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PUFFIN BOOKS

The Return of the

Killer Cat

Anne Fine was born and educated in the Midlands, and now lives in County Durham. She has written numerous highly acclaimed and prize-winning books for children and adults.

Her novel The Tulip Touch won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award; Goggle-Eyes won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and the Carnegie Medal, and was adapted for television by the BBC; Flour Babies won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award; Bill’s New Frock won a Smarties Prize and Madame Doubtfirehas become a major feature film.

Anne Fine was named Children’s Laureate in 2001.

www.annefine.co.uk

Books by Anne Fine

Care of Henry

Countdown

Design-a-Pram

The Diary of a Killer Cat

The Haunting of Pip Parker

Jennifer’s Diary

Loudmouth Louis

Notso Hotso

Only a Show

Press Play

Roll Over Roly

The Same Old Story Every Year

Scaredy-Cat

Stranger Danger?

The Worst Child I Ever Had

How to Cross the Road without Turning into a Pizza

The James and Angus stories

The Return of the Killer Cat

Picture books

Poor Monty

Ruggles

ANNE FINE

The Return of the

Killer Cat

Illustrated by Steve Cox

PUFFIN

PUFFIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in hardback in Puffin Books 2003

Published in paperback in Puffin Books 2004

8

Text copyright © Anne Fine, 2003

Illustrations copyright © Steve Cox, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-193613-0

Contents

1: How it began

2: Home not-so-sweet home

3: Mistake!

4: Stuck up the tree

5: Genius!

6: More fool me

7: Splat!!!

8: Sweet little pussy

9: Rumbled

10: How it ended

1: How it began

OKAY, OKAY! so slap my teensy little furry paws. I messed up.

Big time!

And okay! Tug my tail! It all turned into a bit of a one-cat crime wave.

So what are you going to do? Confiscate my food bowl and tell me I’m a very bad pussy?

But we cats aren’t supposed to hang about like dogs, doing exactly as we’re told, and staring devotedly into your eyes while we wonder if there is some slipper we can fetch you.

We run our own lives, we cats do. I like running mine. And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s wasting the days and nights when the family are on holiday.

‘Oh, Tuffy!’ fretted Ellie, giving me the Big Farewell Squeeze. (I gave her the cool blink that means: ‘Careful, Ell! Stay on the right side of cuddle here, or you’ll get the Big Scratch in return.’) ‘Oh, Tuffy! We’ll be away for a whole week!’

A whole week? Magic words! A whole week of sunning myself in the flower beds without Ellie’s mother shrieking, ‘Tuffy! Get out of there! You’re flattening whole patches!’

A whole week of lolling about on top of the telly without Ellie’s father’s endless nagging: ‘Tuffy! Shift your tail! It’s dangling over the goalmouth!’

And, best of all, a whole week of not being scooped up and shoved in next-door’s old straw baby basket and stroked and petted by Ellie and her soppy friend Melanie.

‘Ooh, you are lucky, Ellie! I wish I had a a pet like Tuffy. He’s so soft and furry.’

Of course I’m soft and furry. I’m a cat .

And I am clever, too. Clever enough to realize it wasn’t Mrs Tanner coming to house-and-cat-sit as usual…

‘… no, she suddenly had to rush off to her daughter in Dorset … so if you hear of anyone who could do it … only six days… well, if you’re sure , Vicar. Yes, well. So long as you’re comfortable with cats…’

Who cares if the vicar’s comfortable? I’m the cat.

2: Home not-so-sweet home

UH-UH! MR Houseproud!

‘Off those cushions, Tuffy. I don’t think you’re supposed to be lolling about on the sofa.’

Excuse me! Had the vicar not noticed it was me he was talking to? So what was I supposed to be doing? Mopping the floor? Tapping away on the computer? Digging the garden?

‘Tuffy! Don’t scratch the furniture.’

Hell-oooo? Whose house? His? Or mine? If I want to scratch furniture, I’ll scratch it.

Worst of all: ‘No, Tuffy! I’m not opening a fresh tin until you’ve finished this.’

I took a peek at ‘this’. It was hard. It was lumpy. It was yesterday’s grub.

And I wasn’t eating it.

I walked away. The last thing I heard was Reverend Barnham calling after me: ‘Gome back and finish your supper.’

In his dreams! I was off out. I met up with the gang – Tiger and Bella and Pusskins – and told them I hadn’t had supper. They were hungry too, so we sat on the wall and had a bit of a yowl about where to eat.

‘Fancy peeling the pepperoni off a leftover pizza?’

‘Fish without chips?’