, his colleague, shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon so,’ he replied.

‘Andrew McClements?’

‘Nah.’

‘What about Geoff?!’

‘Are you having a laugh?’

Relations between the station cat and the crotchety team leader were famously still at an impasse.

‘You know who my money’s on?’ said Chris. ‘I reckon it’s Martin.’

All eyes turned to the unassuming announcer, who was quietly making his way, head down, to the tiny announcer’s office where he spent so much of his time during his shift. Ever since he had befriended Felix with that mouse-on-a-string toy when she first arrived at the station – her very first toy – he and Felix had remained close. Martin even kept a little bag of cat treats for her in his desk drawer.

‘He’s got the opportunity, hasn’t he?’ reasoned Chris. ‘He’s always in the back office. He could be on Facebook all the time and we’d never know.’

The gateline team assessed this possibility with the keen consideration of super sleuths. Ever since Chris had discovered that there was a Facebook page for ‘Felix, the Huddersfield station cat’ – it had come up on his recommended pages and he’d liked it instantly – he and his colleagues had been playing this guessing game, trying to work out who it was that had set it up. The page had been running since July 2015 and it was now December; it had a couple of hundred likes. As more and more of the team had discovered it through their personal Facebook accounts, tongues had started wagging on the concourse about who was actually running it. No one had the faintest clue – but the team were all convinced that it had to be a member of the team. Every day, Chris and his colleagues on the gateline tried to figure out who was maintaining the page and keeping it a secret. It was almost like Cluedo : ‘I think it was Andy Croughan in the team leaders’ office using a smartphone.’

The amount of thought they applied to it would have put CID to shame: psychological profiling, alibis, opportunity and more all came into play. When it came to Martin, the announcer’s notorious quietness at work certainly made him enigmatic enough to be a prime candidate.