I dashed off. There wasn’t a receiver, of course, but I wasn’t having Flakk tell the quacks I was hearing voices. I walked off briskly towards the LiteraTec office [3]. I stopped and looked around The corridor was empty.
   ‘I can hear you,’ I said, ‘but where are you?’ [4]
   ‘Her name’s Flakk. Works over at SpecOps PR.’ [5]
   ‘What is this? SpecOps Blind Date? What’s going on?’ [6]
   ‘Case? What case? I haven’t done anything!’
   My voice rose with injured pride. For someone who had spent their life enforcing law and order, it seemed a grave injustice that I should be accused of something—especially something I knew nothing about. [7]
   ‘For God’s sake, Snell, what is the charge?’
   ‘Are you okay, Next?’
   It was Braxton Hicks. He had just turned the corner and was staring at me very oddly.
   ‘Fine, sir,’ I said, thinking fast ‘The SpecOps tensionologist said I should vocalise any stress regarding past experiences Listen: “GET AWAY FROM ME HADES, GO!” See? I feel better already.’
   ‘Oh!’ said Hicks doubtfully. ‘Well, the quacks know best, I suppose. Did you sign that picture for my godson Max?’
   ‘On your desk, sir.’
   ‘Miss Flakk ran a competition or something. Would you liaise with her over it?’
   ‘I’ll make it my top priority, sir.’
   ‘Good. Well, carry on vocalising, then.’
   ‘Thank you, sir.’
   But he didn’t leave. He just stood there, watching me.
   ‘Sir?’
   ‘Don’t mind me,’ replied Hicks, ‘I just want to see how this stress vocalising works. My tensionologist told me to arrange pebbles as a hobby—or count blue cars.’
   So I vocalised my stress there in the corridor for five minutes while my boss watched me.
   ‘Jolly good,’ he said finally, and walked off.
   After checking I was alone in the corndor. I spoke out loud:
   ‘Snell!’
   Silence.
   ‘Mr Snell, can you hear me?’
   More silence.
   I sat down and put my head between my knees. I felt sick and hot, both the SpecOps resident tensionologist and the stresspert had said I might have some sort of traumatic aftershock from tackling Acheron Hades, but I hadn’t expected anything as vivid as voices in my head. I waited until I felt better and then made my way, not towards Flakk and her competition winners, but towards Bowden and the LiteraTec office. [8]
   I stopped.
   ‘Prepared for what? I haven’t done any thing!’ [9]
   ‘No, no!’ I exclaimed. ‘I really don’t know what I’ve done. Where are you!?![10]
   ‘Wait! Shouldn’t I see you before the hearing?’
   There was no answer. I was about to yell again but several people came out of the elevator so I kept quiet. I waited for a moment but Mr Snell didn’t seem to have anything more to add, so I made my way into the high-ceilinged LiteraTec office, which more closely resembled a library than anything else. There weren’t many books we didn’t have—the result of bootleg seizures of literary works collected over the years. Bowden Cable, my partner, was already at his desk, which was as fastidiously neat as ever. His quiet and studious approach to his work contrasted strongly with my own directness. The partnership seemed to work well.
   ‘Morning, Bowden.’
   ‘Good morning, Thursday I saw you on the TV last night.’
   ‘How did I look?’
   ‘Fine. They didn’t let you talk about Jane Eyre much, did they’!
   I gave him a withering look and he understood.
   ‘Never fear—some day the full story will be told. Are you okay? You look a little flushed.’
   ‘I’m okay,’ I told him, then added in a quieter voice: ‘Actually I’m not. I’ve been hearing voices.’
   ‘Stress, Thursday. It’s not unusual. Anyone specific?’
   ‘A lawyer named Snell. Akrid Snell. He said he was representing me.’
   ‘On what charge?’
   ‘He wouldn’t say.’
   ‘Sounds like an inner guilt conflict, Thursday. In policing we have to sometimes close off our emotions. Could you have killed Hades if you’d been thinking clearly?’
   ‘I don’t think I would have been able to kill him if I wasn’t. I’ve not lost a single night’s sleep over Hades, but poor Bertha Rochester bothers me a bit.’
   ‘Maybe that’s it,’ replied Bowden. ‘Perhaps you secretly want to be held accountable for her death. I heard Crometty talking to me for weeks after his murder—I thought I should have been there to back him up, but I wasn’t.’
   This made me feel a lot better and I told him so.
   ‘Good. Anything else you want me to reassure you about while we’re on the subject?’
   ‘The Goliath Corporation?’
   Bowden’s face fell.
   ‘Sometimes you ask too much.’
   ‘Ah, there you are!’ said a booming voice. It was Victor Analogy, the head of the LiteraTec office. He was in his mid-seventies and possessed a mind as sharp as a razor. He was a natural buffer between us at SO-27 and Commander Braxton Hicks, who was strictly a company man. Analogy guarded our independence closely, which was the way we all liked it.
   We all said our good mornings and Victor sat on my desk.
   ‘How’s the PR stuff going, Thursday?’
   ‘More tedious than Spenser, sir.’
   ‘Too right. I saw you on the telly last night. Rigged, was it?’
   ‘Just a little.’
   ‘I hate to be a bore but it’s all important stuff. Have a look at this fax.’
   He handed me a sheet of paper and Bowden read over my shoulder.
   ‘Ludicrous,’ I said, handing the fax back. ‘What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing Board get from sponsoring us?’
   Victor shrugged.

