Dawn Undercover

by Anna Dale

  ‘What do you think, Izzie?’ said Red. He turned towards P.S.S.T.’s needlewoman. ‘Could you rustle up a few stylish outfits for Trudy? Nothing too drab, you understand.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Izzie, her beady eyes flicking up and down Trudy’s skinny figure. ‘Something in linen, perhaps … and I’ve some fine material from that fancy department store. Let’s see … yes … and half a dozen balls of cashmere wool –’

  ‘Cashmere?’ said Trudy, lifting a slender eyebrow. Then she frowned. ‘No, no, no. I will not be involved in this hare-brained scheme! The idea of sending a child on a mission is absolutely ludicrous.’

  ‘I prefer to think of it as “daring”,’ said Red, ‘and if we don’t go through with it, Angela’s fate may never be known.’

  ‘Angela,’ said Trudy, biting her lip. She sank into her seat with a sorrowful look on her face.

  Red gave his secretary an encouraging smile. ‘You’ll be ideal for this job,’ he said, and in case she didn’t realise quite how ‘ideal’ he thought she’d be, he wrote the word on the blackboard and ringed it three times. ‘You’re intelligent, capable, cool-headed …’

  ‘Not the motherly type, though is she?’ said Socrates. He still seemed reluctant to accept that he would not be accompanying Dawn himself. ‘Don’t you need warmth and affection to be a parent? Trudy wouldn’t make a very convincing one, if you ask me.’

  Izzie gave Socrates a stern look. ‘Don’t take any notice of that old gasbag, Trudy,’ she said. ‘He’s just bellyaching because he hasn’t got his own way. Plenty of mothers are dour, strict, bossy women. I reckon you could do a fair impression of one of those.’

  Trudy glared at her.

  ‘So, you’re up for the challenge, then?’ said Red gently to his secretary.

  She gave a reluctant nod. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go. If there’s even a glimmer of a chance that we might find Angela, how can I refuse?’

  ‘Good,’ said Red, sighing deeply. ‘That is a weight off my mind.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Right, folks. Listen up. I aim to send Dawn on her mission on Saturday morning, so that gives us just under four days to get her ready for it.

  ‘Emma, I want you to help me come up with some false names for Dawn and Trudy. Izzie – I’ll have to ask you to sew like blazes, I’m afraid. They’ll need a dozen outfits each for their new personas. Jagdish, can you get cracking on some forged papers? And Socrates – you’ll have the most important job of all. I need you to teach Dawn how to be a spy.

  ‘That’s all, then, chaps. Let’s get to it!’

  After the meeting, Socrates lumbered out of the Top Secret Missions room with a scowl on his face. He spent the rest of the day behind the door labelled ‘Codes and Devices’, refusing to open it to anyone but Peebles, whose entrance was only permitted at lunchtime and then only if he was carrying the right sort of sandwiches. The old man’s hermit-like behaviour prompted Dawn to ask the others what he was doing. She received two explanations. Red insisted that he was probably very busy preparing Dawn’s training schedule – and Izzie said that he was sulking.

  It did not really matter that Socrates chose to keep himself to himself. Dawn received plenty of attention from the other members of P.S.S.T.

  She spent the first few hours in Izzie’s company. In the room assigned to the business of ‘Concealment and Disguise’ she stood very patiently while Izzie unfurled a tape measure and proceeded to take down Dawn’s particulars. The room was strewn with rolls of material and scraps of fabric. There was a wicker shopping basket containing several balls of wool, and numerous knitting needles in a big glass jar. While Dawn happily poked around in an old tobacco tin brimming with buttons, Izzie sorted through a heap of patterns.

  Dawn left Izzie slicing through great sheets of material with a large pair of scissors and went to visit Jagdish in the Forgery and Fakery room. She helped him clean his paintbrushes, sharpen all his pencils and load his camera with a new roll of film. Jagdish’s room was very brightly lit. There was a huge noticeboard hanging on the wall, upon which was pinned every type of document that could be imagined, from driving licences to bus tickets. In the middle of the room was a vast sloping desk where Jagdish seemed to spend most of his time, a pair of spectacles on his nose and a writing implement between his long, inky fingers.

