It was the squealing that led him to her, there were she lay in the corner of the barn, curled around her new-born kittens, purring deep in her throat as she licked them clean and their tiny paws kneaded her sides.

The green eyes mirrored his hatred. The green eyes were knowing and filled with contempt. And the green eyes were filled too with fear and the knowledge that she was helpless, trapped by the beautiful bastard kittens she would not leave. Her curled lips opened in a silent hiss, revealing bright sharp teeth and the ridged pink perfection of her mouth. The long, once-white coat was matted; she was not suited to a feral lifestyle, and Diana would have wept to see her cat now.

He mustn’t think of Diana. The pain was too terrible, he had to keep trying to scrub from his memory the agony of holding her beautiful, broken body in his arms, weeping into her hair at the foot of the hard stone staircase; holding her to him so tightly that the paramedics had to forcibly pull her from him, and even they, familiar as they were with tragedy, were moved by the man's terrible grief.

"The cat," he sobbed, "the bloody cat tripped her."

"She'll be OK, you'll see, she'll be alright. Just let us get her to hospital and everything will be alright," they promised.

For two days she lay unconscious, while the surgeons fought to save her, removing fragments of skull from where they were embedded within her brain, while all the time he sat in the waiting room reading the same article repeatedly, without ever once seeing a word, and drinking watery coffee from plastic cups.

On the third day Diana had died. The surgeons said it was better for her. And at her funeral friends and family offered meaningless words of comfort as they left the graveside, where her beloved, faithless body lay beneath a quilt of flowers.

When he returned to the house, the white cat had shot out from the bushes around the front door, hissing, and disappeared over the fence. She was already thin and bedraggled. The food he put out was left untouched, as if she knew it would kill her. Several times he had seen her sitting on the window sill, staring at him with her green unblinking eyes, hissing silently, but at his first movement she would vanish.

But now after all these weeks, he had her. She was trapped there with her kittens, totally vulnerable.

"Bitch," he snarled, relishing her fear, seeing the defeat in her hatefilled eyes. One by one he took the mewling kittens from her, heedless of the frantic scratching claws and sharp teeth that created thin red rivulets on his hands and arms. Now he had all six, a squirming bundle in his hands. He found an old plastic bag on the floor and dropped the kittens into it. The cat howled and wailed.

"Say 'Bye-bye, Mummy'" he laughed, swinging the bag at the frantic cat. "Babies are going for a swim now. Don’t go away now, I’ll be back!"

Across the road the pond lay still and dark and black, shrouded in damp evening fog.

From behind him the piteous cries of the mother cat reached a crescendo, answered by feeble mewling from the kittens. As he stepped into the road something glistening caught his eye, and he hesitated for a moment.

His mind flashed back to the hospital waiting room, to the article he had read uncomprehendingly so many times, and strangely, he could now remember every word. It was the story of Percy Shaw OBE, the Yorkshireman who had invented the cat's-eye, the device embedded into roads and which reflects vehicle lights in the dark, the device which now held him transfixed with the same glittering malevolence the cat had done four months earlier, when it had watched him gently push Diana off balance at the top of the staircase.

What was left of his body landed 40 feet away, a shapeless pile of rags, rapidly staining crimson in the lights of the juggernaut. The driver of the vehicle leant wretching beside his cab.

Some way away, an empty plastic bag rustled, caught on a bush.

At the back of the barn the white cat nuzzled her babies to her, and curling herself around them slept, purring.

END