‘How you going to feed her?’ my mum said because she was keeping the fridge closed. He bought tins of cat food out his own pocket money and my dad said it wasn’t fair but she had to start catching the mouse because money was short.

We all joined in training her to chase balls of wool, or when my mum complained about her knitting, to go after pieces of string and people’s shoelaces. She was a natural, curving her paw to catch at things, but we didn’t see her claws come out and everyone looked at Manus like we could see it was gonna end badly. ‘Get Bluey to teach her,’ Busola said. We weren’t sure how they were gonna get on, Missus was a luxury cat and Bluey was a smelly old tramp. He got in a bad temper, hissing down at her from the wall. So Manus kept her inside and used toilet paper to pick up Bluey’s mice by the tail and take them in to her on a plate to have a sniff and wrinkle her nose up. She’d got used to fish fingers and tinned food, and it smelt like Bluey was telling her to get lost.

‘What you gonna do?’ we said.

Manus arranged it like there’d been a murder and it was Missus who did it. There were body parts all over the hall when my mum and dad came in, he’d rubbed her nose in it to look red. They looked at him, and my dad shook his head. How could they tell, when you could see Missus licking her paw and wiping it off?

‘Clear up this mess and come, we want to talk to you.’

We all squeezed in the front room with Missus looking up at Manus like she was on trial and he had to save her. ‘First,’ my dad said, ‘no one is on trial here for the murder. The wild cat has done this.’ He looked around to make sure we could all see he had the evidence and was going to bring it out the bag. ‘In the first case, if you don’t know, the difference between rat and mouse, it’s not just big and small. And ... what’s her name?’

‘Missus,’ Manus said.