Lost in a Good Book

‘How’s the PR stuff going, Thursday?’

‘More tedious than Spenser, sir.’

‘Too right. I saw you on the telly last night. Rigged, was it?’

‘Just a little.’

‘I hate to be a bore but it’s all important stuff. Have a look at this fax.’

He handed me a sheet of paper and Bowden read over my shoulder.

‘Ludicrous,’ I said, handing the fax back. ‘What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing Board get from sponsoring us?’

Victor shrugged.

‘Not a clue. But if they have cash to give away we could certainly do with some of it.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Braxton’s speaking to them this afternoon. He’s very big on the idea.’

‘I bet he is.’

Braxton Hicks’s life revolved around his precious SpecOps budget. If any of us even thought of doing any sort of overtime, you could bet that Braxton would have something to say about it—and something in his case meant ‘no’. Rumour had it that he had spoken to the canteen about giving out smaller helpings for dinner. He had been known as ‘Small Portions’ in the office ever since—but never to his face.

‘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.’

3. Cardenio Unbound

‘Cardenio was performed at court in 1613. It was entered in the stationer’s register in 1653 as “by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare” and in 1728 Theobald Lewis published his play Double Falsehood which he claimed to have written using an old prompt copy of Cardenio. Given the uneven Shakespearean value of his play and his refusal to produce the original manuscript, this claim seems doubtful. Cardenio was the name of the Ragged Knight in Cervantes’s Don Quixote who falls in love with Lucinda, and it is assumed Shakespeare’s play followed the same story. But we will never know. Not one single scrap of the play has survived.’

MILLON DE FLOSS. Cardenio—Easy Come, Easy Go

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.