‘How does it look?’ I asked.

‘Astounding!’ replied Bowden as he waved a printed report. ‘Ninety-four per cent probability of Will being the author—not even the best fake Cardenio managed higher than a seventy-six. The VMA detected slight traces of collaboration, too.’

‘Did it say who?’

‘Seventy-three per cent likelihood of Fletcher—something that would seem to bear out against historical evidence. Forging Shakespeare is one thing, forging a collaborated work is quite another.’

There was silence. Victor rubbed his forehead and thought carefully.

‘Okay. Strange and impossible as it might seem, we may have to accept that this is the real thing. This could turn out to be the biggest literary event in history, ever. We keep this quiet and I’ll get Professor Spoon to look it over. We will have to be a hundred per cent sure. I’m not going to suffer the same embarrassment we had over that Tempest fiasco.’

‘Since it isn’t in the public domain,’ observed Bowden, ‘Volescamper will have the sole copyright for the next seventy-six years.’

‘Every playhouse on the planet will want to put it on,’ I added, ‘and think of the movie rights.’

‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘He’s sitting on not only the most fantastic literary discovery for three centuries but also a keg of purest gold. The question is, how did it languish in his library undiscovered all this time? Scholars have studied there since 1709. How on earth was it overlooked? Ideas, anyone?’

‘Retrosnatch?’ I suggested. ‘If a rogue ChronoGuard operative decided to go back to 1613 and steal a copy he could have a tidy little nest egg on his hands.’

‘SO-12 take retrosnatch very seriously and they assure me that it is always detected, sooner or later or both—and dealt with severely. But it’s possible. Bowden, give SO-12 a call, will you?’

Bowden put out his hand to pick up the phone just as it started to ring.

‘Hello… It’s not, you say? Okay, thanks.’

He put the phone down.

‘The ChronoGuard say not.’

‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ I asked.

‘Hundred million,’ replied Victor, ‘two hundred. Who knows? I’ll call Volescamper and tell him to keep quiet about it. People would kill to even read it. No one else is to know about it, do you hear?’

We nodded our agreement.

‘Good. Thursday, the Network takes internal affairs very seriously. SO-1 will want to speak to you here tomorrow at four about the Skyrail thing. They asked me to suspend you but I told them bollocks so just take some leave until tomorrow. Good work, the two of you. Remember, not a word to anyone!’

We thanked him and he left. Bowden stared at the wall for a moment before saying:

‘The crossword clues bother me, though. If I wasn’t of the opinion that coincidences are merely chance or an overused Dickensian plot device, I might conclude that an old enemy of yours wants to get even.’

‘One with a sense of humour, obviously,’ I told him sullenly.

‘That rules out Goliath, I suppose,’ mused Bowden. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘SO-5.’

I dug Agent Phodder’s card out of my pocket and rang the number. He had told me to call him if ‘an occurrence of unprecedented weird’ took place, so I was doing precisely that.

‘Hello?’ said a brusque-sounding man after the telephone had rung for a long time.

‘Thursday Next, SO-27,’ I announced. ‘I have some information for Agent Phodder.’

There was a long pause.

‘Agent Phodder has been reassigned.’

‘Agent Kannon, then.’

‘Both Phodder and Kannon have been reassigned,’ replied the man sharply. ‘Freak accident laying linoleum. The funeral’s on Friday.’

This was unexpected news. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so mumbled:

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Quite,’ said the brusque man, and put the phone down.

‘What happened?’ asked Bowden.

‘Both dead,’ I said quietly.

‘Hades?’

‘Linoleum.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘Does Hades have the sort of powers that might be necessary to manipulate coincidences?’ asked Bowden.

I shrugged.

‘Perhaps,’ said Bowden thoughtfully, ‘it was a coincidence after all.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, wishing I could believe it. ‘Oh—I almost forgot. The world’s going to end on the twelfth of December at 20.23.’

‘Really?’ replied Bowden in a disinterested tone. Apocalyptic pronouncements were nothing new to any of us. The imminent destruction of the world had been predicted almost every year since the dawn of man.

‘Which one is it this time?’ asked Bowden. ‘Plague of mice or the wrath of God?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve got to be somewhere at five. Do us a favour, would you?’

I handed him the small evidence bag my father had given to me. Bowden stared at the goo inside.

‘What is it?’

‘Exactly. Will you have the labs analyse it?’

We bade each other goodbye and I trotted out of the building, bumping into John Smith, who was manoeuvring a wheelbarrow with a carrot the size of a vacuum cleaner in it. There was a big label attached to the oversized vegetable that read ‘evidence’. I held the door open for him.

‘Thanks,’ he panted.

I jumped in my car and pulled out of the carpark. My appointment at five was at the doctor’s, and I wasn’t going to miss it for anything.

‘Honey, I’m home!’ I yelled out. There was a scrabbling noise from the kitchen as Pickwick’s feet struggled to get a purchase on the tiles in his eagerness to greet me. I had engineered him myself when you could still buy home cloning kits over the counter. He was an early-version 1.2, which explained his lack of wings—they didn’t complete the sequence for two more years. He made excited plock-plock noises and bobbed his head in greeting, rummaged in the wastebasket for a gift and eventually brought me a discarded junk-mail flyer for Lorna Doone merchandising. I tickled him under the chin and he ran to the kitchen, stopped, looked at me and bobbed his head some more.

‘Hell-ooo!’ yelled Landen from his study. ‘Do you like surprises?’

‘When they’re nice ones!’ I yelled back.

Pickwick returned to my side, plock-plocked some more and tugged the leg of my jeans. He scuttled off into the kitchen again and waited for me at his basket. Intrigued, I followed. I could see the reason for his excitement. In the middle of the basket, amongst a large heap of shredded paper, was an egg.

‘Pickwick!’ I cried excitedly. ‘You’re a girl!’

Pickwick bobbed some more and nuzzled me affectionately. After a while she stopped and delicately stepped into her basket, ruffled her feathers, tapped the egg with her beak and then walked round it several times before gently placing herself over it. A hand rested on my shoulder. I touched Landen’s fingers and stood up. He kissed me on the neck and I wrapped my arms round his chest.

‘I thought Pickwick was a boy,’ he said.

‘So did I.’

‘Is it a sign?’

‘Pickers laying an egg and turning out to be a girl?’ I replied. ‘What do you mean—you’re going to have a baby, Land?’

‘No, silly, you know what I mean.’