The Secret of Platform 13 (12 page)

He turned right, plodded through a storm relief chamber, and made his way along one of the oldest tunnels close to Waterloo Bridge. You could tell how old it was with the brickwork being so neat and careful. No one made bricks like that nowadays.

Then suddenly he stopped, and sniffed. His snout-like nose was wrinkled, his mouth was pursed up in disgust. Something different had just come down. Something horrid and yucky and
wrong
. Something that didn’t belong among the natural, wholesome smell of the drains.

‘Ugh!’ said the Plodger, and shook his head as though he could escape the sickly odour. A rat scuttled past him and he fancied that it was running away from the gooey smell just as he wanted to do himself. Rats were sensible. You could trust them.

It wasn’t just nasty – it was familiar. He’d smelled it before, that sweet, overpowering, clinging smell.

But where? He thought for a moment, standing on the ledge beside the slowly moving sludge. Yes, he remembered now. Not here – in quite a different part of the town.

He was excited now. Moving forward he examined the inlet a few paces ahead. Yes; that was where it was coming from, running down in a slurp of bath water. He tilted his head so as to shine the torch down the pipe, making sure he knew exactly where he was.

Then he turned back and hurried away, turning left, right . . . left again. A lipstick case bobbed up quite near him – brand new it looked too – but he wouldn’t stop.

Half an hour later, he was lifting the manhole cover on the path between the Serpentine and the summer house inside the park.

No one, at first, could believe the wonderful news. They stood round the Plodger and stared at him with shining eyes.

‘You really mean it? You’ve found the Prince?’ asked Gurkie, holding a leek which had sprung out of the ground before she could stop it.

The Plodger nodded. ‘Leastways, I’ve found his mother.’

‘But how?’ Cornelius was completely bewildered. Surely the Trottles weren’t hiding in the sewer?

The Plodger answered with a single word.

‘Maneater,’ he said.

‘Maneater?’ The wizard shook out his ear trumpet, sure he had misheard.

‘That rubbishy scent Mrs Trottle uses. It’s got a kick like a mule. I used to smell it when I worked the drains under Trottle Towers. And just now I smelled it again.’

The ring of faces stared at him, breathless with suspense.

‘Where – oh, please tell us? Where?’ begged Gurkie.

‘I can tell you for certain,’ said the Plodger with quiet pride, ‘because I followed the outlet right back. It came from the Astor. That’s where Mrs Trottle’s taken Raymond. She’s holed up here in London, and in as clever a place as you can find. Getting the perisher out of there’ll be like getting him out of Fort Knox.’

The Astor was a hotel, but it was not an ordinary one. It was a super, luxury, five star, incredibly grand hotel. The front of the hotel faced a wide street with elegant shops and night clubs, and the back of the hotel looked out over the river Thames with its bridges and passing boats. Gentlemen were only allowed to have tea in the Astor lounge if they were wearing a tie, and the women who danced in the ballroom wore dresses which cost as much as a bus driver earned in a year. The Astor had its own swimming pool and gym and in the entrance hall were show cases with one crocodile-skin shoe in them, or a diamond bracelet, and there was a flower shop and a hairdresser and a beauty salon so that you never had to go outside at all.

Best of all was the famous Astor cake. This was not a real cake; not the kind you eat. It was a huge cake made out of plywood, painted pink and decorated with curly bits that looked like icing – and every night while the guests were at dinner, it was wheeled into the restaurant and a beautiful girl jumped out of it and danced!

Needless to say, ordinary people didn’t stay in a hotel like that. It was pop stars and business tycoons and politicians and oil sheiks who came to the Astor, and people of that kind are usually afraid. Pop stars are afraid of fans who will rush up to them and tear their clothes, and politicians are afraid of being shot at by people they have bullied, and oil sheiks and business tycoons like to do their work in secret.

So the Astor had the best security service in the world. Guards with arm bands and walkie talkies patrolled the corridors, there were burglar alarms everywhere and bomb-proof safes in the basement where the visitors could keep their jewels. Best of all there was a special penthouse on the roof built of reinforced concrete and the rooms in it had extra thick walls and secret numbers and lifts which came up inside them so that they weren’t used by the other guests at all. What’s more, the penthouse was built round a helicopter pad so that these incredibly important people could fly in and out of the hotel without being seen by anyone down in the street.

