‘On the contrary,’ I replied, ‘who would have thought a LiteraTec would drive a car like this? Besides, I have to drive it.’

He got in the passenger seat and looked around slightly disdainfully at the spartan interior.

‘Is there a problem, Miss Next? You’re staring.’

Now that Bowden was in the passenger seat I had suddenly realised where I had seen him before. He had been the passenger when the car had appeared in front of me at the hospital. Events had indeed started to fall into place.

Bowden guided me to a transport cafe on the old Oxford road. I thought it was an odd choice for lunch; the seats were hard orange plastic and the yellowing Melamine-covered table-tops had started to lift at the edges. The windows were almost opaque with dirt and the nylon net curtains hung heavily with deposits of grease. Several flypapers dangled from the ceiling, their potency long worn off, the flies stuck to them long since desiccated to dust. Somebody had made an effort to make the interior slightly more cheery by sticking up a few pictures hastily cut from old calendars; a signed photo of the 1978 England soccer team was hung above a fireplace that had been filled in and then decorated with a vase full of plastic flowers.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, sitting gingerly at a table near the window.

‘The food’s good,’ responded Bowden, as though that was all that mattered.

A gum-chewing waitress came up to the table and put some bent cutlery in front of us. She was about fifty and was wearing a uniform that might have been her mother’s.

‘Hello, Mr Cable,’ she said in a flat tone with only a sliver of interest in her voice, ‘all well?’

‘Very well, thank you. Lottie, I’d like you to meet my new partner, Thursday Next.’

Lottie looked at me oddly.

‘Any relation to Captain Next?’

‘He was my brother,’ I said loudly, as if wanting Lottie to know that I wasn’t ashamed of the connection, ‘and he didn’t do what they said he did.’

The waitress stared at me for a moment, as if wanting to say something but not daring.

‘What will you lot have, then?’ she asked instead with forced cheerfulness. She had lost someone in the Charge; I could sense it.

‘What’s the special?’ asked Bowden.

‘Soupe d’Auverge au Fromage,’ replied Lottie, ‘followed by Rojoes Cominho.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘It’s braised pork with cumin, coriander and lemon,’ replied Bowden.

‘Sounds great.’

‘Two specials please and a carafe of mineral water.’

She nodded, scribbled a note and gave me a sad smile before departing.

Bowden looked at me with interest. He would have guessed eventually that I was ex-military. I wore it badly.

‘Crimea veteran, eh? Did you know Colonel Phelps was in town?’

‘I bumped into him on the airship yesterday. He wanted me to go to one of his rallies.’

‘Will you?’

‘You must be kidding. His idea of the perfect end to the Crimean conflict is for us to fight and fight until there is no one left alive and the peninsula’s a poisoned and mined land no good for anything. I’m hoping that the UN can bring both governments to their senses.’

‘I was called up in ‘78,’ said Bowden. ‘Even got past basic training. Fortunately it was the same year the Czar died and the Crown Prince took over. There were more pressing demands on the young Emperor’s time, so the Russians withdrew. I was never needed.’

‘I was reading somewhere that since the war started, only seven years of the one hundred and thirty-one have actually been spent fighting.’

‘But when they do,’ added Bowden, ‘they certainly make up for it.’

I looked at him. He had taken a sip of water after offering the carafe to me first.

‘Married? Kids?’

‘No,’ replied Bowden. ‘I haven’t really had time to find myself a wife, although I am not against the idea in principle. It’s just that SpecOps is not really a great place for meeting people and I’m not, I confess, a great socialiser. I’ve been short-listed for a post opening the equivalent of a LiteraTec office in Ohio; it seems to me the perfect opportunity to take a wife.’

‘The money’s good over there and the facilities are excellent. I’d consider it myself given the opportunity,’ I replied. I meant it, too.

‘Would you? Would you really?’ asked Bowden with a flush of excitement that was curiously at odds with his slightly cold demeanour.

‘Sure. Change of scenery,’ I stammered, wanting to change the subject in case Bowden got the wrong idea. ‘Have you—ah—been a LiteraTec long?’

Bowden thought for a moment.

‘Ten years. I came from Cambridge with a degree in nineteenth-century literature and joined the LiteraTecs straight away. Jim Crometty looked after me from the moment I started.’

He stared out of the window wistfully. ‘Perhaps if I’d been there—‘

‘—then you’d both be dead. Anyone who shoots a man six times in the face doesn’t go to Sunday school. He’d have killed you and not even thought about it. There’s little to be gained in what ifs; believe me, I know. I lost two fellow officers to Hades. I’ve been over it all a hundred times, yet it would probably happen exactly the same way if I had another chance.’

Lottie placed the soup in front of us with a basket of freshly baked bread.

‘Enjoy,’ said Lottie, ‘it’s on the house.’

‘But—!’ I began. Lottie silenced me.

‘Save your breath,’ she said impassively. ‘After the charge. After the shit hit the fan. After the first wave of death—you went back to do what you could. You went back. I value that.’ She turned and left.

The soup was good; the Rojoes Cominho even better.

‘Victor told me you worked on Shakespeare up in London,’ said Bowden.

It was the most prestigious area in which to work in the LiteraTec office. Lake poetry was a close second and Restoration comedy after that. Even in the most egalitarian of offices, a pecking order always established itself.

‘There was very little room for promotion in the London office so after a couple of years I was given the Shakespeare work,’ I replied, tearing at a piece of bread. ‘We get a lot of trouble from Baconians in London.’

Bowden looked up.

‘How do you rate the Baconian theory?’

‘Not much. Like many people I’m pretty sure there is more to Shakespeare than just Shakespeare. But Sir Francis Bacon using a little-known actor as a front? I just don’t buy it.’

‘He was a trained lawyer,’ asserted Bowden. ‘Many of the plays have legal parlance to them.’

‘It means nothing,’ I replied, ‘Greene, Nashe and especially Ben Jonson use legal phraseology; none of them had legal training. And don’t even get me started on the so-called codes. ‘

‘No need to worry about that,’ replied Bowden. ‘I won’t. I’m no Baconian either. He didn’t write them.’

‘And what would make you so sure?’

‘If you read his De Augmentis Sdentarium you’ll find Bacon actually criticising popular drama. Furthermore, when the troupe Shakespeare belonged to applied to the King to form a theatre, they were referred to the commissioner for suits. Guess who was on that panel and most vociferously opposed the application?’

‘Francis Bacon?’ I asked.

‘Exactly. Whoever wrote the plays, it wasn’t Bacon. I’ve formulated a few theories of my own over the years. Have you ever heard of Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘There is some proof that, unlike Bacon, he could actually write and write quite well—hang on.’