Page 12 - Billy the Cat and Katie

everything and William explained that the visor had been covered in a chemical that made the
wearer able to see the faintest of light and even body heat, so even in the darkest room you
could clearly make out furniture and people. ‘It’s amazing’ Kathleen was totally shocked at
everything that she had discovered but just as she was about to take the helmet off there was a
sound from inside the lining that stopped her. ‘William, I can hear people talking!’ Slipping on
another helmet William listened to the voices. ‘It’s radio chatter. My father put two-way radios
into the helmets and what you can hear is on one of the radio frequencies. It picks up police
and military signals but it doesn’t sound like either of those. I know; I’ve heard both of them
before. Let’s listen and see what they are saying.’

As they sat in the kitchen eating toast and marmalade both William and Kathleen came to a big
decision. No one must know about the special suits and no one must ever know about
William’s secret, but now it was a secret that both of them must keep and on top of that there
was this latest development. The voices they’d heard were criminal’s voices and they were
using stolen military radios to listen in on the police whilst planning a robbery in Burnham high
street in just a weeks time. What were they to do? If they told the police their secret would be
out, but if they didn’t the robbers would get away with the goods and Burnham would become
an easy target for villains. William looked at Kathleen and Kathleen looked back at William. It
was up to them, they would have to stop the criminals on their own, or at least ‘someone’
would have to!

Each day after school William and Kathleen would go down to the shed, explaining to Aunt
Mable that they had some practical school homework to do and it would be noisy and messy to
do it in the house, so rather that get under her feet they’d go somewhere out of the way. As
William had already had plenty of practice with the suit it was Kathleen’s turn and whilst she
learned what she could do William listened into the robber’s conversations. They obviously
didn’t think anyone else could hear them as they discussed their plans quite freely and could be
heard talking to members of the gang, some of whom were hiding out above a shoe shop next
door to their target, Burnham Provincial Bank. It appeared that they’d been tunnelling into the
vault of the bank from the basement next door for weeks and this Sunday was the day they’d
break in. Burnham was pretty quiet on Sundays as lots of people went to watch Burnham Town
FC play football whilst others would go to the park or just do odd jobs at home. The shops were
closed and the robbers believed they had the perfect plan but they’d not considered that their
plans would be overheard by two very special and very determined people.

‘What if we can’t stop them William? I mean, there seems to be four of them and only two of us
and we’re not used to dealing with this sort of thing.’ Kathleen did seem to be nervous but as
William said, ‘Who else will stop them? We can’t let them get away with this and besides, you
and I have a secret weapon and now we have secret identities. I’ll call you Katie and you can
call me Billy.’ ‘Billy the Cat’ laughed Kathleen, ‘that’s what I’ll call you, Billy the Cat!’

Aunt Mabel was fast asleep when William and Kathleen crept from their beds on Saturday night
and changed into their catsuits. Kathleen switched on the helmet radio and put down the night
vision visor. ‘We must test that everything works first and also make sure that we’re not seen,