And it was one of these secret rooms – Number 202 – which Mrs Trottle had rented for herself and Raymond. Actually, it wasn’t one room: it was a whole apartment with a luxurious sitting room and a bedroom with twin beds so that Mrs Trottle could watch over her babykin even when he slept. Even so, she had checked into the hotel under a different name. She’d called herself Lavinia Tarbuck and Raymond was Roland Tarbuck and both of them wore dark glasses so that they stumbled a lot, but felt important.

Although the Astor bristled with security men, Mrs Trottle had hired two bodyguards specially for Raymond. Bruce Trout was a fat man with a pony tail, but the fatness wasn’t wobbly like Raymond’s; it was solid like lard. His teeth had rotted years ago because he never cleaned them and his false ones didn’t fit, so they weren’t often in his mouth. They were usually behind the teapot or under the sofa. Not that it mattered. If there was trouble, Bruce could kill someone even without his teeth and had done so many times.

But it was the other bodyguard that was the most feared and famous one in London. Doreen Trout was Bruce’s sister, but she couldn’t have been more different. She was small and mousy with a bun of grey hair and weak blue eyes behind round spectacles. Doreen wore lumpy tweed skirts and thick stockings – and more than anything, she loved to knit. She knitted all day long: purple cardigans and pink bootees and heather mixture ankle socks . . . Clackety-click, clickety-clack, went Doreen’s needles from morning to night – and they were sharp, those needles. Incredibly sharp.

There are certain places in the human body which are not covered by bones and someone who knows exactly where these soft places are does not need to bother with a gun. A really sharp needle is much less messy and scarcely leaves a mark.

Bruce was costing Mrs Trottle a hundred pounds a day, but for Soft Parts Doreen, as they called her, she had to pay double that.

Mrs Trottle had made a good job of scaring Raymond. He believed her when she said that everything he’d seen in the park and in his bedroom had been due to dangerous drugs that the kidnappers had put into his food, and when she told him not to move a step without his bodyguards, he did what he was told.

Life in the Astor suited Raymond. He liked the silver trolley that came in with his breakfast, and the waiters calling him ‘sir’, and he liked not having his father there. Mr Trottle sometimes seemed to think that Raymond wasn’t absolutely perfect and this hurt his son. Best of all, Raymond Trottle liked not having to go to school.

Because the bodyguards were so careful, Mrs Trottle soon allowed her son to leave his room. So he sat and giggled in the jacuzzi beside the swimming pool and went to the massage parlour with his mother and bought endless boxes of chocolate from the shop in the entrance hall. In the afternoon, the Trottles ate cream cakes in the Palm Court Lounge which had palm trees in tubs, and a fountain, and at night (still followed by the bodyguards) they went to the restaurant for dinner and watched the girl come out of the Astor cake.

She was a truly beautiful girl and the dance she did was called the Dance of the Seven Ve ils. When she first jumped out she was completely covered in shimmering gold, but as she danced she dropped off her first veil . . . and then the next . . . and the next one and the next. When she was down to the last layer of cloth, all the lights went out – and when they came on again both the girl and the cake had gone.

Raymond couldn’t take his eyes off her. He thought he would marry a girl like that when he grew up but when he said so to his mother, she told him not to be silly .

‘Girls who come out of cakes are common,’ said Mrs Trottle.

What she liked was the man who played the double bass. He had a soaring moustache and black soulful eyes and he called himself Roderigo de Roque, but his real name was Neville Potts. Mr Potts had a wife and five children whom he loved very much, but the hotel manager had told him that he must smile at the ladies sitting close by so as to make them feel good, and so he did.

Mrs Trottle liked him so much that on the second night she decided to go downstairs again after Raymond was in bed and listen to him play.

First though, she put a call through to her husband.

‘Have you done what I told you? About Ben?’

‘Yes.’ Mr Trottle sounded tired. ‘Are you sure . . .?’

‘Yes, I’m perfectly sure,’ snapped Mrs Trottle. ‘Tell the servants he may leave very suddenly and I don’t want any talk about it.’ She paused for a moment, tapping her fingers on the table. It was important that there weren’t any bumps or bruises on the boy when he was taken away. ‘You can tell them to let him off his work till then – and remember, Ben is to be told
nothing
. What about the kidnappers – any sign of them?’

