by Anna Dale
‘Have you lost your marbles?’ he said rudely. ‘Ghosts don’t exist – and anyone who says they do is talking utter rot.’
Dawn sighed. ‘I didn’t mean that I thought she was a real ghost.’ She looked Felix straight in the eye. ‘I’m certain that she was real … as in … human.’
He turned ashen as the penny dropped. ‘Granny! You think that Seth saw Granny and mistook her for a ghost … ’
‘That’s right,’ said Dawn. ‘Her kidnapper must have kept her imprisoned in the manor for a while before he decided to … um …’
‘… move her somewhere else,’ finished Felix. He stared at the slice of lemon at the bottom of his glass, and his lower lip began to wobble.
‘Here,’ said Dawn, pushing her lolly into his hand. ‘You can finish my Chilblain if you like. I’m going to sneak into the pub to see if I can find Charles.’ She rose to her feet, but before she turned to go, she patted Felix on the shoulder. ‘Try not to think the worst,’ she murmured, hoping against hope that, wherever she was, Angela Bradshaw was still alive.
Inside The One-eyed Stoat it was hot and murky, and crowded with people. Dawn squeezed past a group of guffawing men with large bellies, a woman in dungarees who was sipping a lurid cocktail and two old ladies playing a rather aggressive game of beggar-my-neighbour. Planning to give the excuse that she was looking for the loo should anyone ask her what she was doing, Dawn hunted everywhere for Charles. She saw three other men who were listed on the five of diamonds before she discovered Charles, at last, propping up the bar, with a wine glass in his hand. He was holding a conversation with a fellow bell-ringer. It was noisy in the pub but Dawn thought she heard them mention somebody called ‘Little Bob’. Could the Bob they were discussing be Bob Chalk, the P.S.S.T. secret agent? She crept closer.
‘Kitty!’ Dawn felt someone prod her in between her shoulder blades.
She turned around. ‘Hello, big brother,’ said Dawn wearily. Felix had a maddening habit of showing up at the worst possible moment. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she whispered.
Felix grinned, and jigged up and down, brandishing a lolly stick. ‘I’ve come to show you this!’
‘I’m really not interested in hearing another joke right now,’ said Dawn.
Felix remained unfazed. ‘At first I thought there’d been a mistake,’ he said, breathless with excitement, ‘and it had been printed in a foreign language or something – but then I realised it was in some kind of code!’
‘What?’ said Dawn. In the midst of a room of chattering people, she wasn’t quite sure that she had heard him correctly. ‘Code, did you say? Can I have a look?’
There wasn’t enough natural light in the pub to read the words properly so Dawn was forced to return to the garden, where she found Haltwhistle guiltily wagging his tail as he bolted down the rest of the ploughman’s lunch which, presumably, he had stolen from the plate. Frustrated at having to miss Charles’s conversation with his bell-ringing friend, Dawn was nevertheless intrigued to discover what had been written on the lolly stick. She sat down at the picnic table and held the stick in her lap.
Unless it was a joke that had been atrociously misspelled, Dawn decided that Felix was right. To an untrained eye, the words printed at one end of the stick would have proved unfathomable, but Dawn was an agent of P.S.S.T. and – what was more – she was getting rather good at decoding messages. In less than two minutes she had managed to identify the particular code which had been used, and in another seven, without the aid of pen or paper, she had succeeded in working out what the message said.
The first word was URGENT which explained why P.S.S.T. had elected to send the message with Nathan rather than wait to pass on the information over the radio waves at the scheduled hour. It was, now, no longer in doubt that the ice-cream man had been Nathan Slipper. Dawn realised that he must have been instructed to sell her the Chilblain, no matter what she asked for.
The message was a short one – but devastating nonetheless:
URGENT. S.H.H. CHIEF KNOWS ALL. ABORT MISSION AND RETURN TO BASE TOMORROW.
Felix was distraught when Dawn broke the news to him.
‘They can’t do that!’ he said. ‘I won’t go back to London without my granny … I won’t. Who does this high-handed S.H.H. big shot think he is? I’ll jolly well knock his block off.’
