Dawn Undercover

by Anna Dale

  There he was! The sandal thief! With the pilfered item lying at his feet. He was standing in full view of the house with his head hanging down. She couldn’t see his face but she could hear the slap of his tongue against the water as he took a lengthy drink from the pond.

  ‘Haltwhistle.’ said Dawn. She was livid. ‘Youuuuu …’ She stopped herself from calling him something rude and, instead, peeked around the conifer tree to see if Charles was watching. Fortunately, he was no longer at the window. Dawn tried to attract Haltwhistle’s attention by clicking her fingers. ‘Fred!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Oi, Fred! Come here, you monster.’

  The dog stopped drinking. He raised his head and looked directly at Dawn, water dribbling down his hairy chin. Patting her thighs, Dawn gave him an encouraging smile.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ she said, and then had a moment of inspiration. ‘Biscuits!’ she added enticingly, although she did not have so much as a crumb in her pockets.

  Haltwhistle hesitated. Then he seized her sandal in his mouth and gambolled off in the direction of a small outbuilding close to the house. Dawn ground her teeth together in fury before taking a deep breath and haring after him.

  ‘Ha! Got you cornered,’ said Dawn, closing the door of the outbuilding behind her. She took a couple of paces into the musty-smelling interior. Judging by the tools hanging from nails on the walls, the dining chairs stacked up in a corner and three bikes chained together, Dawn guessed that the building was being used as a workshop-cum-storeroom. Feeble rays of light filtered in through two high windows, leaving much of the room smothered in shadow. She saw a movement underneath a bench on top of which a ladder rested, broken into several pieces.

  Haltwhistle crawled out from under the bench and ventured into a shaft of sunlight, meekly wagging his tail at Dawn. He dropped her sandal and it made a hollow tap as it landed on the concrete floor. Dawn lunged at her sandal and buckled it around her foot. Then she grabbed Haltwhistle’s shaggy neck and felt around it for his collar. It wasn’t there.

  The dog almost knocked her over as he jumped up, put his paws on the bench, and sniffed the ladder. She shook her head in wonderment as he started to lick one of the rungs.

  ‘You are one dozy dog,’ said Dawn, and she allowed herself to smile. Now that she had retrieved her sandal and managed to entrap Haltwhistle, she felt too thankful to be angry. Her moment of relief proved to be all too temporary, however.

  ‘Crikey! Someone’s coming!’ said Dawn, hearing a noise outside. She threw her arms around Haltwhistle’s body and, mustering all her strength, bundled him into a shadowy corner. Then she pinned him to the ground behind the stack of dining chairs and gave him a really stern look. ‘Shh,’ she said, putting her finger to her lips as the door creaked open.

  Dawn heard two sets of footsteps enter the outbuilding. She sneaked a look through the chair legs and saw Charles Noble standing in the doorway with the old man who had been sitting outside the village hall collecting entrance fees for the art exhibition in his bucket.

  ‘You sure ‘bout this, Mr Noble?’ she heard the old man say.

  ‘Yes, Reg. I couldn’t be more positive,’ replied Charles.

  The old man scratched his head. ‘Don’t seem right, somehow. Sawin’ a perfickly good ladder into bits.’

  ‘It’s broken, Reg,’ explained Charles patiently, ‘in several places.’

  They moved closer to the bench where the ladder was resting. Dawn tightened her grip around Haltwhistle’s muzzle.

  ‘Nice bit of wood, that,’ said Reg. ‘You wouldn’t like me to see if I can fix it?’

  ‘No,’ said Charles. ‘It’s kind of you to offer, but I’d rather it was chopped up for firewood. Since that unlucky chap’s accident, I’ve barely been able to bring myself to look at it. Broke both his legs, poor devil.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Reg slowly, as if he were willing his brain to remember. ‘Window cleaner, weren’t he?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Charles, retreating towards the door. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it – and afterwards, if you wouldn’t mind seeing to that other little job I mentioned …’

  ‘Right-o,’ said Reg, lifting down a large saw from a hook above his head. ‘Will do.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll be in my study if you need me,’ said Charles, his hand on the doorknob, ‘finishing off today’s cryptic crossword. Cup of tea at eleven, as usual? Three sugars, isn’t it?’

  ‘Four,’ said Reg, and sniffed. Then he gripped the ladder with one hand and began to make a groove in the wood with the saw’s toothed blade.

