The Secrets of the Stone A Lottie Lipton Adventure Read online

  “We’d better get a move on,” said Lottie. “The thief might be close to the Trident already.”

  And so they started to climb the 334 steps to the belfry. As they got closer to the top, they could hear the tick, tick, tick of the grand clock, reminding them that time was of the essence. Lottie’s legs started to ache halfway up and Uncle Bert looked breathless after only a few minutes. Reg didn’t seem to notice the effort, his tall frame almost leaping up the steps.

  “How will we know where the clue is?” asked Lottie.

  “I suppose we’ll see it when we see it,” puffed Uncle Bert. “The clue talks about the bell. Did you know that the name ‘Big Ben’ is the name of the bell, not the tower or the clock?”

  They reached the top of the stairs and came to the platform on which the clock stood. Lottie had never seen anything like it! The workings of the clock lay all about them, cogs and pendulums moving with loud clicks, ticks and tocks. These moved the arms on the clock faces, which were on the four sides of the tower, made from delicate milky white glass panes. Lottie couldn’t get over the size of them. One glass panel was missing, so Lottie peered through and saw London in the night time. She saw a huge city lit by streetlights, which looked like tiny pinpricks of white on a black canvas. The only thing she couldn’t see was the clock tower, which was directly below her.

  “There’s the beauty!” said Reg. Looking up they could see the undersides of the bells that struck the hour. There were four smaller ones and one large one with a crack in it – this was Big Ben.

  Lottie searched the belfry for clues, hoping to find a simple note or a riddle, but they couldn’t find anything.

  “This is hopeless!” she cried. She inwardly told herself off after saying it. Would DI Blade give up? Of course not! He’d carry on through the night until the thief was in his grasp. Lottie looked again at the great bell. She noticed that around the rim of it were markings that she recognised.

  “Found it!” she sang. Uncle Bert and Reg gathered around. Stamped into the rim of the bell were a series of dots and dashes. Lottie noted the code down in her detective’s notebook:

  “It doesn’t look like much of a code to me,” said Reg.

  “It’s Morse Code,” said Lottie. “It’s usually used to send codes electronically over a telegraph wire. I read about it in my True Mysteries magazine.”

  “It makes sense,” said Uncle Bert. “Morse Code was invented in the 1840s, about the same time that the Houses of Parliament were being built. They must have built the code into the bell when it was being cast. Ingenious!”

  Lottie flipped through her notebook, where she had a cutting from her True Mysteries magazine. It was the key to the code.

  “I knew this would come in handy one day!” she smiled.

  “Now all we have to do is match up the letters and we’ll have our clue!”

  She looked proudly at her friends. They looked blankly back.

  “Get on with it then! I want to get back to my bed!” said Reg.

  Lottie sighed and set about cracking the code.

  Lottie scribbled the answer as fast as she could.

  “There!” she said. She showed them the notebook.

  They all stared at the clue for a while longer.

  “No, it means nothing to me,” said Uncle Bert after a few tense moments.

  “Nor me,” sighed Lottie. She sat down on the floor and put her head in her hands. Uncle Bert joined her.

  “Really?” said Reg. “It seems pretty obvious to me.” Lottie and Uncle Bert looked back up at him, both frowning. “Don’t look at me like that! I know I ain’t got much in the old brainbox department, but you don’t work in a museum all of your life without picking up a few bits of information here and there.”

  Lottie jumped up, excited once more.

  “Go on then!”

  Reg smiled proudly.

  “Is this what it feels like to be the clever one?” he said, toying with his friends.

  “Get on with it!” they both shouted.

  “Alright! So we’re looking for a Greek shoe, set in stone. That could be a statue of some sort. The most famous Greek ones I know of are the Elgin Marbles.”

  “Which are back in the museum! Reginald my boy, you’re brilliant!” said Uncle Bert as he stood up to join them. He shook the old caretaker’s hand with glee.

  From underneath them came a slow hand clap. Up the steps came a man, all dressed in black, but with a shock of curly white hair.

  “Bravo,” he said with no emotion and an unexpected posh accent. “You really are quite the team.”

  “Who the devil are you?” asked Uncle Bert.

  “You may well ask, Professor West,” said the man. “Allow me to introduce myself. My friends call me Bill and you’ve just led me to my fortune.”

  Lottie gasped.

  “You’re Bloomsbury Bill from my crime magazines! You broke into the museum!”

  “Precisely,” he said. “I’ve been researching the Trident of Neptune for some time and tonight I finally uncovered a clue on the Rosetta Stone. When you came along and solved it, I thought I’d tag along to see how far you got.”

  Lottie thought back.

  “You were in the black car!” she said, furious with herself for not taking the earlier sighting seriously. “So all the time we thought we were chasing you –”

  “I was following you. Yes.” He smiled. It looked horrible, like a snake digesting its meal. “And you will now lead me to the Trident.”

  “Oh really? And what makes you think we’ll do that?” said Reg, raising himself up for a fight.

  “This,” said Bloomsbury Bill. His hand suddenly held a small gun. He pointed it at the three of them.

