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door as soon as he got home. I’d arrived a few
    minutes earlier, and had scrambled out of my uniform, and was munching on a slice of toast
    in the kitchen and reading my book. It was nearing the end, and I already knew what was
    going to happen, but it was well written, and by one of my favourite authors, so it didn’t
    matter.
    “Met our new neighbour this morning,” he announced out of the blue, saying just
    enough to pique my curiosity, as usual. At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but
    then I remembered the commotion across the street yesterday.
    “Already?”
    “Yep. He found an injured kitten, so I showed him where the vet was. Seems OK.” Then
    he was gone, bounding up the stairs two at a time. I shrugged. I wasn’t sure if it was the
    kitten that seemed OK, or if it was the neighbour.
    “He’s got a fab car too,” shouted my typically male sibling from upstairs. I chuckled.
    Amazing how some things are important to some people, and not one bit significant to
    others.

    Angus
    The vet’s receptionist phoned just after breakfast. I was driving back to my hotel. I
    pressed the speaker function on the phone set.
    “Hello, is that Angus Byrne?”
    “Yes.” She paused, maybe waiting for me to go on.
    “You brought the kitten in this morning?”
    “Yes.” I wondered, not for the first time, if I should try to be more talkative, but I had
    nothing else I felt I needed to say.
    “Just to let you know that it’s got a broken pelvis. Vet says it looks like someone’s
    stomped on it.” My knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Another pause. “Anyway,
    she’s going to need a few wires to stabilise the pelvic fractures, if that’s OK. We can do it for you this afternoon, and you can fetch her tonight.”
    “What time?”
    “Between six and seven pm?”
    “OK.”
    Pause. “OK. Bye then.”
    As I hung up I thought of the kind of person who would stamp on a small animal hard
    enough to break its bones. I wondered how anyone would ever be able to justify doing
    something like that, and yet I knew from experience that there were people out there who
    hurt animals for fun. They were one of my favourite targets. Them, and the monsters who
    abused children.
    Fergus and I had developed a kind of partnership a decade or so back, when I realised
    that being a legitimate policeman was not a very efficient way of fighting crime. You’d hunt
    for a certain perpetrator for ages, and when you eventually found them, you would have to
    hand them over to what was essentially a deeply flawed system, and hope that justice
    would prevail. Yeah, right.
    So Fergus hunted the crime online, looking on sites like youtube for video footage of
    cruelty of any description. He would send me the footage, and whatever information he
    could garner from the IP address. I did the rest, finding those deeply repulsive individuals
    who were responsible for such atrocities, and I hurt them. Sometimes I hurt them quite a
    lot. And then I would rewrite their mean little minds so they would feel physically and
    mental agony if they even considered being cruel in any way to anything ever again.
    Paedophiles were a bit more difficult to find, but find them we did, and they were the ones I
    usually killed. Sometimes a mind will be so dark and foul and evil that repairing it is just not an option.
    As I drove, I realised that it was going to be difficult for me to keep a kitten in a hotel
    room. I thought of Mark, and of his obvious compassion for the little animal. I decided to ask him if he would watch the cat overnight. I could always smuggle it into the hotel, but I had
    something I needed to do tonight, and I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t want to
    leave the small feline invalid unattended in some empty hotel room. I phoned Fergus’
    mobile.
    “What?” Fergus answered. “We’re busy here, you know.”
    “Yeah, yeah. I need the names of those people who lived in that house you just bought
    for me, and