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tortoises; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; the scalp and one tusk of a mammoth - although Ulysses didn't understand what was so special about that when one could still see the real thing roaming the tundra of Siberia, if one was lucky.
    A number of the exhibits had been stuffed to preserve them but they were not the finest examples of the taxidermist's art. There was an elephant's head, minus its ivory; a still-born two-headed lamb; a stuffed pangolin; a two-tailed lizard; various cases of pin-stuck butterflies, moths, spiders and scorpions; and then there was a large pickling jar containing the knotted form of an octopus, which reminded him far too vividly of his jaunt to the Pacific only a few months before.
    He was disappointed not to see much in the way of dinosaurian artefacts. Thought of the terrible lizards then took him back to London Zoo and the breakout from the Challenger Enclosure nearly six months previously, and his rather too close an encounter with a fully-grown megasaur. What had happened to the brute after he brought it down in Parliament Square, he wondered.
    And there were plants too; dried vanilla pods; the rump-shaped seed of the Coco-de-Mer palm; and, supposedly, a mandrake root, but which to Ulysses looked more like a prize-winning obscenely shaped vegetable at a village flower show. He had seen the genuine article, and it looked nothing like a cheekily-shaped parsnip.
    But none of the plants on show here were as amazing, or as deadly, as the others he had encountered within the Amaranth House at Kew.
    Suspended from the ceiling by means of a complicated system of pulleys and wires was a hollowed-out bark canoe that had once belonged to a lost Amazonian tribe; a gaudily-painted totem pole of the Gitxsan Indians of Canada, painted in what would have once been bright, overpowering primary colours; a slice taken out of a Californian giant redwood; and the hull of a Chinese junk.
    "It's as if the spirit of Pitt Rivers is alive and well, and residing here in London," Ulysses announced with something like delight in his voice. "Oh, I've got one of those," he said, pointing at a Balinese fetish mask, "or at least I should say I had one of those, before the fire and all."
    It amazed Ulysses how many items there were. It seemed that it was not enough merely to own the tusk of a narwhal; Cruickshank needed to possess at least three of the things, each carefully labelled and catalogued with its provenance, including where and when it was acquired, or killed, in the case of the whale tusks.
    It a less enlightened age, when the world was a much larger and more mysterious place, such tusks were passed off as the horns of unicorns, and for a suitably unreal price too. Recalling to mind the photograph of the Whitby Mermaid from the paper, Ulysses was almost disappointed not to find one of the horns screwed into the skull of a stuffed antelope or llama with the proud boast that this was the last unicorn to die on British soil. However, his faith in human nature, specifically man's ability and desire to dupe his fellow man, and man's readiness, in turn, to be duped, was restored when he spotted what was purported to be the shed skin of a basilisk - in truth, a cobra's skin with cockerel's wattles sewn on.
    The Germans had a wonderful word for collections such as these; they called them Wunderkammer - literally "Cabinet of Wonders." But Cabinet of Curiosities seemed to suit this place better. Most of the objects on display weren't wonders; they were tired, faded, deteriorating scrag-ends of dubious provenance, or downright fakes. There wasn't anything wonderful about them although they did make Ulysses wonder as to the obsessive hoarding nature of the man who had gathered this disparate collection together. Yes, curiosities, not wonders.
    "Excuse me, constable," Ulysses said, putting a fraternal hand on the shoulder of a young policeman whose misfortune it had been to be put on this case. "But who's the officer in