  “Ooh, hecky thump,” said Reg with a gulp.

  Chapter Four

  They drove carefully back to the museum. Bloomsbury Bill joined them, his gun trained on them all the way. Once they arrived they got out of the car and walked to the Greek section, deep in the heart of the museum, where the Elgin Marbles were on display. Lottie whispered to Uncle Bert as they walked side by side.

  “We can’t let him have the Trident, Uncle Bert!” hissed Lottie.

  “He’s got a gun!”

  “He’s a thief and a bully! And he doesn’t deserve it. We did all the work.”

  “Lottie darling, just do as he says. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  They came to the correct room and Reg flicked the lights on as he walked in, illuminating the marbles. They were huge sculptures of Greek gods in smooth white stone.

  “Here we are,” said Uncle Bert. “Now what?”

  “We hunt for the Trident of course,” said Bill. He strolled up and down the room admiring the sculptures. “They really are quite beautiful aren’t they? Did you know that the temple that they came from was built around 2,500 years ago in Greece? When an army used the temple as a gunpowder store in the seventeenth century, there was a huge explosion, destroying the building completely. Lord Elgin transferred the surviving sculptures here in the early 1800s.”

  Uncle Bert stared at the burglar in disbelief.

  “You know, you’re remarkably well educated for a common thief.”

  “Less of the ‘common’, if you please,” Bloomsbury Bill laughed. “I had a good reputation once. Now I find that stealing is easier than working and so much more fun! Now come along, get searching. Remember, we’re looking for a ‘Greek shoe’.”

  Lottie begrudgingly looked for the clues. The marbles were mostly friezes, large white marble slabs with figures sculpted into them. There were other figures, which would have stood atop the entrance of the temple. These were gods and goddesses, wearing togas or nothing at all. Over the years, some of the figures had lost their feet altogether, having had them blown off in an explosion or knocked off by careless passers-by. The figures that remained were mostly barefoot. It was ancient Greece after all. Lottie suspected they didn’t wear a nice pair of leather boots around Athens in 500 BC.

/>   She looked around and saw the others were looking blank also. The room they were in was large and she was now a good distance from Bloomsbury Bill. Maybe she could get away and raise the alarm, if only…

  Just then, her eye caught a different sort of sculpture; an army of soldiers and horses, which got her thinking.

  Horses wore shoes, didn’t they?

  She searched the exhibit with a renewed energy and came across one horse with its hooves showing a definite horseshoe pattern on the bottom. She vaguely remembered from one of the books she had read in the library (or perhaps it was Uncle Bert boring her with another piece of seemingly useless information), that horseshoes didn’t come into common use until 1000 AD, meaning they were totally out of place on this sculpture. Maybe whoever had set the trail had added the horseshoe themselves with a hammer and chisel. She ducked under the red rope barrier to take a closer look. Sure enough, she could see a small message imprinted on the bottom of the shoe:

  180 ACW

  She glanced over at Bloomsbury Bill, who wasn’t paying any attention to her. He probably thought she was just an annoying little girl who was up past her bedtime. Well she’d show him! If she could just work out what she had to do, she could get away and keep the Trident for herself. Uncle Bert would keep his job, winning his foolish bet.

  She stared at the secret message on the sculpture and concentrated.

  Lottie bit her lip as she concentrated and the answer hit her. Thank goodness she had paid attention in Uncle Bert’s maths lessons. ACW must stand for anti-clockwise and 180 must be the amount of degrees – a half turn!

  She checked that Bloomsbury Bill wasn’t looking and reached out to the horseshoe. She grabbed it and turned, surprised to find that it slid easily around to face the other way like a key in a lock. She smiled as the horseshoe clicked into position and she felt the stone panel behind it shift, exposing a crack in the sculpture.

  At first she thought she had broken it, but Lottie stepped back and saw that the crack was actually the start of a door. Checking over her shoulder again, she gave the frieze a nudge. It slid open like a freshly oiled door. Lottie’s heart leapt as it revealed a shining silver trident, a giant weapon with three prongs at the top.

  “Found something?” said Bloomsbury Bill. He was at the other end of the long room and Lottie knew that she would have to act fast.

  “There’s no way I’m letting a bully like him take this away from us,” she whispered to herself.

  Without thinking, she grabbed the Trident of Neptune from the secret compartment and ran as fast as she could to the nearest exit.

  “Get back here you little thief!” shouted Bloomsbury Bill. Lottie thought that was a bit rich, coming from him. He had anger in his voice and immediately gave chase. Lottie was already through the door, but she could hear his heavy footsteps as he pounded through the corridors. She sped around a corner, the Trident heavy in her hands, but her pulse was racing so fast that it gave her energy and strength.

  “I’ll tear you limb from limb, you greasy little tyke!” threatened Bloomsbury Bill, his voice echoing in the empty, dark museum. Lottie didn’t dare look back. Thank goodness she knew the halls and corridors so well. Even if Bloomsbury Bill caught up with her, she knew all the best places to hide.