   ‘Not a clue. But if they have cash to give away we could certainly do with some of it.’
   ‘What are you going to do?’
   ‘Braxton’s speaking to them this afternoon. He’s very big on the idea.’
   ‘I bet he is.’
   Braxton Hicks’s life revolved around his precious SpecOps budget. If any of us even thought of doing any sort of overtime, you could bet that Braxton would have something to say about it—and something in his case meant ‘no’. Rumour had it that he had spoken to the canteen about giving out smaller helpings for dinner. He had been known as ‘Small Portions’ in the office ever since—but never to his face.
   ‘Did you find out who’s been forging and trying to sell the missing ending to Byron’s Don Juan?’ asked Victor.
   Bowden showed him a black-and-white photo of a dashing figure climbing into a parked car.
   ‘Our prime suspect is a fellow named Byron2.’
   Victor looked at the picture carefully.
   ‘He’s Byron number two? Must have been pretty quick to get in when the name changing ident law came into effect. How many Byrons are there now?’
   ‘Byron2620 was registered last week,’ I told him. ‘We’ve been following Byron2 for a month but he’s smart. None of the forged scraps of Heaven and Earth can be traced back to him.’
   ‘Wiretap?’
   ‘We tried but the judge said that even though Byron2’s surgery to make his foot clubbed in an attempt to emulate his hero was undeniably strange, and then getting his half-sister pregnant was plainly disgusting, those acts only showed a fevered Byronic mind, and not necessarily intent to forge. We have to catch him inky fingered, but at the moment he’s off on a tour of the Mediterranean. We’re going to attempt to get a search warrant while he’s away.’
   ‘So you’re not that busy, then?’
   ‘What had you in mind?’
   ‘Well,’ began Victor, ‘it seems there have been a couple more attempts to forge Cardenio. Would you go and have a look?’
   ‘Shouldn’t take long,’ I told him. ‘Got the addresses?’
   He handed over a sheet of paper and bade us luck. We rose to leave, Bowden studying the list carefully.
   ‘We’ll go to Roseberry Street first,’ he said, ‘it’s closer.’

3. Cardenio Unbound

   ‘Cardenio was performed at court in 1613. It was entered in the stationer’s register in 1653 as “by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare” and in 1728 Theobald Lewis published his play Double Falsehood which he claimed to have written using an old prompt copy of Cardenio. Given the uneven Shakespearean value of his play and his refusal to produce the original manuscript, this claim seems doubtful. Cardenio was the name of the Ragged Knight in Cervantes’s Don Quixote who falls in love with Lucinda, and it is assumed Shakespeare’s play followed the same story. But we will never know. Not one single scrap of the play has survived.’

MILLON DE FLOSS. Cardenio—Easy Come, Easy Go


   A few minutes later we were turning into a street close by the new thirty-thousand-seater croquet stadium.
   ‘How much of Shakespeare’s original writing exists on the planet today?’ I asked Bowden as we negotiated the Magic Roundabout.
   ‘Five signatures, three pages of revisions to Sir Thomas More and the fragment of King Lear discovered in 1962,’ he told me. ‘For someone so influential, we know almost nothing about him. If it wasn’t for the first folio being collected when it was, we’d be sixteen plays the poorer.’
   I didn’t think I’d tell Bowden what my father had told me regarding the true authorship of the Shakespeare canon; this was a revelation that the world could well do without.
   Bowden parked the car in a street of terraced houses. He locked it and we rang on the doorbell of number 216. After a few moments a woman of about sixty opened the door. She had recently had her hair done and was dressed in something that might have been her Sunday best, but not anyone else’s.
   ‘Mrs Hathaway34?’
   ‘Yes?’
   We held up our badges.
   ‘Cable and Next, Swindon LiteraTecs. You called the office this morning?’
   Mrs Hathaway34 beamed and ushered us in enthusiastically. On every available wall space there hung pictures of Shakespeare, framed playbills, engravings and commemorative plates. It was clear she was a serious fan. Not quite rabid, but close enough.
   ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Hathaway34.
   ‘No thank you, ma’am. You said you had a copy of Cardenio?’
   ‘Of course!’ she enthused, then added with a wink: ‘Will’s lost play popping up like a jack-in-the-box must come as quite a surprise to you, I imagine?’
   I didn’t tell her that a Cardenio scam was almost a weekly event.
   ‘We spend our days surprised, Mrs Hathaway34.’
   ‘Call me Anne!’ she said as she opened a desk and gently withdrew a book wrapped in pink tissue paper. She placed it in front of us with great reverence.
   ‘I bought it in a car boot sale last week,’ she confided. ‘I don’t think the owner knew that he had a copy of a long-lost Shakespeare play in amongst unread Daphne Farquitt novels and back issues of Shakespeare Today.’
   She leaned forward.
   ‘I bought it for a song, you know.’
   And she giggled.
   ‘I think this is the most important find since the King Lear fragment,’ she went on happily, clasping her hands to her bosom and staring adoringly at the engraving of the Bard above the mantelpiece. ‘That fragment was in Will’s hand and covers only two lines of dialogue between Lear and Cordelia. It sold at auction for 1.8 million! Just think how much Cardenio would be worth!’
   ‘A genuine Cardenio would be almost priceless, ma’am,’ said Bowden politely, emphasising the ‘genuine’ bit.
   I closed the cover. I had read enough.
   ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mrs Hathaway34—’
   ‘Anne. Call me Anne.’
   ‘Anne. I’m afraid to say I believe this to be a forgery.’
   She didn’t seem very put out.
   ‘Are you sure, my dear? You didn’t read very much of it’
   ‘I’m afraid so. The rhyme, metre and grammar don’t really match any of Shakespeare’s known works.’
   ‘Will was adaptable to the nth degree, Miss Next—I hardly think that any slight deviation from the norm is of any great relevance!’
   ‘You misunderstand me,’ I replied, trying to be as tactful as possible. ‘It’s not even a good forgery.’
   ‘Well!’ said Anne, putting on an air aggrieved indignation. ‘Such authentication is notoriously difficult. I may have to seek a second opinion!’
   ‘You are more than welcome to do that, ma’am,’ I replied slowly, ‘but whoever you consult will say the same as I. It’s not just the text. You see, Shakespeare never wrote on lined paper with a ballpoint, and even if he did, I doubt he would have had Cardenio seeking Lucinda in a Range Rover.’
   ‘And what of that?’ returned Mrs Hathaway34 angrily. ‘In Julius Caesar there are plenty of clocks yet they weren’t invented until much later. I think Shakespeare introduced the Range Rover in much the same way; a literary anachronism, that’s all!’
   We walked towards the door.
   ‘I’d like you to come in and file a report. We’ll let you look at some mugshots; see if we can find out who pulled this.’
   ‘Nonsense!’ said the lady loftily. ‘I’m sorry to see that the LiteraTecs here in Swindon are obviously incapable of recognising a genuine masterpiece. I will seek a second opinion, and if necessary, a third and a fourth—or as many as it takes. Good day, Officers!’
   And she opened the door, shoved us out and slammed it behind us. This wasn’t unusual. The week before I had almost been attacked when I dared to suggest that a crackly recording of William Hazlitt was certainly a forgery as recording devices were unknown in the early nineteenth century. The annoyed owner explained that, yes, he knew it was odd but it was on eight-track, but even so I had to be firm.
   ‘One born every minute,’ muttered Bowden as we walked to the car.
   ‘I’d say. Well—that’s interesting.’
   ‘What?’

