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“Mmm. Maybe.” Edie frowned. “I’d like something that was a bit more special, sort of different. Like Treasure, or … or Rescue. Because we found her.”

Layla nodded.“I know what you mean. Oh! I know.” She laughed. “You could call her Barbie. Because of the barbed wire!”

Edie looked at the kitten again.“Yes! That’s perfect! She does look like a Barbie. Yes, Barbie, that’s you,” she murmured lovingly to the kitten. Then she sighed. “I wish we knew where she came from.”

Layla glanced at the living-room door– they could hear Edie’s mum and dad chatting in the kitchen.

“Are you going to keep her?” she whispered. “I mean, we’ve just given her a name. What if she has to go and live with someone else?”

Edie smiled.“I think it’s going to be OK. Mum came downstairs on Saturday morning, and me and Dad and the kitten – I mean, Barbie – we were all asleep on the sofa. We’d fallen asleep feeding her! And she was asleep on both of us, half on me and half on Dad. Mum laughed and said something like, Well, she’s obviously not going anywhere, is she? And I reckon that means we’re keeping her.”

She reached out and gave Layla a quick hug.“But you can come and see her whenever, I promise. You rescued her, too.”

Layla sniffed and sighed.“Thanks. Hey, we’d better get to school.” She leaned over to rub Barbie under her chin. “Bye, gorgeous.”

“This is almost where we found her,” Edie murmured, stopping to look around the path, trying to work out exactly where it had been. “Yes – here, look.” They could see where the grass had been squashed down as they crouched to rescue the little kitten.

Edie took a shocked breath at the sight of the rusty, jagged wire. It was hard to think of Barbie being caught up on it, even when she knew that the kitten was safe now. She had just left her at home, with Dad teaching her how to pat her little paws at a piece of string. She was the world’s best looked-after kitten, Edie was making sure of it.

“We should go, we’ll be late,” Layla pointed out.

Edie took one last look around.“I hate thinking of her stuck here,” she said, with a shiver. “Do you think we could stop on the way home? Look for clues? We should try and find out where she came from.”

Layla nodded.“Course. Though I don’t know what we’re looking for.”

Edie sighed.“Me neither. I just feel like we ought to.”

Edie had printed out a photo that her mum had taken of her feeding Barbie, and she spent the whole of break and lunch showing it off to everyone in their class. It was great having everyone oohing and aahing over how cute and fluffy and little she was but Edie felt worried all day. She hadn’t liked leaving Barbie with Dad – even though he was a vet and she knew he could look after a kitten much better than she could. He was even going to take Barbie into work with him later on so she wouldn’t be left on her own. All the same, Edie still felt like she was abandoning her tiny cat. She was practically chasing Layla out of the cloakroom after school.

“Slow down!” Layla gasped, as she hurried along the path after Edie.

“I can’t! I really, really want to get home and check Barbie’s OK, and I want to look at the place we found her and see if we can work out what happened,” Edie explained.

Layla smiled.“Oh, all right.” She sped up a bit, until they arrived panting back at the little space in the bushes. “I honestly don’t see what we’re going to find, though.”

Edie sighed.“I know. But we have to try. I mean, what if it was the cat’s owner who abandoned her kittens?”

“How horrible!” Layla was shocked.

“Some people do that. They don’t think animals matter.” Edie scowled and Layla stared at her.

“You look scary like that.”

“Good!” But then Edie’s shoulders drooped. “I can’t see any clues, can you? And we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

Layla stood on tiptoe, trying to peer through the bushes on the side of the footpath.“What’s behind this hedge?”

“The road that goes into the village.” Edie stepped up close to the hedge. “If Mum’s right and it was a feral cat moving her kittens, she would have had to carry them across the road.”

“Maybe a car…” Layla’s voice trailed off, and the two girls looked at each other, appalled. “But your mum or dad would know about that, wouldn’t they? Somebody would have brought the cat in if they’d hit her?”

“I suppose…” Edie sniffed. “Can you see anything else? On the other side it’s just a field…”

“There are some sheds or something over there, near that copse of trees.” Layla pointed across the field. “They’re quite a long way, though.” Then she glanced up at the sky. “Edie, look! It’s going to pour down any minute. Come on. Let’s get home.”

Edie watched the grey-black cloud chasing up behind them and nodded. It looked like it might thunder and she knew Layla hated thunderstorms. Besides, she was desperate to get home and see Barbie. She grabbed Layla’s hand and they ran down the length of the field and across the courtyard.