He got the nickname Ratbag because he was a mess in every way - yet Nick was amazed to see him in a park one day making sounds on a trumpet that he'd never heard before. Ratbag could make that trumpet laugh and cry. He was brilliant - though it took a lot of coaxing from Nick to get the seemingly half-mad loner to demonstrate his talent for the school band leader, Skinhead. This was the first crucial step in the fabulously successful musical career of 'Peewee Mountjoy.' But back in the days when Ratbag was still Ratbag, a school trip to Amsterdam for a school band competition was to turn, by chilling stages, into a tangled nightmare involving an unscrupulous international crime ring. Unwittingly, Nick and Ratbag were to become the bait in a police trap. Young adult fiction.