Pax Britannia: Human Nature (24 page)

"The boss isn't going to be happy," the second offered unhelpfully.

"No, 'e's bloody not," the first scowled. He looked down at the corpse stretched out on the table next to him. "Come on, we'd better get on and shift this. We don't want anyone else coming round here and finding the bloody thing, do we? Come one, give me an 'and will ya?"

None too willingly his partner joined him at the end of the tables and took hold of one of the creature's back legs.

"And what do we do when we've moved the bugger?" the second asked.

The first took the cigar from between his teeth and smiled, the few yellow pegs of what teeth he had left looking like a row of discoloured headstones planted within the blood red cemetery of his gums. "What do we do then? Why, then we burn the place," he said, with obvious delight. "To the ground."

Chapter Sixteen

The Industrialist

Ulysses stood at the top of the flight of broad white stone steps, Jenny waiting nervously beside him, both of them looking up at the awesome facade of the mansion.

Umbridge house had been constructed in the Neo-Classical style. To either side of them stood great columns of white stone which in turn supported a grand pediment which was itself decorated with carved figures from Greek and Roman myth. The whole place looked more like a temple of antiquity, than someone's home.

Considering the imposing edifice in front of him, for a moment Ulysses felt butterflies of nervousness take flight within his stomach.

'Well, here goes nothing,' he said giving the bell-pull a tug.

A moment later a distant bell tolled ominously somewhere away within the vast complex of the building.

They had been able to approach the mansion unhindered, having not seen another human soul since arriving at the main gates half a mile away, down the gravel drive that snaked up to the main house through an acre of sparse woodland. For someone so keen on his privacy, Ulysses would have expected Josiah Umbridge to have had someone on the gate to monitor the approach of strangers.

For not only was Umbridge a recluse, he was also one of the richest, most successful men in the empire and, hence, the world. Umbridge's factories had proliferated across the North York moors, polluting the surrounding environment, in the process making him a very rich man. It was Umbridge Industries that provided other factory-owners with the factory structures themselves and internal machinery they needed to produce the automobiles, automata, steam engines, printing presses, traffic control systems, dirigibles, kinema cameras and scores of other mechanical mechanisms that kept every major city from Edinburgh to Calcutta running.

And of course Ulysses now knew that Josiah Umbridge had had his own part to play in Project Leviathan. He might be an ill man, as was reported in the papers, but ironically, if it hadn't been for his deteriorating state of health he would like as not have been a dead man by now.

Ulysses was roused from the recollection of his last fateful sea voyage by footsteps coming from beyond the closed double doors. There was the rattle of bolts being loosened, a handle being turned and then one of the doors opened a crack. An ancient face peered out at them through the gap, the sagging jowls, the bags of skin under the eyes and scraggy wattles of the butler's neck wobbling loosely as he looked from Ulysses to his female companion and back again.

"Yes?" the butler asked, managing to sound both imperious and irritated at the same time.

"Good morning," Ulysses said brightly. "We're here to see Mr Umbridge."

The butler looked down his nose first at Ulysses and then, even more disdainfully, at Jennifer.

"Mr Umbridge is not receiving visitors."

"He'll see us," Ulysses said confidently, his jaunty tone shot through with steel. Reaching into a jacket pocket he extracted his leather card-holder with his left hand and then almost dropped it as he attempted to flick it open. The butler could not help but be unimpressed by Ulysses' clumsiness.

The butler took a moment or two to read the information presented there on the ID - a moment or two longer than was really necessary, Ulysses thought - all the while looking as though he was being expected to survey the contents of a gutter press publication.

"This way please, sir. Madam," the Umbridge Estate's ancient retainer said, stepping aside and ushering them into the cavernous, echoing entrance hall beyond. Everything was cold and white and palatial, like some eccentric aristocrat's mausoleum, an edifice built to honour the memory of a dead man.

The butler was a good head shorter than Ulysses' own manservant - and even Jennifer was a good few inches taller, and able to see the top of his balding pate - but he still managed to look down at the two of them.

As soon as Ulysses and Jennifer were over the threshold, the butler assiduously closed the door again, shutting out the morning light, returning the white-stoned hall to its previous state of grey shadow, and then, as the two visitors waited for him to show them to his master, simply held out a white-gloved hand.

"I'm sorry," Ulysses said, confused. "Aren't you going to take us to see Mr Umbridge?"

"Your ID, sir," the butler said unsmilingly, "if you would be so kind."

"Oh, I see." Ulysses hesitated for a moment before handing it over.

"Wait here," he said, and then, turning on his spatted heel, strode slowly away into the depths of the house, leaving the two of them alone in the sepulchral atrium.

In the shelter of a sparse stand of beech, Nimrod paused in front of a high stone wall. It extended away from him on both sides. He had approached it from the right, where, one hundred yards away, it turned a sharp corner and headed off northwards across the moors.

Nimrod had parted company with his master and the young Miss Haniver as they made their way along the rough dirt road that skirted the edge of Ghestdale as it tracked its way towards the Umbridge estate. The estate, with its Neo-Classical style mansion set at the north-east corner, came into view when they were still two or three miles away, the house itself framed by formal gardens. The high wall which was blocking Nimrod's own approach to the house, appeared to encompass the entire estate.

It was at this point that Nimrod split from the other two, taking a divergent path which headed back across the undulating acres of bracken and heather towards the rear of the estate. While his master and the naturalist's daughter sought an audience with the industrialist himself, Nimrod's remit had been to try to locate the gamekeeper Rudge - assuming he wasn't ensconced within some Whitby drinking house, or out on the moors - without attracting undue attention to himself. But Master Ulysses had a feeling that the thug wouldn't be too far away, and Nimrod tended to agree. And of course, even if he didn't find the man himself, who knew what other clues or dark secrets he might uncover? Under the circumstances, a little, clandestine exploration could pay dividends.