  Dawn’s eyes were as round as marbles. She sat, as motionless as she was able with a headstrong dog squirming in her arms, and gave herself a good talking to in her head: You ninny, Dawn. Fancy not realising that Charles Noble’s house was the scene of Miles’s accident. Red pointed it out to you on the map of the village and you weren’t paying proper attention. What did he say its name was? The Old Toast House or something …

  She watched Reg’s elbow swing back and forth as he sawed the ladder into segments. Dawn shared the old man’s opinion that it was rather wasteful to reduce the ladder to a stack of firewood. It was also a blow to her investigation. If she had realised the ladder’s importance when she first set eyes on it, she could have examined it to check for any signs of foul play. Now she would never know if Miles’s fall had been engineered or if he had merely lost his balance.

  Like most dogs, Haltwhistle did not have very good manners – and neither did he have very clean teeth. Unfortunately, Dawn learnt both these facts in quick succession when he opened his cavernous mouth and yawned right in her face. With no prior warning, Dawn did not have a chance to turn her head away before the blast of doggy breath hit. Instinctively, Dawn’s fingers flew to her nostrils to block out the smell.

  If Dawn had credited Haltwhistle with having the tiniest scrap of intelligence (which she didn’t), she might have thought that he had yawned on purpose. To fend off his unpleasant breath, she was compelled to release him with one hand. This gave him a distinct advantage and he wasn’t slow to act upon it. One moment Dawn was pressed up against him, eyeball to eyeball, and the next she was watching helplessly as his feathery tail disappeared through the door. Fortunately, Reg seemed to be far too engrossed in his task to notice a dog slipping past him, followed by a vexed eleven-year-old girl with a very light tread.

  Once she was out in the open air, Dawn could hear a distant voice calling the same name over and over again.

  ‘Fre … d! Fre … d! Fre..d!’

  She looked desperately about her but Haltwhistle was nowhere in sight. Bracing herself to bump into Charles at any moment, she dashed over to the strangely shaped house and, pressing her back against it, moved crabwise along its wall until she reached a corner. Just as she peered round it, Dawn heard a noisy scampering sound and saw Haltwhistle bolting down the gravel driveway towards a scrawny boy with his arms outstretched.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed at Felix, as soon as she had joined them outside the front gate of the house.

  ‘Don’t glare at me like that,’ he said, frowning at her. He stroked Haltwhistle’s head, and the dog gave a contented sigh.

  ‘You’re supposed to be at home!’ fumed Dawn. She stole a quick look at the house behind them, and noticed a porcelain tablet beside the front door which confirmed that she had misremembered its name. It was called ‘The Old Oast House’. ‘Of course…that was it,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘He slipped out of his collar, didn’t he,’ said Felix, producing a choke chain from his pocket and dropping it over the dog’s head. ‘Wily old thing,’ he added as he clipped on a lead.

  Dawn narrowed her eyes. She had a sneaking suspicion that Felix wasn’t being truthful, but she didn’t want to argue with him in such a public place. Instead, she suggested that they should move a little further up the road: she was worried that Charles Noble might glance out of a window and wonder what they were doing skulking about o
utside his house.

  ‘Cracked the case yet?’ said Felix cheekily.

  ‘Funnily enough … no,’ said Dawn. ‘I’ve been too busy chasing your dog all over the place. He could ruin this whole mission if you don’t keep him under control.’ She glared at Felix. ‘Now, go back to the cottage, please. You know you shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Neither should you,’ responded Felix with a smirk. ‘That fellow whose garden you’re working in is going to be mightily puzzled by now. Let’s hope Trudy could come up with a story to explain where you’d disappeared to.’

  ‘What?’ said Dawn, her eyes widening. ‘Has Larry come back? How long ago did you see him? You’d better not be pulling my leg …’

  ‘Old bloke?’ said Felix glibly. ‘Bandy legs … beard … brown paper bag?’

  Dawn nodded, her heart sinking.

  ‘Sure I saw him … He walked in through his front gate about five minutes ago.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Third Moon

  ‘Did you get fish and chips?’ said Felix, hurtling down the stairs of Daffodil Cottage three at a time. By some miracle, he managed to avoid tripping over Haltwhistle, who seemed to be determined to beat his master to the bottom step. ‘Well?’ said Felix eagerly, as he landed in the hallway. His restless eyes settled on Dawn’s rucksack and, before she could protest, he had snatched it out of her hand and unfastened it. ‘I’m absolutely starving,’ he said, rummaging inside the bag. ‘I hope you got an extra-big portion for me.’

