dunnit?' I said, without much enthusiasm.
'Oh no, you don't need to do anything like that, my dear Francis. We know who dunnit.'
'You know who ... but then for heaven's sake why don't you get your skates on and pick him up?'
I stopped abruptly. I wished I hadn't made that last remark. Sometimes, I realised, I had all the sensitivity of a slogger in a baseball game.
'Your eyes,' I said, awkwardly. 'I suppose they make things difficult for you outside.'
'Yes, there's a bit of a problem there,' said Saffron, to my relief ignoring the brick I'd dropped. 'But the complicated part is finding him, because he's everywhere and nowhere. In fact strictly speaking he doesn't exist: he's a legend, a shadow from the past ...'
Saffron suddenly stopped and sat there, concentrating hard. The sparkling gold rings swung gently from his pointed ears, pricked in their most receptive position; his head swayed back and forth like a tank turret seeking its target, and his whiskers quivered busily, as if they were insect antennae processing information. Then his blind, flickering gaze came to rest on a certain point in the waters of the sewer.
'Niger, you tell him about the Black Knight,' whispered the Chartreux, barely audibly, and with a mighty leap he plunged head first into the water. While I was still trying to recover from my surprise, he came to the surface again with something struggling frantically between his teeth. He had obviously caught a rat and was taming it for breakfast. I'd already heard amazing tales of the acoustic sensitivity of the blind, but this episode surely took the biscuit.
Paying no further attention to the incident, Niger walked on. I took this as an invitation to follow her. Leaving the angler to his hobby, I followed close on my companion's heels. Naturally I couldn't resist the temptation to cast several glances back over my shoulder for a better view of Saffron's extraordinary activities, but I couldn't really see much except a frantic splashing as either the hunter tried to drag his prey under water or vice versa.
'Once upon a time, Francis, something evil ruled the underworld.' Niger closed her eyes and stretched her neck telescopically forward, as if passing through an imaginary wall into the realm of the past. Inexpressible horrors seemed to be resurrected before her mind's eye.
'We didn't know what the evil thing was, but we knew it was there . Anyway, it seemed to be a creature of darkness, like us, and it could come round the corner without warning any time it liked. When it did appear, sudden as a jack-in-the-box, it would grab one of us and make mincemeat of him in the fraction of a second. We usually panicked and ran for our lives. If some brave person did go to the victim's aid, he'd be mincemeat too in no time at all, leaving only a couple of extremities, torn off but despised by the phantom, to bear witness to his courage. Our enemy was bestiality incarnate and completely unpredictable, and as time went on it became a terrible scourge threatening to wipe us all out. We crept along, hugging the walls, our teeth chattering; we couldn't hunt properly because there was no way to turn the threat aside, and we saw a time coming when we'd be wiped out. Meanwhile, the phantom was pursuing its annihilation programme as relentlessly as a finely calibrated circular saw, always trusting to vicious surprise attacks. Sometimes it would lie in wait in a secret niche above the wall, leap down on any group of brothers and sisters who happened to be passing and wreak indescribable havoc among them. Or it would dart out of a branch drainpipe like a combine harvester run amok and dispose of one of us with only a couple of bites. Whenever these things happened we heard terrible screams which sounded like the dreadful howling of madmen unable to express the infinite horror of their dark, imaginary world in language. And we heard echoes of terrifying sounds: the hiss of fangs plunged into live flesh, the dry crack of
'Oh no, you don't need to do anything like that, my dear Francis. We know who dunnit.'
'You know who ... but then for heaven's sake why don't you get your skates on and pick him up?'
I stopped abruptly. I wished I hadn't made that last remark. Sometimes, I realised, I had all the sensitivity of a slogger in a baseball game.
'Your eyes,' I said, awkwardly. 'I suppose they make things difficult for you outside.'
'Yes, there's a bit of a problem there,' said Saffron, to my relief ignoring the brick I'd dropped. 'But the complicated part is finding him, because he's everywhere and nowhere. In fact strictly speaking he doesn't exist: he's a legend, a shadow from the past ...'
Saffron suddenly stopped and sat there, concentrating hard. The sparkling gold rings swung gently from his pointed ears, pricked in their most receptive position; his head swayed back and forth like a tank turret seeking its target, and his whiskers quivered busily, as if they were insect antennae processing information. Then his blind, flickering gaze came to rest on a certain point in the waters of the sewer.
'Niger, you tell him about the Black Knight,' whispered the Chartreux, barely audibly, and with a mighty leap he plunged head first into the water. While I was still trying to recover from my surprise, he came to the surface again with something struggling frantically between his teeth. He had obviously caught a rat and was taming it for breakfast. I'd already heard amazing tales of the acoustic sensitivity of the blind, but this episode surely took the biscuit.
Paying no further attention to the incident, Niger walked on. I took this as an invitation to follow her. Leaving the angler to his hobby, I followed close on my companion's heels. Naturally I couldn't resist the temptation to cast several glances back over my shoulder for a better view of Saffron's extraordinary activities, but I couldn't really see much except a frantic splashing as either the hunter tried to drag his prey under water or vice versa.
'Once upon a time, Francis, something evil ruled the underworld.' Niger closed her eyes and stretched her neck telescopically forward, as if passing through an imaginary wall into the realm of the past. Inexpressible horrors seemed to be resurrected before her mind's eye.
'We didn't know what the evil thing was, but we knew it was there . Anyway, it seemed to be a creature of darkness, like us, and it could come round the corner without warning any time it liked. When it did appear, sudden as a jack-in-the-box, it would grab one of us and make mincemeat of him in the fraction of a second. We usually panicked and ran for our lives. If some brave person did go to the victim's aid, he'd be mincemeat too in no time at all, leaving only a couple of extremities, torn off but despised by the phantom, to bear witness to his courage. Our enemy was bestiality incarnate and completely unpredictable, and as time went on it became a terrible scourge threatening to wipe us all out. We crept along, hugging the walls, our teeth chattering; we couldn't hunt properly because there was no way to turn the threat aside, and we saw a time coming when we'd be wiped out. Meanwhile, the phantom was pursuing its annihilation programme as relentlessly as a finely calibrated circular saw, always trusting to vicious surprise attacks. Sometimes it would lie in wait in a secret niche above the wall, leap down on any group of brothers and sisters who happened to be passing and wreak indescribable havoc among them. Or it would dart out of a branch drainpipe like a combine harvester run amok and dispose of one of us with only a couple of bites. Whenever these things happened we heard terrible screams which sounded like the dreadful howling of madmen unable to express the infinite horror of their dark, imaginary world in language. And we heard echoes of terrifying sounds: the hiss of fangs plunged into live flesh, the dry crack of
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