by Anna Dale
C.L.I.C.K. (Creation of Ludicrously Ingenious Codes and Keys) was the department of S.H.H. that was responsible for supplying everything spies would need to correspond in secret.
The staff at C.L.I.C.K. were all chess players and crossword compilers with the types of brains that thrived on solving really difficult puzzles. It was they who came up with all the codes and ciphers that the spies used to obscure their messages. A code was a system that replaced words with other words whereas a cipher swapped each letter with another letter. To solve a code or cipher you would need a key – not one made from metal which could lock and unlock things, but a confidential piece of knowledge that would enable you to work out how to unscramble the message so that it made sense.
Dawn swallowed the last crumb of her second cheese and salad cream sandwich and wriggled uncomfortably in her seat. The waistband of her kilt felt rather tight. It wasn’t just her stomach that felt full, however; her head was stuffed with so many facts that she did not think she could possibly absorb any more.
When Socrates had been explaining about codes, ciphers and keys she had felt her eyes beginning to glaze over. It was all so terribly complicated. She could not prevent herself from sighing with relief when he lifted down a small cardboard box from a shelf and announced that the rest of the afternoon would be spent doing practical work. Dawn pushed her notepad and writing implements aside as Socrates deposited the box on her desk. She removed its lid and her eyes lit up immediately.
There were bottles of ink (blue, black and purple), notelets, postcards, pads of writing paper, stamps, envelopes, a gold-plated fountain pen, something that looked like a rusty biscuit tin and a book with a crimson cover that was almost the size of a telephone directory.
Dawn lifted the book out first. It was called C.L.I.C.K.’s Compendium and was in the kind of poor condition that suggested it had been well used. Someone had stuck several strips of black tape along its spine to help keep all the pages together. Dawn opened its cover, upon which were two labels saying ‘REALLY REALLY SECRET’ and ‘NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS ROOM OR ELSE’, and discovered that the book was in its thirty-ninth edition.
She began to flick through its pages and found that it was full of different types of codes and ciphers, each of which had been given a name. There was ‘Clown’ (a complex cipher involving the repeated juggling of letters), ‘Easy Peasy’ (where the message was hidden letter by letter in front of every ‘e’), ‘Shopping List’ (in which grocery items represented particular words) and ‘Ditchwater’ (consisting of a longwinded letter, designed to be so dull that the person reading it would give up way before he reached the end and, therefore, miss the message cleverly concealed in the postscript).
As Dawn leafed through C.L.I.C.K.’s Compendium she noticed that a few pages had had their corners folded over. Socrates explained that these contained the fifteen codes and ciphers which he wanted her to memorise. Dawn considered herself lucky. In total, there were over nine thousand codes and ciphers in the book, so fifteen was quite a modest amount to have to learn.
She set about the task straight away, copying them into her notebook. Socrates gave her several sentences to encode and she managed quite well, only making a couple of mistakes. He suggested that she might like to use the gold-plated fountain pen and she abandoned her ballpoint eagerly. The fountain pen felt satisfyingly weighty between her fingers and its nib glided smoothly across the page.
Dawn found the black and blue inks to be perfectly ordinary, but the purple ink began to fade slowly as soon as she had set down the words on the page, and after a quarter of an hour they had become totally invisible. Dawn remembered that Emma had used purple ink when she had written both their names in the hotel’s guest book downstairs. When she mentioned this to Socrates he had nodded sagely and told her that anyone on official S.H.H. business always used purple ink when signing the hotel’s guest book so that they could appear to behave like normal visitors while leaving no record that they had ever stayed there.
The rusty tin may once have held biscuits, but now it contained a bizarre collection of objects. There was a heavy bolt, a toilet-roll holder, a metal spike similar to those found on the tops of railings, a door knob and – strangest of all – a stone finger with lichen growing on it. Dawn was bewildered. She could not imagine why they had been placed together in the tin or what they could possibly have to do with secret ways of communicating. Socrates provided her with an explanation. He told her that they were examples of dead letter boxes in which spies could hide messages and, lifting each object in turn, he showed her how they could be unscrewed to reveal a hollow cavity where a carefully folded piece of paper could be inserted. Dawn was greatly impressed. The stone finger was her favourite dead letter box. Apparently, it had once belonged to the statue of a boy in Kensington Gardens.
