500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(46)

“Margaret McLafferty, is that you?” came a loud cracked voice from the bus. Nina obviously wasn’t having a great deal of luck holding back Carrie. “Did you just kill my cat?”

“Och, noooooo,” said the woman, leaning faintly on the car door. Lissa went up to her.

“Are you all right?” she said. “Do you need to sit down?”

“Dinnae worry about her!” came Carrie’s strident voice. “Save my cat!”

“I’m not . . .”

Lissa moved closer. Her heart dropped. The poor creature was in a bad way: one of her ears was ripped off and her back leg looked as if it were half torn off. The cat eyed her piteously, even as Lennox came and stood next to her.

“Aye, that’ll be her,” said Lennox shortly. “Tried to fish her out of a tree. She took fright and bolted.”

“Can you get the vet?” she said.

“No need,” said Lennox. “There’s a shovel in the van.”

“You’re kidding!” said Lissa. “There must be hope.”

She crouched down. The cat yowled and tried frantically, claws out, to back away, but couldn’t move because of her shattered leg. Her eyes were absolutely wild. It was heartbreaking to see.

Nina came out. “Vet’s over Kinross way,” she said, and Lennox swore.

“Bloody Sebastian. And those bloody horse shows.”

Sebastian was a good vet, but horses were his true love.

“Fix my cat!” came Carrie’s voice. She still wasn’t, Lissa noticed, getting out of the bus. Lissa couldn’t blame her for not wanting to see it.

“I feel very faint,” said the woman who’d been driving.

“Good!” came Carrie again. “Hope you die!”

Lennox glanced at the surgery. “Where’s Joan?”

Lissa winced. “She said she was going to . . .”

“The horse show,” said Nina. “Might have known. She’ll probably be assisting Sebastian.”

“Christ, if we ever needed her.”

The cat was yowling, but the sound was deeper and more groaning now.

“I could get the spade,” said Lennox helplessly.

“John Lennox, if you kill my cat I’ll have you up in a court of law,” said Carrie, storming out of the bus, face alight. “No cat murdering on my watch.”

Lennox’s face was a mask of despair. “You cannae let the wee thing suffer, Mrs. Brodie. You just cannae do that. It’s no right.”

The baby started crying, as if to chime in with the miserable atmosphere all around. Nina looked at Lissa inquiringly, who stared back, helpless. She didn’t have a clue what to do. Carrie had now burst into noisy sobs.

“Somebody do something! Not you, John Lennox!!”

Lissa fumbled in her pocket for the key to the surgery but then remembered that Joan kept the door unlocked. She couldn’t, could she? It was absurd—there was a world of difference between a boy lying on the ground and a cat. They were completely different. But still, somehow, she felt something surge within her. She put her sleeves over her hands and attempted to lift the screaming cat up.

“What are you doing?” said Lennox, still outraged that there was an animal in such pain. Lennox was an extremely conscientious and humane farmer, but he was not remotely squeamish. To his mind, to leave an animal in this state was utmost cruelty.

“We can . . . get her into Joan’s,” stammered Lissa. “There are supplies there. I could . . . I could take a look.”

Lennox looked at her. “You don’t know how to treat a cat,” he said roughly.

“No, but . . . I can stop her pain,” said Lissa, and Lennox calmed down a bit.

“How?” he said, as Nina rushed in to take little John off his dad, with Carrie hurrying behind her, and Lennox took off his jacket and bundled the poor creature inside it.

“It must be the same weight as a baby,” said Lissa, opening the big manse door and then the surgery. She pulled out a huge swath of medical paper and placed Joan’s files onto the floor, then put the paper over the top of them. Lennox kept the animal covered with his jacket, but it had quieted now and was making the occasional soft whimper, which they both recognized as being distinctly worse. Lissa scrubbed her hands quickly and put a tiny amount of morphine in a syringe, frantically doing the arithmetic in her head. It slid in easily as she found a tiny vein in the creature’s groin, grateful for the amount of times she’d spent taking blood on her various placements.

Then, once the large cat had fallen asleep, she took a look at what they were dealing with. She palpated the cat’s stomach—she knew absolutely nothing about animal biology, but it wasn’t firm or feeling like it was filling with blood. Neither was the heartbeat thready, although it was fast—“Google cat heartbeat,” she told Nina, who immediately complied. There was a leg that was patently broken—there was no plaster of paris on-site, but she could certainly improvise a splint until they could get her to a vet.

The most important thing, though, was the shape of the cat’s face. The skin had been ripped away; you could see sinew and bone underneath, and her ear was hanging off. It was a mess. Lissa looked at it carefully. It reminded her of working A&E, in fact. Underneath the fur, it was just skin and sinew and muscle, after all. Nothing she hadn’t seen a million times. She looked at it for a long time.