Pax Britannia: Human Nature Read online

  "Very good, ma'am. Then, if you are quite ready, Mr Wraith will see you now."

  "Very good," Miss Powell repeated unconsciously, her tone clipped - possibly over-severe she considered, her cheeks reddening at the thought - in an effort to regain her composure.

  Why did she feel so intimidated by this place? There was no need to; she wasn't some silly working class girl applying for the position of scullery-maid. She was the client here after all. Then why did she feel so nervous?

  "We'd best not keep your employer waiting," she went on. "I'm sure he must be a very busy man."

  "Very well, ma'am. If you would like to follow me?"

  The butler, dressed in the regulation black, as if he was going to a funeral, turned and marched out of the waiting room with carefully paced strides. Miss Powell followed, the skirts of her dress sweeping the floor as she kept pace with the man, who moved with all the precision of a fish-stalking heron.

  He led her back into the just-as-opulent entrance hall of the Bloomsbury house and from there up a mahogany and marble staircase to the first floor. From there they crossed a landing and came to a halt by a pair of grand doors. Seizing the gleaming brass door handles in his white-gloved hands the butler opened the doors and entered the room.

  "Miss Powell, sir," the butler announced before promptly backing out of the room again.

  Michelle stepped forward, suddenly feeling self-conscious again. There, standing before an unnecessarily large marble fireplace was Maximum Londinium's foremost consulting detective, Gabriel Wraith. He was standing straight as a beanpole, staring disinterestedly out of one of the windows on the opposite side of the ballroom-styled chamber. His profile looked as sharp as a stiletto dagger - hawkish nose, jutting chin and pointed, vespertilian ears - accentuated by the way his boot black hair had been scraped back from a widow's peak and kept in place with so much hair lacquer that it gleamed in the light of the ostentatious crystal chandeliers that lit the room.

  The room was almost bare of furniture, other than for a leather-topped desk in the far corner, on which stood a reading lamp and a carefully positioned copy of The Times, a large magnifying glass resting conspicuously on top of it. It certainly didn't look like the sort of room where a consulting detective could actually do any work, Michelle thought. Was all this ostentation really just for show, she wondered.

  She cleared her throat nervously, even though she wasn't really sure that she should be so presumptuous as to speak first in the presence of the gentleman detective.

  His head snapped round and he studied her with unblinking ophidian eyes. He appeared thin almost to the point of anorexia. Michelle caught her own curve-endowed figure in one of the tall mirrors that stood between the windows on the other side of the room and, unable to help herself, automatically found herself thinking that she was looking rather less than totally stunning that day, even though no right-thinking male would have ever agreed with her.

  "You sent word, Mr Wraith," she said, trying to hide the anxious excitement from her voice. "You have, I take it, something to report?"

  "I have news, Miss Powell, good news."

  "You have recovered it?"

  Gabriel Wraith put a tapering white finger to his lips and the young woman was almost surprised to find her words faltering into silence. He had hushed her without saying a word.

  The thin man flicked aside a tail of his jacket and dipped long fingers into a waistcoat pocket, pulling out a glittering silver chain, and the pendant that dangled from it.

  Wraith stared at the jewel as it spun and sparkled in its setting on the end of the chain. Michelle watched him intently. There was a hungry, almost lascivious, look in his snake-like eyes. She almost expected him to lick his lips in delight at any second, as if the jewel was good enough to eat.

  "The Huntingdon Jewel," he said at last, his unblinking eyes never once leaving the faceted face of the gemstone which now swung only inches away from the end of his nose.

  "Then I was right," Michelle said with unashamed relief. "You have it!"

  "Yes, Miss Powell, I have it. I have it indeed." The consulting detective continued to stare at the gently turning jewel. "A black diamond is it not?"

  "Yes... That's right," she replied, suddenly cautious. "Why do you mention it?"

  "Oh, no reason, Miss Powell. No reason. Merely out of professional interest. Worth a fortune, is it not?"

  "I told you, Mr Wraith, it is a family heirloom. Its value is beyond reckoning, as far as I am concerned."

  "Come, come, Miss Powell, there is no need to be so suspicious," Wraith said, and smiled for the first time since he had begun his audience with Michelle, holding court as a university don might deign to entertain a group of first year students. She had preferred it when he hadn't been smiling. "It is a very rare piece, that is all, and one with a most fascinating history."

  "Legend, that is all," Michelle was quick to point out.

  "If you say so, Miss Powell, if you say so. Still, all those people who have met untimely and unusual deaths. Some might say it was cursed."

  "There is no curse!" Michelle said pointedly, taken aback herself by the vehemence of her own retort.

  "No, of course not, Miss Powell. Of course not. Perish the thought. But fascinating nonetheless."

  "Mr Wraith," Michelle began, concentrating on controlling her growing anger and impatience - it was like the man was deliberately goading her - "I appreciate you recovering what I thought had been lost forever - nay, I am delighted - but I would be grateful if you would now fulfil the final part of our agreement by returning the Huntingdon Jewel to me."