When Dawn had finished examining the contents of the tin, Socrates packed everything back into the cardboard box and returned it to its shelf. He glanced at his watch and drew a breath sharply.
‘Only an hour left,’ he said. ‘Still, that should give me just enough time to talk you through one last thing.’
He steered an intricate course through the stacks of paper until he reached a cupboard, the key to which was in the pocket of his pinstriped waistcoat. Having opened the cupboard doors, Socrates bent down and dragged out a large wooden packing case which had labels with the names of various countries stuck all over it. He beckoned to Dawn and she hurried over to him.
‘Used to belong to my auntie Florrie,’ he said, patting the case as if it were a faithful dog. ‘Went all over the world with her, and now it just sits here in this cupboard.’ Its locks sprang open under his fingers. ‘I call it my gadget box.’
As he lifted its lid, Dawn peered eagerly inside. ‘Oh,’ she said disappointedly. ‘It’s empty.’
‘Whaaaaat? Course it’s not!’ scoffed Socrates. His head disappeared from view as he scrabbled around in the bottom of the box. When he next spoke, his voice sounded muffled and echoey. ‘I knew we were running a bit low,’ he said, his fingernails scraping against the box’s insides, ‘but I could have sworn there was something left. Wait a minute – what’s this?’ He straightened up for a second and thrust what looked like a large shell into Dawn’s hands. It was smooth, white and oval-shaped with dark brown blobs and splotches on it. She looked at it in puzzlement.
‘And this is a gadget?’ said Dawn, doubtfully.
‘Sure is,’ said Socrates. ‘It’s a shell phone.’
‘A phone?’ she said, trying to peek between the shell’s teeth on its underside.
‘Uh-huh. Good, isn’t it?’
‘Do you use it like a normal phone?’ said Dawn, staring at the shell in bewilderment. ‘Wouldn’t that seem a bit … well … odd to anyone who saw you?’
‘Nah … It’s one of them tiger cowries … you know – the sort of shell that you hold to your ear to listen to the sound of the sea. You’d look perfectly natural with that clamped to your lughole.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Dawn, smiling. ‘That’s quite clever.’
‘Mmm. The folks at P.I.N.G. are a pretty smart bunch. They certainly live up to their name. It’s an Incredibly Nifty Gadget, all right.’ Socrates took the shell from her, squinted at it and pressed it with his fingers. He sighed. ‘Shame it doesn’t work. Prob’ly been sitting at the bottom of the gadget box for a good few years. I’ll tell you what, Dawn, I’ll take it home tonight and have a bit of a tinker – see if I can bring it back to life.’
‘Thanks,’ said Dawn.
Socrates put the shell in his trouser pocket and began to rummage around in the box again. ‘Got something!’ he said after half a minute. He drew out a cigarette and a matchbox.
‘Gadgets?’ she said uncertainly.
‘Too right,’ replied Socrates. He shook the box of matches, but instead of making a rattling noise, it made no sound at all. ‘Miniature camera,’ he said, grinning at Dawn. It did not open like a little drawer as most
matchboxes did; this one flipped open at one end to reveal a tiny lens, a shutter release button and a wheel that wound the film on.
Dawn was riveted. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said, ‘but it must take minuscule pictures. Wouldn’t you need a magnifying glass to see them?’
‘Yeah,’ said Socrates. ‘You’re spot on. It’s a clever little invention. Doesn’t produce a negative like most cameras do. Just spits out a strip of titchy photographs called microdots. Each microdot is the size of a pinhead – and to look at it you’d need to use one of these.’
He held the cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a microdot viewer.’ Socrates showed her how to unfasten each end of the cigarette. It was like a tiny microscope inside. ‘Course,’ he said, pocketing both items, ‘we can’t send a kid on a mission with a ciggie and a box of matches – even if they are fake. No, no, no, no. I’ll have a go at modifying them for you, shall I?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Dawn.
‘Now, what else can I find?’ He continued with his search inside the gadget box. ‘What the devil …?’ he said, producing a sombrero and a pair of castanets.
‘They’re gadgets, too, right?’ said Dawn.