  At a few minutes to five, most of the P.S.S.T. employees began gathering their things together and preparing to go home. Once they had climbed to the bottom of the staircase and sneaked through the secret door in the pantry, they usually left via the tradesmen’s entrance in the basement, so as to give the impression that they worked in the hotel – which they did, in a manner of speaking. Emma was the only one who ever accessed the building by its main entrance – and then only on rare occasions when she needed to accompany a guest from another S.H.H. department or, in Dawn’s case, a new recruit.

  Just as Dawn was about to make her way down the staircase, Socrates emerged from the Codes and Devices room and told her, rather tersely, that she should dip into a good spying manual before their first training session the following day. Then he dropped a book called Keeping to the Shadows by Anonymous into her hands.

  It was beginning to get dark when Dawn climbed into bed. Nightfall was still half an hour away, but a shapeless lump of leaden cloud had settled in the sky above Pimlico, blotting out the last weak rays of sunlight.

  She had been given the key to room four. Twice the size of her bedroom at home, it contained a single bed, a small chest of drawers, a high-backed chair and a wardrobe with a design of squirrels and oak leaves carved into its panels. It would have been a very pleasant place in which to spend the night, if it had not been so stiflingly hot.

  Dawn threw back the eiderdown but she did not feel a great deal cooler. She slid off the mattress and padded over the floorboards. Her fingers gripped the underside of the heavy sash window and she managed to raise it a few more inches. In the paved backyard of the hotel, Dawn could see two elderly men, puffing on their pipes and playing dominoes. Apart from Dawn and Emma, they were the only other guests in the hotel. The portly man with the handlebar moustache was called Mr Sparks and his scrawny friend was Mr Hollowbread.

  Edith had explained that guests were actively discouraged from staying at Dampside (hence the ‘No Vacancies’ sign which was displayed almost all the year round). For appearances’ sake, a couple of people were allowed to stay every so often – just to keep up the pretence that Dampside was an ordinary hotel, but the fewer guests there were, the easier it was for Edith to make sure that they didn’t find out about P.S.S.T. on the second floor.

  Thunder grumbled overhead and Dawn heard a succession of little taps as raindrops burst against the windowpane. As she turned away from the window, her gaze rested on a small alarm clock which was sitting on a table next to her bed. Her father had a clock just like it. In fact, he had fifteen. Dawn found herself thinking about home. She could not help feeling a little glum. What would her family be doing right now? Would any of them be wondering how she was getting on?

  Dawn cheered up considerably when she saw Clop lying on the bed with his legs splayed out like a starfish. She presumed that he was enjoying a much-needed stretch after having been squashed in her suitcase for hours on end. His legs shifted their position slightly when she sat down on the mattress. She leaned over, gently tugged his woolly mane and told him how glad she was that he had come with her – and that he was quite the best donkey in the world. Typically, Clop stared straight ahead as if he had not heard her. Sentimental remarks always seemed to cause him embarrassment. However, when Dawn studied him closely she was fairly sure that his smile had acquired an extra stitch.

  Lightning illuminated the room for a split second. A crash of thunder followed. Dawn glanced worriedly at Clop, but he had not even flinched. He wasn’t afraid of thunderstorms.

  ‘Neither am I,’ she said out loud. Pressing her toes against a rumpled sheet and blanket, she pushed them to the very foot of the bed
.

  Dawn did not lay her head on the pillow or close her eyes. The turbulent weather put paid to any ideas she had of falling asleep. Intending to do a bit of reading, she switched on her bedside lamp. Then her hand reached out for her book, Pansy the Goat Girl, but she didn’t open it. Instead, she set it down again and picked up the book that had been lying underneath it. It was the thick, well-thumbed hardback called Keeping to the Shadows, by Anonymous, which Socrates had lent to her. The title and author were printed in bold white lettering on a simple black cover. At least, Dawn had assumed that the cover was plain – but when she tilted the book at a certain angle and peered very closely, she could just make out the silhouette of a man wearing a mackintosh and a trilby hat standing rather shiftily in the bottom right-hand corner.

