Dawn Undercover by Anna Dale

Author:Anna Dale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2005-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

Wow. What luck! It’s open, thought Dawn as they approached the village hall. It was an old, red-brick building with arched windows and two solid, oak doors. Sitting on a chair, outside with a plastic bucket in his lap, was an elderly man. A toothpick was jutting from a corner of his mouth. Dawn stopped and read a poster which had been stuck to one of the doors.

‘Please can we have a look at the art exhibition?’ she said to Trudy.

‘You can, if you like,’ she replied, ‘but potato prints aren’t really my thing. Why don’t I have a sit-down over there, on that bench by the pond, while you check out the paintings.’

‘OK, Mum.’

Trudy smiled weakly and released Dawn’s hand. She looked pale, tense and exhausted. Dawn knew precisely how she felt. Pretending to be a different person was immensely draining. She wished that she could switch off her brain for a while and relax in the sunshine with Trudy – but she couldn’t. She had work to do.

‘I’d like to see the exhibition, please,’ said Dawn, dropping the twenty pence entry fee into the man’s bucket.

He chewed on his toothpick, nodded vaguely and waved her inside.

Dawn spent a couple of minutes wandering up and down admiring the artwork of Cherry Bentley Primary School. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw some photographs pinned to a large sheet of yellow sugar paper in one corner of the hall and, reaching into her pocket for her miniature camera, she casually ambled towards them.

Somebody had taken great pains to write the words ‘Garden and Allotment Show’ as fancily as they could, with the result that they were almost impossible to read. The photographs had been arranged in a circle around the words which meant that Dawn had to tilt her head to get a proper look at them. They all seemed to feature a person showing rather a lot of teeth with a trophy or rosette in one hand and a particularly fine example of a marrow or a bunch of sweet peas or a pot of jam in the other.

Dawn found the photograph of Bess Arbuthnot. She was wearing a hat with a narrow, stiff brim, a dress with a lace collar, and a pair of white gloves. In the crook of her arm she held a magnificent cucumber, the size and lustrous colour of which Dawn had never seen in any supermarket.

Flicking open one end of the box of chocolate raisins with her finger, Dawn lifted it until it was level with the photograph of Bess Arbuthnot and pressed the shutter release button. She then proceeded to do the same with the other photographs. In one, she saw Larry Grahams holding up an unusually shaped beetroot, his face glowing with pride. Seth Lightfoot, the man whom Dawn had seen leaving the post office in great haste, was in five different photographs. He was dressed quite scruffily and appeared to be looking at something on the ground in each picture.

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