Pax Britannia: Human Nature (12 page)

"Mr Wraith is not used to receiving guests in the middle of the night, sir!" the butler said with some vehemence.

Awkwardly, using his left hand, Ulysses extracted the leather cardholder from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. The butler scanned the details so presented.

"Mr Quicksilver," he said, maintaining the same disapproving tone - like a schoolmaster giving a misbehaving pupil a dressing down - "Mr Wraith is not receiving guests at this hour."

Ulysses was taken aback. He was not used to people challenging the authority referred to on his Department ID, not unless he was already wrestling them on top of a train or negotiating with the use of extreme force.

"Oh, I see. That authority not good enough for you, eh? Then try this. Nimrod?"

Ulysses stepped aside, Nimrod forcing his way past the threshold.

"I must protest!" the butler spluttered, his carefully created demeanour of arrogant correctitude crumbling in an instant.

"Must you?" Ulysses said, wearily.

Before the butler knew what was going on, Nimrod's bunched fist connected with his face. He went down, stunned, falling to his knees as he whimpered in shock and pain, his hands pressed to his bloodied nose.

The two men barged past the stunned retainer and into the house.

"Carstairs? Who is it?" came a man's muffled voice from somewhere above.

Saying nothing, Ulysses grabbed his manservant's sleeve and jerked his head upwards, indicating the floor above.

Trying to tread as lightly as he could on the plush carpet covering the grand staircase, Ulysses dashed up it to the first floor, Nimrod following after. Ahead of him, at the end of a darkened landing, stood a set of double doors, light from the room beyond escaping through the cracks where the doors met the frame.

"Carstairs?" came the voice again, warier now and closer, as if its owner stood just on the other side of the doors.

Without hesitation, Ulysses grabbed a brass handle and forced the door open violently, catching the man who had been standing behind it by surprise.

Gabriel Wraith danced back, hastily trying to regain his composure. He stood there in full evening dress, hair slicked down as smoothly as ever with half a tin of pomade.

"Quicksilver!" he yelped in what Ulysses imagined was a more nervously high-pitched tone that he had intended. "What is the meaning of this?"

"With have things to discuss, Wraith," Ulysses announced as he strode into the room, the other man backing into the corner as far as his reading desk, before his unstoppable, glacial advance.

"Things? What do you mean, man, barging in like this?" he demanded, his voice like cold steel now. "What things?"

"The Whitby Mermaid, the Whitechapel Irregulars, the House of Monkeys," Ulysses reeled off the list. "What do you know of th -"

He stopped abruptly, catching sight of the drop of blood, a single crimson droplet oozing from the otherwise almost indistinguishable nick on the consulting detective's otherwise immaculately pale cheek.

"What happened to your face?" Ulysses asked, eyes narrowing as he pointed an accusing, wrongly-angled finger at Wraith.

"I cut myself shaving," he answered icily, subconsciously feeling for the wound. With an arrogant motion he tossed his head back. "You're raving man. I would be grateful if you would depart these premises immediately!"

But even as the words were out of his mouth it was obvious that Gabriel Wraith knew that it was too late, that he had been rumbled. Even as Ulysses went for his blade, pulling the rapier free of its cane-scabbard, Wraith went for his. And then the heavy knife was in his hand again.

"How did you know?" Wraith demanded as he dropped into a fighting stance, more befitting of his criminal alter ego than a respectable Bloomsbury gentleman.

"What, that Gabriel Wraith and the Magpie were one and the same?" Ulysses said. "I didn't know, I only suspected."

"What?" the other man shrieked in angry disbelief.

"But now you've confirmed that fact yourself, the similarities are clear; you're both light on your feet, balletic you might say, face sharp as a blade, mind to match, a propensity for repeating words and phrases. I suppose it would explain your success as a consulting detective as well, if you were the one responsible for the thefts in the first place." Ulysses flashed the icily furious man a devilish grin. "Oh, and you're both arrogant bastards," Ulysses snarled.

"Well then, it would appear we have unfinished business, you and I," Gabriel Wraith declared as he shifted his balance from one foot to the other, preparing himself for the moment when he could duck in under Ulysses' guard and deliver a fatal blow.

"Indeed," Ulysses agreed, hefting the blade in his left hand - not his preferred hand but competent enough, nonetheless. There was the click of a pistol being cocked behind him. "Shame, it appears it's going to have to stay that way, me old fruit. Now drop the knife, or my man here will drop you."

Wraith grimaced and made a sound like an animal snarl. "Idiot!" he hissed.

"What, you or me?"

With a roar born of frustration, rage and despair, Gabriel Wraith sprang at Ulysses, suddenly all semblance of composure gone.

Ulysses raised his own blade just in time to parry the maniac's descending sweep. So angry was the man that, what skill and finesse he might have had was lost as blind rage took over. Ulysses sidestepped and kicked out at the same time, sending his opponent sprawling across the remarkable Turkish carpet that covered the floor of Wraith's consultation chamber.

Before he could recover himself, Nimrod stepped forward, the barrel of the pistol pointed directly at Wraith's face. The rogue's features lost what little colour they still retained as he realised that he had come to the end of the line.

"Go on then - kill me, if that's what you're going to do. Just don't make a damned meal of it."

"Don't be so bloody stupid," Ulysses laughed. "I've not hunted you through Whitechapel and chased you over rooftops simply to kill you now. As you said yourself, Mr Magpie, we have unfinished business you and I."

Wraith looked up into Ulysses' cruelly smiling face and felt his bowels turn to water. He suddenly felt much worse than he had done when he just thought that Ulysses was going to have him killed.

"I hope you have a head for heights," Ulysses hissed as Nimrod delivered a blow to the head with the butt of his pistol.

