The Great Ghost Rescue

‘You won’t forget to vanish, will you?’ he called out. And from under the tree, her head, lying sleepily between the Shuk’s paws, said: ‘Don’t worry, dear child; don’t worry about a thing.’

The friend Rick was going to spend the night with was called Daniel. He had been at Norton Castle School with Rick but the Crawlers made him so sick that he’d got his parents to take him away and let him go to day school. Daniel’s father was a painter and his mother was a writer and they were pleasant, vague sort of people with a cheerful, pink house near the river – the kind that people were always arriving at and going away from without anyone bothering. Rick reckoned he could turn up there without a lot of questions about what he was doing alone in London in the middle of the term.

Daniel was very pleased to see him and Daniel’s mother gave him some rather peculiar risotto to eat, and after that Rick phoned Barbara who was waiting as she’d promised in the deserted school office. It was nearly three days since Rick had left and she was very, very pleased to hear his voice.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Mm. We’ve got to London. But I’ve kind of collected rather a lot more than I started with.’

And he told her about Walter the Wet, and the Mad Monk, and the vampire bats.

‘Goodness! It’s like the Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ said Barbara. ‘You’ll need an absolutely enormous sanctuary.’

And then she told him what she had found out since Rick had gone.

‘Now listen. Our Member of Parliament is called Clarence Wilks. Clarence Ephraim Wilks.’

‘Wow!’ said Rick.

‘So you’d better go to the Houses of Parliament and ask if you can speak to him.’

‘But nobody will ever let me in.’

‘Rick you’ve got to be firm. Everyone’s allowed to see their M.P.; I told you. That’s the point of a democracy. And if he isn’t at Westminster you must go and see him in his house. He lives at 397 Cadbury Avenue, Golder’s Vale. It’s in the North of London somewhere.’

‘All right,’ said Rick. ‘And then I explain to Mr Wilks about the ghosts and ask him to take me to the Prime Minister.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’ve never heard of a boy who just got taken to the Prime Minister,’ said Rick. Now that he was actually in London it all seemed much more difficult than it had done at Norton.

‘There’s always a first time,’ said Barbara briskly.

Rick sighed. ‘O.K. How are things at school?’

‘All right. The Crawlers are quite happy about you being gone because your rich godmother is going to buy a smashing present for the school.’

‘My rich what?’

‘Never mind. I’ll explain when you get back. Nothing’s happened really. Maurice’s feet are worse than ever and Masterson got detention for hoisting Matron’s knickers on the flagpole. The usual stuff.’

‘Well, I’d better be off.’ said Rick. ‘I’ve got to feed this vampire bat.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Barbara, who was a very motherly girl. ‘A waste, really. I’d be better at it. More blood.’

And hung up.

Nine

The following afternoon, feeling as if a whole lot of very large butterflies were banging about in his stomach, Rick took a bus to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. They looked very beautiful and very impressive in the sunshine, with the Clock Tower and Big Ben standing out against a clear, blue sky, pigeons roosting on the carved stonework, and glimpses behind the buildings of pleasure boats going up the Thames. It seemed perfectly ridiculous that a boy no one had ever heard of could just march into a place like that.

But of course Barbara was perfectly right. She always was. The first policeman he spoke to directed Rick to St Stephen’s Gate and the policeman there showed him the entrance that visitors used, and there he was in a huge, echoing place called the Central Lobby which felt like a cross between a railway station and a church, filling in a green card which yet another policeman had given him. And when he’d filled it up and put in his own name, and the name of the person he wanted to see, a very grand man in a tail coat, wearing a golden chain took it and went off to find Mr Wilks.

While he was waiting, Rick looked round and what he saw encouraged him. There were a lot of people queuing up to see their Member of Parliament: a party of school children come to see how the government worked, two students, and a whole bus-load of grey-haired ladies – probably a Women’s Institute or something like that. And as one by one their Member of Parliament came to take them inside, Rick noticed that the M.P.s all had very kind and intelligent faces. He even overheard one of them say something cheering about going to have tea.