Pax Britannia: Human Nature (42 page)

A hissed expletive escaped Ulysses' gritted teeth. They had been so close. If only they had got there sooner, he might have had the Christmas Killer in his clutches right at that very moment. Instead he was no closer to catching the murderer of his old friend and tutor, and all those other men. In fact his failure to act in time had led to another man's death. Not for the first time that day, Ulysses berated himself for not answering his tutor's plea sooner.

It was at that moment that his personal communicator buzzed inside his pocket. Straddling the top of the wall, Ulysses took out the device and pressed the enamelled answer key.

"Yes?" he snapped sharply into the mouthpiece.

"It's Lucy," the woman's voice at the other end of the line said. "Did you get to Fitzmaurice in time?"

"No. We were too late. The killer got here first and now he's got away. I lost him!" he snarled, the rancour evident in his voice.

"Well I think I know where you might find him," Lucy said.

"Really?"

"I've identified the last man in the photograph. Get yourself back to Boriel, it's the Master. It's Virgil Ashton-Griffiths! Either he's the killer or he's the next victim!"

VI - THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST

"So, tell me about the Damocles Club, Master," Ulysses said, regarding the gargoyle-faced man opposite from over steepled, black-gloved fingers, "and, more specifically, why somebody would want every last member dead."

Ulysses Quicksilver was impressed. The Master had maintained the same stony facade ever since they had invaded his private sanctuary.

The porter - still shaken by his discovery of Montgomery Summerson's eviscerated body - had reluctantly led Ulysses, Nimrod and Lucy through the college buildings to the Master's apartments, as if he half expected to stumble upon another corpse. It had been with some obvious relief that he had opened the door, hearing the Master's voice command them to "Come!" Ulysses' 'by Appointment to Her Majesty' ID had done the rest.

Ulysses and Virgil Ashton-Griffiths met each other's unblinking eyes, each regarding the other by the ruddy glow of the fire crackling in the hearth. For a moment, all that could be heard within the Master's study was the insistent ticking of a clock and the snap and crackle of the fire smouldering in the grate.

And then the older man's expression of steely resolution slowly began to crumble, the hard lines of his hawkish face becoming sagging lines heavy with worry.

"We were undergraduates at the time, here at Boriel College," the Master said quietly. "We were young, we were arrogant -"

"I could see that for myself," Ulysses threw in.

"And we were bored. The idle rich, if you like," Ashton-Griffiths went on.

"So, apart from looking down on everyone else and your Daddies having more money than you had things to fill your days with, what did you do that would make someone wish you all dead?"

"From what I remember of your own background, Mr Quicksilver, you were not left exactly destitute by your parents when they died." The Master's previous steel had started to return in the face of Ulysses' brusque manner.

"But my name isn't the one that's at the bottom of a list of dead men," Ulysses pointed out darkly.

The Master sighed. "To be honest, it will be a relief to be able to tell someone about it after all these years."

"How many years, precisely?"

"Thirty-seven."

"So, around the time the photograph was taken, when the Damocles Club was at its height."

The Master reached for his cup of tea and took a sip before continuing.

"It was the product of the recklessness of youth, I suppose, a group of like-minded individuals, cast free of boarding school and our mothers' apron strings for the first time, with enough money and status to do pretty much as we pleased. Such youthful exuberance manifested itself at first in terms of ridiculous drinking games at various pubs around the town, but they didn't really appeal to our thrill-seeking natures. It was adrenalin that motivated us, the need to face impossible odds and triumph.

"We began to partake in various gambling pursuits, but when money is no object, when you are not really risking anything in a real sense, it takes away the element of risk and saps the excitement from it. So we started gambling with things that were more precious to us than money. We took up some of the rather more extreme sports, rock-climbing, white-water rafting and the like."

"But we've all done that sort of thing haven't we?" Ulysses said, recalling the time in his own life when he had frittered his life away in idle pursuits. He had held the Paris-Dakar rally record for eight years running, for a start. And it could be argued that his life now was even more dangerous, and satisfying as a result. Well, most of the time, he thought, rubbing at the shoulder joint of his left arm.

"We fashioned ourselves into the Damocles Club, named after the infamous sword, of course," the Master went on, as if he hadn't heard a word Ulysses had said. "But, unlike Damocles, we liked that feeling of imminent danger, that everything about our position of privilege could be over-turned in an instant."

He paused, returning the teacup and its saucer to the table.

"And then we met Marley."

"Go on."

"Lacey brought him along, I think he had a bit of thing for him to be honest. Lockwood always did go for those rugger types, the old poof. But Marley wasn't one of us. He didn't fit in. He didn't come from the right background."

"What do you mean?" Lucy asked.

"His father was a churchman. They didn't have money." Ashton-Griffiths gave her a disparaging look. Something of the arrogant youth was still there, just beneath the veneer of social responsibility. "Anyway, it was Higgins who suggested the initiation. Hackett provided the gun. His family were of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' variety."

"So you shot him?" Lucy asked, shocked.

"Don't be ridiculous, my dear," Ulysses rebutted her. "I'm guessing that after a bout of heavy drinking the idea of the initiation was raised with this Marley - a game of Russian roulette was it, Master?"

The older man nodded. He suddenly appeared to have aged ten years, the inconstant shadows cast by the fire giving him a haunted appearance.

"And Marley lost."

"I didn't know Higgins had actually loaded the damn thing! Marley's death shocked us all out of our youthful arrogance and taught us to value what we had more carefully. The Damocles Club was disbanded. We all went our separate ways."

"And yet, almost all of you ended up back in Oxford thirty-seven years later," Ulysses pointed out. "I wonder why that was. A sense of guilt? Unable to completely leave the past behind? Having discovered that you couldn't run from yourselves you all decided to confront your past in some pathetic, subconscious way?"