Slowly a bleary consciousness returned and Gabriel Wraith opened his eyes. He immediately let out a wail of fear as the street appeared four storeys above him, gently swaying from side to side. His head felt thick, engorged with the blood that seemed to be collecting within his skull. The shock of his situation merely helped to bring him round more completely.

Gradually reality reasserted itself and he realised the seriousness of his predicament. He looked up, straining his neck and could see the cord around his ankle just as he became aware of the dull throb there. Beyond that lay only the dark pall of the Smog, under-lit a satanic red by the blinking lights of the city below, the Overground network a dark spider's web against it. The cord ran up and over a bent aerial mast and back to a window on the fourth floor of the house.

"Ah, you're awake. Had a nice sleep, did you?"

Wraith froze. The familiarity of the voice cut through him like a blade of ice and brought with it sudden remembrance of the night-time chase over the rooftops of Whitechapel and Quicksilver's sudden attack within his own home.

Wraith's lip curled into an angry sneer. "Quicksilver, you bastard," he snarled. "What are you doing? What, precisely, do you think you are doing?"

"I'll give you a clue," Quicksilver said, the same cruel smile still locked on his face. "Nimrod?"

At once the line holding him up went slack and suddenly he was falling. The cord whizzed over the mast, accompanied by the sharp smell of scorched rope.

He cried out in fear as the slabs of the pavement and the points of the railings shot rapidly closer.

He was only vaguely aware of Quicksilver shouting for his manservant to halt his descent.

"You said... you weren't... going to... kill me!" the panicking Wraith protested, as he panted for breath. "That's what you said!"

He could see Quicksilver's manservant now, standing at another window on the top floor of the house, the rope held tightly in his great bunched fists.

"I said I hadn't come all this way to kill you
then
," the other clarified, an expression of cruel delight etched onto his clean cut aristocratic features. "But your fate now depends on whether you answer my questions truthfully. You see, there are things that you know Wraith - or should that be Magpie? - things that I
need
to know."

"And what makes you I'll give you the answers?" Wraith retorted pathetically, making one last ditch attempt at a rebellious front.

"Because I believe you to be a sensible man," Quicksilver said calmly. "Nimrod?"

The cord went loose again and Wraith dropped, another involuntary cry escaping his lips.

It took longer for his fall to be slowed this time and, with a growing sense of dread, Wraith realised that Quicksilver quite possibly was willing to do anything to get the answers he wanted.

As he hung there, swinging from the end of the thin line, upside down, like a fish on a hook, gravity pushing his eyes out of his head, he had a clear view of the spear-tipped railings outside his Bloomsbury residence. Were he to fall he would be lucky if all he ended up with was a fractured skull and a broken neck; at least that way death would be instantaneous. If he was unlucky, he might puncture a kidney, or skewer some other vital internal organ, before bleeding to death in agonising pain, like a stuck pig on the railings.

He felt the cord jerk again, but this time he was being pulled upwards. When he was level with the sadistically-smiling face once more, Quicksilver spoke again. "If you're suspended uncomfortably, then we'll begin."

Wraith nodded slowly; he didn't see that he had any other option.

"You were behind the theft of the Whitby Mermaid, weren't you?" Quicksilver stated calmly.

Wraith paused for a moment. He had determined to be defiant to the end, but the fire had gone from him now. All that stubbornness would save him, other than his pride, was a painful death on the pavement below.

He nodded again. "Yes."

"But why steal a fake? What was it worth to you?"

"A fair amount. It was stolen to order," Wraith stated flatly.

For the first time something other than an absolute conviction in his own arrogant opinion crossed Quicksilver's features. It was the one thing that gave Wraith some small nugget of satisfaction.

"To order?" Quicksilver echoed.

"That's what I said."

"Who for?"

The pedant in Wraith couldn't resist: "I think you mean 'for whom?'"

The cord went slack again. Wraith dropped a floor before the rope pulled taut, tugging sharply on his hip. He almost bit through his tongue with the shock of it.

"Bellerophon," he gasped, blood spraying from his mouth as he spat the name.

"Who is Bellerophon? And don't tell me he's a hero from Greek myth."

"I don't know," Wraith snarled. "It was just a name. There was never any face to face meeting."

"What does Bellerophon want with a fake?" Quicksilver pressed.

"I don't know! I didn't ask!"

"You just took the money."

"As you say," Wraith snarled, "I just took the money."

"So, where is it now? The mermaid."

"There were instructions to send it north, to Whitby."

"Back to Whitby, eh?" Quicksilver pondered. "It keeps coming back to Whitby. But I still don't understand why someone would go to so much trouble to steal what appears to be - what
must
be - a fake." He stepped back from his place by the window and Wraith heard him say to his manservant: "We're not done with this mystery yet, Nimrod. But we're done here."

Disbelieving doubt was soon ousted by cold horror as Wraith awakened to his fate as he watched the one called Nimrod tie off the cord to something inside the room. Quicksilver turned from the window, immediately disappearing into the shadows of the room beyond.

"You can't just leave me here!" Wraith screamed after him, all his fear and anxiety suddenly taking hold.

There was a moment's pause and then his tormentor appeared at the window again.

"Oh, can't I? Goodnight, Mr Wraith." He turned and then was gone, for good this time.

Wraith stared up at the heaving morass of the Smog that hung over the city like a funeral shroud and listened as the distant sounds of police sirens grew louder.

It was the end of the line for the Magpie, and, more importantly, it was the end for Gabriel Wraith as well.

His eyes on the cord cutting into his aching ankle, he reached deep inside a trouser pocket, searching for the pen knife that he always kept there.

This night would see the end of both the master of the House of Monkeys, the Magpie, and Gabriel Wraith, London's finest consulting detective. And all thanks to that smug-faced bastard, Ulysses Quicksilver.