Victor frowned.

'We don't hold with the book-burning lark of Kaine's. You heard about the order to start incinerating Danish literature?'

I nodded.

'Kierkegaard's works are being rounded up as we speak. I told Braxton that if we were asked to do any of it we'd resign.'

'Oh — ah.'

'I'm not sure I like the way you said that,' said Bowden.

I winced.

'I agreed to be the SO-14 Danish Book Seizure Liaison Officer for Flanker — sorry. I didn't have much of a choice.'

'I see that as good news,' put in Bowden. 'You can have them searching in places where they won't find any Danish books. Just be careful. Flanker has been suspicious ever since we said we were too busy to find out who was planning to smuggle copies of The Concept of Dread to Wales for safe-keeping.'

Bowden laughed and lowered his voice.

'It wasn't an excuse.' He chuckled. 'We actually were too busy — gathering copies of banned books ready for transportation to Wales!'

Victor grimaced.

'I really don't want to hear this, Bowden. If you get caught we'll all be for the high jump!'

'Some things are worth going to jail for, Victor,' replied Bowden in an even tone. 'As LiteraTecs we swore to uphold and defend the written word — not indulge a crazed politician's worst paranoic fantasies.'

'Just be careful.'

'Of course,' replied Bowden, 'it might come to nothing if we can't find a way to get the books out of England — the Welsh border shouldn't be a problem since Wales aligned itself with Denmark. I don't suppose you have any ideas how to get across the English border post?'

'I'm not sure,' I replied. 'How many copies of banned books do you want to smuggle anyway?'

'About four truckloads.'

I whistled. Things — like cheese, for instance — were usually smuggled in to England. I didn't know how I'd get banned books out.

'I'll give it a shot. What else is going on?'

'Usual stuff,' replied Bowden. 'Faked Milton, Jonson, Swift . . . Montague and Capulet street gangs . . . someone discovered a first draft of The Mill on the Floss entitled The Sploshing of the Weirs. Also, the Daphne Farquitt Specialist Bookshop went up in smoke.'

'Insurance scam?'

'No — probably anti-Farquitt protesters again.'

Farquitt had penned her first bodice-ripping novel in 1932 and had been writing pretty much the same one over and over again ever since. Loved by many and hated by a vitriolic minority, Farquitt was England's leading romantic novelist.

'There's also been a huge increase in the use of performance-enhancing drugs by novelists,' added Victor. 'Last year's Booker speed-writing winner was stripped of his award when he tested positive for Cartlandromin. And only last week Handley Paige only narrowly missed a two-year writing ban for failing a random dope test.'

'Sometimes I wonder if we don't have too many rules,' murmured Victor pensively, and we all three sat in silence, nodding thoughtfully for a moment.

Bowden broke the silence. He produced a piece of stained paper wrapped in a cellophane evidence bag and passed it across to me.

'What do you make of this?'

I read it, not recognising the words but recognising the style. It was a sonnet by Shakespeare — and a pretty good one, too.

'Shakespeare — but it's not Elizabethan; the mention of Basil Brush would seem to indicate that — but it feels like his. What did the Verse Metre Analyser say about it?'

'Ninety-one per cent probability of Will as the author,' replied Victor.

'Where did you get it?'

'Off the body of a down-and-out by the name of Shaxtper killed on Tuesday evening. We think someone has been cloning Shakespeares.'

'Cloning Shakespeares? Are you sure? Couldn't it just be a ChronoGuard "temporal kidnap" sort of thing?'

'No. Blood analysis tells us they were all vaccinated at birth against rubella, mumps and so forth.'

'Wait — you've got more than one?'

'Three,' said Bowden. 'There's been something of a spate recently.'

'When can you come back to work, Thursday?' asked Victor solemnly. 'As you can see, we need you.'

I paused for a moment.

'I'm going to need a week to get my life into gear first, sir. There are a few pressing matters that I have to attend to.'

'What, may I ask,' said Victor, 'is more important than Montague and Capulet street gangs, cloned Shakespeares, smuggling Kierkegaard out of the country and authors using banned substances?'

'Finding reliable childcare.'

'Goodness!' said Victor. 'Congratulations! You must bring the little squawker in some time. Mustn't she, Bowden?'

'Absolutely.'

'Bit of a problem, that,' murmured Victor. 'Can't have you dashing around the place only to have to get home at five to make Junior's tea. Perhaps we'd better handle all this on our own.'

'No,' I said with an assertiveness that made them both jump. 'No, I'm coming back to work. I just need to sort a few things out. Does SpecOps have a creche?'

'No.'

'Ah. Well, I suspect I shall think of something. If I get my husband back there won't be a problem. I'll call you tomorrow.'

There was a pause.

'Well, we have to respect that, I suppose,' said Victor solemnly. 'We're just glad that you're back. Aren't we, Bowden?'

'Yes,' replied my ex-partner, 'very glad indeed.'

I wasn't done with SpecOps yet. I still needed to figure out what my father had told me at our first meeting. Finding a time traveller can be fraught with difficulties, but since I passed the ChronoGuard office almost exactly three hours after our last meeting, it seemed the obvious place to look.

I knocked at their door and, hearing no answer, walked in. When I was last working at SpecOps we rarely heard anything from the mildly eccentric members of the time-travelling elite, but when you work in the time business, you don't waste it by nattering — it's much too precious. My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offence — which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straight away.

The room was empty and, from appearances, had been so for a number of years. At least, that's what it looked like when I first peered in — a second later some painters were decorating it for the first time, the second after that it was derelict, then full, then empty again. It continued like this as I watched, the room jumping to various different stages in its history but never lingering for more than a few seconds in any one particular time. The ChronoGuard operatives were merely smears of light that moved and whirled about, momentarily visible to me as they jumped from past to future and future to past. If I had been a trained member of the ChronoGuard perhaps I could have made more sense of it, but I wasn't, and couldn't.