   ‘Don’t look now but up the road there is a black Pontiac. It was parked outside the SpecOps building when we left.’
   Bowden had a quick glance in its direction as we got into the car.
   ‘See it?’ I asked when we were inside.
   ‘Yup. Goliath?’
   ‘Could be. Think they’re still pissed off about losing Jack Schitt into that copy of The Raven?’
   ‘Probably,’ replied Bowden, pulling into the main road.
   I looked in the vanity mirror at the black car four vehicles behind.
   ‘Still with us?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘Yup. Let’s find out what they want. Take a left here, then left again and drop me off. Carry on for a hundred yards and then pull up.’
   Bowden dropped me off as instructed, sped on past the next corner and stopped, blocking the street. I ducked behind a parked car and, sure enough, the large black Pontiac swept past me. It drove round the next corner, stopped abruptly when it saw Bowden and started to reverse. The car was big and the road narrow, and with me tapping on the smoked-glass window and waving my badge, the driver obviously thought brazening it out would be a better course of action.
   ‘So here I am,’ I told him as soon as he had wound down the window. ‘What do you want?’
   The driver looked at me.
   ‘We seem to have taken a wrong turning, miss. Can you tell me the way to Pete and Dave’s Dodo Emporium?’
   I was unimpressed by their drab cover story, but I smiled anyway. They were SpecOps as much as I was.
   ‘We can lose you just as easily, boys. Why don’t you just tell me who you are so we can all get along a lot better?’
   The two men looked at one another and then held up their badges for me to see. They were SO-5, the same Search & Containment unit I was at when we hunted down Hades.
   ‘SO-5?’ I queried. ‘Tamworth’s old outfit?’
   ‘I’m Phodder,’ said the driver. ‘My associate here is Kannon. SpecOps 5 has been reassigned.’
   ‘Does that mean Acheron Hades is officially dead?’
   ‘The case will always remain open, Miss Next—but Acheron was only the third most evil criminal mind on the planet.’
   ‘Then who—or what—are you after this time?’
   ‘Classified. Your name came up in preliminary enquiries. Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?’
   ‘What do you mean, odd?’
   ‘Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.’
   I thought for a moment.
   ‘No.’
   ‘Well,’ said Mr Phodder, ‘if it does, would you call me on this number?’
   ‘Sure.’
   I took the card, bade them goodbye and returned to Bowden. We were soon heading north to the Cirencester road, the Pontiac nowhere in sight. I explained who they were to Bowden, who raised his eyebrows and said:
   ‘Sounds ominous. Someone worse than Hades?’
   ‘Perhaps. Where’s the next stop?’
   ‘Cirencester and Lord Volescamper.’
   ‘Really?’ I replied in some surprise. ‘Why would someone as eminent as Volescamper get embroiled in a Cardenio scam?’
   ‘Search me. He’s a golfing buddy of Braxton’s so this could be political. Better not dismiss it out of hand and make him look an idiot—we’ll only be clobbered by the chief.’

* * *
   We swung in through the battered and rusty gates of Vole Towers and motored up the long drive, which was more weed than gravel. We pulled up outside the imposing Gothic Revival house which was clearly in need of repair, and Lord Volescamper came out to meet us. Volescamper was a tall man with grey hair and an exuberant manner. He was wearing an old pair of herringbone tweeds and brandished a pair of secateurs like a cavalry sabre.
   ‘Blasted brambles!’ he muttered as he shook our hands. ‘Look here, they can grow two inches a day, you know; inexorable little blighters that threaten to engulf all that we know and love—a bit like anarchists, really. You’re that Next girl, aren’t you? I think we met at my niece Gloria’s wedding—who did she marry again?’
   ‘My cousin Wilbur.’