‘Her block,’ said Dawn. ‘She’s called Philippa Killingback, and from what the others have said about her, she’s super-scary. Somehow, she must have heard about Operation Question Mark. Red tried to keep it a secret from her. He was sure that she wouldn’t let him go ahead with the mission so he didn’t bother telling her about it.’
‘The Chief of S.H.H. sounds like a silly old moo,’ said Felix. ‘Why would she object to Operation Question Mark? Doesn’t she care what’s happened to my granny?’
‘Apparently,’ said Dawn, ‘Philippa thinks that P.S.S.T. is making a great big fuss over nothing. She won’t believe that Murdo Meek can still be alive … and she’d never agree to someone as young as me being sent on a mission.’
‘What a rotter,’ said Felix. ‘I know! Let’s pretend we didn’t see the message!’
Dawn shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t do any good. They’d only send another.’
‘It’s not fair,’ protested Felix, and he stared vacantly into the middle distance. He looked so miserable that, for a fleeting moment, Dawn thought about giving him a hug – but before she could, she happened to glance at a nearby picnic table, and noticed something odd.
‘That wasn’t there before,’ she said. ‘Was it?’
‘Huh?’ said Felix blearily.
‘The chalk mark on that table leg.’ Dawn’s heartrate doubled as she recalled Socrates lecturing her on the subject of dead letter boxes. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t there when we arrived. Don’t you remember?’
Felix shrugged unhelpfully. ‘Haven’t got the foggiest.’
‘Wait here,’ said Dawn, slipping the lolly stick into her pocket and standing up. Her eyes roamed about the garden. She saw Diana Flinch sitting with a whey-faced girl, a basket of chips between them; a man folding a crisp packet into a neat triangle; an old couple bickering; and a group of youths talking animatedly with the vicar. As far as she could tell, not one of the people in the garden was looking in Dawn’s direction. Furtively, she moved towards the empty table which had been marked with white chalk.
A few days ago, in the Codes and Devices room, Socrates had told her all about dead letter boxes (most commonly known as ‘drops’). They were a means of communicating secretly. A spy would pop a message for another spy in a particular hiding place and would then make it known that he had done so by leaving a signal. This signal was – more often than not – a chalk mark somewhere close by.
Just as Dawn was about to pass behind the table she pretended to stumble and fell to her knees. This gave her the perfect opportunity to check if there was a message taped to the underside of the tabletop. There wasn’t. Getting to her feet slowly, Dawn glanced around. She was looking for a crevice or some sort of container where a piece of folded paper could be squirreled away. The tub of flowers next to the table caught her eye. She inspected it closely under the guise of smelling a cluster of geraniums and her heart flipped over when she found what she was looking for. Tucked between the wood and the metal band surrounding the tub was a small slip of paper. Dawn eased it out carefully and unfolded it. She had expected the message to be written in code and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was wrong. It read, simply:
Meet me by the duck pond. Ten pm.
Tonight. M.M.
Fearing that the spy for whom the message was intended could make an appearance at any minute, Dawn swiftly returned the piece of paper to its hiding place. Then she went back to the table where Felix was waiting for her with a bemused frown on his face.
‘What were you doing?’ he asked.
Dawn was so excited she could barely speak. ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘Murdo Meek. He’s
definitely here, in this village – and he isn’t working alone, either.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Felix in sullen tones. ‘You’re not making any sense.’
Dawn took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. ‘Meek left a message for someone and I’ve just intercepted it,’ she said. He’s going to meet this other spy at the duck pond after dark –’
‘Big wow,’ said Felix who seemed to be having an attack of the glums. ‘In case you’d forgotten – Operation Question Mark has just been cancelled by Philippa Pain-in-the-neck … or whatever her name is …’
‘Killingback,’ said Dawn.
‘And we’ve got to pack our bags and leave Cherry Bentley in the next twenty-four hours.’ Felix gave Dawn a puzzled stare. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, ‘but that is the meaning of “Abort mission and return to base tomorrow”, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm,’ said Dawn, thoughtfully, ‘but when exactly are we meant to abort the mission? Right now – or tomorrow? It isn’t very clear.’ An idea suddenly popped into her head. ‘Perhaps Red worded the message like that on purpose … to give us a bit more time.’