  ‘You’ve got no manners,’ said Dawn feebly. She didn’t have the energy to give him a proper lambasting: her muscles ached, her feet were all grimy and the tip of her nose was tender to the touch.

  Felix groaned and let the rucksack sag in his arms. ‘You didn’t get my message, did you. Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘Have you looked in a mirror? Your nose is sunburned right on the end. Either that or you’ve got a very big spot.’

  Dawn sighed. She had worn a sun hat dutifully for the entire day but its brim had obviously not been wide enough.

  ‘What message?’ she said.

  ‘The one I sent you by telepathy. I asked you to stop at the chip shop on your way home.’

  ‘No, I didn’t get your message,’ said Dawn wearily, resisting the temptation to add, ‘You nutcase.’

  ‘Don’t know what Trudy’s going to make us for supper,’ said Felix. ‘There’s hardly any decent grub in the kitchen. Bit of bread, some funny-looking cheese, a jar of plum jam and an egg. Where is our lovely mother, anyway?’

  Dawn put her head around the living-room door. Still wearing her muddy shoes, gardening gloves and baseball cap, Trudy had collapsed untidily on to the sofa.

  ‘She’s fast asleep,’ said Dawn, succumbing to a little yawn herself. ‘I’m not surprised. We’ve worked in four different gardens today. Weeded at “Rustlings”, watered at “Fledglings”, mowed the lawn at “Ogle Lodge” and dug a deep pit at “The Eerie Eyrie”. Well, I hardly lifted a finger. Trudy did all the backbreaking stuff …’

  ‘“The Eerie Eyrie”, did you say?’ Felix sniggered. ‘What kind of weirdo would choose a name like that?’

  ‘Seth Lightfoot lives there,’ said Dawn a little defensively. ‘He is a bit odd, but he’s very kind. He chatted to Trudy for ages, and kept us well supplied with iced tea and arrowroot biscuits.’

  ‘Isn’t he the man who warned us not to go near Palethorpe Manor? I thought he was a suspect,’ said Felix.

  ‘He is,’ said Dawn, ‘but I managed to search every room in his house and I didn’t find anything suspicious.’

  ‘So, what was the pit for?’

  ‘To anchor his totem pole.’

  ‘W-e-i-r-d-o,’ said Felix, looking smug.

  ‘Seth made it himself, out of bits and pieces that people had thrown away,’ explained Dawn with a touch of awe in her voice. ‘He recycles the litter he collects and makes sculptures out of it. He even gave me one of his creations as a present.’

  ‘I wondered what that junk was at the bottom of your bag,’ said Felix, delving into her rucksack and lifting out a strange object. It consisted of several spheres attached to part of an umbrella frame by thin strands of wire. The spheres smelled of wallpaper paste and had been covered with scraps of newspaper. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s a mobile,’ said Dawn. ‘That big ball in the middle is meant to be the planet Neptune and the others are its moons.’

  ‘Want me to bin it?’ said Felix.

  ‘No!’ Dawn wrested it from his grasp. ‘I’m going to hang it in my bedroom.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Felix. ‘Hey, how d’you explain yourself to that chap Larry today? Was he cross that you’d slunk off when you were supposed to be tending his garden?’

  ‘I told him that I’d gone to fetch ice creams for me and Trudy but that they’d melted on the way back and I’d had to eat them both. He believed every word,’ said Dawn.

  ‘Ice cream!’ said Felix, rubbing his stomach and groaning. ‘I could eat a whole tubful!’

  ‘You’d be sick afterwards if you did,’ said Dawn. She relieved him of her rucksack and began to climb the stairs. Unlike Felix, she wasn’t at all ravenous. Courtesy of her four employers, she had eaten a dozen assorted biscuits, a chapatti, two jam tarts and a big hunk of pumpernickel over the course of the day. Supper was the last thing on her mind.

  What she really needed was a good, long soak in a bathtub and a couple of hours’ kip. The gardening chores had tired her, but it was the constant fear of discovery as she went about her spying tasks that had sapped her strength the most. By nine o’clock that night it was crucial that she should feel spry, alert and ready for anything, because that was when she planned to set off on her moonlit walk to Palethorpe Manor.