   ‘Now I remember. Who was that sad old fart who made a nuisance of himself on the dance-floor?’
   ‘I think that was you, sir.’
   Lord Volescamper thought for a moment and stared at his feet.
   ‘Goodness! It was, wasn’t it? Saw you on the telly last night. Look here, it was a rum business about that Brontë book, eh?’
   ‘Very rum,’ I assured him. ‘This is Bowden Cable, my partner.’
   ‘How do you do, Mr Cable? Bought one of the new Griffin Sportinas, I see. How do you find it?’
   ‘Usually where I left it, sir.’
   ‘Indeed? You must come inside. Victor sent you, yes?’
   We followed Volescamper as he shambled into the decrepit mansion. We passed into the main hall, which was heavily decorated with the heads of various antelope, stuffed and placed on wooden shields.
   ‘In years gone by the family were prodigious hunters,’ explained Volescamper. ‘But look here, I don’t carry on that way myself. Father was heavily into killing and stuffing things. When he died he insisted on being stuffed himself. That’s him over there.’
   We stopped on the landing and Bowden and I looked at the deceased earl with interest. With his favourite gun in the crook of his arm and his faithful dog at his feet, he stared blankly out of the glass case. I thought perhaps his head and shoulders should also be mounted on a wooden shield, but I didn’t think it would be polite to say so. Instead I said:
   ‘He looks very young.’
   ‘But look here, he was. Forty-three and eight days. Trampled to death by antelope.’
   ‘In Africa?’
   ‘On the A30 near Chard one night in ‘34. He stopped the car because there was a stag with the most magnificent antlers lying in the road. Father got out to have a peek and… well, look here, he didn’t stand a chance. The herd came from nowhere.’
   ‘I’m sorry.’
   ‘Sort of ironic, really,’ said Volescamper, ‘but do you know, the really odd thing was, when the herd of antelope ran off, the magnificent stag had also gone.’
   ‘It… it must have just been stunned,’ suggested Bowden.
   ‘Yes, yes, I suppose so,’ replied Volescamper absently. ‘I suppose so. But look here, you don’t want to know about Father. Come on!’
   And so saying he strutted off down the corridor that led to the library. We had to trot to catch up with him, but any doubts as to the value of Volescamper’s collection were soon dispelled. The doors to the library were hardened steel.
   ‘Oh, yes,’ said Volescamper, following my gaze. ‘Look here, the old library is worth quite a few pennies—I like to take precautions. Don’t be fooled by the oak panelling inside—the library is essentially a vast steel safe.’
   It wasn’t unusual; the Bodleian these days was like Fort Knox—and Fort Knox itself had been converted to take the Library of Congress’s more valuable works. We entered, and I saw Bowden’s eyes light up at the collection of old books and manuscripts.
   ‘You didn’t just buy Cardenio recently or something, then?’ I asked, suddenly feeling that perhaps my early dismissal of the find may have been too hasty.
   ‘Goodness me no. Look here, we found it only the other day when we were cataloguing part of my great-grandfather Bartholomew Volescamper’s private library. Didn’t even know I had it. This is Mr Swaike, my security consultant.’
   A thick-set man with a humourless look had entered the library. He eyed us suspiciously as Volescamper made the introductions, then laid a sheath of roughly cut pages bound into a leather book on the table.
   ‘What sort of security matters do you consult on, Mr Swaike?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘Personal and insurance. This library is uncatalogued and uninsured. Criminal gangs would regard this as a valuable target, despite the obvious security arrangements. Cardenio is only one of a dozen books I am currently keeping in a secure safe within the locked library.’
   ‘I can’t fault you there, Mr Swaike,’ replied Bowden.
   I pulled up a chair and looked at the manuscript. At first glance, things looked good, so I quickly donned a pair of cotton gloves, something I hadn’t even considered with Mrs Hathaway34’s Cardenio. I studied the first page. The handwriting was very similar to Shakespeare’s and the paper clearly handmade. I smelled the ink and paper. It all looked real, but I had seen some good copies in my time. There were a lot of scholars who were versed well enough in Shakespeare, Elizabethan history, grammar and spelling to attempt a forgery, but none of them ever had the wit and charm of the Bard himself. Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was inherently impossible because the act of copying overrode the act of inspired creation—the heart being squeezed out by the mind, so to speak. But as I turned the first page and read the dramatis personae, something stirred within me. Butterflies mixed with a certain apprehension. I’d read fifty or sixty Cardenios before, but… I turned the page and read Cardenio’s opening soliloquy:
   ‘Know’st thou, O love, the pangs which I sustain—’
   ‘It’s a sort of Spanish thirtysomething Romeo and Juliet but with a few laughs and a happy ending,’ explained Volescamper helpfully. ‘Look here, would you care for some tea?’
   ‘What? Yes—thank you.’
   Volescamper told us that he would lock us in for security reasons but we could press the bell if we needed anything.
   The steel door clanged shut and we read with increased interest as the Knight Cardenio told the audience of his lost love, Lucinda, and how he had fled to the mountains after her marriage to the deceitful Ferdinand and become a ragged, destitute wretch.
   ‘Good Lord,’ murmured Bowden over my shoulder, a sentiment that I agreed with whole-heartedly. The play, forgery or not, was excellent. After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where the unragged Cardenio and Lucinda write a series of passionate love letters in an Elizabethan version of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day split screen, Lucinda on one side reacting to Cardenio writing them on the other and then vice versa. It was funny, too. The world was indeed poorer without it. We read on and learned of Cardenio’s plans to marry Lucinda, then the Duke’s demand for him to be a companion to his son Ferdinand, Ferdinand’s hopeless infatuation for Dorothea, the trip to Lucinda’s town, how Ferdinand’s love transfers to Lucinda—
   ‘What do you think?’ I asked Bowden as we reached the halfway point.
   ‘Amazing! I’ve not seen anything like this, ever.’
   ‘Real?’
   ‘I think so—but mistakes have been made before. I’ll copy out the passage where Cardenio finds he has been duped and Ferdinand is planning to wed Lucinda. We can run it through the Verse Metre Analyser back at the office.’
   We read on. The sentences, the metre, the style—it was all pure Shakespeare. It filled me with excitement but worried me too. My father always used to say that whenever something is too fantastic to be true, it generally is. Bowden pointed out that the original manuscript of Marlowe’s Edward II only surfaced in the thirties, but I still felt uneasy.
   The tea was apparently forgotten and, at midday, just as Bowden had finished copying out the five-page scene, a key turned in the heavy steel door. Lord Volescamper popped his head in and announced slightly breathlessly that owing to ‘prior engagements’ we would have to resume our work the following day. As we walked out of the house a Bentley limousine arrived. Volescamper bade us a hasty goodbye before striding forward to greet the passenger in the car.
   ‘Well, well,’ said Bowden. ‘Look who it is.’
   A young man flanked by two large bodyguards got out and shook hands with the enthusiastic Volescamper. I recognised him instantly. It was Yorrick Kaine, the charismatic young leader of the marginal Whig party. He and Volescamper walked up the steps talking animatedly, and then vanished inside Vole Towers.
   We drove away from the mouldering house with mixed feelings about the treasure we had been studying.
   ‘What do you think?’

