Dawn Undercover

by Anna Dale

  ‘Amateurs … the lot of you!’ said Larry in disgust. He prodded the final part of the message with his finger. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why I always sign my name in pencil like this?’

  Dawn looked at the two Ms on the scrap of paper. ‘No,’ she said, truthfully.

  ‘Grey Ms!’ Larry stared expectantly at Dawn. Then he put the two words together. ‘Grahams,’ he said. ‘You see – I handed S.H.H. my name on a plate.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ said Dawn. ‘Red and the others will kick themselves when they find out.’ She gave a horrified gasp and pressed a hand over her mouth. The shock of discovering Meek’s true persona had loosened her tongue.

  ‘You might as well come clean,’ he sneered. ‘You are Dawn Buckle, aren’t you?’ Larry’s smugness was unbearable.

  Having already betrayed herself, Dawn did not think that there was any point in continuing to deny it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I am.’

  The triumphant look on Larry’s face made her feel quite nauseous. Choosing to avert her eyes, she was astonished to see something resembling a four-legged Cornish pasty moving slowly across the floor. Dawn looked more closely and saw that the pasty was, in fact, a tortoise.

  ‘Isn’t that Pilliwinks?’ she said in a puzzled voice. ‘Why have you brought your pet along with you?’

  Larry smiled. ‘She was a little unwilling to leave her favourite flowerbed, but when I told her about the pressing engagement that she should attend …’

  ‘Pressing engagement?’ said Dawn, glancing uneasily at her forefinger which was strawberry-coloured and rather swollen. Casting another glance in Pilliwinks’s direction, she realised that her finger was just the right size to fit inside the tortoise’s mouth.

  ‘Her skills can come in very handy in my line of work,’ said Larry. ‘Of course, she’s a wonderful companion, too. Animals are so much nicer than people, don’t you agree?’

  ‘We … ell,’ said Dawn. She remembered that Larry’s house had been chock-a-block with porcelain creatures and his garden had been teeming with wildlife. ‘You like animals rather a lot, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Larry happily. ‘They’re superior to humans in every way. I adore them. They’re my friends.’

  ‘Then how could you have murdered Bernard?’ said Dawn. ‘The poor, defenceless duck!’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Larry, his voice beginning to tremble. ‘I don’t like to speak of it.’

  ‘Animal lovers don’t do horrible things like that!’ persisted Dawn.

  ‘I know!’ wailed Larry. ‘I didn’t want to do it, but I needed rather a lot of feathers to make my tickling stick. I chose to bump off Bernard because he was the oldest, you see. He’d had a long, happy life. I even fed him some crumbs from a freshly made fruit scone before I … er … wrung his neck.’

  ‘Well, I think it was a despicable thing to do,’ said Dawn.

  Larry stifled a sob. He gave Dawn a push, tucked Pilliwinks under his arm and snatched up the oil lamp before climbing down the stepladder at speed. There was a crash as he shut the trapdoor behind him.

  Dawn was left in the dark. In his distress, Larry had neglected to bind her hands so she felt around on the floor for the blanket. Once she had found it, she pressed a button on her watch, which lit up its face and helped her to find her way across the room to the bench. Stunned by the evening’s revelations, she sank down on to it, reached inside her jumper and pulled out Clop, who seemed to be in quite a state of shock himself. She decided that the best thing for them both would be to get a few hours’ sleep. Hugging her donkey to her chest, Dawn lay down under the blanket, but she soon sat up again when a hard object dug into her hip bone.

  Larry must have confiscated her rucksack, because there had been no sign of it in the room, but he had forgotten to search her pockets.

  ‘My phone!’ exclaimed Dawn as she slipped a hand into her jeans and drew out the tiger cowrie shell. ‘Don’t worry, Clop,’ she said, stroking her donkey’s woolly mane. ‘Help will soon be on the way.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Donkey Riding

  Well, so much for that,’ said Dawn. She was bitterly disappointed. No matter how many times she had pressed the splodges on the shell (in the correct sequence, at first, and then, in every order she could think of) the phone had remained lifeless. She had shaken it, warmed it in her hands, and even knocked it against the leg of the bench – but nothing seemed to make any difference. Dawn was forced to accept the fact that it was broken.

