Chapter 1
The Great White Silence
Barcelona
It was a frightful night for a mystery. Lightning flickered dim and distant. Grey clouds swamped the moon. A blue fog rose from the harbour, creeping up the fishbone alleys of old town. The temperature fell. On came the damp fog, slinking up the flagstone steps of the maritime museum and slithering beneath the old, weathered door. The clouds thickened, snuffing out the moonlight. There would be no navigating by stars tonight. Not even for the sharpest explorers.
*
In the attic above the Nighthawk Detective Agency, Penelope Green latched the window against the gathering storm. It was late and she was tired, but there was work to be done.
She lit a camping lamp, filling the attic with a rosy glow. Overhead, the rafters arched like the ribs of a whale. Beneath them, pegged to the dark floorboards, was a red polar tent. Her island. Her basecamp. The headquarters of her investigation.
Penelope crawled inside and unrolled a map of Antarctica, smoothing the wrinkles of the South Pole beneath her palms. Her fingers walked the snowy plains and picked at the edges of the great white continent. The paper was wearing thin along the coast as she traced again the last-known footsteps of her father.
Dynamite Island.
White Fang Point.
The Screaming Minkies.
There was danger in every name. Somewhere in that great white silence was her father, as invisible on the ice as he was on the map.
Shadows shifted. The hanging lamp creaked. A cold wind whistled through the attic’s rotting window frame, rustling the tent flap and sending a photo spinning across the groundsheet. Penelope caught it and peered again at the grainy details.
Beneath a pale sky was the old timber whaling hut at White Fang Point. Skis by the porch. Harpoons on the wall. And just visible, nailed to the door, the note her father had left before he’d disappeared into the snow.
POPPED OUT TO FIND THE PEREGRINE.
BACK SOON WITH TREASURE. HG
Penelope had always liked riddles, but not this one.