  Gabriel Wraith snatched the dangling pendant up into his hand again, clenching the piece tightly within his closed fist, and looked at Michelle directly. Once again, she had preferred it when he hadn't been looking at her. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, as her sense of unease grew.

  This is getting ridiculous! she scolded herself silently. Pull yourself together, woman; it is almost within your grasp. Only a minute more and it shall be yours!

  "Mr Wraith?"

  The consulting detective smiled again and then, with a sudden movement, tossed the pendant the length of the room into Michelle's waiting hands. She immediately began to inspect the jewel in its setting, looking for any signs of damage, any clue that the original black diamond had been exchanged for a forgery, but there was nothing; as far as she could tell, it was the genuine article, and she should know.

  "I'm sorry to say that the other items - the watch, the money, the jewellery - the rest of it had already been fenced on. I am truly very sorry," Wraith said, his words devoid of any real sentiment.

  "But you managed to recover the pendant," she said, possibly rather too quickly. "The rest doesn't matter."

  "But it was worth a tidy sum, was it not, Miss Powell? A tidy sum indeed."

  "The rest of it didn't have the same... sentimental value, Mr Wraith. Let us not speak of it again."

  "As you wish, Miss Powell. As you wish."

  "Then I believe that our business together is concluded."

  The stick thin gentleman detective raised one supercilious eyebrow.

  "There is just the small matter of the remainder of my fee, Miss Powell, or had you forgotten?"

  "I had not forgotten," Michelle said, extracting a slip of paper from within the bosom of her bodice, and proffering it to him. "Your cheque, Mr Wraith."

  "Carstairs will take it on your way out," he said, waving her away as if the concept of an exchange of funds for services filled him with disdain, and he hadn't been the one to suggest payment in the first place.

  "Ma'am?" And then Carstairs was there at her shoulder again, without having apparently entered and crossed the room to get there.

  Michelle could not help letting out an involuntary cry of surprise.

  Having recovered herself, she placed the cheque onto the butler's outstretched porcelain palm.

  "Good day, Miss Powell," Gabriel Wr
aith said from his position at the fireplace.

  "Good day, Mr Wraith," she responded, and without waiting to be told twice, turned on her heel and strode out of the room, Carstairs swiftly taking his place ahead of her without even having had to speed up to overtake her. "And if I don't see you again, it will be too soon," she added barely under her breath. She didn't want to spend a minute longer than she had to in that house.

  Turning back from observing his guest's hurried departure, Gabriel Wraith relaxed his affected pose of arrogant supremacy and moved gracefully from his place at the mantelpiece to the reading desk positioned so carefully in the corner of the room. Picking up the folded newspaper he returned to his perusal of its column inches.

  Gabriel Wraith loved the smell of newsprint. It was the smell of information, of intrigue and of inscrutability. And he always found The Times to be satisfyingly abundant in both.

  The front page was laden with pieces about Prime Minister Valentine's war on climate change. Even if their hoped for revolution had not come to pass, the Darwinian Dawn's campaign of terror had certainly raised awareness of ecological issues around the globe. And the new PM was not averse to using such concerns as a means of promoting himself. He had made the subject his own personal project, effectively killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand he was seen to be listening to the general populace's concerns, and thereby helping to avert any further terrorist activity from groups like the Darwinian Dawn, whilst, on the other hand, doing as much as he could to distance himself from his traitorous predecessor.

  Much was being made of Prime Minister Valentine's efforts to make a stand on climate change and industrial pollution here at home, in the capital to be precise. Early next year would see the launch of the Jupiter Station, which the popular press had already dubbed the Weather Machine.

  It was claimed that the Jupiter would be capable of controlling and influencing the weather over London, and ultimately the rest of the South East, the primary intention being to rid the capital of the worsening pall of smog that smothered its streets and clung to its towering skyscrapers with greasy perniciousness.

  There were parts of the Upper City that were now almost permanently trapped within the Smog as it was commonly known. The Jupiter was being constructed by the factories of the philanthropist millionaire Halcyon Beaufort-Monsoon, apparently as an act of true altruism by the reclusive industrialist, for the paper reported that it wasn't going to cost the tax payer a single brass farthing. Whether this wondrous machine would actually work as was intended was yet to be seen.

  Gabriel Wraith turned the page, and let out a disgruntled harrumph.

  There, taking up a quarter of the page was an over-embellished advertisement for Doctor Feelgood's Tonic Stout.

  What was becoming of one of Magna Britannia's greatest institutions, for it to sport such gutter press advertisements, the kind he would have expected to find plastered to the walls of East End slums?