  She supposed that it must have got damaged the night before, when it had dropped out of her pocket – or perhaps Haltwhistle had pummelled it with his paws a little too zealously when he’d tried to retrieve it from the rabbit burrow.

  ‘Bang goes Plan B,’ said Dawn. (Plan A had been the failed attempt to hamper Larry with a blanket and bolt for the trapdoor.) She wondered if Larry had already discovered that the phone was useless, and for that reason had allowed Dawn to keep it in her possession.

  Sighing heavily, she lifted Clop on to her lap. ‘Your turn,’ she said. ‘I’m all out of ideas. You can come up with Plan C.’ It might have been her imagination, but Dawn thought she felt the donkey sit up a little straighter as if he were applying his mind to the problem instantly. ‘Tell you what, Clop,’ she said, reclining on the bench and closing her eyes, ‘why don’t you sleep on it.’

  Startled out of her dreams by a prolonged, mournful cry, Dawn’s eyes flicked open. As the stifled wailing sound reached an even higher pitch, Dawn glanced around her to try to establish where it was coming from and realised that the room was far less dark than when she had fallen asleep. Scanning the walls, she saw that she had not been mistaken about the lack of windows in the tower room but she had missed a narrow slit which looked just like a white rod glowing in the wall. Through it, daylight was filtering in.

  There was something otherworldly about the cry that suggested to Dawn that it might not be human. She was only too aware that the church was surrounded by a graveyard, and tried to put all thoughts of ghosts and vampires out of her mind. Deciding to investigate every corner of the room, Dawn got to her feet, almost stepping on her donkey in the process. Clop must have fallen off the bench in the night. He was lying on the floor with his head turned to one side, as if he were listening to something beneath the floorboards.

  ‘I think you’re right, Clop!’ said Dawn, dropping to her knees. She crawled across the floor, guided by the caterwauling noise which seemed to have increased in volume. ‘It’s coming from round about here,’ she said, pausing beside a floorboard with two screws missing. Something was knocking against its underside as if it were trying to force the board upwards.

  Dawn dithered for a moment or two until her inquisitiveness finally overcame her fear. With her heart in her mouth, she attempted to lift up the board using the tips of her fingers. The wailing stopped.

  Like a streak of black smoke, a cat slipped through the space that Dawn had created, and hightailed it over to a corner. Then, with great urgency, it began to wash itself all over.

  Cobwebby and smeared with dust, its fur was in a sorry state. Dawn approached the cat cautiously.

  ‘Peebles,’ she said, screwing up her eyes, ‘is that you?’

  The cat paused in mid-lick and shot her a scathing look as if to say, Yes, of course it’s me … who else were you expecting? Dawn was overjoyed to see him, but she was polite enough to wait until he had finished his ablutions before attempting to give his head a stroke.

  ‘How on earth did you get up here?’ asked Dawn, guessing the answer to her own question as soon as it had left her lips. She remembered being told by Red that Peebles was a first-rate climber and was able to squeeze himself through the slimmest of gaps.

  She wondered if the cat had found her purely by chance, or whether somebody had sent him, suspecting that she was in the building. Dawn left Peebles purring in the corner and hastened over to the narrow slit in the wall. If she stood on tiptoe
, she found that she could see rooftops and the uppermost branches of the yew trees in the graveyard. In an attempt to give herself a better view, Dawn dragged the bench over to the wall and stood on it. Her eyes searched the ground outside but, to her disappointment, there was no sign of Trudy or Felix, and the dog that she saw sniffing around a gravestone was far too small and neatly groomed to be Haltwhistle.

  ‘If only I had a pen and paper,’ said Dawn, ‘I could slip a message through this crack. Someone would be bound to pick it up … or perhaps I could try waving to the people below.’ She attempted to push her hand through the slender crevice but, although she managed to squeeze four fingers through, her hand was too plump – and got stuck. She told herself that her stubby little fingers were unlikely to be noticed by any passers-by, no matter how energetically she wiggled them. Unless one of the villagers happened to be looking through a pair of binoculars and had them trained on exactly the right spot, Dawn’s chances of attracting anyone’s attention were slight.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any thoughts about Plan C?’ she said to Clop.