‘Brilliant!’ said Felix, shrugging off his bad mood. He looked at Dawn with shining eyes. ‘If we don’t have to chuck in the mission until tomorrow, we’ve still got a few hours left to save my granny!’
‘Oi! You kids!’ A burly man in a tight-fitting shirt appeared at the back door of the pub, and wagged his finger at them. He had been serving behind the bar a few minutes ago, and Dawn had supposed him to be the landlord of The One-eyed Stoat. ‘Get yer ’orrible dog out me garden. Go on ….’op it!’ He gestured with his thumb towards the garden gate.
‘Gosh,’ said Felix, scowling at the man, ‘how awfully rude you are.’
‘Watchoo say?’ thundered the landlord. He began to lumber towards them.
‘Time to go,’ said Dawn, seizing Felix by the arm.
‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ said Felix brazenly as the landlord drew closer. ‘My dog has been perfectly well behaved – and he’s certainly not horrible. By the way, I think you’ll find that “horrible” begins with an “H”– not an “O”.’
‘Everybody’s looking at us,’ whispered Dawn in a panic, ‘and the landlord’s turned a funny colour. I really think we should leave, now.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Felix. He glared at Dawn until she released her hold on his arm; then calling Haltwhistle to heel, he stormed out of the garden.
Dawn’s exit was a lot less theatrical. As she slipped quietly away, she glanced over her shoulder to see if the chalk mark was still on the table leg. It wasn’t.
While Felix had been cheeking the landlord someone had sneakily rubbed it out – and picked up Murdo Meek’s message.
Sitting cross-legged on a cushion with a ginger nut in one hand and the five of diamonds in the other, Dawn frowned hard. She dipped the biscuit into a mug of steaming cocoa. It was sheer luck that she didn’t dunk the playing card into the mug instead. She was thinking so deeply about Operation Question Mark that she probably would not have noticed her mistake until her teeth clamped down on a slippery piece of card.
So far, Dawn had managed to rule out more than half of the eleven suspects. Six names had been scribbled through when she discovered that they had been nowhere near the Garden and Allotment Show on the first of July, which was the day that Angela disappeared. The seventh man had been discounted because of his foreign accent.
That left four suspects. Of these, three had definitely been at the show: the Right Honourable Charles Noble had presented the prizes, Larry Grahams had won a trophy and Seth Lightfoot had been there in his capacity as ‘refuse technician’. Whether the remaining man, Jack Turtle, had attended the function on the village green, Dawn had not found out yet.
‘Explain to me again why Charles is your number one suspect,’ said Trudy from an armchair. As she bit into a bourbon, a few crumbs landed on Peebles’s fur. The cat gave a little shiver and curled into an even tighter ball. There was no room to spread himself out on Trudy’s lap because her legs were so very slender.
‘Lots of reasons,’ said Dawn. ‘Miles was cleaning Charles’s windows when he had his accident; Charles was very keen to get rid of the ladder afterwards; he seems quite wealthy; I heard him say that he does cryptic crosswords – so he must be quite brainy; he was in The One-eyed Stoat when Murdo Meek left his message … and he’s a really good swimmer …’
Trudy looked blankly at her. ‘Swimmer?’ she said. ‘Oh, I see. Yes. Murdo Meek is supposed to have jumped into the Thames. Potty thing to do, if you ask me. Well, Dawn … I suppose you could be right. Charles does seem to be a likely candidate. It’s a shame that our glorious leader has pulled the plug on Operation Question Mark when you’re so close to getting to the bottom of things.’
‘A shame?’ said Felix indignantly. He stopped peering through Dawn’s microdot viewer and shot Trudy a look of pure venom. ‘It’s an outrage, that’s what it is.’
There was an awkward silence during which Dawn nibbled her soggy biscuit and avoided catching anyone’s eye. Trudy was making a valiant effort to seem disappointed about being recalled to London before the completion of the mission – but Dawn could tell that she was hugely relieved to be going home. Felix, on the other hand, was furious about it.
‘I’m going to kick up an almighty stink when I get back to P.S.S.T.,’ he growled, seizing a tiny microdot between his thumb and forefinger and holding it underneath the viewer.
