“Me too.”

  I looked in the vanity mirror at the black automobile 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 turned off the main road and into another narrow residential road, 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 and stopped abruptly when it saw Bowden and started to reverse. I tapped on the smoked glass window and waved my badge. The driver stopped and wound down the window.

  “Thursday Next, SO-27. Why are you following us?” I demanded.

  The driver and passenger were both dressed in dark suits and were clean-shaven. Only Goliath looked like this. Goliath— or SpecOps. The driver looked blankly at me for a moment and then launched into a well-practiced excuse.

  “We seem to have taken a wrong turning, miss. Can you tell us 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.

  “Why don’t you just tell me who you are? We’ll all get along a lot better, believe me.”

  The two men looked at one another, sighed resignedly and then held up their badges for me to see. They were SO-5, the same search & containment that 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.”

  “Reassigned? Does that mean Acheron Hades is officially dead?”

  “No SO-5 case is ever completely closed. Acheron was only the third most evil criminal mind on the planet, Miss Next.”

  “Then who—or what—are you after this time?”

  It seemed that they preferred asking questions to answering them.

  “Your name came up in preliminary inquiries. 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,” announced Phodder with an air of finality, “if it does, would you call me at this number?”

  I took the card, bade them goodbye and returned to Bowden.

  We were soon heading north on 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? That’ll take some doing.”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Where are we heading now?”

  “Vole Towers.”

  “Really?” I replied in some surprise. “Why would someone as eminent and respectable as Lord 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 that was clearly in need of repair, and Lord Volescamper came out to meet us. Volescamper was a tall thin man with gray hair and a ponderous air. He was wearing an old pair of herringbone tweeds and brandished a pair of secateurs like a cavalry saber.

  “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 favorite 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?”

  “No,” sighed Volescamper wistfully, “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,” he rambled on as Bowden looked at his watch, “but do you know the really odd thing was, when the herd of antelope ran off, the magnificent stag had also gone.”

  “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 and soon arrived at a pair of steel vault doors—clearly, Volescamper had no doubts as to the value of his collection. I touched the blued steel of the doors thoughtfully.

  “Oh, yes,” said Volescamper, divining my thoughts, “look here, the old library is worth quite a few pennies—I like to take precautions; don’t be fooled by the oak paneling 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 if I was prepared to see an immaculate collection, I was to be disappointed—the library looked more like a box room than a depository of knowledge; the books were piled up on tables, in boxes, arranged haphazardly and in many cases just stacked on the floor ten or twelve high. But what books! I picked up a volume at random which turned out to be a second-impression copy of Gulliver’s Travels. I showed it to Bowden, who responded by holding up a signed first edition of Decline and Fall.

  “You didn’t just buy Cardenio recently or something, then?” I asked, suddenly feeling that perhaps my early dismissal of the find might 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. Ah!—this is Mr. Swaike, my security consultant.”

  A thickset man with a humorless look and jowls like bananas had entered the library. He eyed us suspiciously as Volescamper made the introductions, then laid a sheaf 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, Mr. Cable,” replied Swaike in a drab monotone. “This library is uncatalogued and uninsured; criminal gangs would regard it as a valuable target, despite the 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 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 pulled up a chair and studied the first page. The handwriting was very similar to Shakespeare’s with loops at the top of the L’s and W’s and spirited backward-facing extensions to the top of the D’s; and the spelling was erratic, too—always a good sign. 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, butterflies stirred within me. 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 thirty-something 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 wholeheartedly. The play, forgery or not, was excellent. After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where 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. 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 end of the second act.

  “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 Meter Analyzer back at the office.”

  We eagerly read on. The sentences, the meter, the style—it was all pure Shakespeare. Cardenio had been missing for over four hundred years, but for it to surface now and quite out of the blue gave me mixed feelings. Yes, it would throw the literary world off kilter and send every single Shakespeare fan and scholar into paroxysms of litjoy, but on the other hand it worried me, too. My father always used to say that whenever something is too fantastic to be true, it generally is. I voiced my concerns to Bowden, who pointed out less pessimistically that the original manuscript of Marlowe’s Edward II surfaced only in the thirties. So unearthing new plays wasn’t unprecedented— but I still felt uneasy.

  The tea was apparently forgotten, and while Bowden copied out the five-page scene for the VMA I looked around the library, wondering just what other treasures might be hidden here. The large safe-within-a-safe stood at the side of the room and contained, Swaike had said, another dozen or so rare books. I tried the safe door but it was locked, so I made a few notes for Victor in case he thought we should apply for a Compulsory Literary Disclosure Order. I then ambled round the old library, looking at books that caught my eye. I was thumbing through a collection of first-edition Evelyn Waugh novels when a key turned in the heavy steel door. I hurriedly replaced the volume as Lord Volescamper popped his head in and announced in an excited manner that due to “prior engagements” we would have to resume our work the following day. Swaike walked in to lock Cardenio back in the safe, and we followed Volescamper out through the shabby building to the entrance, just as a pair of large Bentley limousines rolled up. Volescamper bade us a hasty goodbye before striding forward to greet the passenger in the first 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 recognized him from his numerous TV appearances. 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 moldering 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 humor wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, none of us really had much of a sense of humor 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, ‘How do you find the Sportina? / Where I left it’ was a good start,” I told him.

  He stared at me blankly. 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 sharp crack, the car swerved, and we heard a fast flapping noise. I tensed as we fishtailed for a moment before Bowden brought the car under control.

  “Damn!” he muttered. “Blowout.”

  There was another concussion like the first, but we weren’t going so fast by now and Bowden eased the car in towards the car park at the South Cerney stop of the Skyrail.

  “Two blowouts?” muttered Bowden as we got out. We looked at the remnants of the car tire still on the rim, then at each other—and then at the busy road to see if anyone else was having problems. They weren’t. The traffic zoomed up and down the road quite happily.

  “How is it possible for both tires to go within ten seconds of each other?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer for this. It was a new car, after all, and I’d been driving all my life and never had a single blowout, much less two. With only one spare wheel we were stuck here for a while. I suggested he call SpecOps and get them to send a tow truck.

  “Wireless seems to be dead,” he announced, keying the mike and turning the knob. “That’s odd.”

  Something, I felt, wasn’t quite right.

  “No more odd than a double blowout,” I told him, walking a few paces to a handy phone booth. I lifted the receiver and said: “Do you have any change—”

  I stopped because I’d just noticed a ticket on top of the phone. As I picked it up a Skyrail shuttle approached high up on the steel tracks, as if on cue.

  “What have you found?” asked Bowden.

  “A Skyrail day pass,” I replied slowly, replacing the receiver. Broken images of something half forgotten or not yet remembered started to form in my head. It was confusing, but I knew what I had to do. “I’m going to take the Skyrail and see what happens.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a neanderthal in trouble.”

  “How do you know?”

  I frowned, trying to make sense of what I was feeling.

  “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 I would have found two tickets.”

  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 makeup 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. Using cells reengineered from DNA discovered in a Homo Llysternef 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 labor and became a celebrated tax write-off. Infertile males and an expected life span of fifty years meant they would soon be relegated to the reengineerment industries’ ever-growing list of “failures.”