  The donkey did not give her any indication to show that he had.

  Dawn turned to Peebles, who had jumped up on to the bench and was sitting on the blanket, watching her.

  ‘It’s a shame you’re not wearing your harness,’ she said. ‘I might’ve been able to wedge something into it that was recognisably mine. Then the others would have known that you’d found me.’

  Peebles blinked.

  ‘Perhaps I could make a harness out of that blanket,’ she said, trying to decide if she was strong enough to tear it into strips. ‘What do you reckon, huh?’

  The cat fastened her with a flinty stare.

  ‘Or the rope! I could use the rope!’

  Peebles seemed to like that idea. He sprang off the bench and started to weave himself between Dawn’s legs, purring like a little lawnmower.

  ‘But what can I tie to your back?’ she said, stooping to retrieve the piece of rope. Larry had tossed it on to the floor after he had freed her hands. It was very fortunate that he hadn’t thought to take it with him.

  Kneeling on the floorboards, Dawn did her best to fashion the rope into a rudimentary harness and wrap it securely around Peebles’s middle. Then she took out the only possession that Larry had left her with and tried to wedge it underneath the rope.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said, as the shell phone slipped out of place and clunked against the floor. ‘I need something that can be squashed.’

  Dawn thought about removing her jumper and jamming that under the harness but she abandoned that idea swiftly when she realised that it was far too big and heavy.

  ‘What else is there?’ she said. ‘I can’t think of a single thing.’

  Peebles’s miaow sounded rather reproachful.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dawn in a glum voice.

  After a few minutes of sitting in doleful silence, she got the funniest feeling that someone was trying to catch her eye. Searchingly, she looked around the room.

  Her throat tightened when she saw him. ‘No, Clop! Oh, no … not you.’

  He was the perfect size, as squashable as it was possible to be and, of course, braver than a mountain lion, but Dawn was going to take some persuading before she would allow him to be strapped to Peebles’s back.

  ‘Look, here, Clop,’ she said, balancing her donkey on her knee. ‘I know I asked you to come up with Plan C but I didn’t mean that you should take it upon yourself to go and fetch help. It’s awfully heroic of you, but …’

  Clop was sitting in a defiant pose with his chest pushed out and his ears erect. He looked more determined than Dawn had ever seen him.

  ‘What happens if you fall off?’ she said. ‘I might never find you again.’

  Her donkey’s expression remained unchanged.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Dawn reluctantly. She lifted his chin and kissed him on the nose. ‘But you’d better promise to be careful.’

  Dawn took longer than was really necessary to fit Clop securely into the harness. She fussed over him, tucking in his hooves, and tying his pleated tail to the rope as a precautionary measure. Impatient to be off, Peebles twitched his ears and miaowed at regular intervals until Dawn was satisfied that he and his passenger were ready.

  ‘Good luck, you two,’ she said, lifting the loose floorboard. She reached out to stroke Clop’s mane for a final time but Peebles was too quick for her. As agile as a weasel, he darted into the gap and was gone.

  No sooner had they disappeared than Dawn heard muffled tapping sounds. Someone was coming up the stepladder. She got up from the floor and waited for the trapdoor to open, clinging to the vain hope that her visitor was someone other than Larry.

  When a woman’s head and shoulders appeared, Dawn could not believe her luck.

  She looked slightly younger than Trudy, and had dark, bouncy, shoulder-length hair which gleamed like the bottles of burgundy wine which stood on Dawn’s sideboard at home. Her features were soft and pretty but, as the woman turned towards her, Dawn saw that her eyes had a shrewdness about them that did not seem to belong on such a gentle face.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ said Dawn, rushing forwards. ‘I’ve been locked in …’

  Saying nothing, the woman looked pityingly at her and shook her head as if she were shocked.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you,’ said Dawn, even though she had never clapped eyes on the woman before. ‘I’m sorry that I haven’t got time to explain, but I really must get out of here.’ She hurried over to the trapdoor and was about to descend through it when the woman put out her hand and grabbed Dawn’s shoulder.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  Dawn heard the sound of someone else climbing up the rungs. She stepped back from the trapdoor and laughed.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said, appreciating that it would be an immensely tricky feat to pass another person on a ladder. She gave the woman a friendly grin, which, to her bewilderment, was not returned.

