Percival Dunmore

Percival Dunmore is 27 and the natural history museum's preparatorpreparator Museum technician who cleans, repairs and readies fossils and specimens for study or display.. Thin and pale, with deep dark circles, lank blond hair parted in the middle and round thin-rimmed glasses, he is shy and meticulous, speaks softly and only perks up when the subject is bone and tooth. He joined the museum six years ago, sweeping floors, and today the professor lets him touch the teeth.

He works before everyone and leaves after everyone. His lunch is bread and cheese eaten alone, on a bench in the museum's main hall, among display cases of fossil shells, ammonites and stuffed birds, where skylight rays fall in squares on the floor. He says he has nothing else in life, and says it without complaint, like someone reading a drawer label.

He wears a stained canvas apron over an open-collared shirt, sleeves rolled up, and his hands are stained brown and a jeweler's loupe hangs around his neck. When the professor enters the room, he shoves his hands into the apron pockets. He has a habit of adjusting his glasses with a knuckle and of not looking in the eyes of whoever addresses him.

About the jawbone, his account is that of someone who knows exactly what he saw: parallel, straight scratches on both molars, a wear that is too flat, like a tabletop's, and on the root of one a brown mass plugging a hole, something nature does not do. It was he who raised the alarm, and he says so with a trace of pride he cannot hide.

When the question suggests he stained the bones to fool the professor, Percival answers that he was the one who raised the alarm and that, if he wanted to fool anyone, he would have stayed quiet. He hides his stained hands in the apron pockets and adjusts his glasses with a knuckle: the hurt of a faithful employee or the unease of someone with something to hide?