Nimrod wasn't blessed with the near prescient powers that his master seemed to have acquired during his sojourn with the monks of Shangri-La, but he still had the sudden and uneasy feeling that someone was watching him, right now.

One hand on the butt of the fully loaded pistol in its underarm holster, Nimrod turned, half-expecting to see the burly gamekeeper, pork pie hat pulled down hard on top of his head, bearing down on him, ham-sized fists bunched, ready to give him a pummelling.

For a split second he thought he saw movement, as if somebody had just ducked down out of sight, but then there was nothing. One tussock of coarse, sun-bleached grass looking just like another.

Who was it? Who was out there? Was it the gamekeeper, returning to the estate after unleashing the monstrous hound on the Hanivers?

And then the uneasy feeling was gone.

He turned back to the wall. After making a quick assessment of the arrangement of the stones, Nimrod started to climb, his black leather gloves helping him secure a confident grip. As soon as he could see over the top - the stones there arranged so that their jagged points might cause anyone trying to scale the wall no small discomfort - he scanned the grounds beyond, his gloves protecting his palms and fingertips.

He could see Umbridge house at the top of the hill, a good mile from his current position. Beneath the house and its clinically symmetrical formal gardens, carefully tended lawns stretched down to a babbling stream, the lush green sward a stark contrast to the sombre, almost spectral palette, of Ghestdale itself. The stream itself had clearly been re-engineered to produce a series of pleasantly descending and carefully sculpted cascades that eventually emptied into a lake at the bottom of the valley. Around the man-made mere, a carefully-managed strip of woodland was nestled, protected from the moor-scouring winds by the steeply-rising slopes and the estate wall itself.

Seeing no one within the fastidiously-kept gardens, Nimrod scrambled over the parapet and dropped down on the other side, landing lightly on his feet among the drifts of autumnal leaves that had collected there. Keeping to the shadows on this side of the wall, Nimrod moved as quickly and as quietly as he could towards the leafless wood. For if the gamekeeper had a hovel anywhere within the estate, it would be there.

After what seemed like an eternity, the butler returned. He made no apology for keeping them waiting but simply said: "Follow me."

"I told you he'd see us," Ulysses said in a forced whisper, offering Jennifer his arm again.

"But what are you actually going to say to him?" Jennifer whispered back.

"Don't worry, I do this sort of thing all the time."

"Really?" She looked at him with genuine astonishment.

"Really. And usually I just make something up on the spot."

"You're not serious?"

"No," Ulysses said with a forced grin, "of course I'm not. Not really. Do you think I'd walk in here to confront the man we suspect of masterminding the theft of the Whitby mermaid and the Barghest killings without having some sort of a plan?"

Ulysses wondered if all the white lies he told would catch up with him one day.

The butler led them from funereal white entrance hall into a wood-panelled corridor - clinical and dustless - through another room another hallway, just like those before, and so on. Many of the rooms they passed seemed more like museum pieces, as if the stately home was open for public viewings, the rooms and their contents trapped in time, like galleries in a museum of antiquities. The place certainly didn't feel lived in. It was almost as if the fading Umbridge had actually died long ago.

That was until the diminutive manservant led them into a fire-lit study at the back of the house, and the warmest room in the place they had so far experienced.

The study was small compared with the palatial, columned chambers they had passed - sterile ballrooms, libraries, dining chambers and galleries, all unoccupied - but it was still easily as big as the largest room in Ulysses' own Mayfair residence. Much of one wall was taken up by a huge stone-carved fireplace, the fire that had been set within it blazing away, keeping out the wintry chill that seemed to pervade the rest of the house. Two massive leather armchairs, upholstered in a deep red, had been arranged so as to face the fire.

"Mr Quicksilver and Miss Haniver, sir," the butler announced to someone sitting in the chair with its back to the door, and so still out of sight.

"Show them in," came a reedy, age-cracked voice.

The unsmiling manservant signalled for Ulysses and Jennifer to approach.

As they rounded the side of the unnecessarily large chair, the voice said: "That will be all, Molesworth," and waved the butler away with a skeletally-thin hand, veins visible beneath the parchment-like skin.

Where Hannibal Haniver had appeared aged and withered by ill-health, the older Josiah Umbridge appeared even more so. He looked like little more than a skeleton. There was almost no flesh on his bones, beneath the waxy, liver-spotted skin and his out-dated black suit hung off his sparse frame as if he were no more than a glorified coat-hanger. As well as liver spots, his pallid skin was covered with crusted black pressure sores. From the waist down he was buried beneath a bundle of blankets so that his feet and legs couldn't be seen at all. There was barely a hair left on his head, other than for the occasional, intermittently sprouting strand of grey, which only served to give his head a truly skull-like appearance.

The dying man - and he certainly smelt like he was dying, the air around him already heavy with the smell of death and decay - regarded the two of them from the abyssal pits of his sunken eye-sockets and his thin lips parted in a deaths-head grimace.

"Miss Haniver; what a pleasure it is to meet you at last."

"Mr Umbridge." Jennifer hesitated, having not expected to be the one to have to speak. "Thank you for agreeing to see us at such short notice, um, without an appointment," she said, as if feeling under pressure to give some sort of explanation as to their presence there within his home. "I hope that we are not keeping you from anything important."

"Well, I could hardly refuse now, could I?" Umbridge replied, turning his deathly gaze on Ulysses. "Not when you come bearing such auspicious authority." Still without having actually addressed his other guest directly, Umbridge turned his gaze and his smile back onto Jennifer. "You're dear old Hannibal's daughter, aren't you?"