   ‘Fishy,’ said Bowden. ‘Very fishy. How could something like Cardenio turn up out of the blue?’
   ‘How fishy on the fishiness scale?’ I asked him. ‘Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark.’
   ‘A whale isn’t a fish, Thursday.’
   ‘A whale shark is—sort of.’
   ‘All right, it’s as fishy as a crayfish.’
   ‘A crayfish isn’t a fish,’ I told him.
   ‘A starfish, then.’
   ‘Still not a fish.’
   ‘A silverfish?’
   ‘Try again.’
   ‘This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.’
   ‘I’m pulling your leg, Bowden.’
   ‘Oh, I see,’ he replied as the penny dropped. ‘Tomfoolery.’
   Bowden’s lack of humour wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, none of us really had much of a sense of humour in SpecOps. But he thought it socially desirable to have one, so I did what I could to help. The trouble was, he could read Three Men in a Boat without a single smirk and viewed P. G. Wodehouse as ‘infantile’, so I had a suspicion the affliction was long lasting and permanent.
   ‘My tensionologist suggested I should try stand-up comedy,’ said Bowden, watching me closely for my reaction.
   ‘Well, the “How do you find the Sportina/Where I left it” was a good start,’ I told him.
   He stared at me oddly. It hadn’t been a joke.
   ‘I’ve booked myself in at the Happy Squid talent night on Monday. Do you want to hear my routine?’
   ‘I’m all ears.’
   He cleared his throat.
   ‘There are these three anteaters, see, and they go into a—’
   There was a bang, the car swerved and we heard a fast flapping noise.
   ‘Damn!’ muttered Bowden. ‘Blowout.’
   There was another bang like the first, and we pulled in to the carpark at the South Cerney stop of the Skyrail.
   ‘Two blowouts?’ muttered Bowden as we got out. We looked at each other quizzically and then at the road. No one else seemed to be having any trouble, the traffic zoomed up and down the road quite happily.
   ‘How is it possible for two tyres to go at the same time?’
   ‘Just bad luck, I guess.’ I shrugged.
   ‘Wireless seems to be dead,’ announced Bowden, keying the mike and turning the knob. ‘That’s odd.’
   ‘I’ll find a call-box,’ I told him. ‘Do you have any change—’
   I stopped because I’d just noticed a ticket by my foot. As I picked it up a Skyrail shuttle approached high on the steel tracks, as if on cue.
   ‘What have you found?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘A Skyrail day pass,’ I replied thoughtfully ‘I’m going to take the Skyrail and see what happens.’
   ‘Why?’
   ‘There’s a Neanderthal in trouble.’
   ‘How do you know?’
   I frowned.
   ‘I’m not sure. What’s the opposite of déjà vu; when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?’
   ‘I don’t know—avant verrais?’
   ‘That’s it. Something’s going to happen… and I’m part of it.’
   ‘I’ll come with you.’
   ‘No, Bowden; if you were meant to come we would have found two tickets. I’ll send a tow truck out.’
   I left my partner looking confused and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform fifty feet above ground. I was alone apart from a young woman sitting by herself on a bench, checking her make-up in a mirror. She looked up at me for a moment before the doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, wondering what events were about to unfold.

4. Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Neanderthal

   ‘The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled “medical test vessels”, living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. Re-engineered from cells discovered in a Homo Llysternef neanderthalensis forearm preserved in a peat bog near Llysternef in Wales, the experiment was an unparalleled success. Sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as “expendable combat units”, a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. Infertile males and an expected lifespan of fifty years meant they would soon be relegated to the re-engineerment industries’ ever-growing list of “failures”.’

