She locked the car without any further static shocks, nodded to Ted, and walked down the road.

Ruth Clark, Ted Dundas’s neighbour, was a slim, intense woman on the upper margin of middle age; evidently the cat meant a great deal to her.

Morag took the cat’s description: a tabby, five years old, female. Unusually intelligent and sensitive. (Right.)

She looked around the boundary of Mrs Clark’s fairly shabby suburban garden. There was no sign of cat droppings — but then, said Mrs Clark, Tammie was too smart to do her business in her own garden and she always used the neighbours’, oh, yes.

On the other hand, there was no sign that anything amiss had happened to Tammie. No rat poison put down by a pissed-off neighbour, for instance.

Missing cats weren’t a police priority. There wasn’t anything Morag could do but assure Mrs Clark that they would circulate the details of the cat, and suggest that she do her own searching — circulate notices to the neighbours, for instance — and then she endured a little routine vitriol at the general incompetence and apathy of the police.

“Even my phone’s been off since I got up. I had to walk down the road to the public phone box and you wouldn’t believe the filth…”

Morag got out as quickly as she could, reported into the station, and walked back up the road to Ted Dundas’s.

She sat in his kitchen — warm, smelling so thickly of bacon she could feel her arteries furring up just sitting here — and let him make her a mug of strong tea. He boiled up a pan on a battered camping stove, propped up on his gas hob.

“The gas is off,” Ted explained. “You saw the repair crew in the road. Bunch of bloody cowboys,” he said amiably. “I heard old Dougie at number fifteen complaining about it, and he said he’d heard someone else had called them in to look at a leak. Dougie heard that because they’d come to borrow his mobile phone; their phone was out.”

Mrs Clark’s phone had been cut too. “Ted, what about your phone line?”

“Snafu. But I have a mobile. But you can hang the bloody phone; what bothers me is the cable TV. I was watching the baseball from Japan. Got to the fourth innings before it cut out.”

“Um.” Cable and phone lines and gas lines, all out. Morag turned over the possibilities. Was it possible one of those cack-handed crews, doing some innocent repairs, had cut through the other service lines? It wouldn’t be the first time. Or what about deliberate vandalism?

“You own a cat, don’t you, Ted?”

“The cat owns me, more like.”

“I just can’t see what people like about the bloody creatures.”

“Aye, well, cats are unpleasant and unnecessarily cruel predators. And it’s soggy and sentimental to think anything else.”

“But you keep one anyhow.”