‘Actually … nope, I don’t think so,’ said Socrates, examining them closely. ‘They must’ve belonged to my auntie Florrie. She picked them up on her travels, no doubt.’ He tossed them aside and had one last, desperate ferret in the packing trunk. ‘That’s it, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘We’ve got next to nothing left in our gadget budget, so until Red manages to persuade the Chief of S.H.H. to give our department more funds – and frankly I shan’t be holding my breath – we won’t be able to place another order with P.I.N.G.’
‘It’s a bit like asking for more pocket money, isn’t it?’ said Dawn, and she sighed.
Socrates grinned and nodded. ‘Yeah … you can plead as much as you like, but it won’t do any good. Philippa Killingback’s never going to stump up any more cash for P.S.S.T. Hard as nails, she is. Reckons that after she’s dolled out each department’s annual allowance, it’s down to the Head of each one to make the money last. Between you and me, Dawn, I think she’s got it in for P.S.S.T. Red won’t tell us what our allowance was this year, but the rumour is that it was measly.’
‘Will Red get into trouble?’ asked Dawn, remembering the fiery telephone conversation between Red and the Chief of S.H.H. that she had overheard the previous morning.
‘Yeah,’ said Socrates sadly. ‘Could lose his job. We might all be given our marching orders if things get any worse. P.S.S.T. is supposed to catch at least a dozen scheming spies or traitors per year. We’ve only managed to nab a handful so far. If we don’t reach our target …’ He drew his finger across his neck and made a noise like someone being garrotted.
‘Oh,’ said Dawn and bit her lip.
Socrates smiled. ‘But don’t you worry about us. You’ve got quite enough to think about for now, what with your test and all.’
‘Test?’ said Dawn, her eyes popping. ‘What test?’
‘The one on spying techniques that I’m going to give you tomorrow.’
Chapter Eight
A New Identity
‘Armpit,’ said Dawn firmly as she planted her right plimsoll on the first blue stair. ‘Bungalow, Chutney, Doodah,’ she said, timing the utterance of each word with the thump of her feet on the next three steps. She furrowed her brow before climbing higher. ‘Er … Egghead, Flip-flop, Gunk … now, what comes after “Gunk”?’ She barely had enough time to say ‘Hurrah’ before a massive yawn stretched her mouth open wide enough for a double-scoop ice cream to pass between her lips without even touching them.
Dawn clutched the banister rail and blinked sleepily. She had stayed up into the early hours, revising for Socrates’s test and, although she had read Keeping to the Shadows from cover to cover, tiredness was making her brain feel fuzzy. This did not help when she was trying to recall the special phonetic alphabet used by spies when they needed to pronounce letters clearly over the radio. It was called the Cumberbatch Alphabet, deriving its name from its creator who was a lowly C.L.I.C.K. employee called Stanley Cumberbatch. Stanley had thought up the alphabet in a launderette one Sunday afternoon whilst waiting for his smalls to stop spinning round and round (as mentioned in the footnotes at the bottom of page one hundred and six of Keeping to the Shadows).
Dawn was familiar with doing tests, thanks to her teacher’s almost fanatical obsession with them. Mrs Kitchen tended to inform her class when tests were going to happen so that they would have ample opportunity to revise but, occasionally, she liked to spring tests on them without any warning. Dawn had become quite skilled at sensing when these spontaneous tests were going to occur. Friday afternoons were always a good bet. Firstly, Mrs Kitchen would halt in mid-sentence and gaze dreamily out of the window; then she might glance at her watch followed by a heavy sigh; and finally she would lean sideways and grope around in her bag. If, when she withdrew her hand, it was holding a crochet hook or a puzzle magazine, Dawn knew that a test would be announced imminently. Then she and her classmates would spend the next half hour with their heads bent over a page of questions while Mrs Kitchen made progress with her new cardigan or tackled a jumbo wordsearch.
Dawn’s ability to predict when a surprise test was about to befall her class was not the only instinctive skill that she possessed when it came to tests. She also had a knack for sensing which questions were likely to crop up on a test paper and, therefore, which topics it would be prudent to mug up on before taking it. As soon as Dawn had come across the Cumberbatch Alphabet in Keeping to the Shadows, she felt sure that she would be tested on it.