GERHARD VON SQUID. Neanderthals—Back after a Short Absence


   Coincidences are strange things. I like the one about Sir Edmund Godfrey, who was found murdered in 1678 and left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and charged with the crime—Mr Green, Mr Berry and Mr Hill. My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely the chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. ‘Stop a stranger in the street,’ he would say, ‘and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding, too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.’
   I suppose he was right, but that didn’t help explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless, one fortuitous ticket and an approaching Skyrail could all turn up together out of the blue.
   I stepped into the single Skyrail car and took a seat at the front. The doors sighed shut and we were soon gliding effortlessly above the Cerney lakes as we crossed into Wessex. I was here for a purpose, I thought, and looked around carefully to see what that might be. The Neanderthal Skyrail operator had his hand on the throttle and gazed absently at the view. His eyebrows twitched and he sniffed the air occasionally. The car was almost empty, seven people, all of them women and no one familiar.
   ‘Three down,’ exclaimed a short woman who was staring at a folded-up newspaper, half to herself and half to the rest of us. ‘Well decorated for prying, perhaps? Ten letters.’
   No one answered as we sailed past Cricklade station without stopping, much to the annoyance of a large, expensively dressed lady who huffed loudly and pointed at the operator with her umbrella.
   ‘You there!’ she boomed like a captain before the storm. ‘What are you doing? I wanted to get off at Cricklade, damn you!’
   The operator seemed unperturbed at the insult and muttered an apology. This obviously wasn’t good enough for the loud and objectionable woman, who jabbed the small Neanderthal violently in the ribs with her umbrella. He didn’t yell out in pain; he just flinched, pulled the driver’s door closed behind him and locked it. I snatched the umbrella from the woman, who seemed shocked and outraged at my actions.
   ‘What the—!’ she said indignantly.
   ‘Don’t do that,’ I told her, ‘it’s not nice.’
   ‘Poppycock!’ she guffawed in a loud and annoying manner. ‘He’s only a Neanderthal!’
   ‘Meddlesome,’ said one of the other passengers with an air of finality, staring at an advert for the Gravitube that was pinned at eye level.
   The objectionable lady and I stared at her, wondering who she was referring to. She looked at us both, flushed, and said:
   ‘No, no. Ten letters, three down Well decorated for prying. Meddlesome.’
   ‘Very good,’ muttered the lady with the crossword as she scribbled in the answer.
   I glared at the well-heeled woman, who eyed me back malevolently.
   ‘Jab the Neanderthal again and I’ll arrest you for assault.’
   ‘I happen to know,’ announced the woman tartly, ‘that Neanderthals are legally classed as animals. You cannot assault a Neanderthal any more than you can a mouse!’
   My temper began to rise—always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.
   ‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘but I can arrest you for cruelty, bruising the peace and anything else I can think of.’
   But the woman wasn’t the least bit intimidated.
   ‘My husband is a Justice of the Peace,’ she announced, as if it were a hidden trump. ‘I can make things very tricky for you. What is your name?’
   ‘Next,’ I told her unhesitantly. ‘Thursday Next. SO-27.’
   Her eyelids flickered slightly and she stopped rummaging in her bag for a pencil and paper.
   ‘The Jane Eyre Thursday Next?’ she asked, her mood changing abruptly.
   ‘I saw you on the telly,’ said the woman with the crossword. ‘You seem a bit obsessed with your dodo, I must say. Why couldn’t you talk about Jane Eyre, Goliath or ending the Crimean War?’
   ‘Believe me, I tried.’
   The Skyrail swept on past Broad Blunsdon station and the passengers all sighed, made tut-tut noises and shrugged at one another.
   ‘I am going to complain to the Skyrail management about this,’ said a heavy-set woman with make-up like woad who carried a disgruntled-looking Pekinese. ‘A good cure for insubordination is—’
   Her speech came to an abrupt end as the Neanderthal suddenly increased the speed of the car. I knocked on the heavy acetate door and shouted:
   ‘What’s going on, pal?’
   ‘Open this door immediately!’ demanded the well-heeled woman, brandishing her umbrella. But the Neanderthal had taken about as much umbrella jabbing as he could that day.

   ‘We are going home now,’ he said simply, staring straight ahead.
   ‘We?’ echoed the woman. ‘No we’re not. I live at Crick—’
   ‘He means I,’ I told her. ‘Neanderthals don’t use the singular personal pronoun.’
   ‘Damn stupid!’ she replied, yelling a few more insults for good measure before she harrumphed back to her seat. I settled closer to the driver.
   ‘What’s your name?’
   ‘Kaylieu,’ he replied.
   ‘Good. Now, Kaylieu, I want you to tell me what the problem is.’
   He paused for a moment as the Swindon airship stop came and went. I saw another shuttle that had been diverted to a siding and several Skyrail officials waving at us, so it was only a matter of time before the authorities knew what was going on.
   ‘We want to be real.’
   ‘Day’s hurt?’ murmured the squat woman at the back, still sucking the end of her pencil and staring at the crossword.
   ‘What did you say?’ I said.
   ‘Day’s hurt?’ she repeated. ‘Nine down; eight letters—I think it’s an anagram.’
   ‘I have no idea,’ I replied before turning my attention back to Kaylieu. ‘What do you mean, real?’
   ‘We are not animals,’ announced the small and once extinct strand of human. ‘We want to be a protected species—like dodo, mammoth—and you. We want to speak to head man at Goliath and someone from Toad News.’
   ‘I’Il see what I can do.’
   I moved to the back of the shuttle and picked up the emergency phone.
   ‘Hello?’ I said to the operator. ‘This is Thursday Next, SO-27. We have a situation in shuttle number, ah, 6-1-7-4.’
   When I told the operator what was going on she breathed in sharply and asked how many people were with me and whether anyone was hurt.
   ‘Seven females, myself and the driver; we are all fine.’
   ‘Don’t forget Pixie Frou-Frou,’ said the large woman.
   ‘And one Pekinese.’
   The operator told me they were clearing all the tracks ahead; we would have to keep calm and she would call back. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t a bad situation, but she had rung off.
   I sat down next to the Neanderthal again. Jaw fixed, he was staring intently ahead, knuckles white on the throttle lever. We approached the Wanborough junction, crossed the M4 and were diverted west. One of the younger passengers caught my eye; she looked frightened.
   ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.
   ‘Irma,’ she replied, ‘Irma Cohen.’
   ‘Poppycock!’ said the umbrella woman. ‘I’m Irma Cohen!’
   ‘So am I,’ said the woman with the Peke.
   ‘And me!’ exclaimed the thin woman at the back. It was clear after a short period of frenzied cries of ‘Ooh, fancy that!’ and ‘Well I never!’, that everyone in the Skyrail except me and Kaylieu and Pixie Frou-Frou were called Irma Cohen. Some of them were even vaguely related. It was quite a coincidence—for today, the best yet.
   ‘Thursday,’ said the squat woman.
   ‘Yes?’
   But she wasn’t talking to me; she was writing in the answer: Day’s hurt—Thursday. It was an anagram.
   The emergency phone rang.
   ‘This is Diana Thuntress, trained negotiator for SpecOps 9,’ said a businesslike voice. ‘Who is this?’
   ‘Di, it’s me, Thursday.’
   There was a pause.
   ‘Hello, Thursday. Saw you on the telly last night. Trouble seems to follow you around, doesn’t it? What’s it like in there?’
   I looked at the small and unconcerned crowd of commuters, who were showing each other pictures of their children. Pixie Frou-Frou had fallen asleep and the Irma Cohen with the crossword was puzzling on six across: The parting bargain.
   ‘They’re fine. A little bored, but not hurt.’
   ‘What does the perp want?’
   ‘He wants to talk to someone at Goliath about species self-ownership.’
   ‘Wait—he’s a Neanderthal?
   ‘Yes.’
   ‘It’s not possible’ A Neanderthal being violent?’
   ‘There’s no violence up here, Di—just desperation.’
   ‘Shit,’ muttered Thuntress. ‘What do I know about dealing with Thals? We’ll have to get one of the SpecOps Neanderthals in.’
   ‘He also wants to see a reporter from Toad News.’
   There was silence at the other end of the phone.
   ‘Di?’
   ‘Yes?’
   ‘What can I tell Kaylieu?’
   ‘Tell him that—er—Toad News are supplying a car to take him to the Goliath Genetic Labs in the Preselh mountains where Goliath’s Governor, Chief Geneticist and a team of lawyers will be waiting to agree terms.’
   As lies go, it was a real corker.
   ‘But is that right?’ I asked.