  Feeling a flicker of excitement, Dawn ignored the thunderstorm which was raging outside her window, turned to the first page and began to read.

  Chapter Seven

  Training Day

  Socrates did not give Dawn’s knuckles a chance to make contact with the door before he flung it open, exclaiming ‘Aha!’

  Dawn was so surprised that she lost her grip on Keeping to the Shadows and it landed on the midnight-blue carpet with a thud. She eyed Socrates anxiously, expecting to be scolded for damaging his book but, to her amazement, he didn’t look the least bit angry. In fact, his face was wreathed in smiles.

  ‘Heard you coming!’ he announced smugly. ‘Clocked you through the keyhole, too! A spy is always on the alert, Dawn. Remember that. Ha!’ He tapped his nose with the tip of his finger and threw her a knowing glance. ‘I may have been put out to pasture as far as my spying career is concerned, but I haven’t lost the knack!’

  Dawn smiled and nodded. She was far too polite to mention that Socrates had instructed her to report at the Codes and Devices room at nine o’clock that morning and, therefore, it wasn’t really very impressive that he had caught her in the act of arriving exactly when she was meant to.

  Socrates opened the door wide and waved her into the room. ‘OK, Dawn Buckle,’ he said firmly, ‘let’s get started, shall we?’

  Dawn picked up Keeping to the Shadows and cradled it in both arms. As she stepped through the doorway, Socrates patted its black cover in a reverential manner.

  ‘Marvellous book, that,’ he said. ‘Contains everything a spy could ever need to know. You’ve studied it thoroughly, I hope.’

  ‘Er … yes,’ said Dawn. Well, she’d almost finished chapter three.

  ‘Good.’ Socrates rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His nut-brown, muscular arms were as bristly as his chin. ‘Take a seat over there,’ he said, pointing to a chair and an old school desk.

  Dawn crossed the room – which was no mean feat. Stacks of paper were heaped everywhere and she had to step very carefully to avoid them all. It occurred to her that, perhaps, Socrates should arrange his documents in some sort of order. Then she noticed that every pile of paper had a large stone on top of it, marked with a different letter of the alphabet. What she had mistaken for a jumbled mess was, in fact, a rather strange and somewhat archaic filing system.

  Dawn stepped over a stone with a white ‘W’ daubed on it and sat down in a creaky wooden chair. She placed Keeping to the Shadows on the desk in front of her, next to a notepad with the first few pages torn out, a ball-point pen, half a ruler, a freshly sharpened pencil and a nub of grey rubber.

  ‘Feel free to make notes,’ said Socrates, threading his way through the islands of paper until he reached a shabby wing chair and sank into it.

  Dawn wrote the date on the first page of her notepad and underlined it twice, just as Mrs Kitchen had taught her. When she looked up she found that Socrates was gazing at her intently. He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

  ‘You’re something else, Dawn,’ he said in admiration. ‘I haven’t seen anyone with your sort of potential for years.’ His face seemed to adopt a faraway look. ‘You know, you remind me a little bit of Pip. Natural talent oozing out of every pore, that kid had. Came to P.S.S.T. as a fresh-faced twenty-one-year-old and developed into one of the best spies I’ve ever worked with. You could be just as good,’ he said. ‘Maybe even better.’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to say that,’ mumbled Dawn a little bashfully.

  ‘Right.’ Socrates cleared his throat. ‘Let’s get down to business.’

  ***

  As she scribbled at the top of the twenty-seventh page in her notepad, Dawn noticed a dull, aching sensation in her wrist. She had been writing pretty much non-stop for over two hours, and in that time she had learned a considerable amount.

  Firstly, Socrates had quashed all the myths about spying. Unlike the silhouetted gentleman on the cover of Keeping to the Shadows, spies never ever dressed in mackintoshes and trilby hats; they didn’t wear false noses, wigs or stick-on moustaches either and they tried their utmost to avoid leaning against lampposts or lurking in shop doorways. Socrates said that if spies did any of these things they would stick out like sore thumbs and it would be obvious to just about everybody exactly what they were up to.

