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Excerpt
Trail of Feathers
By Olivia Lorenz
Prologue
London, 1938
Three men gathered around a neat and tidy desk in a small office
just off Gower Street. The room was laid out as carefully as the
desk, each bookshelf filled to capacity with the latest journals and
books, a selection of tidy-trays labelled with their contents, a
blackboard wiped clean, and fresh pieces of chalk awaiting use in
their packet. Nothing was out of place. Even the picture-frames were
aligned correctly, and on the narrow windowsill a begonia provided
the sole splash of colour, not a single fleck of soil or drop of
water spoiling the white-painted woodwork.
The
only suggestion that this office was the domain of a man with
unusual interests was the presence of a grim shrunken head hanging
by its matted hair from the hat-stand in one corner. The cleaners
complained about its presence, so usually the head was obscured from
view by a large trilby.
Today the hat had been tossed aside, and if the head could have
opened its eyes, it would have beheld the three men exclaiming over
an object even more peculiar than itself.
“It’s a condor feather,” said the visitor, a stooping, huddled
ornithologist named Pendle summoned from his roost in the Natural
History Museum to identify the object.
“Are you certain?”
Pendle glanced across the desk at his questioner, the man who’d
invited him here, Dominic Lane-Fox, Esq. He’d not had much contact
with the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, but Lane-Fox’s
reputation preceded him more than did the reputation of the third
man in the room, the Head of Department, Professor Edward St. John
Woolley.
Pendle knew that Woolley’s fieldwork was negligible, unlike that of
his employee Dominic Lane-Fox. Who had not heard of the deeds of
derring-do serialised in The Morning Herald, based upon the
telegrams wired by Lane-Fox from inhospitable and often unspellable
locations around the globe?
Like two hundred thousand other Londoners, Pendle looked forward to
reading Lane-Fox’s dispatches, tucked into three columns beside the
weather forecast and the country diary. Invariably the stories were
the same no matter what the locale. Accounts of intrigue and danger,
helpful natives, a race against time to reach priceless treasure
before the dastardly foreign swine–usually an Eastern European of
suspect loyalties to two or more governments–got there first, and,
of course, the timely intervention by the British Army, ever on call
to lend a hand and proving the sun never set upon the Empire.
Absolute twaddle, but as a scientific man, Pendle found it
astonishing so many people loved to read the stuff and believed it
to the extent that a national broadsheet had run a major story on
Lane-Fox and Doubleday had offered a small fortune for his memoirs.
It
would never happen to an ornithologist, Pendle reflected as he took
the feather from the desk and held it up. Conscious of the two pairs
of eyes upon him, one bored and the other curious, he waggled the
feather back and forth under the weak light afforded by the window.
“Definitely a condor,” he said, using his free hand to indicate the
length. “Eight or nine inches, so it’s been plucked from the upper
flights of the wing–the ‘fingers’ of the bird, if you can imagine
it.”
Woolley blinked. “And the relevance of the condor is…?” he prompted,
looking at Pendle expectantly.
The
ornithologist shrugged. “The flights are not usually shed once the
bird has reached adulthood. This feather was probably taken from a
specimen already dead.”
“Or
killed on purpose,” mused Lane-Fox.
“Yes.” Pendle felt uncomfortable with the idea of someone trapping
the huge bird just to pluck out its feathers. He took tighter hold
of the lone example in his hand. “You may be right, Mr. Lane-Fox.
These three notches on the shaft were cut deliberately.”
“Of
course they were,” Lane-Fox drawled, his expression of boredom back
in place. “Ritualistic, I should say.”
Pendle continued despite the snub. “The odd thing is, the feather
has been dyed, probably with vegetable matter.” He licked his thumb
and forefinger before running the leading edge of the feather
between them, revealing only the trace of dust but no green residue.
“The natural colour of the condor’s plumage is black, save for the
ruff and legs. It’s a powerful dye that can change the filaments to
this shade of green. I have a colleague who could ascertain what
material was used, if you would like me to enquire.”
“That will not be necessary.” Dominic Lane-Fox retreated behind his
desk and prepared a pipe of tobacco. Woolley took a closer look at
the feather.
“There’s some sort of rusty colour here. It looks like blood.”
Lane-Fox puffed a stream of blue smoke at the feather. “It is
blood.”
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