  She turned the corner and stopped dead. Bloomsbury Bill stood in front of her, grinning menacingly.

  “You’re not the only one who knows a few shortcuts kid,” he said, stepping closer. “I studied this museum for months trying to find that trident. Now give it here.”

  Lottie forced herself to show no fear.

  “Come and get it!” she shouted and ran off in the opposite direction. Bloomsbury Bill was hot on her heels now, just a few paces behind her. She had lost her head start, but she still had youth and intelligence on her side.

  An idea came to her.

  She allowed her shoes to slip off as she turned into a corridor. She sped up and ran full pelt. Just when she could run no faster, she stopped and slid across the wooden floor at an impressive speed, just as she had planned.

  Behind her, Bloomsbury Bill turned and accelerated also, but hadn’t noticed Reg’s super-shiney-slidey waxed floor.

  He screamed as he lost his footing and seemed to hang in mid-air for a second or two. His legs kicked desperately, trying to get a grip on the floor, but he fell flat on his back, knocking himself out cold. Lottie made her way back to where he was lying and stood over him proudly.

  “That’s what you get for bullying Lottie Lipton!” she said triumphantly.

  Chapter Five

  “I have to say Professor West, when someone rang Scotland Yard and said they’d captured Bloomsbury Bill all on their own, I thought it was a wind-up.”

  Detective Inspector Victor Blade stood in the courtyard of the British Museum dressed in his usual attire of a raincoat and three-piece-suit. Two uniformed police officers led Bloomsbury Bill across the large space in handcuffs. “Yet here he is. Keep an eye on him lads,” he called to the policemen. “He’s a slippery little beggar.”

  It was early morning and the sun was coming up over the rooftops of London. Uncle Bert stood in the courtyard too, yawning widely.

  “I’m afraid I can claim none of the credit, Detective Inspector,” he said. He went on to recount the entire adventure, while the policeman made notes in his trusty notebook.

  “What a marvellous story,” said Blade finally. “I’d like to meet this niece of yours.”

  They went indoors where Lottie and Reg, too excited to sleep, sat on some steps playing cards.

  “Lottie? There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

  Lottie jumped up and recognised him immediately. She was too amazed to speak, her voice disappearing.

  “That was pretty good work you did tonight,” said Blade. “Usually I’d say to never take on a criminal yourself. It can be a dangerous business and we wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. In this case however, I think I should be telling criminals not to mess with Lottie Lipton!”

  They all laughed. Lottie could not believe her hero was standing right in front of her.

  “C-can you sign this please?” she said, finding her voice. She handed him a copy of True Mysteries magazine, which he signed with a flourish.

  “I’d better be off,” he said. He winked at Lottie as he left.

  “That was some night,” said Reg with a tired stretch.

  “Uh-oh,” said Uncle Bert. “Looks like it isn’t over yet.” He nodded at the entrance, where Sir Trevelyan Taylor was barging through the doors.

  “Bertram!” he bellowed. “What’s the meaning of this? There’s police everywhere!”

  “Calm down Sir Trev. We’ve had a busy night, that’s all,” said Reg.

  “Busy? If my museum is damaged in any way, I’ll –” He fell silent as Uncle Bert produced the glittering silver Trident of Neptune and laid it in his hands.

  “Yours, I believe?” said Lottie.

  “B-but…I…H-how…?” stuttered Sir Trevelyan. He had turned a pleasing shade of pink.

  “I’ll expect my new double pay at the end of the month,” said Uncle Bert with a grin. “Anyone for cocoa?”

  Reg and Uncle Bert strolled off, already bickering about the best way to make cocoa. Lottie patted Sir Trevelyan on the arm as she passed, who looked like he was going to faint.

  “Yes, that really was some night,” she said to herself. She looked down at the magazine in her hands and opened it to look at the inscription.

  Glossary

  Cleopatra Queen of Egypt between 44 BC and 30 BC. She was the last Pharaoh (ruler) of ancient Egypt.

  Elgin Marbles Large collection of Greek sculptures in the British Museum. They were originally part of the Parthenon, an ancient temple in Athens.

  Houses of Parliament The buildings in London where Members of Parliament meet to run the country.

  Morse Code A system which uses dots and dashes in place of letters. It was invented in 1836 by Samuel Mor
se.

  Neptune The Roman God of the Sea. He is often pictured in paintings and mosaics riding a horse and holding a large Trident.

  Rosetta Stone A large stone in the British Museum. On it is a law written by King Ptolemy V in three different languages.

  Scotland Yard The Police Force in London.

  Trident A three-pronged spear used for fishing and in battles.

  Did You Know?

  • Big Ben weighs 13 tonnes.

  • The tower that Big Ben stands in was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

  • Cleopatra lived between 69 BC and 30 BC.

  • The ancient Greeks believed in a family of gods and goddesses, with King Zeus as the King of the Gods.

  Crack the Code!

  Use the Morse Code table from Chapter Three to decipher this message:

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published 2015 by

  A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2015 A & C Black

  Text copyright © Dan Metcalf

  Illustrations © Rachelle Panagarry

  The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted

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