‘Idiot,’ said Dawn as she mounted another step on the staircase. She was determined to reel off the whole alphabet before she arrived at the door of the Codes and Devices room. ‘Jellyfish, Keyring, Leotard, Muesli … uh-oh.’ She stumbled slightly as Peebles dashed through her legs with a little bundle of envelopes tied around his middle. ‘Morning, Peebles!’ she called after him. ‘Oh, no, I’ve forgotten where I’d got to! It was something you have for breakfast. Might have been marmalade … No. Muesli – that was it. Now, I think the word for “N” is a type of flower … ’
Once Dawn had thought of ‘Nasturtium’ she rattled off the next few at an impressive speed. ‘Onion, Puddle, Quicksand, Roundabout, Sausage, Tracksuit, Unicorn … er … er …’ She paused on the top stair, panting slightly, and hitched up her knee socks. ‘Voodoo,’ she said suddenly.
The corridor was empty apart from Peebles, who was busy trying to alert someone to his presence outside the door marked ‘Clerical Affairs’. Dawn walked slowly over the carpet, urging herself to remember the last few letters of the Cumberbatch Alphabet.
‘Wednesday, Xmas, um … um …’ She stopped outside the Codes and Devices room just as the doorknob began to turn. ‘Yo-yo … Zilch,’ blurted out Dawn half a second before Socrates’s rugged face appeared.
The boy with the scruffy dog was there on the street again. When Dawn had seen him the day before, he had been attempting to drag his dog away from a lamppost. Today, the situation was reversed. It was the boy who seemed to be rooted to the spot on the pavement opposite the Dampside Hotel and the dog who was yanking on the lead, eager to progress further along the road.
Dawn kept her eye on them both as she paced up and down beside the window in the Codes and Devices room. Having spent most of the morning seated behind a desk, she felt the need to indulge in a spot of exercise to loosen up her limbs. The test had proved to be quite a challenging one and her body had been taut with concentration for the entire morning.
There had been questions on almost every aspect of spying, from trailing suspects in the dark to picking locks with a pair of tweezers. She had encoded straightforward sentences so that they resembled twaddle and decoded complete nonsense so that it made perfect sense. Question sixty-three had caused a smile to blossom on Dawn’s face. It had asked her which,
out of the following, did not belong in the Cumberbatch Alphabet: Egghead, Balderdash, Tracksuit, Puddle. She had underlined ‘Balderdash’ without a moment’s hesitation.
Dawn cast a glance at Socrates who was sitting in his wing chair with her test paper resting on a clipboard in his lap. His face was solemn. Every few seconds, with a flick of his wrist, he marked her answers right or wrong. Occasionally he blew out his cheeks, sighed or swept a hand through his stubbly grey hair. Dawn suspected that she might have made a few mistakes but she was fairly confident that she had managed a half-decent score.
‘Stop doing that!’ yelled a boy’s voice from the street. Dawn looked out of the window again. The boy had hooked his elbow around a railing and was trying to stop himself from being pulled off his feet by the dog, whose claws were scrabbling against the paving slabs. ‘Haltwhistle, sit!’ said the boy with more than a hint of desperation in his voice. To Dawn’s surprise, the dog appeared to obey the boy’s command – only it couldn’t really be described as a ‘sit’. The dog had lowered his rear end by only a couple of inches. It would be more accurate to describe it as a sort of ‘crouch’. As it turned out, the dog’s position was neither a sit nor a crouch. In fact, he was merely bunching his muscles to prepare for a massive leap. He bounded forward like an extremely hairy greyhound springing from a trap; the lead slipped from the boy’s grasp, and the dog, followed by his horrified, spindly-legged owner, dashed off down the street.
‘Run away,’ murmured Socrates.
‘Er … yes,’ said Dawn hesitantly. ‘They have.’ She wondered how Socrates could possibly have witnessed the incident with the boy and the dog from his wing chair.
He shot her a bemused look and prodded the test paper with his pen. ‘Last question,’ he boomed. “What action should a spy take if he’s sure that he’s been rumbled and someone is after him?” You’ve put: “Walk a bit faster and try not to look too afraid.” That wouldn’t do, would it?’
