Kayla Kat is my little furry girl. My raison d'etre. She'd have been 11 years old in November.
The guy down the road, a self-professed cat-killer, told me he killed cats that came onto his property. He told me back in the autumn of 2010 that if I had a cat, never to let it go on his property because he would "dispatch it". Since then my family have called him "Deadly Dave".
Kayla gets locked in at night, but she got out at 7:30pm when I let the dogs out the back briefly. She didn't come back in. She was wearing a collar that wouldn't slip over her head, and ID tag with my number on it. It never occured to me she'd go as far as Deadly Dave's.I waited up for her all night, knowing something awful had happened because she hadn't come home. I walked and searched for my girl all the next day, and found a big clump of her fur, pulled out by the roots, on Deadly Dave's verge and her belly fur on his fence and a few centimetres away on shrubs in his garden.
He claimed that when he came home from work at 8:00pm that night when Kayla went missing, that he let out his (elderly) dog who had a fight with a cat, and the cat must have run away.
But the evidence doesn’t tally with a dog/cat fight and three neighbours say they heard nothing, and would have, had there been a fracas.
There were no signs of any scrabbling or disturbance in the wet soil. No blood. Just a big clump of her fur, ripped out by the roots, on the ground, as if she was stomped on.
So Deadly Dave may have fulfilled his promise. And his neighbours all seem to think that he’s dispatched yet another cat.
And I’m saying it out loud, because I believe he may have done wrong, and I can’t prove it sufficiently for a prosecution. And I want to be very wrong and hope she's just been severely scared off.
Kayla has a routine, she's locked in at night, and she sleeps in the crook of my arm every night, purring away.
So what's happened to her? She's very approachable, very friendly. But no-one's phoned so far. So where is her body?
Kayla was a major reason for me being here, given I battle to keep the Black Dog at bay. Kayla’s incredibly affectionate nature and my drive to protect her has kept me going each day.
IF Deadly Dave’s has done the dastardly deed, then he's done more than just killed my Kayla, he's killed my joy. I don’t do grieving very well, very badly in fact, so writing about it here might be a different strategy to see if I can get through this next day, and maybe the day after, because I have a hope of justice, that Deadly Dave’s “dispatching” of cats, if he's true to his word, will one day be widely known and he’ll be punished - socially, legally, whatever.