   ‘There is no “right”, Thursday,’ snapped Diana. ‘Not since he took control of the Skyrail. There are eight lives in there. It doesn’t take the winner of Name That Fruit! to figure out what we have to do. Pacifist Neanderthal or not, there is a chance he could harm the passengers.’
   ‘Don’t be ridiculous! No Neanderthal has ever harmed anyone!’
   ‘We’re not going to take that risk, Next. This is how it’s going to be. We’re going to divert you back up along the Cirencester line. We’ll have SO-14 agents in position at Cricklade. As soon as he stops I’m afraid we will have no alternative but to take him out. I want you to make sure the passengers are all in the back of the car.’
   ‘Diana, that’s crazy! You’d kill him because he took a few lamebrained commuters for a merry trip round the Swindon loop?’
   ‘The law is very strict on hijackers, Next.’
   ‘He’s nothing of the sort, Di. He’s just a confused extinctee!’
   ‘Sorry, Thursday—this is out of my hands.’
   I hung up as the shuttle was diverted back up towards Cirencester. We flew through Shaw station, much to the surprise of the waiting commuters, and were soon heading north again. I returned to the driver.
   ‘Kaylieu, you must stop at Purton.’
   He grunted in reply but showed little sign of being happy or sad—Neanderthal facial expressions were mostly lost on us. He stared at me for a moment and then asked:
   ‘You have childer?’
   I hastily changed the subject. Being sequenced infertile was the Neanderthals’ biggest cause of complaint against their sapien masters. Within thirty years or so the last of the experimental Neanderthals would die of old age. Unless Goliath sequenced some more, that would be it. Extinct again—it was unlikely even we would manage that
   ‘No, no, I don’t,’ I replied hastily.
   ‘Nor us,’ returned Kaylieu, ‘but you have a choice. We don’t. We should never have been brought back. Not to this. Not to carry bags for Sapien, no childer and umbrellas jab-jab.’
   He stared bleakly into the middle distance—perhaps to a better life thirty thousand years ago when he was free to hunt large herbivores from the relative safety of a draughty cave. Home for Kaylieu was extinction again—at least for him. He didn’t want to hurt any of us and would never do so. He couldn’t hurt himself either, so he would rely on SpecOps to do the job for him.
   ‘Goodbye ‘
   I jumped at the finality of the pronouncement but upon turning found that it was merely the crossword Mrs Cohen filling in the last clue.
   ‘The parting bargain,’ she muttered happily. ‘Good buy. Goodbye. Finished!’
   I didn’t like this; not at all. The three answers to the crossword clues had been ‘meddlesome’, ‘Thursday’ and ‘goodbye’. More coincidences. Without the dual blowout and the fortuitous day ticket, I wouldn’t be here at all. Everyone was called Cohen and now the crossword. But goodbye? If all went according to SpecOps plans, the only person worthy of that interjection would be Kaylieu. Still, I had other things to worry about as we passed Purton without stopping. I asked everyone to move to the back of the car and, once they had, joined Kaylieu at the front.
   ‘Listen to me, Kaylieu. If you don’t make any threatening movements they may not open fire.’
   ‘We thought of that,’ said the Neanderthal as he pulled an imitation automatic from his tunic.
   ‘They will fire,’ he said, as Cricklade station hove into view a half-mile up the line. ‘We carved it from soap—Dove soap,’ he added. ‘We thought it ironic.’
   We approached Cricklade at full speed; I could see SpecOps 14 vehicles parked on the road and black-uniformed SWAT teams waiting on the platform. With a hundred yards to run, the power to the Skyrail abruptly cut out and the shuttle skidded, power off, towards the station. The door to the driver’s compartment swung open and I squeezed in. I grabbed Kaylieu’s soapy gun and threw it to the floor. He wasn’t going to die—at least, not if I could help it. We rumbled into the station. The doors were opened by SO-14 operatives and all the Irma Cohens were rapidly evacuated. I put my arm round Kaylieu.
   ‘Move away from the Thal!’ said a voice through a bullhorn.
   ‘So you can shoot him?’ I yelled back.
   ‘He threatened the lives of commuters, Next. He is a danger to civilised society!’
   ‘Civilised?’ I shouted angrily. ‘Look at you!’
   ‘Next!’ said the voice. ‘Move aside. That is a direct order!’
   ‘You must do as they say,’ said the Neanderthal.
   ‘Over my dead body.’
   As if in reply there was a gentle pok sound and a single bullet hole appeared in the windshield of the shuttle. Someone had decided they could take Kaylieu out anyway. My temper flared and I tried to yell out in anger but no sound came from my lips. My legs felt weak and I fell to the floor in a heap, the world turning grey about me. I couldn’t even feel my legs. I heard someone yell ‘Medic!’ and the last thing I saw before the darkness overtook me was Kaylieu’s broad face looking down at me. He had tears in his eyes and was mouthing the words ‘We’re so sorry. So very, very sorry.’

