Pax Britannia: Human Nature (4 page)

"Very well, assuming for a moment that I
am
interested, what's happened to Department Q then?"

Ulysses' annoyed expression didn't change but he realised that this was as good as he was going to get so he made the most of the opportunity.

"Word is there's been a shake-up. No more direct ministerial interference. And about time too."

"No more ministerial involvement?" Barty said, putting a piece of black pudding in his mouth and chewing it lugubriously.

"It's been brought in under the wire, along with Prime Minister Valentine's other reforms, in the wake of the terror attacks and Wormwood's attempted coup. About time too. Can't have politicians getting in the way when there are Magna Britannia's national interests to protect."

Barty swallowed and paused in his decimation of the breakfast plate in front of him. "Prime Ministers and political parties come and go, but the Empire endures!"

"Quite so."

A minute passed without either of them saying anything, the only sound in the dining room, other than the ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, the scrape of Barty's cutlery on his plate as he chased the last of the fried mushrooms around his plate.

"But just the same. Page
seven
?"

"Anyway, apart from nothing of significance about you," Barty said with strained good humour, "what else is in the news today?"

"Oh, you know, the usual," Ulysses muttered, shaking the paper out in front of him as he finally moved on from his brief mention on page seven. "More about Valentine and his attempts to turn back the tide, or rather, in his case, the Smog."

"Right little Canute, isn't he?"

"You could say that." Ulysses said half under his breath, eyes scanning the newsprint in front of him.

"And?"

"Oh, how wonderful. It says here that Petunia Chase is being considered for the recently vacated post of Director of Kew. Bully for her!"

"Anything else?"

"There's something about Oddfellow's return as well."

"Oh yes?" Barty said, soundly properly interested now. "Any mention of your other lady friend? What was her name again? Emily? Amelia?"

"Emilia, with an 'E'."

"Oh yes, that was it," Barty said locking onto this little nugget, seeing how Ulysses was squirming at his interrogation. There weren't many occasions when Barty had the chance to feel superior to his brother, so when one did come along, he liked to make the most of it. "You never did tell me how the two of you got on."

"No, I didn't," Ulysses snapped.

"How long has it been, now?'

"Listen to this!" Ulysses suddenly exclaimed, behaving as if the last two minutes of conversation had never happened. "A mermaid has been stolen from an exhibition, right here in London!"

Realising that Ulysses wasn't going to be drawn further on the subject of him and his old flame Emilia Oddfellow, no matter how much he badgered, Barty gave in and feigned interest in the article Ulysses was reading.

"What? You mean like the figurehead of some ship, or something."

"No, I mean like a half-human, half-fish hybrid. Comb, mirror, siren song, beloved of sailors. I swear on our mother's grave -"

"There's no need for that," Barty protested.

" -it's the genuine article. A sailor's wet dream, I tell you."

"Oh, you mean like a manatee, or sea cow, or whatever they're called."

There was a suggestion of mania about both Ulysses' tone and his expression now. "No. I mean a mermaid!" he said, delighted.

"You can't be serious. You're having me on."

"No honestly."

"It has to be a hoax."

"No, it's in
The Times
."

"But everyone knows that mermaid's don't exist," Barty persisted, even though by the gleam in his brother's eye he already knew he was fighting a losing battle. But he had to persist, for sanity's sake.

"Oh, I wouldn't bet on it."
Not after what I saw, within the rusting chambers of Marianas Base,
he added to himself. "There's a photograph and everything, if you don't believe me."

He roughly folded the broadsheet pages back on themselves and then in half again, proffering the rustling wodge of pages to his brother across the pristine white linen of the tablecloth, exposing the grainy, unbelievable black and white image. Barty took it from him.

"But it's a fake, obviously," he said, taking in the hideous image of what looked like some species of primate melded with the lower half of a large fish - a sturgeon perhaps - with just a hint of doubt entering his voice. Whatever it was made up of, it was a truly repugnant creature.

No matter how much he wanted to hide it, the soupcon of uncertainty was there nonetheless.

"There's no such thing as mermaids," he pronounced again, as if the more times he reiterated that fact, the truer it became.

"You're sure about that are you?" Ulysses challenged, the same manic rictus grin still distorting his features.

Barty looked at the picture again, studying it more closely.

"Look, it's a fake. It's obvious. Look at how the two halves don't match up."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean in terms of scale. The proportions are all wrong. Surely something as skinny as the monkey half would have to have a much more slender lower body - if you believed mermaids really existed, which they don't!"

"Go on."

"And you can practically see where the two halves have been sewn together. It doesn't look so much like a chimpanzee has been bothering a trout, and this was the obscene offspring of the unnatural coupling, as it looks like someone just chopped a monkey and a fish in half, and then stuck the two together. There's probably a tuna-headed chimp masquerading as some kind of fishman at the same exhibition; part of a matching set."

He thrust the paper back into his brother's hands.

"Well, listen to this," Ulysses said, releasing Barty from his scrutinous gaze and applying it to
The Times
again.

"'The exhibit known as the Whitby Mermaid has been stolen from the Cruickshank's Cabinet of Curiosities exhibition, which has taken up residence within the Holbrook Museum for the duration of the London leg of its nationwide tour,'" Ulysses read.

Bartholomew Quicksilver put down his knife and fork to listen more intently.

"'Mr Mycroft Cruickshank told
The Times
that nothing else was taken from the exhibition of the bizarre and the macabre.'" Ulysses went on. "'Police are baffled' - but then, aren't they always? - 'as there appears to be no sign of a break-in. The question also remains as to why the Whitby Mermaid was singled out by the thieves.'"

