‘Have some tea,’ said Kitty’s dad.
‘What time is it?’ asked Mum.
‘Five to seven.’
Kitty’s mum yawned and answered, ‘Oh, what a night.’
When he placed a mug of tea on her bedside table, she sat up and said, ‘Peter? What’s the matter?’
He sighed, a very long drawn-out sigh.
‘You’re trembling. You’re pale. It’s Chum, isn’t it? Chum got caught in the trap!’
‘It’s not Chum,’ said Kitty’s dad. ‘Well then?’
‘But there was one trap still left down.’
He was very careful not to say, ‘there was still one trap which you had left down,’ but she still felt bad about it and snapped at him. ‘Peter, I asked you to go downstairs and check.’
He was silent for a while and sipped at his mug of tea. ‘It was awful. There was a mouse caught in that thing.’
‘That’s why I put it there.’
‘Allie, it was stuck there.’
‘That’s the idea of the traps.’
‘It was squeaking and squawking in terror.’
‘You haven’t just left it there?’
‘Its eyes looked up into mine. They were no different from Chum’s eyes. I just couldn’t help thinking – supposing it had been Chum caught in the trap.’
‘I’m so glad it wasn’t. What did you do to the little brute? Drown it?’
‘Allie, it was screaming and struggling. I just didn’t know what to do. At first I tried to get it off the trap.’
‘You mean, let the smelly thing go?’
‘But he was stuck fast. So I just wanted to end its suffering as soon as possible. I took it in the garden – it was terrible.’
Kitty’s dad groaned. ‘I hit him with a rake a few times. Then I poured water over the body from the watering can – just to make sure. He’d have drowned then. Then I wrapped him in a plastic bag and put him in the dustbin.’
‘At least you’re not asking us to have a funeral.’
‘You’d have felt the same if you’d found him. I just had this sense when he looked up into my face that he was a fellow creature; that I had no right to take his life.’
Mum smiled at him. ‘Are you a man,’ she asked, ‘or a mouse?’
They decided not to tell Kitty about the mouse. It was upsetting enough that Chum had, yet again, gone missing. They really didn’t need to tell Kitty about the sticky-traps, and – as they saw it – the hamster’s lucky escape.
‘Suppose it had been Chum caught in that thing? I couldn’t have killed her –’
‘You’d have had to.’
‘Alex, we must find a different solution to the mouse problem.’
Kitty’s mum was a practical person, and she knew that there were only three possible ‘solutions to the mouse problem’. The first solution was to do nothing. There are seven million people in London and probably getting on for thirty million mice. These mice are going to live somewhere, and the likeliest place for them to choose is within reach of human houses, so they could eat the food that people hoard, store, drop or throw away. Everywhere you looked in London there were mice. In the underground railway stations mice leaped across the electrified rails and hopped about the platforms, picking up crusts of bread dropped from sandwiches, gnawing on apple cores, chewing pieces of paper. On street corners and in gutters, indoors and out of doors, there were mice.
She knew that she couldn’t change this. But she didn’t want mice in her house. The mice were dirty and smelly and they made a mess. And that same morning she found mayhem everywhere: half-chewed vegetables on the larder floor, and a whole packet of biscuits, broken and half-chewed, on the kitchen floor.
Worse than this, when she went into her office at the front of the house, she found little footprints all over a document which she had just printed out from her computer.
Clearly she had to do something, so option number one, doing nothing, was no use. There were only two alternatives: either to kill the mice, or to stop them getting in. Killing them upset everybody and she worried about the hamster. She would just have to make sure the house itself was mouseproof: to block up all the holes, cracks and cavities which let them in.
Kitty’s mum went over every inch of the house before she called in Ted, her favourite builder.
And so, a day or two after Kitty’s dad had found the mouse in the sticky-trap, Mum took Ted on the tour. They started in the small paved garden at the back of the house. She pointed to holes in the brickwork through which it was possible to imagine mice squeezing. They examined drainage holes and ventilation shafts. Once inside, they peered at the holes through which pipework burst into plastering. They looked in the larder, and at the various holes and cracks under the stairs. Then they went to the kitchen, and lay under the sink. They moved back the dresser. There were many intakes of breath here.
‘I reckon this is one of the places they’ve been using. Look here,’ said Ted.
Kitty’s mum fetched a dustpan and brush to sweep up crumbs and – she couldn’t help noting – two sorts of droppings. The tiny pellets left by the mice and the slightly larger little turds usually found in the hamster cage.
‘That’s not all,’ she said. And she led the builder to her small basement office at the front of the house. ‘Somehow they got in here. Look at this!’
She held up her document, covered with little sooty pawprints. And this time she noted there were two sorts of pawprints – some tiny ones, which must be from the mice, and some which were a bit bigger, more the size of a hamster’s. She couldn’t be sure of this, and the thought slipped out of her mind while Ted, lying on the floor beneath the window, looked at the skirting board under the radiator.
Then Ted went with a torch into the area at the front of the house to look round the coal vaults. These searches were a bit less thorough, but when he turned to Kitty’s mum he had a funny expression on his face.
‘I don’t want to worry you,’ he said, ‘but I think I just seen a rat scurrying out of there.’