The Whirl of a Bird [antikvár]

CHAPTER I It was a crisp, sunny Sunday morning in winter and, instead of being submerged in his beloved Pacific Ocean as was his custom for the other nine months of Simdays in the year, Detective-Inspector Trevor Nichols was fathoms deep in a technical tome in the King's Cross apartment he shared with his assistant and best friend, Detective-Sergeant Tom Burton. Tom sat in a companion easy chair, hogging the electric fire as usual. Both heads, the fair and the dark, were studiously bent. Two right hands, clutching pencils, rested on notebooks perched on the arms of their chairs. Groans of concentration were growled into the silence from time to time. Occasionally, the right hands downed pencils and went groping for the tall beer glasses which rested on tables at each elbow. Occasionally, Tom Burton paused to sketch something in his notebook but, at last, down went his pencil and book to the accompaniment of the loudest moan heard in the room so far. "Never!" he told Inspector Nichols' head as it lifted over the top of his book at the same instant. "I'll never get this navigation lark into my skull! It'll have to rest with St. Christopher from now on. Him, and Jacko." The Inspector's attraaive smile sprang out to transform his pleasantly ordinary features into an answer to a maiden's prayer. "Good job we're only going to be substitutes in case of emergency, then." "I suppose got the hang of the pilot's lot?" Tom's black, bushy eyebrows curled upwards, and the comers of his lips drew downwards into their well-used sardonic lines. Nichols grimaced and shook his head. "I can only hope Bob's on the ball," he admitted. "He has passed his solo," Tom replied. "Brother! When I