"You're telling me," Barty interrupted. "Why would anyone want to steal what is so obviously a fake? Where did it come from anyway?"

Continuing to scan the meat of the article, paraphrasing Ulysses said: "Apparently it was caught off the coast of North Yorkshire, near Whitby, by one," - there was a brief hiatus, as he looked for the name that he had seen earlier - "George Craven. Says here it's made him and the freak show's owner, Mycroft Cruickshank, a pretty penny. And the longer the tour continues, the more they'll rake in, but not with their prize exhibit gone."

"Frauds and charlatans," Barty pronounced, imperiously, conveniently forgetting that Ulysses might have said the same thing of him less than six months before.

"Craven claims to have caught the thing whilst out fishing, and he claims that it was alive when he hauled it in, only it suffocated once it was out of the water, before he could do anything to save it."

"Oh, what a shame. How inconvenient," Barty sneered.

"Says he's given up his old job to travel with the tour and see the sights while the exhibition's in London."

"Bully for him."

"Now, don't be like that, Barty," Ulysses chided. "You wouldn't deny a fellow man, who had been down on his luck, a little good fortune, would you?"

"S'pose not," Barty mumbled ungraciously. "Still looks fake to me, though. Don't tell me you think that thing's the genuine article," he said, stabbing an accusing finger at the picture in the paper.

"Perhaps not."

"Perhaps? There's no 'perhaps' about it! Why I'd bet you anything that somewhere in this farce there's someone with a big fat sail needle, a ball of twine and a bloody big knife," Barty finished, a triumphant look in his eyes.

"If you were a gambling man."

Barty suddenly looked sheepish and cast his eyes down at the tablecloth.

"Which you're not."

"No. No anymore."

"Not anymore indeed."

"But it's still fake."

"But if that's the case, why would anyone want to go to all the trouble of stealing this mermaid, and it alone?"

"That one I can't answer," Barty admitted, stumped. "But you're the one with all the deductive reasoning. I'll let you work that one out, Ully."

"Right you are then!" Ulysses said with gleeful delight and jumped to his feet.

"What?"

"I said, right you are then," Ulysses repeated.

"But what are you doing?"

"I'm taking your advice, Barty. I'm going to find out for myself, as you so rightly pointed out, why someone would bother to steal a fake."

"What, now?"

"There's no time like the present. Are you coming?"

"But it's barely ten o'clock. I'm not seen out these days before noon," Barty said, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. "So, if you don't mind, I think I'll pass. I don't want to ruin my carefully cultivated reputation."

"Heaven forbid," Ulysses scoffed and pulled the cord hanging between the drapes and the door. A moment later a voice crackled over an intercom speaker half-hidden in an aspidistra pot.

"You rang, sir?" came the carefully cultivated tone of disinterest of gentlemen's menservants the world over.

"I did indeed, Nimrod. We're going out."

"Very good, sir." Nimrod continued in the same unemotional manner. "Will you be needing the car?"

"Yes, why not? I like to travel in style. Fire up the Phantom."

"Might I enquire as to where we are going, sir?"

"The Holbrook Museum, old chap. We have an appointment with one Mr Cruickshank who inexplicably finds his freak show short of one freak."

Chapter Three

A Cabinet of Curiosities

"Sorry, sir. I can't let you in there," the well-meaning yet resolute guard at the door to the museum instructed Ulysses.

"Really?" Ulysses said, exaggeratedly, looking somewhat taken aback.

"'Fraid so. It's a crime scene, see?"

"Yes, I know," Ulysses said, looking the man directly in the eye. "The Whitby Mermaid was stolen from here two nights ago. It was in the paper. That's why I'm here."

"Really, sir?" Now it was the slow-thinking guardsman's turn to look taken aback. He wasn't stupid exactly, just single-minded of purpose and very forward focused in his thinking. He did what he was told.

With one deft movement, Ulysses dipped his hand into an inside pocket of the morning frock coat he was wearing and whipped out a leather card-holder. With an equally assured flick of the wrist he opened it and held it up in the guard's narrow-minded field of vision.

There was a pause as the guard read what was printed on the card inside. Ulysses could see the moment the penny dropped from the way the man's features contorted in, if not confusion, then bewildered understanding.

"Oh. I see, sir. I'm very sorry. If you would like to step this way?"

"Don't mind if I do," Ulysses said breezily and bounded up the last few steps, making for the door to the museum.

As the man's attention moved onto Nimrod on the steps behind him, Ulysses saw the way in which the guard's former steadfastness was regrouping in his features and pre-empted any further delay with a brusque, "He's with me."

Passing through a gloomy walnut-panelled hallway, motes of disturbed dust spinning lazily in the thin beams of autumn sunlight that managed to penetrate the grimy leaded windows, the dandy and his batman followed the signs to the exhibition and came at last to the hallowed hall of ephemera that was Cruickshank's Cabinet of Curiosities.

They had barely crossed the threshold of the equally drear and dusty room in which the exhibition was temporarily being housed when they were met by an anxiously fidgeting man sporting an startling yellow checked waistcoat under his even more startling crushed green velvet jacket - that made him look like some kind of showman, which, Ulysses considered, was probably precisely what he was. He had an impressive belly - no doubt the product of a strong attraction to ale - and an even more impressive curled handlebar moustache. In fact, this sideshow man appeared to have made a feature of his hair; his moustache was matched by his bushy eyebrows which looked like they were trying to take flight to join the curly, upstanding knot on the top of his head. Between the eyebrows and the moustache, the man's face was a podgy pink mass of broken veins and purple cheeks, a bulbous, gout-swollen nose and a pair of beady black eyes buried amidst all the flesh.