Something rotten

The uniformed agent moved to pull Dennis's creator away but the Neanderthal stopped him.

'No,' he said gravely, 'leave him for a moment.'

The agent shrugged and walked to the Land Rover to fetch a bodybag.

'Every time we do this it's like killing one of our own,' said Stiggins softly. 'Where have you been, Miss Next? In prison?'

'Why does everyone think I've been in prison?'

'Because you were heading towards death or prison when we last met — and you are not dead.'

Dennis's maker was rocking backwards and forwards, bemoaning the loss of his creation.

The agent returned with a bodybag and a female colleague, who gently prised the man from the creature and told his unhearing ears his rights.

'Only one signature on a piece of paper keeps Neanderthals from being destroyed, the same as him,' said Stiggins, indicating the creature. 'We can be added to the list of banned creatures and designated a chimera without even an Act of Parliament.'

We turned from the scene as the other two agents laid out the bodybag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera on to it.

'You remember Bowden Cable?' 1 asked. 'My partner at the LiteraTecs.'

'Of course,' replied Stiggins, 'we met at your reception.'

'How have you been?' asked Bowden.

Stiggins stared back at him. It was a pointless human pleasantry that Neanderthals never troubled themselves with.

'We have been fine,' replied Stig, forcing the standard answer from his lips. Bowden didn't know it but he was only rubbing Stiggins's nose deeper in sapien-dominated society.

'He means nothing by it,' I said matter-of-factly, which is how Neanderthals like all their speech. 'We need your help, Stig.'

'Then we will be happy to give it, Miss Next.'

'Mean nothing by what?' asked Bowden as we walked across to a bench.

'Tell you later.'

Stig sat down and watched as another SO-13 Land Rover turned up, followed by two police cars to disperse the now curious crowd. He pulled out a carefully wrapped package of grease-proof paper and unfolded it to reveal his lunch — two windfall apples, a small bag of live bugs and a chunk of raw meat.

'Bug?'

'No thanks.'

'So what can we do for the Literary Detectives?' he asked, attempting to eat a beetle that didn't really want him to and was chased twice around Stig's hand until caught and devoured.

'What do you make of this?' I asked as Bowden handed him a picture of the Shaxtper cadaver.

'It is a dead human,' replied Stig. 'Are you sure you won't have a beetle? They're very crunchy.'

'No thanks. What about this?'

Bowden handed him a picture of one of the other dead clones, and then a third.

'The same dead human from a different viewpoint?'

'They're all different corpses, Stig.'

He stopped chewing the uncooked lamb chop and stared at me, then wiped his hands on a large handkerchief and looked more carefully at the photographs.

'How many?'

'Eighteen that we know of

'Cloning entire humans has always been illegal,' murmured Stig. 'Can we see the real thing?'

The Swindon morgue was a short walk from the SpecOps office. It was an old Victorian building which in a more enlightened age would have been condemned. It smelt of formaldehyde and damp and the morgue technicians all looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.

The lugubrious head pathologist, Mr Rumplunkett, looked avariciously at Mr Stiggins. Since killing a Neanderthal wasn't technically a crime no autopsy was ever performed on one — and Mr Rumplunkett was by nature a curious man. He said nothing but Stiggins knew precisely what he was thinking.

'We're pretty much the same inside as you, Mr Rumplunkett. That was, after all, the reason we were brought into being in the first place.'

'I'm sorry—' began the embarrassed chief pathologist.

'No, you're not,' responded Stig, 'your interest is purely professional and in the pursuit of knowledge. We take no offence.'

'We're here to look at Mr Shaxtper,' said Bowden.

We were led to the main autopsy room, where several bodies were lying under sheets with tags on their toes.

'Overcrowding,' said Mr Rumplunkett, 'but they don't seem to complain too much. This the one?'

He threw back a sheet. The cadaver had a high-domed head, deep-set eyes, a small moustache and goatee. It looked a lot like William Shakespeare from the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the first folio.

'What do you think?'

'Okay,' I said slowly, 'he looks like Shakespeare, but if Victor wore his hair like that, so would he.'

Bowden nodded. It was a fair point.

'And this one wrote the Basil Brush sonnet?'

'No; that particular sonnet was written by this one.'

With a flourish Bowden pulled back the sheet from another cadaver to reveal a corpse identical to the first, only a year or two younger. I stared at them both as Bowden revealed yet another.

'So how many Shakespeares did you say you had?'

'Officially, none. We've got a Shaxtper, a Shakespoor and a Shagsper. Only two of them had any writing on them, all have ink-stained fingers, all are genetically identical, and all died of disease or hypothermia brought on by self-neglect.'

'Down-and-outs?'

'Hermits is probably nearer the mark.'

'Aside from the fact that they all have left eyes and one size of toe,' said Stig, who had been examining the cadavers at length, 'they are very good indeed. We haven't seen this sort of craftsmanship for years.'

'They're copies of a playwright named William Shakes—'

'We know of Shakespeare, Mr Cable,' interrupted Stig. 'We are particularly fond of Caliban from The Tempest. This is a deep recovery job. Brought back from a piece of dried skin or a hair in a death mask or something.'

'When and where, Stig?'

He thought for a moment.

'They were probably built in the mid-thirties,' he announced. 'At the time there were perhaps only ten biolabs in the world that could have done this. We think we can safely say we are looking at one of the three biggest genetic engineering labs in England.'

'Not possible,' said Bowden. 'The manufacturing records of York, Bognor Regis and Scunthorpe are in the public domain; it would be inconceivable that a project of this magnitude could have been kept secret.'

'And yet they exist,' replied Stig, pointing to the corpses and bringing Bowden's argument to a rapid close. 'Do you have the genome logs and trace element spectroscopic evaluations?' he added. 'More careful study might reveal something.'

'That's not standard autopsy procedure,' replied Rumplunkett. 'I have my budget to think of'

'If you do a molar cross-section as well we will donate our body to this department when we die.'

'I'll do them for you while you wait,' said Mr Rumplunkett.

Stig turned back to us.

'We'll need forty-eight hours to have a look at them — shall we meet again at my house? We would be