‘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 deja 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”.’
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.’