  Removing her sandals first, Dawn clambered on to her bed. The mattress was firm and noiseless – so different from her lumpy one at home that creaked reassuringly whenever she sat on it. She stretched both arms above her head and managed to attach Seth’s sculpture to a little hook in the ceiling. It dangled lopsidedly, the balls knocking against each other.

  ‘What do you think of it, Clop?’ she asked brightly.

  Dawn had always considered her donkey to be a connoisseur of all things artistic. Whenever she brought home polystyrene space ships or dumpy clay monsters or eggshell mosaics that she had made at school, he had seemed to marvel at their exquisiteness. However, just one glance at Clop’s appalled expression was enough to tell her that he thought Seth’s handiwork was shoddy in the extreme.

  ‘It’s not as bad as all that!’ said Dawn, prodding the largest sphere with her finger. ‘Imagine that my bedroom is the solar system, right? Well, this ball’s supposed to be the planet Neptune and … Seth did tell me the names of all its moons … um …’ She thought hard for a moment; then began to point at the other balls individually. ‘Here’s Triton … and this one’s Naiad, and … OH, MY GOSH!’ Dawn seized the third moon in the palm of her hand and breathed in sharply. Her cheeks turned as pink as the tip of her nose.

  In the midst of all the shreds and scraps of newspaper which had been pasted on to the moon’s surface, there was a small mauve triangle. The colourful piece of paper was edged with gold, and upon it had been typed the words:

  except pteronophobia.

  Dawn reclined in a bathtub filled with steaming, scented water. She had found a bottle of frangipani bath essence in the cabinet above the sink and had tipped a generous amount into the bath while the taps were running. It had turned the water milky lilac: a colour strikingly similar to that of the fragment which had been torn from a sheet of P.S.S.T.’s distinctive notepaper. What were the chances, marvelled Dawn, of the missing scrap of paper from Bob Chalk’s file turning up pasted to a replica of Neptune’s third moon?

  She had recognised the stiff mauve paper as being the property of P.S.S.T. in less than a second. It had taken a fraction longer to realise that she was staring at the corner of a sheet from Bob’s file. Someone
must have torn off the triangle of paper on purpose – and used the information against the P.S.S.T. agent.

  How it had come to be in Seth’s possession, Dawn could only guess. Had he found it on the street and innocently brushed it into his dustpan? Or had he been the one to steal it from the filing cabinet in the headquarters of P.S.S.T.?

  Dawn’s brain tried to unscramble all the information that was massing in her head.

  Pteronophobia. Thanks to her grandfather, who had heard its definition on a quiz show, she knew exactly what it meant. Pteronophobia was the fear of being tickled with feathers. When Gramps had introduced her to the word on the morning that she had set out for P.S.S.T., she hadn’t really believed that knowing its meaning would come in useful. But it had! Dawn reminded herself how lucky she was to have a slightly mad grandfather who, instead of giving her boring advice, told her weird and wonderful facts in the hope that they just might come in handy one day.

  As far as dislikes, allergies and phobias went, it was now evident that Bob had none … except pteronophobia. Fearless in every other respect, he was a man who was frightened of feathers.

  Feathers. There had been a feather in the telephone box where Bob was discovered in an hysterical state: a large, pale grey one. Its tip was currently poking out of the pocket of her shorts which she had tossed on to a chair when she’d undressed. Regrettably, Dawn had not realised the feather’s significance when she had first set eyes on it – but she did now, of course. Someone had gained access to Bob’s personal file and had learned his only weakness.

  They could have lured him into the telephone box – and then what? Dawn remembered the missing pane of glass. Perhaps the villain in question had inserted some sort of tickling device through the hole and barricaded the door to prevent Bob’s escape. But surely, thought Dawn, shaking her head, a single feather could not have reduced a tough P.S.S.T. spy to a gibbering wreck.

  Still puzzling over these recent developments in Operation Question Mark, Dawn leaned forward to pick up a bar of soap and a flannel from the tray in front of her. As she took the flannel in her hand, something else fell out of the tray and dropped into the water. Instead of sinking into the milky lilac depths, it bobbed about on the surface, a painted smile on its orange beak. Dawn grinned. A little rubber duck had jumped in to share the bath with her.