The Devil`s Feather Read Online Free PDF

importer, but he hated the insularity of England, the claustrophobia of city life and the modest rented flat in Kentish Town that was a quarter the size of their farmhouse outside Bulawayo.
    I take after my mother in looks, tall and blonde, and my father in character, determinedly independent. On the face of it, my mother appears the least secure of the three of us, yet I wonder if her willingness to admit fear shows that she’s the most self-assured. For my father, running away was an admission of defeat. He thought of himself as strong and resolute, and I realized in the summer of 2004 how humiliating it had been for him to cut and run. He hadn’t found the courage to confront Mugabe’s bullies any more than I could find the courage to confront mine…and we both felt diminished as a result.
    The excuse I gave them of wanting time and space to write a book was partially true. I’d produced an outline while still in Baghdad (in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations) and had been offered a publishing contract on the back of it. I saw how twitched I and my colleagues became when the West lost its sheen of moral respectability, and my idea had been to chart the world’s trouble-spots through the eyes of war correspondents. I particularly wanted to explore how constant exposure to danger affects the psyche.
    The original advance offered was a pittance but I renegotiated it on the basis that the book would include a full and free account of my kidnapping. It was straightforward fraud, because I signed the contract knowing I would never reveal the truth. Indeed, I couldn’t see myself writing a book at all—I seized up every time I sat in front of a keyboard—but I had no conscience about persuading the publishers I was committed. It was the pretext I needed to take myself out of circulation while I stitched my tattered nerve together again.
    I found Barton House on a Dorset agent’s website and chose it because it was the only property available on a six-month lease. It was far too big for one person but the weekly rent was the same as for a three-bedroomed holiday cottage. When I queried this, the agent told me that holiday lets were unreliable and the owner wanted a guaranteed regular income. Since I could afford it, I accepted his explanation and forwarded a money draft under the name I’d used in the hotel, which was my mother’s maiden name—Marianne Curran—but even if he’d told me the truth, that the house was in a poor state of decorative repair, I would still have gone ahead. I was obsessed at that stage with removing myself from the world.
    I don’t know what I expected—to be part of a small community where I could close the door when I felt like it, perhaps—but that wasn’t the reality. All the arrangements had been made by email and telephone until my collection of the key from the agent’s office in Dorchester half an hour earlier. The photograph of Barton House on the website had shown climbing plants across a stone façade, with the roof of another building to the side (a garage as I discovered later). I had assumed, since the address was Winterbourne Barton, that this meant it was within the village boundaries.
    Instead, it stood behind high hedges, well away from the nearest house, and with most of it invisible from the road. An absence of crowds was exactly what it promised—even isolation—and I halted my newly acquired Mini at the entrance and stared through the windscreen with anxiety fluttering at my heart. The human maelstrom of London had been a nightmare during the three weeks I’d spent with my parents because I’d never known who was behind me. But surely this was worse? To be alone, and hidden from view, with no protection and no one within calling distance?
    The hedges cast long shadows and the garden was so wild and unkempt that an army could have been lurking there without my seeing them. Since the moment I’d landed at Heathrow, I’d been trying to conquer my fears