"So, what do we do now?" The Master raised his head and looked at Ulysses, his eyes glistening in the flickering firelight. "Are you going to have me arrested?"

"Arrested?" Ulysses laughed humourlessly. "But you're not the murderer, are you?"

"But..." Lucy suddenly put in, looking bewildered. "But he's the only one left on the list."

"Yes, but Nimrod and I came straight here, having just chased the killer out of the Botanic Gardens. The Master here is some years older than me and, if you don't mind me saying so Master, he's carrying a few more pounds and he wasn't even out of breath when we arrived. If he had been the killer I wouldn't have expected him to be waiting in his rooms when we arrived and, if by some miracle he was, I would certainly have expected him to be out of breath!"

"But I've just confessed our crime to you," the Master pressed. "I need to pay for the part I played, for being an accessory after the fact."

"If I didn't know any better, I would have to say that I thought you wanted to be arrested, to be put into protective custody and save your own sorry skin."

For a moment the Master was speechless.

"So who's the Christmas Killer?" Lucy asked, completely confused.

"That is, what I suspect, we will all discover before this night is through," Ulysses said, brimful of the sort of arrogant confidence that would have seen him fit quite well with the rest of the Damocles Club where the wretched Marley had not.

"So, what are we going to do now?"

"Now?" Ulysses said, a dark smile forming on his lips. "Now we wait."

VII - SANTA CLAWS IS COMING TO TOWN

The clock in the Master's study was just striking the tenth bell of eleven when Father Christmas paid a call. He broke down the door on the second attempt, but by that time Ulysses' prescient sixth sense had already alerted him to the assailant's approach.

Lucy screamed as the doorjamb splintered and a hulking figure burst into the room. He was shrouded by a deep red cloak and hood, trimmed with white fur, and as he lurched into the study steel claws gleamed in the dying ember-glow emanating from the grate.

With a startled grunt the hulk hesitated, surprised to discover that the Master had company. But his hesitation lasted only a moment. Dogged in his determination, and apparently unconcerned as to the presence of potential witnesses to the crime he was about to commit, the ogre lunged for the Master with a savage roar.

But Ulysses and Nimrod were ready.

The brute was almost as broad as he was tall, built from slabs of muscle, as Ulysses soon learnt to his cost, the man-mountain hurling him across the room by one swipe of his arm, sending the sleigh bells ringing again.

The killer turned his attention back onto the Master who had backed away as far as he could behind his desk, until he was stopped from going any further by a wall of bookshelves.

"Sir!" Nimrod shouted over the furious bellows of the brute, casting an anxious glance Ulysses' way.

"Don't worry about me!" he shouted back, picking himself out of the remains of the side table on which he had landed. "Take him down!"

Nimrod's pistol was in his hands in an instant. Ulysses looked from the muzzle of the gun to the ogre, batting Lucy aside, claws extended, as he tried to reach the mewling Master. Apart from the fact that there was a mad killer on the loose in the room with them, something wasn't right.

"I want him alive!" Ulysses shouted.

Nimrod's gun fired.

With a howl the brute slumped against the Master's desk as his right leg gave way beneath him, his kneecap a bloody mess.

Seizing the opportunity, Nimrod and Ulysses moved in together, Ulysses disarming the killer with a flick of his own rapier-blade. With the two of them pinning the thrashing attacker to the ground, Lucy pulled down one of the velvet drapes covering the windows with which to bind the captured killer, as the Master looked on in amazement.

"But I mean, Father Christmas?" Lucy repeated.

"Who else were you expecting?" Ulysses said. "After all, it is Christmas Eve. And from the look of the gift he was bringing you, Master, it looks like you've most definitely been a bad boy this year."

The Master said nothing, but continued to stare into the shadows beneath the obscuring hood of the cloak

"But what kind of a disguise is that?" the reporter persisted.

"One that's kept his identity a secret and allowed him to kill four - possibly five - men," Ulysses stated grimly. "So," he said, approaching the chair to which they had bound the moaning brute with the curtain, "shall we see who it is before we inform Chief Inspector Thaw that we've caught his Christmas Killer for him?"

Taking hold of the hood in one black-gloved hand he threw it back.

Lucy gasped in horror. As did the Master.

"Marley!" was all he could say, his voice a strained whisper.

Ulysses studied the face of the killer with clinical interest, as a lepidopterist might examine a moth pinned beneath a microscope.

The brute appeared to be a similar age to the Master - in his late fifties - but that was where the similarity ended. His head was entirely hairless and where the Master's eyes sparkled with a ferocious intelligence, behind the killer's eyes there resided a brutal and imbecilic child.

The reason for the former Oxford undergraduate's reversion to a state of moronic childishness was clear. It was as if his face had been sliced down the middle, from the top of his head to his cleft palette. A livid sunken scar had pulled the man's features into the middle of his face, pulling his eyes closer together, making him appear almost permanently cross-eyed. Saliva drooled continually from his gaping toothless mouth soaking the collar of the cloak with its stinking residue.

"The gunshot wound," Ulysses said. "The one that you thought had killed him, Master, all those years ago did this to him."

"I-I had n-no idea," Ashton-Griffiths stammered.

"Looks like your 'victim' is not as dead as you thought he was. By the way," he added, "what time of year did this -" Ulysses indicated Marley's face with a waving finger "- happen?"

"A few days before Christmas 1960," the Master replied, a distant look in his eyes.

"Well, Ulysses, you promised me an exclusive," Lucy said, turning to the dandy, her own shock passing as her reporter's instinct for a good story took over again, "but I never expected anything like this. The Christmas Killer unmasked before my very eyes. Congratulations!" She put out her hand to shake his.