5. Vanishing Hitch-hikers

   ‘Urban legends are older than congress gaiters but far more interesting. I’d heard most of them, from the dog in the microwave to ball lightning chasing a housewife in Preston, to the fried dodo leg found in a SmileyFriedChicken, to the carnivorous Diatryma supposedly re-engineered and now living in the New Forest. I’d read all about the alien spaceship that crash-landed near Lambourn in 1952, the story that Charles Dickens was a woman and that the president of the Goliath Corporation was actually a 142-year-old man kept alive by medical science in a bottle. Stories about SpecOps abound, the favourite at present relating to “something odd” dug up in the Quantock Hills. Yes, I’d heard them all. Never believed any of them. Then one day, I was one…’

THURSDAY NEXT. A Life in SpecOps


   I opened one eye, then the other. It was a warm summer’s day on the Marlborough downs. A light zephyr brought with it the delicate scent of honeysuckle and wild thyme. The air was warm and small puffy clouds were starting to tinge red from the setting sun. I was standing by the side of a road in open country. In one direction I could see a lone cyclist; in the other the road wound away into the distance past fields in which sheep grazed peacefully. If this was life after death then a lot of people had not much to worry about and the Church had delivered the goods after all.
   ‘Psssst!’ hissed a voice close at hand. I turned to see a figure crouched behind a large Goliath Corporation billboard advertising buy-two-get-one-free grand pianos.
   ‘Dad—?’
   He pulled me behind the hoarding with him.
   ‘Standing there like a tourist, Thursday!’ he snapped crossly. ‘Anyone would think you wanted to be seen!’
   I regarded my father as a sort of time-travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his ‘historical and moral’ differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The downside of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been born. ‘Things,’ Dad used to say, ‘are a whole lot weirder than we can know.’
   He glanced nervously up and down the road.
   ‘How are you, by the way?’ he asked.
   ‘I think I was just accidentally shot dead by a SpecOps marksman.’
   He laughed for a while, then suddenly stopped when he saw I was serious.
   ‘Goodness!’ he said. ‘You do live an exciting life. But never fear. You can’t die until you’ve lived, and you’ve barely started that at all. What’s the news from home?’
   ‘A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash wanting to know where you were.’
   ‘Lavoisier?’
   ‘Yes; do you know him?’
   ‘I should think so.’ My father sighed. ‘We were partners for nearly seven centuries.’
   ‘He said you were very dangerous.’
   ‘No more dangerous than anyone else who dares speak the truth. How’s your mother?’
   ‘She’s fine, although you might try and clear up that misunderstanding about Emma Hamilton.’
   ‘Emma and I… I mean Lady Hamilton and I are simply “good friends”. There’s nothing to it, I swear.’
   ‘Tell her that.’
   ‘I try, but you know what a temper she has. I only have to mention I’ve been anywhere near the turn of the nineteenth century and she gets in a frightful strop. What else is happening?’
   ‘We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.’
   ‘Thirty-three?’ echoed my father. ‘That’s odd. When I took the entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to distribute there were only eighteen.’
   ‘Until yesterday there have always been thirty-two.’
   ‘Hmm,’ he replied, brow furrowed. Dad’s work in the timestream could be tricky to get your head round sometimes
   ‘Perhaps the actor Shakespeare started writing them himself?’ I suggested
   ‘By thunder, you could be right!’ exclaimed my father. ‘He looked a bright spark. Tell me, how many comedies are there now?’
   ‘Fifteen,’ I replied.
   ‘But I only gave him three. They must have been so popular he started writing new ones himself!’
   ‘It would explain why all the comedies are pretty much the same,’ I added. ‘Spells, identical twins, shipwrecks—’
   ‘—usurped dukes, men dressed as women,’ continued my father. ‘You could be right’
   ‘But wait a moment—’ I began. But my father, sensing my disquiet over the seemingly impossible paradoxes, silenced me with his hand.
   ‘One day you’ll understand and everything will be more different than you can, at present, possibly hope to imagine.’
   I must have looked blank for he continued:
   ‘Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought—indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else—is just like the fashions that we wear—only much longer lived. It’s a little like a boy band.’
   ‘Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?’
   ‘Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolise them right up until—’
   ‘—the next boy band?’ I suggested.
   ‘Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts—but different moves.’
   ‘Einstein, right?’
   ‘Right. Do you see what I’m saying?’
   ‘I think so.’
   ‘Good. So try and think of maybe thirty or forty boy bands past Einstein. To where we would regard Einstein as someone who glimpsed a truth, played one good chord on seven forgettable albums.’
   ‘Where is this going, Dad?’
   ‘I’m nearly there. Imagine a boy band so good that you never needed another boy band ever again. Can you imagine that?’
   ‘It’s hard. But yes, okay.’
   ‘Now think of a boy band so good you never needed any more music—or anything else for that matter.’
   He let this sink in for a moment.
   ‘When we reach that boy band, my dear, everything becomes a lot easier to understand. And you know the best thing about it? It’s so devilishly simple.’
   ‘When is this boy band discovered?’