  Instead, spies tried their best to look completely ordinary. By wearing conventional clothes in dull colours, acting naturally and doing nothing to draw attention to themselves, they could go just about anywhere without being noticed. Spies were never too tall, too short, too fat or too thin; they didn’t twitch, fidget, burp or pick their noses. They were as close to being invisible as it was possible to be.

  Spies were experts at finding out things. Their methods were simple. They watched and listened until they discovered what they wanted to know. Although spies were reliant on their eyes and ears, they also used their mouths to make enquiries. However, they were extremely careful about the questions that they posed. If they asked the wrong thing or if they appeared to be too nosy, they could instantly arouse other people’s suspicions.

  Like Boy Scouts and Brownies, it was drummed into spies always to be prepared. This meant that if they were pretending to wait for a bus, they should know its number and destination in the event that someone should ask them; they should carry a pen at all times should they need to write anything down, and they should never be without some loose change in case they needed to buy a drink in a cafe – or a newspaper to hide behind. Swotting up on a map of the area in which they would be operating was also a crucial part of ‘being prepared’. Spies needed to know the whereabouts of every footpath, farm track and short cut.

  Socrates paused for breath. ‘Got all that?’ he said to Dawn.

  She finished drawing a shaky line underneath the words ‘Be Prepared’ and then nodded her head. She was fairly sure that she’d managed to copy down most of what Socrates had been saying, even though her handwriting was a little messy in places. With some relief, Dawn allowed her aching wrist to drop on to the desk.

  ‘Elevenses!’ announced Socrates. He left the room and reappeared moments later with a bag of crisps and two cups of tea.

  Dawn wasn’t particularly hungry but good manners made her accept the refreshments that she was offered. It didn’t take long for Socrates to gulp down his share. He pulled a face.

  ‘Not exactly haute cuisine,’ he said, ‘but it fills a hole.’ He gasped and clicked his fingers. ‘That’s another thing you should remember when you’re undercover, Dawn: always carry some food in your pocket! I trailed a bloke for a whole day once. Only had three peanuts and a throat lozenge on me. My rumbling stomach made such a din, I’m surprised the bloke didn’t hear it and twig that he was being followed.

  ‘Okey-dokey, must get on.’ Socrates began to search around the room until he found a stone with ‘C’ marked on it. There was a wad of paper beneath it, from which he removed a few sheets. ‘Let’s make a start on “Communications”,’ he said. ‘Should be able to give you a general overview by lunchtime, I reckon. Might even be able to squeeze in codes, ciphers and keys. You’ve probably read about them already in Keeping to the Shadows –’

/>   ‘Um,’ said Dawn, feeling a twinge in her wrist as she picked up her pen.

  After what seemed like twenty minutes rather than two hours, Peebles did his own bit of communicating when he miaowed lustily from the other side of the door. Dawn could not believe that her lunch had arrived already. She had been transfixed by what Socrates was saying and hadn’t noticed the time whizzing past. As she sat at her desk, munching her cheese and salad cream sandwiches, she reflected on how many different ways there were for spies to send information back and forth.

  In the main, spies communicated by sending letters through the post, leaving notes at hiding places known as ‘dead letter boxes’ or ‘drops’ where they would be collected later, and by transmitting words or Morse signals on the airwaves using specially constructed radios. (Morse code was an alphabet made up of long signals known as ‘dahs’ and short ones referred to as ‘dits’.)

  Anything that was written down was encoded first, as a matter of course. This meant that a straightforward sentence could be reduced to a baffling mixture of letters or numbers which would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t familiar with the code that had been used. When communicating via radios, spies were just as cunning. They transmitted from secluded spots at scheduled times and made sure that they kept their messages as brief as possible so that enemy agents would not have a chance to discover which frequency they were broadcasting on.

  Spies seldom made calls from telephone boxes, where they could be easily overheard, but some preferred to use mobile phones rather than cumbersome radios. Socrates, however, didn’t rate phones very highly. He thought that telephone conversations were vulnerable to interception and, if phones were stolen or mislaid, they could reveal sensitive data to the enemy.