‘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.’

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.