The Secret of Platform 13 Read online

  And there were the harpies! They had elbowed their way to the front, these monstrous women with the wings and claws of birds – and even the fiercest creatures who waited with them, gave them a wide berth.

  ‘Tell them to choose a spokesperson and we will hear what they have to say,’ said the King.

  But he knew why they had come and what they had to say, for these creatures of the North were as much his subjects as any ordinary school child or tender-hearted fey. Not only that, they were useful. They were the police people. There was no prison on the Island – there was no need for one. No burglar would burgle twice if it meant a hell hound flying in through his window and taking pieces out of his behind. Any drunken youth going on the rampage soon sobered up after a squint-eyed harridan landed on his chest and squeezed his stomach so as to give him awful dreams – and you only had to say the word ‘harpy’ to the most evil-minded crook and he went straight then and there.

  And it was a harpy – the chief harpy – who pushed the others aside and came in to stand before the King.

  She called herself Mrs Smith, but she wasn’t married and it would have been hard to think of anyone who would have wanted to sit up in bed beside her drinking tea. The harpy’s face was that of a bossy lady politician, the kind that comes on the telly to tell you not to eat the things you like and do something different with your money. Her brassy permed hair was strained back from her forehead and combed into tight curls, her beady eyes were set on either side of a nose you could have cut cheese with and her mouth was puckered like a badly sewn button hole. A string of pearls was wound round her neck; a handbag dangled from her arm and she wore a crimplene stretch top tucked into dark green bloomers with a frill round the bottom.

  But from under the bloomers there came the long, scaly legs and frightful talons of a bird of prey, and growing out of her back, piercing the crimplene, was a pair of black wings which gave out a strange, rank smell.

  ‘I have come about the Prince,’ said Mrs Smith in a high, piercing voice. ‘I am disgusted by the way this rescue has been handled. Appalled. Shocked. All of us are.’

  Harpies have been around for hundreds of years. In the old days they were called the Snatchers because they snatched people’s food away so that they starved to death, or fouled it to make it uneatable. And it wasn’t just food they snatched in their dreadful claws; harpies were used as punishers, carrying people away to dreadful tortures in the underworld.

  Mrs Smith patted her hair and opened her handbag.

  ‘No!’ said the King and put up his hand. The handbags of harpies are too horrible to describe. Inside is their make-up – face powder, lipstick, scent . . . But what make-up! Their powder smells of the insides of slaughtered animals, and one drop of their perfume can send a whole army reeling backwards. ‘Not in the palace,’ he went on sternly .

  Even Mrs Smith obeyed the King. She shut her bag, but once again began to complain.

  ‘Obviously that feeble fey and wonky wizard have failed; one could hardly expect anything else. And frankly my patience is exhausted. Everyone’s patience is exhausted. I insist that I am sent with my helpers to bring back the Prince.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that you can find him?’ asked the King.

  The harpy twiddled her pearls. ‘I have my methods,’ she said. ‘And I promise he won’t escape us.’ She lifted one leg, opened her talons, covered in their sick-making black nail varnish, and closed them again – and the Queen buried her face in her hands. ‘As you see, my assistants are ready and waiting.’ She waved her arm in the direction of the window and sure enough there were four more loathsome harpies, like vultures with handbags, standing in the light of the lamp. ‘I’ll take a few of the dogs as well and you’ll see, the boy will be back in no time.’

  By ‘dogs’ she meant the dreaded sky yelpers with their fiery breath and slavering jaws.

  The Queen had turned white and fallen back in her chair. She thought of Gurkie with her gentle, loving ways . . . of Odge showing them the baby mistmaker she meant to give to the Prince . . . And old Cor, so proud to do this last service for the court. Why had they failed her? And how could she bear it if her son was snatched by bossy and evil-smelling women?

  Yet how long could they still delay?

  The King now spoke.

  ‘We will wait for one more day,’ he said. ‘If the Prince has not been returned by midnight tomorrow, I will send for you all and choose new rescuers to find him. Till then everyone must return to their homes so that the Queen can sleep.’

  But when the Northerners had flown and slithered and hopped away, the King and Queen did anything but sleep. All night long, they stared at the darkness and thought with grief and longing and despair of their lost son.

  Twelve

  Mrs Trottle was in the bath. It was an enormous bath shaped like a sea shell. All round the edge of the tub were little cut-glass dishes to hold different kinds of soap and a gold-plated rack stretched across the water so that she could rest her box of chocolates on it, and her body lotions, and the sloppy love story she was reading. On the shelf above her head was a jar of pink bath crystals which smelled of roses, and a jar of green crystals which smelled of fern, and a jar of yellow crystals which smelled of lemon verbena, but the crystals she had put into the water were purple and smelled of violets. Mrs Trottle’s face was covered in a gunge of squashed strawberries which was supposed to make her look young again; three heated bath towels waited on the rail.

  ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ray!’ sang Mrs Trottle, lathering her round, pink stomach.

  She felt very pleased with herself for she had foiled the kidnappers who were after her darling Raymond. She had outwitted the gang; they would never find her babykins now. They would expect her to go to Scotland or to France, but she had been too clever for them. The hiding place she had found was as safe as houses – and so comfortable!

  Mrs Trottle chose another chocolate and added more hot water with her magenta-painted toe. Next door she could hear the rattle of dice as R aymond played ludo with one of his bodyguards. She’d told Bruce that he had to let Raymond win and he seemed to be doing what he was told. The poor little fellow always cried when he lost at ludo and she was paying the guards enough.

  Reaching for the long-handled brush, she began to scrub her back. Landon was staying at home to find out what he could about the kidnappers. They would probably go on watching the house and once she knew who they were she could hire some thugs to get rid of them. That was the nice thing about being rich; there was nothing you couldn’t do.

  And that reminded her of Ben. She’d rung the hospital and though they never told you what you wanted to know, it didn’t look as though Nanny Brown was ever coming out again. The second the old woman was out of the way, she’d move against Ben. Thinking of Ramsden Hall up in the Midlands, made her smile. They took only difficult children; children that needed breaking in. There’d be no nonsense there about Ben going on too long with his schooling. The second he was old enough he’d be sent to work in a factory or a mine.

  How she hated the boy! Why could he read years before Raymond? Why was he good at sport when her babykin found it so hard? And the way Ben had looked at her, when he was little, out of those big eyes. Well, she’d found a place where they’d put a stop to all that!

  As for Raymond, she’d frightened him so thoroughly that there was no question of him wandering off again. He knew now that all the things he thought he’d seen in the park, and earlier in his bedroom, were due to the drugs he had been given.

  ‘There’s nothing people like that won’t do to you if they get you in their clutches,’ she’d said to him. ‘Cut off your ear . . . chain you to the floor . . .’

  She’d hated alarming her pussykin, but Raymond would obey her now.

  What a splendid place this was, thought Mrs Trottle, dribbling soapy water over her thighs. Everything was provided. And yet . . . perhaps the violet bath crystals weren’t quite strong enough? Perhaps she should add
something of her own; something she had brought from home? Sitting up, she reached for the bottle of Maneater on the bathroom stool. The man who mixed it for her had promised no one else had a scent like that.

  ‘You’re the only lady in the world, dear Mrs Trottle, who smells like this,’ he’d said to her.

  Upending the bottle, she poured the perfume generously into the water. Yes, that was it! Now she felt like her true and proper self.

  She leant back and reached for her book. The hero was just raining kisses on the heroine’s crimson lips. Mr Trottle never rained kisses on her lips, he never rained anything.

  For another quarter of an hour, Mrs Trottle lay happily soaking and reading.

  Then she pulled out the plug.

  The Plodger liked his job. He didn’t mind the smell of the sewage; it was a natural smell, nothing fancy about it, but it belonged. He liked the long dark tunnels, and the quiet, and the clever way the watercourses joined each other and branched out. He could tell exactly where he was – under which street or square or park – just from the way the pipes ran. It was a good feeling knowing he could walk along twenty feet under Piccadilly Circus and not be bothered by the traffic and the hooting and the silly people trying to cross the road.

  It wasn’t a bad living either. It was amazing what people lost down the loo or the plughole of a bath, especially on a Saturday night. Not alligators – the stories about alligators in the sewers were mostly rubbish – but earrings or cigarette lighters or spectacles. His father had been in the same line of business, and his grandfather before him: flushers they were called, the people who made a living from the drains. Of course, having some fish blood helped – that’s what merrows were, people who’d married things that lived in water. Not that there had been any tails in the family; merrows and mermen are not the same. Melisande was quite right to be proud of her feet; tails were a darned nuisance. No one could work the sewers with a tail.

  Thinking about Melisande brought a frown to the Plodger’s whiskery face. Melisande was all churned up. She’d got very fond of the fey – of all the rescuers – and now she worried because they couldn’t find that dratted boy. All yesterday they’d searched and they were at it again today, scuttling about up there, but there wasn’t any news.

  Over his woolly hat the Plodger wore a helmet with a little light in it and now, bending down, he saw a pink necklace bobbing in the muck. Not real – he could see that at once; plastic, but a pretty thing. It would fetch a few pence when it was cleaned up and that was good enough for him; he wasn’t greedy . S cooping it up in his long-handled net, he tramped on along the ledge beside the stream of sludge. He was near the Thames now, but he wouldn’t go under it, not today. There were good pickings sometimes from the busy street that ran beside the river.

  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.