  Feeling that something wasn’t quite right, Dawn managed to wriggle out of the woman’s grasp. She retreated until she was standing beside the bench. Then she waited, with growing unease, for the second person to arrive at the top of the ladder.

  ‘You see,’ said a voice that chilled Dawn to the bone, ‘I told you she was quite unscathed.’

  Dawn watched, aghast, as her captor emerged through the hole in the floor. Larry was wearing a tweed cap, a tank top over a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of turn-ups. Dressed in the garb of an ordinary old man, the most cunning spy in England stepped into the room.

  ‘Your assurances mean nothing, Meek,’ said the woman coldly. ‘I wanted to see the child for myself,’

  ‘And now that you have, you can push off back to London.’

  ‘As you wish,’ conceded the woman, ‘but Dawn is coming with me.’

  Larry chuckled in a disquieting way. ‘Over my dead body,’ he snarled. ‘The little brat has seen my face. She’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘Think logically,’ said the woman. ‘Dawn would be far more secure in my neck of the woods, amongst city-dwellers who mind their own business. Villagers are notoriously nosy. This tower isn’t a safe place to keep her, and even if you moved the child to a different spot, someone would be bound to stumble across her sooner or later.’

  ‘The vicar’s got vertigo,’ said Larry. ‘No one ever comes up here – apart from a few mice, maybe. It’s perfect.’

  ‘You said the same about Palethorpe Manor. Do I have to remind you what happened there?’

  ‘That was bad luck,’ said Larry, agitatedly. ‘Seth Lightfoot isn’t normal.’

  ‘Who?’ asked the woman.

  ‘That interfering pest who spotted Angela and thought she was some kind of spectral being. Regular folk don’t hang around a building that’s supposed to be dangerous. I spent a whole evening hammering those signs into the ground to warn people to keep away from the manor. Everyone else did as they were told – but no
t Seth Lightfoot … the obstinate little twerp.’

  ‘Do the sensible thing,’ said the woman, coaxingly. ‘Dawn is an inconvenience you could do without. Looking after children isn’t exactly your forte, is it? Let me take care of her for you.’

  ‘No!’ said Larry. ‘You may have sweet-talked me into handing over the old woman but I shan’t be making you a present of Dawn.’

  ‘Please.’

  Larry Grahams pursed his lips and shook his head fiercely.

  Having had her spirits dampened by Larry’s arrival, Dawn was feeling rather subdued. She was also very curious as to the identity of the woman with the bouncy hair. Larry had mentioned that she came from London and, indeed, she was dressed like a sophisticated city type in an elegant plum skirt, matching jacket and suede high heels.

  Whoever she was, the woman seemed to be very strong-minded. She continued to argue with Larry about who should hold Dawn captive. It had occurred to Dawn that the woman might be Larry’s helper, but it was obvious from the way she refused to kowtow to him that they were both on an equal footing.

  Rather than listen to them wrangling over her (Dawn had never been so popular), she climbed stealthily on to the bench and endeavoured to have a look through the slit in the wall. She could hear some dogs barking below, and wondered what was going on. The short, high-pitched yaps were nothing like the booming woofs of Haltwhistle, which would have been music to her ears, but nevertheless she was curious to know what all the fuss was about. She almost lost her balance when she saw what the dogs were barking at.

  Peebles and Clop.

  The cat was perched precariously on a large, tilted gravestone while two hysterical Jack Russell terriers snarled and yipped at him, jumping into the air on their little hind legs. Peebles was making spitting noises and, even from her lofty vantage point, Dawn could see that his tail had swollen to the size of a small draught excluder.

  ‘Oh, no,’ hissed Dawn, as the dogs bounced higher, their jaws snapping together an inch away from Peebles’s whiskers. Dawn glanced desperately around the graveyard. She was looking for Mrs Cuddy. If only the old lady would appear and call Honeybunch and Lambkin to heel.