Pax Britannia: Human Nature Read Online Free Page B

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