'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 loo
ked 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.