Felix The Railway Cat

A bit timidly, the boy extended an upturned hand towards her, the treat nestled in the middle of it. Felix very gently bent her head to his hand and took the treat from his palm with her rough pink tongue. She licked her lips afterwards, as though to say politely, ‘Thank you so very much indeed.’

‘Another?’ the boy asked, warming up, taking pleasure in her pleasure.

Felix didn’t need asking twice.

The two of them sat together on the bench, and Felix entertained that child as only she knew how. After the treats had been eaten, she happily let him pet and stroke her, sitting calmly by his side and never once showing the slightest grumpiness. In truth, she was simply doing her job as part of the customer-facing team of Huddersfield station – and doing it brilliantly. The boy was still stroking her when, thirty minutes later, Andrew saw two uniformed officers walk out onto the platform.

He went to meet them and together they cautiously approached the runaway. Now calm, he didn’t flee – or lie. The police took a statement from both him and Andrew, then told the child that it was time for them to take him back to the care home.

The boy stood up bravely. Before leaving, he turned back to face the railway cat.

‘See you, Felix,’ he said, with a slight smile twitching at the edges of his lips. ‘Goodbye.’

29. Felix the Facebooker

‘Do you reckon it’s Angie Hunte?’ asked the gateline worker at Huddersfield station. ‘Could she be the one who’s set up this Facebook page for Felix?’

Chris Bamford, his colleague, shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon so,’ he replied.

‘Andrew McClements?’

‘Nah.’

‘What about Geoff?!’

‘Are you having a laugh?’

Relations between the station cat and the crotchety team leader were famously still at an impasse.

‘You know who my money’s on?’ said Chris. ‘I reckon it’s Martin.’

All eyes turned to the unassuming announcer, who was quietly making his way, head down, to the tiny announcer’s office where he spent so much of his time during his shift. Ever since he had befriended Felix with that mouse-on-a-string toy when she first arrived at the station – her very first toy – he and Felix had remained close. Martin even kept a little bag of cat treats for her in his desk drawer.

‘He’s got the opportunity, hasn’t he?’ reasoned Chris. ‘He’s always in the back office. He could be on Facebook all the time and we’d never know.’

The gateline team assessed this possibility with the keen consideration of super sleuths. Ever since Chris had discovered that there was a Facebook page for ‘Felix, the Huddersfield station cat’ – it had come up on his recommended pages and he’d liked it instantly – he and his colleagues had been playing this guessing game, trying to work out who it was that had set it up. The page had been running since July 2015 and it was now December; it had a couple of hundred likes. As more and more of the team had discovered it through their personal Facebook accounts, tongues had started wagging on the concourse about who was actually running it. No one had the faintest clue – but the team were all convinced that it had to be a member of the team. Every day, Chris and his colleagues on the gateline tried to figure out who was maintaining the page and keeping it a secret. It was almost like Cluedo: ‘I think it was Andy Croughan in the team leaders’ office using a smartphone.’

The amount of thought they applied to it would have put CID to shame: psychological profiling, alibis, opportunity and more all came into play. When it came to Martin, the announcer’s notorious quietness at work certainly made him enigmatic enough to be a prime candidate.

‘It’s got to be him!’ exclaimed Chris.

But Martin was coming up for retirement in January 2016, and the others thought it highly unlikely that he’d be at the cutting edge of social media, creating a Facebook page for his feline friend, no matter how cosy the two of them might get in the announcer’s office during Martin’s long shifts. No: they had to think again.

As they investigated the page updates further, they stumbled upon a crucial piece of evidence: every single picture on the Facebook page appeared to have been taken around 6.30 a.m. Whoever was running the page had to be someone who was always on the platform at that time.

The conclusion was clear: it wasn’t a colleague, it was a commuter.