‘I know it’s hard to accept,’ said Trudy in a kindly voice, ‘but things don’t always turn out exactly how we’d like them to.’ She stroked Peebles’s head. ‘You win some; you lose some.’
‘Hey!’ objected Dawn. ‘If you don’t mind, this mission isn’t over yet … although you’re both talking about it as if it were. When Meek shows up at the duck pond tonight, I’ll be waiting for him – and, with any luck, he’ll lead me straight to Angela.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ said Trudy.
‘I wish you’d let me come,’ grumbled Felix, dropping the microdot on to the coffee table and picking up another. ‘It’s a daft idea to go on your own. I’d promise to be quiet. Please change your mind.’
‘No,’ said Dawn firmly. ‘You’re not coming.’
An uncomplimentary stream of words poured forth from his mouth but Dawn didn’t take any notice. She knew that he was just upset about his granny. Over the course of the evening, Felix had been getting more and more on edge and Dawn had tried to think of ways to placate him. She had given him the last two chocolate biscuits in the cookie jar, made him a hot milky drink, and even allowed him to look through her microdot viewer – but nothing had seemed to improve his mood.
‘Why do you keep staring at the names on that silly old playing card?’ he said to Dawn. ‘I thought you’d made up your mind that Charles Noble is the man you’re looking for.’
‘I’m almost sure,’ said Dawn, raising her mug of cocoa to her lips, ‘but Socrates said that a spy should never be overconfident. Hmm … Larry Grahams,’ she murmured, her eyes travelling down the list of suspects. As Charles’s next-door neighbour, Larry would have had plenty of opportunity to slip into the garden of The Old Oast House and smear lard on the ladder. He had also put together a huge collection of porcelain animals which must have cost him a fortune. She remembered how traumatised he had been at the mention of Bernard’s disappearance. No, she told herself firmly. He wouldn’t have been capable of killing that duck.
‘I don’t suppose you’d be interested in my opinion,’ piped up Felix. Without waiting for Dawn to respond, he ploughed on. ‘I’m still suspicious of that Seth chap. Remember when we found him poking around up at Palethorpe Manor. If he was the kidnapper, he could have returned for something he’d left behind when he moved Granny to a different hiding place … like a length of rope or handcuffs or something – and we caught him in the act.’
‘That’s possible,’ said Dawn, uncert
ainly. Her brain began to unscramble all the information she’d found out in the past few days. ‘I’d certainly like to know how he got his hands on that scrap of paper from Bob’s file.’
‘WHAT?’ Trudy’s yell was followed by an even louder exclamation when Peebles showed his displeasure at having been rudely awoken and sank his claws into her thighs.
Dawn smiled meekly. ‘I … er … forgot to mention that I found the missing corner from that sheet of paper in Bob’s folder. It was stuck to the sculpture of Neptune and its moons that Seth gave to me. Bob had pteronophobia,’ she explained.
Trudy looked extremely upset. ‘Do you have any idea what this means?’ she said.
‘Um … pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled with feathers, I think …’
‘No, you silly girl,’ snapped Trudy. ‘It means that somebody stole that information from my filing cabinet and passed it on to Meek. It means that P.S.S.T. has been infiltrated.’
‘Huh?’ said Dawn. She wasn’t quite sure what Trudy was getting at.
‘One of our colleagues,’ said the woman grimly, ‘is a traitor.’
Chapter Nineteen
Murdo Meek is Revealed
Evidently, Clop was made of stern stuff (as well as wool and snipped-up stockings). Despite being informed by Dawn that the night-time excursion to the duck pond might be dangerous, he practically begged to be allowed to go, and even seemed to give a carefree wriggle of his tail as she slipped him into her rucksack.
She had already put on her warmest, darkest clothing, and pocketed her shell phone. Now that Dawn had thought of a feasible reason to be lurking at the edge of the duck pond (she was going to pretend to search for Clop whom she had ‘mislaid’ earlier in the day), everything was set. She was ready.
Before swinging the rucksack on to her back, Dawn unfastened it to check that Clop was comfortable. He seemed to imply that it was a bit dark and that the packet of sandwiches he was sitting on (which had peanut butter as their filling and, thankfully, not lard) were less comfy than a pillow, but they’d do.
