The room was like a library from a country home somewhere. It was two storeys high, with shelves crammed full of books covering every square inch of wall space. A spiral staircase led to a catwalk which ran around the wall, enabling access to the upper shelves. The middle of the room was open plan with desks laid out much like a library’s reading room. Every possible surface and all the floor space were piled high with more books and papers, and I wondered how they managed to get anything done at all. About five officers were at work, but they didn’t seem to notice me come in. A phone rang and a young man picked it up.
‘LiteraTec office,’ he said in a polite voice. He winced as a tirade came down the phone line to him.
‘I’m very sorry if you didn’t like Titus Andronicus, madam,’ he said at last, ‘but I’m afraid it’s got nothing to do with us—perhaps you should stick to the comedies in future.’
I could see Victor Analogy looking through a file with another officer. I walked to where he could see me and waited for him to finish.
‘Ah, Next! Welcome to the office. Give me a moment, will you?’
I nodded and Victor carried on.
‘… I think Keats would have used less flowery prose than this and the third stanza is slightly clumsy in its construction. My feeling is that it’s a clever fake, but check it against the Verse Metre Analyser.’
The officer nodded and walked off. Victor smiled at me and shook my hand.
‘That was Finisterre. He looks after poetry forgery of the nineteenth century. Let me show you around.’
He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.
‘Words are like leaves, Thursday. Like people really, fond of their own society.’
He smiled.
‘We have over a billion words here. Reference mainly. A good collection of major works and some minor ones that you won’t even find in the Bodleian. We’ve got a storage facility in the basement. That’s full as well. We need new premises but the LiteraTecs are a bit underfunded, to say the least.’
He led me round one of the desks to where Bowden was sitting bolt upright, his jacket carefully folded across the back of his chair and his desk so neat as to be positively obscene.
‘Bowden you’ve met. Fine fellow. He’s been with us for twelve years and concentrates on nineteenth-century prose. He’ll be showing you the ropes. That’s your desk over there.’
He paused for a moment, staring at the cleared desk. I was not supernumerary. One of their number had died recently and I was replacing him. Filling a dead man’s shoes, sitting in a dead man’s chair. Beyond the desk sat another officer, who was looking at me curiously.
‘That’s Fisher. He’ll help you out with anything you want to know about legal copyright and contemporary fiction.’
Fisher was a stocky man with an odd squint who appeared to be wider than he was tall. He looked up at me and grinned, revealing something left over from breakfast stuck between his teeth.
Victor carried on walking to the next desk.
‘Seventeenth—and eighteenth-century prose and poetry are looked after by Helmut Bight, kindly lent to us by our opposite number across the water. He came here to sort out a problem with some poorly translated Goethe and became embroiled with a neo-Nazi movement attempting to set Friedrich Nietzsche up as a fascist saint.’
Herr Bight was about fifty and looked at me suspiciously. He wore a suit but had removed his tie in the heat.
‘SO-5, eh?’ asked Herr Bight, as though it were a form of venereal disease.
‘I’m SO-27 just like you,’ I replied quite truthfully. ‘Eight years in the London office under Boswell.’
Bight picked up an ancient-looking volume in a faded pigskin binding and passed it across to me.
‘What do you make of this?’
I took the dusty tome in my hand and looked at the spine.
‘The Vanity of Human Wishes,’ I read. ‘Written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1749, the first work to appear in his own name.’
I opened the book and flicked through the yellowed pages. ‘First edition. It would be very valuable, if—‘
‘If—?’ repeated Bight.
I sniffed the paper and ran a finger across the page and then tasted it. I looked along the spine and tapped the cover, finally dropping the heavy volume on the desk with a thump.
‘—if it were real.’
‘I’m impressed, Miss Next,’ admitted Herr Bight. ‘You and I must discuss Johnson some time.’
‘It wasn’t as difficult as it looked,’ I had to admit. ‘Back in London we’ve got two pallet-loads of forged Johnsonia like this with a street value of over three hundred thousand pounds.’
‘London too?’ exclaimed Bight in surprise. ‘We’ve been after this gang for six months; we thought they were local.’
‘Call Boswell at the London office; he’ll help in any way he can. Just mention my name.’
Herr Bight picked up the phone and asked the operator for a number. Victor guided me over to one of the many frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber into side offices. He opened the door a crack to reveal two officers in shirtsleeves who were interviewing a man dressed in tights and an embroidered jacket.
‘Malin and Sole look after all crimes regarding Shakespeare.’
He shut the door.
‘They keep an eye on forgery, illegal dealing and overtly free thespian interpretations. The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of Twelfth Night. Persistent offender. He’ll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is truly frightful.’
He opened the door to another side office. A pair of identical twins were operating a large computing engine. The room was uncomfortably hot from the thousands of valves, and the clicking of relays was almost deafening. This was the only piece of modern technology that I had seen so far in the office.
‘These are the Forty brothers, Jeff and Geoff. The Forties operate the Verse Metre Analyser. It breaks down any prose or poem into its components—words, punctuation, grammar and so forth—then compares that literary signature with a specimen of the target writer in its own memory. Eighty-nine per cent accuracy. Very useful for spotting forgeries. We had what purported to be a page of an early draft of Antony and Cleopatra. It was rejected on the grounds that it had too many verbs per unit paragraph.’
He closed the door.
‘That’s all of us. The man in overall charge of Swindon SpecOps is Commander Braxton Hicks. He’s answerable to the Regional Commander based in Salisbury. He leaves us alone most of the time, which is the way we like it. He also likes to see any new operatives the morning they arrive, so I suggest you go and have a word. He’s in Room twenty-eight down the corridor.’
We retraced our steps back to my desk. Victor wished me well again and then disappeared to consult with Helmut about some pirate copies of Doctor Faustus that had appeared on the market with the endings rewritten to be happy.
I sat down in my chair and opened the desk drawer. There was nothing in it; not so much as a pencil shaving. Bowden was watching me.
‘Victor emptied it the morning after Crometty’s murder.’
‘James Crometty,’ I murmured. ‘Suppose you tell me about him?’
Bowden picked up a pencil and tried to balance it on its sharp end.
‘Crometty worked mainly in nineteenth-century prose and poetry. He was an excellent officer but excitable. He had little time for procedure. He vanished one evening when he said he had a tip-off about a rare manuscript. We found him a week later in the abandoned Raven public house on Morgue Road. They had shot him six times in the face.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I’ve lost friends before,’ said Bowden, his voice never wavering from the measured pace of speech he used, ‘but he was a close friend and colleague and I would gladly have taken his place.’