‘No.’

‘Well, go on watching,’ said Mrs Trottle. Then she sprayed herself with Maneater and went downstairs to make eyes at Mr Potts as he sawed away on his double bass and wished it was time to go home.

Absolutely everyone wanted to help in rescuing Raymond from the Astor. The ghosts wanted to, and so did the banshees and the troll called Henry Prendergast – and Melisande sent a m essage to say that she was moving into the fountain in the Astor so as to keep an eye on things.

But before they could make a plan to snatch the Prince, there was something they felt had to be done straightaway, and that was to send a message to the Island.

‘They’ll be getting so worried, the poor King and Queen,’ said Gurkie. ‘And even if everything goes smoothly it could take another two days to get Raymond out. If they thought he was lost or hurt it would break their hearts.’

But how to do this? Ernie offered to go through the gump again and speak to the sailors in the Secret Cove, but Cor shook his head.

‘Your poor ectoplasm has suffered enough,’ he said.

This was true. There is nothing worse for ectoplasm than travelling in a wind basket and using ghosts as messengers is simply cruel.

Luck, however, was on their side. The nice witch who worked as a school cook and had fetched Raymond’s gobstopper during the Magic Show, had decided to go through the gump immediately and make her home on the Island. She’d gone to work on Monday morning and been told she was being made redundant because the school had to save money and she didn’t think there was any point in hanging about Up Here without any work.

‘I don’t say as I like Raymond because I don’t, but I dare say by the time he’s on the throne I’ll be under the sod,’ she said, coming to say goodbye.

Needless to say she was very happy to take a message to the sailors in the Secret Cove, so that problem was solved.

‘Tell them there is nothing to worry about. The Prince is found and we hope to bring him very soon,’ said Cor, who actually thought there was quite a lot to worry about, such as how to get into the Astor, how to bop and sack the detestable boy, how to carry the wriggling creature to the gump. But he was determined not to upset the King and Queen.

So the witch, whose name was Mrs Frampton, said she would certainly tell them that, and made her way to King’s Cross Station, and in no time at all she was stepping out on to the sands of the Secret Cove.

No one can be a school cook and work with children and be gloomy , a nd Mrs Frampton was perhaps more cheerful than she needed to be. At all events, the message that a sailor (travelling like the wind in a pinnace) carried back to the Island was so encouraging, that the Queen started to laugh once more and the school children put fresh flowers in the classroom and everyone rejoiced. Any day now, any hour, the Prince would come! The nurses opened the crate of bananas again – and most importantly , t he harpies and the sky yelpers and all the other dark people of the North were told that they would not be needed; that the Prince was found, and coming, and all was wonderfully well!

By the second day of watching Raymond, Bruce was thoroughly fed up. When you are a thug and used to being with gangsters, you aren’t choosy, but he’d never met a boy who opened a whole box of chocolates and guzzled it in front of someone else without offering a single one. Bruce didn’t like the way Raymond whined when he looked like being beaten at ludo and he thought a boy sending up for someone to give him a massage when he hadn’t taken any exercise was thoroughly weird.

All the same, Bruce did his job. He never let Raymond out of his sight, he kept his gun in its holster, he tasted the food that was sent up in case it was poisoned – and each morning he went into the bathroom as soon as Raymond woke so as to make sure there were no crazed drug fiends lurking behind the tub or in the toilet.

Now, though, he came out looking rather pale.

‘There’s something funny in there. It felt sort of cold, and the curtain moved, I’m sure of it.’

Doreen Trout went on knitting. She knitted as soon as she woke. This morning it was a pair of baby’s bootees – very pretty, they were, in pink moss stitch, and the steel of the needles glinted in the sun.

‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘You’re imagining things.’

She got up and went into the bathroom. Her empty needle flashed. She waited. No screams followed, no blood oozed from behind the pierced curtains.

‘You see,’ she said. ‘There’s nobody there.’

But she was wrong. Mrs Partridge was there, and a nasty time she was having of it. She was a shy ghost and hated nakedness, but she had set herself to haunt the Trottles’ sleeping quarters and get the lay-out, and though the sight of Mrs Trottle in her underwear spraying Maneater into her armpits had made her feel really sick, she was determined to stick to her job.