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.’

He rubbed his nose slightly; it was the only sign of outward emotion that he had shown.

‘I consider myself a spiritual man, Miss Next, although I am not religious. By spiritual I merely mean that I feel I have good in my soul and am inclined to follow the correct course of action given a prescribed set of circumstances. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

‘Having said that, I would still be very keen to end the life of the person who did this foul deed. I have been practising on the range and now carry a pistol full time; look—‘

‘Show me later, Mr Cable. Do you have any leads?’

‘None. Nothing at all. We don’t know who he was seeing or why. I have contacts over at Homicide; they have nothing either.’

‘Being shot six times in the face is the mark of a person with a gleeful passion for the undertaking of their duties,’ I told him. ‘Even if Crometty had been carrying a gun I don’t think it would have made much difference.’

‘You could be right,’ sighed Bowden. ‘I can’t think of a single time that a pistol has been drawn on a LiteraTec investigation.’

I agreed. Ten years ago in London it had been the same. But big business and the huge amounts of cash in the sale and distribution of literary works had attracted a bigger criminal element. I knew of at least four London LiteraTecs who had died in the line of duty.

‘It’s becoming more violent out there. It’s not like it is in the movies. Did you hear about the surrealist riot in Chichester last night?’

‘I certainly did,’ he replied. ‘I can see Swindon involved in similar disturbances before too long. The art college nearly had a riot on its hands last year when the governors dismissed a lecturer who had been secretly encouraging students to embrace abstract expressionism. They wanted him charged under the Interpretation of the Visual Medium Act. He fled to Russia, I think.’

I looked at my watch.

‘I have to go and see the SpecOps Commander.’

Bowden allowed a rare smile to creep upon his serious features.