The Girl In the Cave by Anthony Eaton Page B

you get.”
    â€œBut what about keeping me out of Miss Pincushion’s grasp?”
    â€œFirst we have to find what we’re looking for. And besides,” Uncle Dermott added with an evil leer, “after what you did to my nets, I’m not through with you myself yet.”
    He shoved her into the cupboard, then closed and locked the door.
    Inside, Kate sat in the dark smiling to herself, imagining Uncle Dermott and Aunt Tina trying to hammer through the tiles into the concrete foundations of the house. Even moving the washing machine, an old heavy iron one, would take them ages.
    Once she was certain that Uncle Dermott had gone, she quickly climbed up the shelves, pushed the plywood panel aside, and slipped out onto the top of the wardrobe. From there it was only a couple of seconds until she was back down on the floor. Tiptoeing across to the study door, she opened it carefully and listened. The only sounds were some muffled thumps and swearing from the basement, two floors below. All she had to do now was to creep out and find help. It was a pity, of course, that she hadn’t managed to find any real clues as to her own family, but there’d be time for that later.
    She was halfway down the stairs when she realised something – Uncle Dermott and Aunt Tina would be busy for hours, so this was possibly the only opportunity she would ever have to look for clues in Uncle Dermott’s study. There were all sorts of papers and books in there, and Miss Pincushion had spoken about a deal being made, hadn’t she? Well if there had been a deal, there might be proof of it, and the most likely place to find that would be in the study.
    Sighing, she crept back up the stairs and locked the study door behind her.

Chapter Nine
    The Secret Drawer

    Uncle Dermott kept his desk neat and tidy. Nothing at all was out of place: there were pens in special pen holders in the first drawer, staples and stapler neatly in the second drawer, writing paper and files in the filing cabinet in the third drawer. Kate flipped through the papers quickly, but there was nothing even slightly interesting there, only lots of papers about butterflies and taxation.
    Surely there had to be a clue somewhere in here. Getting down on her hands and knees, she crawled under the desk to see if anything was sticky-taped to the bottom. Nothing, but as she was crawling out again, something odd caught her eye.
    The desk was made of solid wood, old, dark mahogany, with a leather top. Just underneath the top, right above where Uncle Dermott’s knees would normally be, was a small brass button built into the bottom of the desk.
    â€œI wonder what that could be?” said Kate, and pressed it.
    There was a soft “click” but nothing happened. Puzzled, Kate crawled out from under the desk and the first thing she noticed was a secret drawer that had slid out a little way from the side of the desk.
    â€œHow clever!”
    With trembling hands, Kate slipped the drawer fully open and peered inside. The drawer was empty apart from a cheap folder, the type you buy in newsagents for presenting assignments or holding recipes, or that sort of thing. It had a blue cover and the pages were all clear plastic sleeves into which you could slip bits of paper.
    The first couple of sleeves were empty, but inside the third was an old clipping, cut from a newspaper, faded yellow with age. The date on the top of the paper was eight years ago. “PINCUSHION BABY MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHES! POLICE PERPLEXED!” read the headline. Under this was a black-and-white picture of an empty cot, and next to it a young man and a young woman looking miserable. The woman had long brown hair, and even though she was so sad she was still beautiful. Barely daring to breathe, Kate read the rest of the article.
    The heir to the missing Pincushion family fortune was today kidnapped while being minded by her aunt, Lady Agnes Pincushion. The police are baffled by the