  Over-embellished with all manner of curlicues and ornamentations available to the typesetter, the advertisement made much of the supposedly beneficial properties of the fictional doctor's health drink. Wraith had seen their like before - he could hardly miss them and nor could anybody else - they were plastered all over brick walls and billboards from here to the suburbs, while animated, kinema-style versions ran on a loop on broadcast screens across the capital, and had done for some weeks now.

  He moved on, scanning the tightly-printed columns, searching for any morsel, any titbit, that might lead him on to his next endeavour.

  Apparently Professor Alexander Oddfellow, scientist, inventor and eccentric, who had been missing presumed dead for some months had turned up again at his Warwickshire home, while in another part of the country there were still concerns over the health of the industrialist Josiah Umbridge - a rival to the philanthropic Beaufort-Monsoon - who had now not been seen in public for over a year.

  On page seven, as he scanned the lines of densely-printed text, Gabriel homed in on one name, mentioned almost in passing as part of an article about the re-building of the Amaranth House at Kew Gardens, destroyed before it was even officially opened by a terrible fire. Half the page was covered by a photograph of the re-building work in progress, the original exotic glasshouse having been razed to the ground by the blazing inferno.

  The passage briefly mentioned that Ulysses Quicksilver had somehow been mixed up in the incident that had seen the glasshouse's destruction, the very morning of its intended opening, much to the chagrin of new Prime Minister Devlin Valentine, who was now focusing his energies on the Jupiter project and on building a better Londinium for all.

  "Page seven," Wraith chuckled to himself. "He won't like that. He won't like that at all." He turned the page.

  The first thing that caught his eye was the hideous photograph. At first he thought it was something from the Royal College of Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh; one of those inhuman aborted foetuses that morbidly curious pathologists seemed to delight in keeping around the place, preserving them in formaldehyde for posterity, as if it was Great Aunt Maud's ashes they were hanging onto so proudly.

  Then he looked more closely. The thing was humanoid, at least in part, but rather than being some partially-formed embryo it was in fact disfigured as a result of the chemical process that it had been subjected to, in a crude attempt to preserve the specimen.

  The photographic reproduction wasn't the best either. What Gabriel had at first taken to be a malformation of the legs, limbs joined where they shouldn't be (as in cases of sirenomelia), he now realised was actually a fish's tail, rapidly losing its scales it appeared, and any doubts he might have still harboured were dispelled as soon as he read the suitably sensationalist headline that accompanied the piece: 'Mermaid stolen from Museum'.

  Gabriel Wraith read on with interest, a wry smile spreading across his pinched lips.

  A minute later he picked up a small brass bell from its place on the desk, next to the reading lamp, and gave it a short sharp ring. Only a moment later, the doors to the room opened and Wraith's butler returned.

  "You rang, sir?"

  "I am needed elsewhere, Carstairs. I am needed most urgently. A crime has been committed and an incisive mind will be needed to unravel the mystery."

  "Very good, sir."

  Wraith examined the photograph of the mermaid in its formaldehyde-flooded glass jar one more time before placing the paper carefully back on the desk.

  "Fire up the Bentley, Carstairs. I cannot keep my public waiting. The game is afoot."

  Chapter Two

  November in Mayfair

  "Page seven? Is that all? I risk life and limb for queen and country, again, and that's all I get? A passing comment on page seven?"

  Bartholomew Quicksilver looked up languidly from his breakfast plate and swallowed his mouthful of scrambled eggs.

  "But Ully, big brother, you don't really want the press making a big fuss about your night time exploits do you?"

  Ulysses Quicksilver fixed his younger sibling with an icy glare. Barty stabbed a piece of sausage on the tines of his fork and popped it in his mouth, giving Ulysses a broad grin. Ulysses' wintry expression melted a little.

  "Well, no," he blustered, "but a little recognition wouldn't go amiss. It's been two months. Two months, and still no word of thanks!"

  "From whom?" Barty asked distractedly eyeing what was left of his grilled tomato.

  "The Ministry, of course, brother dear. Do try to keep up!"

  "But I thought your contact at the Ministry was long gone," Barty managed through a mouthful of tomato.

  "Of course he is! But that doesn't mean that Department Q has up and left!"

  "Oh."

  "Oh? Is that all you can say."

  "Come on, Ulysses, you've hardly touched your breakfast, and it's one of Mrs Prufrock's finest."

  Ulysses eyed Barty, looking him up and down. "Yes, I can see how much you've been enjoying Mrs Prufrock's cooking over the last couple of months. Ea
ting me out of house and home, no doubt.

  "You know I have an addictive personality," his brother countered.

  "Is that what Doctor Armitage calls it? And better food than the gee-gees, eh?" Ulysses said pointedly. "I don't know, I risk life and limb -"

  "Yes, you made that point already," Barty said, making a point himself, ignoring Ulysses' jibe about the few pounds he had put on since moving into the Mayfair residence, and effectively taking the wind out of Ulysses' sails.

  "I don't know what's worse," Ulysses fumed, "your lack of interest or the Ministry's."

  "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.