The Secret of Platform 13 (11 page)

But the dwarf now sighed – he was growing tired – and the Queen dragged herself away and went into the next room which she had prepared for the Prince. His old, white-curtained cradle still stood in the corner, but the palace carpenters had made him a beautiful bed of cedar wood and a carved desk and a bookcase because she knew without being told that the Prince would love to read. She hadn’t made the room fussy, but the carpet, with its pattern of mythical beasts and flowers, had taken seven years to make – and there was a wide window seat so that he could sit and look out over the waters of the bay.

But would he ever sit there? Would she ever come in and see his bright head turn towards her?

The King, coming into the room, found her in tears again.

‘Come, my dear,’ he said, putting his arms round her, ‘there are five days still for the rescuers to bring him back.’

But the Queen wouldn’t be comforted. ‘Let me go to the Secret Cove, at least,’ she begged. ‘Let me wait there for him.’

The King shook his head. ‘What can you do there, my love? You would only fret and worry and your people need you.’

‘I would be closer to him. I would be near.’

The King said nothing. He was afraid of letting his wife go near the mouth of the gump. If she lost her head and went through it, he could lose her as he had lost his son.

‘Try to have patience,’ he begged her. ‘Tr y to be brave.’

The King and Queen were not the only people on the Island to worry and grow afraid. The schoolchildren had been given a holiday during the nine days of the opening, but they had decorated the school with flowers and hung up banners saying
WELCOME TO THE PRINCE
. Now the flowers were wilting, the banners hung limp after a shower of rain. The bakers who had baked huge, three-tiered cakes for the welcoming banquet began to prod them with skewers, wondering if they were going stale and they should start again. The housewives who had ironed their best dresses, shook them out and ironed them all over again because they’d grown crumpled.

As for the nurses in the cave, they had ordered a crate of green bananas before the Opening so that the second the ship was sighted they could rip it open and help themselves to the firm, just ripened fruit – but when no news came they nailed it up again and now they were back to wailing and eating burnt toast.

Then that night the square began to fill up with some very strange people.

There had been rumours, quite early on, of discontent in the north of the island. Not just the kind of grumbling you always get from people who have not been chosen for a job they are sure they could do. Not just Odge’s sisters complaining because their baby sister had been chosen and not them. Not just grumpy giants saying, what do you expect, sending a milksop who yodels to bring back the Prince? No . . . this was more serious discontent, and from creatures that were to be reckoned with.

And that evening, the evening of the fourth day of the Opening, they came, these discontented people of the north. They came in droves, filling the grassy square in front of the palace, and turned their faces up to the windows, and waited . . .

Strange faces they were too: the blue-black faces of the neckies with their lop-sided feet . . . the slavering-tongued sky yelpers, those air-borne hell hounds with their saucer eyes and fiery tongues, and the squint-eyed faces of the harridans.

There were hags in the square who made Odge’s sisters look like tinsel fairies; there was a bagworm as long as a railway carriage; there was even a brollachan – one of those shapeless blobs who crawl over the ground like cold jellies and can envelop anyone who gets in the way.

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.

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.