Pax Britannia: Human Nature Read Online Free PDF Page A

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